Mr James Frith

No, I will not. It is possible that we cannot imagine being the victim of coercion, or that as MPs our agency is so baked in to our experiences of living, that we cannot envisage a scenario where those who already claim to feel unseen are directed towards meeting their end sooner than it otherwise might have been. Our casework from constituents is already full of people struggling to access the rights that we have enshrined in law—access to justice, health, education support, the disaster in our special educational needs system—and of victims often of state neglect or state coercion, and the failure of safeguards that were once supported on paper and passed into law. Disability rights groups and advocates have raised their voices, wanting us to talk about the dangers of normalising assisted dying. For many the Bill represents not a choice but a principle shift that undermines the value we place on protecting the vulnerable. It falls to us as the strongest to stand up and vote against the Bill. Passing the Bill today will not improve palliative and hospice care. My belief is that it will forfeit it. The end of life is complicated; end of life care often is not complicated enough. On reflection, my mother-in-law deserved a frank, trusted conversation about the risk of secondary illnesses and amputation that would follow with the automatic cancer treatment that she was given in her final months of life. We should expect more agility from our NHS, and while dying is the ultimate binary experience, end of life care should be more sophisticated and more personalised. Shortening those expectations with a system that endorses assisted dying would forfeit that too. Finally, as legislators our responsibility is to protect the most vulnerable and consider all eventualities. We disagree on slippery slope arguments, but if the Bill proceeds it will be a moment of no return, and that is why I am not prepared to support it.