Sir Edward Leigh

If the hon. Member will forgive me, I have been told to be brief. I am in favour of our being assisted to die as painlessly as possible, and every palliative care nurse and doctor I have ever talked to has made it clear that in the overwhelming majority of cases, that is possible. Of course, we can be anaesthetised, as we all are when we have operations. I hear the argument, but I believe that we need to improve palliative care. What worries me about the Bill—this is my point—is that I do not believe that it will be just an assisted dying Bill; I think that in time, it will become an assisted suicide Bill. I have mentioned the ECHR. What is the logic of the Bill? We all know it is terrible if you have a terminal cancer prognosis, but what if you are clinically depressed? What if you are quadriplegic? What if you are sentenced to a lifetime of being unable to move your arms or legs? What if you know, as a member of our family in Canada does, that you will get more and more dementia, so you take the assisted dying route? The truth is that we cannot differentiate between these conditions that make life unbearable for many people. I make this prediction: if this Bill goes through—if the Parliament Act ensures that it does—I believe that in 10 years’ time we will be in similar situation to Canada, and very large numbers of people will be choosing assisted dying. We hear a lot that this country is broken, and that the elite is ruining the country. I think that is rubbish. This country is not broken. The reason we are under pressure is that there are too many of us—too many old people; too many people with multiple health conditions. There is tremendous pressure on the NHS; we know that. We heard a lot from my right hon. Friend the Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Dame Karen Bradley) about coercion. We have also heard that coercion is not necessarily external; it can be internal. I believe that if we move to a society in which assisted suicide is the norm, vast numbers of people will take it up. Is that really the sort of society that we want?