Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)

My Lords, I put my name to Amendment 313. My concern is the whole question of misdiagnosis. My noble friend Lord Shinkwin has addressed the fact that he was diagnosed with a terminal illness some time ago. One assumption running through this Bill and through the amendments—I apologise to my noble friends who put down these amendments—is that the medical diagnosis of somebody approaching death is faultless. We know from endless examples given by your Lordships in this Chamber that that is not actually the case. There are a large number of incidents when the medics get it completely wrong. I would like to address the question of them quite innocently getting it wrong. I will deal with more malicious misdiagnosis in later amendments. The whole basis on which we are discussing this Bill is that there has been a medical diagnosis, which must hold as the whole basis on which assisted dying takes place. We know, however, that all too often people live on for quite a long time. The noble Lord, Lord McCrea, made the point that people have lived on with diagnoses that they were going to die after six months. My wife’s uncle, a distinguished diplomat, was given six months to live and died 18 months later. So much fault is the case here that we should be very worried about how much we are going to lean on medical diagnosis as a basis for judging that somebody should be allowed to die. Earlier on in the debate, some weeks ago, my noble friend Lord Polak described how he was given six months to live. He is not with us, but I would not describe him as a delicate flower. I would also say that he is probably not prone to bouts of depression or that sort of thing either, but let us hypothesise—