John Cooper

It is a pleasure to serve under the iron grip of your chairmanship, Sir Edward. We are here not to relitigate the substance of the assisted dying Bill, but to consider a profound change to the way we in this place carry out our duties as legislators. The petitioners seek, in short, for a failed Bill to be smashed through, as though it had not been subject to proper procedure, and for us to accept that it fell through procedural malfeasance. It is not so: this Bill failed because a gamble was taken to proceed down the private Member’s Bill route. It is well known that such Bills can run out of road due to time constraints. The emotive nature of the subject of the Bill is obvious, but just as the Commons debate was dominated by deeply moving yet ultimately anecdotal accounts of painful deaths, we cannot decide here on emotion. Bad cases do not make good laws. We must decide on cold, hard facts. It is a fact that this Bill carried a major flaw at its heart, in that it was not part of the Labour manifesto on which this Government were elected. It is also a fact that the Lords’ scrutiny role is designed to prevent the passage of poor legislation. This was flawed legislation, replete with issues unresolved at Committee, and passed to the Lords in a situation that Cabinet Office guidance warned would “likely kill the Bill”. I have seen all too often the result of a paucity of scrutiny when legislation has passed through the Scottish Parliament. Holyrood lacks a revising Chamber entirely, with its Committees expected to do the hard work of line-by-line consideration. This petition is couched in terms of fairness and democracy, but it is neither fair nor democratic to usurp our system for reasons of dogma. No matter the subject of a Bill, if it lacks a manifesto heritage, staggers through Committee amidst a welter of chops and changes, and ultimately fails on contact with the Lords, we have no place attempting to resurrect it because we admire its aims or because it is popular.