The Archbishop of York

My Lords, it is an honour to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins. I will of course speak for myself, but I also know that I represent views held by many faith leaders—not just Christian leaders—across our nation, with whom I have been in discussion and who have written to me. Jesus teaches us that how we live our lives in relationship to others is vital for the health of our society and our own personal well-being. We belong with and for each other. The Bill is wrong because it ruptures relationships, serving one need but creating many others. The noble Lord, Lord Baker, and several others in this important and moving debate gave the game away early on: no Government, he said, will be prepared to provide palliative and social care in the way it is needed, thus revealing that the Bill’s impact will be economic as well as social. Several speakers said there were too many safeguards; others, that provision for assisted dying ought to be expanded. As the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, pointed out, if this is where compassion leads, the logic of compassion demands the scope be widened. On this side of the argument, and also motivated by compassion, we must say that, while we share the same anguish as we witness the death of a loved one and long for the suffering to end, there is a moral universe of difference between doctors and clinicians in consultation with families withdrawing treatment in the last days of someone’s life, and picking out six months as the point at which life for some can be extinguished. If we do this, we unleash into our society a fundamental change in our relationships: the relationship between death and life, between doctor and patient, between parent and child, between citizen and state. Last year I saw this at first hand in Canada, where priest after priest told me heart-rending stories of people choosing an assisted death because it was better for their family than spending an already meagre inheritance on expensive care and sometimes feeling forced into this choice; they felt it was their duty to die. I know this is not what we want here, but this is what we are proposing. Do we seriously think that if the Bill is passed, palliative care will not be detrimentally impacted or six months will not in due course become 12? I think we can do better than this. Of course, I do not want anyone to die a painful, agonising death, but nor do I want poor and vulnerable people to be faced with such agonising choices. Better palliative care can massively ease the first dilemma. Assisted death will turbocharge the latter. Before I trained for ordination, I worked for a year at St Christopher’s Hospice. It was probably the most formative year of my life. On my first day on the ward, I was terrified; all I could see was cancer and death. But during that year I learned that it is possible to live until you die, and although there are some illnesses so hideous that they cannot be completely controlled, in most cases they can, honouring people’s dignity and upholding their value as someone made in the image of God until their life’s end. Why then, I ask the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, does the Bill deny the right of hospices to opt out? I welcome the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Berger, but I also want to say, alongside the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London, that if the Bill reaches a Third Reading, we on these Benches will be prepared to table an amendment to offer us a vote. Meanwhile, I give the last word to Dame Cicely Saunders: “You matter because you are you, and you matter to the last moment of your life. We will do all that we can not only to help you die peacefully, but also to live until you die”.