Contribution
I will continue. Almost 250 Members of this House have been involved in a massive and sustained effort to try to make the Bill safe and workable. The House staff, as we have heard, have been outstanding in their service to us all and I am sure we are extremely thankful and grateful to them for that. Much has been imputed, particularly in the press, about our motivation in closely scrutinising the Bill, including that we are cruel. At no time have we been unaware of the suffering that the Bill’s supporters have wanted to alleviate. However, it is not compassionate to pass a Bill without addressing the many concerns raised by royal colleges, three committees of this House, myriad disability groups and others: that would be cruel to the poor and the vulnerable. Yet we, and by extension they, have been shown not a little contempt at times when we have taken time to lay out how the Bill would affect them. We need to be wary of contempt when courtesy, as we were reminded at the beginning, is the currency of this House.
I continue to have a quiet concern about the language used. Orwell described political language as
“designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”.
First, we talk about “assisted dying”, when we surely mean “assisted suicide”. Assisted dying is what Dame Cicely Saunders said hospices and palliative care would provide. She said:
“You matter to the last moment of your life, and we will do all we can to help you not only to die peacefully, but also to live until you die.”
I urge this Government to do what no previous Government have done and make high-quality palliative care sustainable and universally available.
Secondly, the legal qualifier for assistance is terminal illness within six months to live. As we have heard already, when that prognosis has at least a 20% to 30% unreliability, according to evidence given to the Select Committee, we should not pretend that legal solidity exists where actually there might be pure wind. Thirdly, any notion that noble Lords are filibustering rather than legitimately scrutinising the Bill is unsustainable, given both the length of the Bill and the proceedings in the Commons, and the fact that the mean length of speeches in this House has actually been under five minutes.
Finally, I detect an assumption that anyone who is religiously motivated should not be heard or impose their views on anyone else. We do not impose our views, but we do echo a very substantial number of people outside this Chamber whose faith is partly why the Bill evokes deep concern. In contrast, every day of our lives, secular humanism is imposed on us, with its assumptions about the primacy of individual autonomy and the irrationality of belief. Such assumptions deny that human existence is inherently relational, deny the loneliness of hyperindividualism and deny that it takes more faith to believe that this incredible world in which we live came from nothing than to believe that there is something or someone behind it:
“Does he who make the eye not see?”
Finally, there are very many ethical, medical and practical reasons why this Bill has needed robust and lengthy scrutiny from a very diverse group of Peers. The process in this House and evidence from other countries have profoundly challenged the assumption that the service that the Bill attempts to provide can be safe. Many here say that this is based not on faith, but on evidence. To return to what I said at the beginning, this House has a premier global reputation for its thoroughness of scrutiny. When I was in Brussels, I talked to an Italian lawyer working for the European Commission who said that the work received from this House was second to that from no other secondary Chamber in the world. I believe that we have lived up to that reputation over the course of this Bill.