This Friday, the House of Commons votes on whether to allow assisted dying. The proposals will have strong safeguards. To fall within the very limited scope of the legislation, an adult must be judged capable of choice (so not children and those suffering neurodegenerative diseases), have a terminal illness and an expected life expectancy of under six months, must make two separate declarations of a wish to die and have approval from two doctors and a judge. The lethal substance must be taken by the patient themselves.

This vote will not involve party whipping. But although not party political, this vote has political and philosophical implications. Whether the Conservatives divide on this issue or largely vote against it as a bloc will be noted and will have an impact. 

Some of the best people I know in politics are against the Bill. But I believe they are deeply wrong. I do not support assisted dying for those not terminally ill, because people can change their mind and live for a long period afterward. But this Bill is about the risk of people choosing – freely – to limit their life by a matter of weeks, specifically weeks where terminally ill adults are often in extreme pain and distress.

Having seen people suffer in my own family, I cannot believe that it is anything other than cruel to deny such people a relief from suffering, from physical pain and mental anguish when they desperately want release. Against those who argue people will be pushed to an early grave, it is more likely that we as a society will continue to force people to live in pain, because we often cannot bear to say goodbye and lose the people that we love.

To love someone – to truly love someone – is to accept that they are an autonomous human being whose wants and desires govern their life. It is to accept that they may want things that hurt us. And to be truly loved by others is for them to accept that we too have the right to make our own choices, that we are fundamentally important and have agency. And this is not just the basis of love, but the basis of the modern Western order and civilisation: that we are individual, free-thinking agents who can make decisions and control our own lives.

The future of the Right is not more government power

This vote will also have wider implications, because for Conservative MPs to reject assisted dying as a whole is to say that the government knows better than the people twice over.

Firstly, it rejects the idea that individuals and their families, not government, know best. Due to unbearable suffering from a terminal illness, you might think you want to die, or your loved one might want to die, but you or they are wrong. And the government will take that choice away from you and the people that you love.

The Conservative Party failed from 2010–2024 for two reasons. Because it prioritised globalism over the nation state, and because it believed individuals could not be trusted, which meant that it consistently gave more power to the bureaucratic class and government. Yes, it often talked about more control for ordinary people in principle, but it always found special reasons to take control away from them in practice.

Secondly, rejecting assisted dying ignores the crushing majority for it among the public, including among Conservative voters. YouGov found support for these changes runs at over five to one. Among Conservative voters it runs at over four to one, and among Reform voters by nearly three and a half to one. Among older voters, those most likely to be focused on this issue, 72% support a change in the law and 16% oppose it. This is despite a barrage of stories in much of the right-wing media about Canada on this issue, despite Canada having weaker safeguards and a different framework to what is proposed, with stories seeming to deliberately distort what is proposed.

The public overwhelmingly supports the proposed Bill

For Conservative MPs as a whole to reject this change in the law is to reject the idea that the public as a whole know best. It is to say that the enlightened folk ruling in London can see things that the public cannot.

Yet the future of the Right in this country – as elsewhere – is to reject the idea of a ruling bureaucratic class and their political masters who micromanage our lives, and support democratic nation states and individuals to largely manage their own affairs. 

We have to trust the people and show that we trust the people. 

America elected Donald Trump in part because, unlike the modern Democratic Party (and much of the Republican Party), voters do not think he will lecture them on how they should live. Government will instead stick to a few things, (secure the borders, provide the core of the welfare state, have sensible energy policies) and deliver them well, rather than trying (and failing) to micromanage our lives. It was no coincidence that Trump successfully dismissed his biggest post-2020 challenger as ‘Ron DeSanctimonious’.

Not everyone will agree with assisted dying – and one of the good things about the Right is that we can disagree with each other in a reasonable way, since we believe in individuals and free thought, unlike the Left’s belief in a top-down, narrow spread of acceptable opinions. 

Yet the future of the Right and conservatism – which is at least populist in part – is going to be hard to sustain when, on key issues such as assisted dying, it looks like the Conservative Party does not trust the people of this country: neither as a collective, nor as individuals. 

It will be interesting to see if a reasonable number of Conservative MPs on Friday show that they believe in agency, autonomy and giving control to ordinary people. The issue at stake is whether we want the Government to have the final say in our own deaths and the deaths of people we love. I fear we will see the Conservatives paying lip service to the principle of giving back control, but yet again voting for the exact opposite in practice.

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Alex Morton is a former member of the No10 Policy Unit and is writing in a personal capacity.

Columns are the author's own opinion and do not necessarily reflect the views of CapX.