The report stage of Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill was meant to be held later this month, on April 25 to be precise. However, earlier this month, in a letter to MPs shortly before they broke up for Easter recess, Leadbeater announced that the date had been pushed back to May 16. Bearing in mind that it is unlikely that the report stage will be sufficient for all the various amendments to her flawed Bill, this will likely mean that the final third reading vote will not be until sometime in June.
Leadbeater has claimed that the reason for this delay is so MPs can be given more time to consider the Bill following the changes that were made to it during the committee stage. The issue now, though, is that thanks to her constant chicanery and game-playing over the past few months, many no longer take her explanation for the delay at face value.
Far from moving report stage back to give MPs more time to consider her Bill, or because she has listened to some of the concerns that were raised by some MPs about the original April 25 date clashing with the local elections, it seems reasonable to presume that the true reason for the delay is more to do with nervousness about voting numbers and issues surrounding the Government’s impact assessment.
For anyone who didn’t follow committee stage closely, on more than one occasion – and often with very short notice – Leadbeater compelled members of the Committee to sit well into the evening. On one occasion, the sitting lasted beyond midnight. This was not necessary. There was time for the Committee to have further sittings before the report stage – so why the rush? Certainly, the compressed, push-it-through tactics of the Committee don’t square with the sudden concern that MPs be given time to consider the Bill purely in the interests of creating good legislation. It is notable that concern for time to consider things has come when the eyes of all MPs are again on Leadbeater and her Bill – messing a few members of a committee around is one thing, but contempt for the entire House might be more conspicuous.
In truth, Leadbeater campaigned her Bill through the committee stage, rather than taking a more considered and open-minded approach that genuinely listened to good-faith concerns. This was very disappointing to see in action, but perhaps shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. Throughout Leadbeater’s campaign to force her Bill onto the statute book, we have had to become used to lots of underhanded tactics and misleading statements. Leadbeater has been helped in this regard by her Bill’s chief cheerleader, the campaigning group, Dignity in Dying.
In their latest ruse, Dignity in Dying’s campaigners worked with pretty much the only newspaper left offering consistent support for Leadbeater’s flawed Bill, the Daily Express. They tried a new tactic that extended beyond the repetitive interventions from Esther Rantzen.
The Express recently led with a front page involving an analysis of the numbers of Britons going to Dignitas each year to end their lives. The headline read: ‘Concrete proof Britons want a right to die choice’. It referred to new data on the number of Britons registering with Dignitas in 2024. This is the new tactic of the pro-assisted suicide lobby – to claim that there is some mass stampede of ill and dying people wanting to go to Swiss clinics to end their lives, and that the kind and compassionate thing to do is to give them the option of doing so closer to home, whatever the risks the Leadbeater Bill presents to vulnerable people.
The reality, though, is very different, and – in truth – you don’t really have to work that hard to see it. Behind the misleading Daily Express article, buried within the story on page 4, it becomes clear that far from there being a big increase in the number of Britons travelling to Switzerland to end their lives, there has actually been a drop between 2023 and 2024. In 2023, 40 Brits travelled to Switzerland; it’s now 37. This, incidentally, is a microscopic proportion of the total number of deaths in the UK last year.
This latest story is indicative of a troubling pattern of behaviour from Leadbeater and her allies. A month or so ago, the Royal College of GPs (RCGP) published survey results of its members on the issue of support for the principle of assisted suicide. The results actually demonstrated a notable shift away from support for assisted suicide towards opposition. Despite this, Leadbeater and her allies at Dignity in Dying jumped on the fact that the RCGP Council had shifted the overall position from against to neutral (a peculiar decision), to try and suggest growing support from GPs towards the principle of assisted suicide when, in actual fact, precisely the opposite was true.
This was pointed out in the media, which led to some more inventive spinning of the RCGP survey results. In a handbook sent to MPs a few weeks ago when presenting the RCGP survey, the results from the 2024 survey are compared to a survey in 2013 (conveniently ignoring the 2019 survey).
We have also had the misleading presentation of the British Social Attitudes Survey. The field work for this survey was carried out in early autumn before the Leadbeater Bill was even published. It was focused purely on the principle of assisted suicide, not Leadbeater’s actual Bill. However, in a letter to MPs a few weeks ago, Leadbeater claimed the survey results demonstrated support for assisted suicide remaining strong ‘following second reading’, which was on 29 November. A deeply misleading statement, but one that Leadbeater clearly believes she can get away with as most MPs simply don’t have the time or capacity to interrogate whether what she says is true.
We also have Leadbeater trying to make it seem she was a reasonable consensus builder at committee stage of the Bill. Nothing could be further from the truth. The bulk of the amendments to her Bill that were accepted by her handpicked Committee were her own amendments. Moreover, 393 amendments were tabled by MPs who opposed her Bill at second reading, and out of these, just seven, which appear objectively likely to increase safeguards, ended up being accepted by Leadbeater, representing 2% of those tabled by Bill opponents at second reading. Among the amendments rejected were attempts to strengthen safeguards for those with Down’s syndrome and anorexia.
It has been deeply depressing to watch a Bill that touches the lives of the most vulnerable in our society in such an intense way handled so shoddily. Or, at least, depressed resignation is where I began. Now I find myself increasingly angry. There are understandably strong views on either side of the argument on this issue, but that is no excuse. A Bill of this nature demands extreme sensitivity, a willingness to listen and to admit you are wrong, a desire to build consensus and a determination to legislate with the vulnerable in mind – not the pattern of misrepresentation and bad-faith political ploys that have defined the Bill’s passage so far.
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