November 23, 2024 - 8:00am
Supporters of Kim Leadbeater’s bid to legalise assisted dying through the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill seem to have switched focus. Rather than defending the Bill as actually drafted, the priority now seems to be persuading undecided MPs with concerns to vote for the Bill at second reading on the grounds that they will be able to scrutinise and amend the Bill later on.
The strategy reflects the fact that many politicians and groups who are not opposed to assisted suicide in principle have raised significant concerns about the lack of safeguards and other dangers with the current bill. For example, human rights organisation Liberty, which has long supported assisted suicide, argues that “there are significant shortcoming in this Bill that present serious safeguarding risks which are hard to look past.”
Is it reasonable for MPs who are similarly concerned about the lack of safeguards in the Bill still to vote in favour at second reading? Part of the answer relates to the level of scrutiny the Bill is likely to get post-second reading. Constitutional expert Nikki da Costa has pointed out how factors such as the lack of pre-legislative process and impact assessment limit the effectiveness of scrutiny for significant private members bills, a concern also raised by the Institute for Government.
But MPs also need to consider which of the Bill’s problems might realistically be amended and which are more fundamental. Many concerns that have been raised could feasibly be addressed later on. One concern is that doctors will be permitted to raise the issue of assisted suicide with their patients thereby adding pressure on vulnerable people to consider ending their lives. Given that other places like Victoria in Australia explicitly forbid this practice, it seems feasible that an amendment to remove this permission could be considered by MPs before third reading.
Others worry about the lack of an effective conscientious objection clause. Although doctors are not required to participate in helping patients to end their lives, the Bill would require them to refer the patient on to another doctor who is. For many doctors, even referring a patient in this way would go against their conscience and some are understandably asking for clarity about whether they would be struck off if they refused to do so. Further, there is currently no right to opt out of the process for judges.
Given that the conscience clause in the Abortion Act does not contain the requirement to refer patients on, it again seems feasible that MPs could deal with the issue by considering an amendment that would remove this requirement. A commitment from the Bill’s backers that they would accept amendments to deal with both these issues could make a big difference to undecided MPs’ willingness to support at second reading.
Other concerns, however, are likely to be harder to address. One of these is the interpretation of the requirement that a patient has less than six months to live. A number of organisations have raised concerns that patients with conditions such as eating disorders would be eligible for assisted suicide. The problem is that someone with, say, anorexia may make themselves eligible by refusing treatment, thereby being considered terminally ill. There is evidence that this is precisely what has happened in US states with laws similar to that being considered in the UK. Making the Bill watertight against such a danger would be no easy task.
A very real problem is the expansion of eligibility by the courts. Legal experts such as Philip Murray have argued that courts may decide restricting assisted suicide to the terminally ill would be in breach of human rights legislation. If MPs decide suicide assistance is a suitable health treatment option for someone with a few months to live, even if they are not in pain, then it could be viewed as discriminatory to deny it to those in severe pain but who have longer to live or, indeed, are not terminally ill at all. Of course no one can be sure how the courts will rule on such issues, but there is precedent in the way Canadian courts have expanded the scope of their assisted suicide laws without requiring further votes from MPs. It is difficult to see how the Bill can be amended so as to give MPs certainty that this would not happen.
When it comes to direct coercion, the Bill makes much of dealing with it by including the creation of new offences. However, many people are concerned by more subtle pressure felt by patients who are already vulnerable and worry that they are a burden on family and friends. Indeed, data from Oregon tells us this is a key concern for over 40% of patients accessing assisted suicide. This is hard to rectify with an amendment.
Finally, under the Bill all cases have to be given approval by the High Court. Sir James Munby, former president of the family division has questioned the desirability and feasibility of court involvement, not least because family courts do not have the capacity to deal with the likely number of cases and could be overwhelmed. But removing court involvement would get rid of a key safeguard.
In sum, it is plausible that a few specific problems with the Bill could be dealt with by amendments. However, a number of the most serious concerns look to be more fundamental and difficult to address in the limited time that would be available for scrutiny after second reading. These are likely to weigh heavily with undecided MPs considering how to vote next Friday.
David Paton is a Professor of Industrial Economics at Nottingham University Business School.
cricketwyvern
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeAll this goes back to two stupid political decisions – by the Conservatives under Major to make the Polytechnics universities (we now have over 140 Higher Education Institutions !) then by New Labour under Blair to try to get half young people to go to university.
Agreed Covid, treating students as “customers”, rampant grade inflation, chasing far eastern students as cash cows, overpaid administrators, and free speech issues have contributed, but it all stems from these two events. The university sector, especially the self-styled Russell Group, have made it worse with their self-satisfied arrogance (my friend calls it “smugplacency”) but it’s all part of a long term trend.
The China Virus is not University’s problem. It’s their leftist-indoctrination culture, which is not only itself destroying the student’s brain but supplants useful courses that might guarantee later employment. That, and academe’s fanatical, estrogen-saturated Social Justice Warrioring, have driven a great many ambitious young men to do what they are doing vis à vis dating and mating as well: walking away.
This essay was well written and a fun read. And it did touch – tangentially – on most of the great litany of reasons why our tertiary ‘education’ institutions largely deserve to be treated with contempt – ” higher grades for less effort; the gamification of learning in place of reading books; safe spaces in which they can be shielded from uncomfortable ideas” etc etc etc. But by framing all this within what is essentially an ephemeral side issue (the Covid hysteria time), it ends up seriously underplaying the scale of the civilisation-wrecking disaster that those institutions have become.
By far the greatest ‘political’ error of the post-war era was failing to foresee the long-term consequences of allowing our universities to become colonised by an intelligentsia intent on ‘cleverly’ unpicking the threads that once held our Western civilisation together. And the massive late 20th c. expansion of the tertiary sector put this disaster on steroids….. by compounding the existing pervasive Lefty groupthink of the academia intelligentsia with hoards of new ‘students’ wholly unsuited to a life of academic intellectual inquiry.
https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-madness-of-intelligentsias: “Most of the craziest outcomes of the West’s post-60s embrace of its ‘social justice’ religion – the ones that people scratch their heads about in dismay – mostly originated in the groves of academe. Things like white self-loathing-by-proxy, the fetishisation of sexual dysphoria and pseudo-therapeutic psychobabble began as fictions and fixations hatched in its humanities and social science petri-dishes.”
A recovery now of anything that could be called a heathy academic intellectual climate would need a scorched-earth approach to most of its non-STEM faculties. Shrink them by around 70% and basically start again…. wised up to the academic/intellectual disaster that the past 60 years has been.
A few years ago, I came across the claim that the absolute number of STEM students was unchanged from the early nineties in spite of doubling the number of total students. I’ll try and find the source for the claim, although I don’t doubt that it is broadly correct.
This occurred during Blair’s drive for a new high tech “knowledge based” economy. I was young, naive and bought the snake oil*. The “knowledge based” economy really became the higher education sector itself and not the industries it should be supporting with its services.
The lack of discipline in taking students on is really quite damning of the university. The obvious solution in being more liberal in fields with high demand and more discerning in those with low demand was ignored and we got the exact opposite.
And here is the heuristic – if universities provided graduates that benefited the economy to the tune of the cost of their education, there would be no need for fees. The need for fees is a tacit acknowledgement that they are not providing the economic benefits claimed.
*In fairness a computer science degree has been pretty good to me: fees paid up and mortgage paid off.
Whatever universities are “for”, we definitely don’t need so many of them.
My head of humanities in the mid 90’s was pretty hardcore left. I would never have known from his behaviour on campus. Professional through and through, he judged essays on their argumentative coherence, and was brutal when confronted with intellectual short cuts and laziness. He would point out facts outside of your knowledge, quite normal from a 50yo to a teenager, but without prejudicing your capacity to reason, without humiliation, without rancour. He was a bloody good teacher, knew what his mission was, where it began and where it ended.
We have lost something essential since Blair. The same applies to the civil service generally speaking for that matter. We have encouraged people in positions of power to politicise public missions quite openly. They have become a tribe whose existence depend on the very taxpayers whom they openly despise. Their interests are profoundly divergent from the majority feeding them, in my case, very much against my will.
I appreciate the essay but still think that Covid was an accelerator of trends which pre existed long before the crisis, in this matter as in many others.
I think universities have a much bigger illness than institutional long covid. The biggest change they need is to rid themselves, or at least take control, of the disastrous influences of post-modernism and identity politics.
Sneaky little granny killers killing grannies on the exhale. Tru$t the $cience!
Interesting read – sadly the claimed demise of UK’s “universities” is untrue. There are enormous numbers of pseudo graduates with pseudo degrees. The tell-tale is that many can’t read or write in English so could not have attained the degrees my generation worked so hard to achieve. I cannot see that changing anytime soon because it’s a result of the regime’s pseudo-Marxism. I believe this point was made in the recent US election: If you print more money you are not richer. Because the amount of goods and services remains about the same prices simply rise. If you print more diplomas the number of intelligent and dilligent students remains the same. So you simply devalue everyones’ qualifications at a stroke.
Having recently completed an MA course as a mature student: full-time in one year; what struck me most was that universities and tutors have abandoned telling students what to do, in favour (and with catastrophic consequences), of asking them what they’d like to do. The real world doesn’t, or shouldn’t function like that and even supposed academic enterprises will crumble on such an unstable premise. What is then taught, or not taught, is a whole other ball of wax.
John Kanefsky, you are so correct! John Major most definitely started the rot with a huge imposition – the conversion of polytechnics into universities. This was a short-sighted blunder by a PM who himself had not attended university. The polytechnics represented a valuable element of higher (i.e. tertiary) education and fulfilled an important role in providing programmes more closely aligned with industry and technical employment. At a stroke the arrogant Major destroyed this valuable educational asset and most of the institutions that became jumped-up universities abandoned their vocational programmes and in their place often adopted non-subjects like womens’ studies, LGBTQ++ studies, racism studies, gender studies, media studies, etc.
And then Blair compounded the crisis by extruding 50% of pupils from their school factories into ‘university’ education. This massively diluted the status of universities and produced a couple of generations of graduates with totally useless degrees in the sorts of subjects highlighted above. These are the generations who have now come to maturity and who have been the vanguard of the Woke madness that has engulfed our world, driven by Gen Z elites from the Oxbridge machine who have understood that Woke is the route to seizing and maintaining power.
Britain used to have an outstanding university sector. No longer. It now instructs students what to think, not teaching students how to think. Even supposedly ‘neutral’ degree like medicine have become infected and corrupted by Woke ideology. I know. I used to be a senior lecturer at one of the older universities in the UK; and both my children did medical degrees.
What has been done to and done by the UK university sector has been shameful and seriously damaging far beyond the empty lecture halls as students study ‘at home’ and their teachers teach from home. ThankGod I was able to retire from the madhouse!
I worked as sessional tutor at a university (in Australia) a number of years ago.
I taught a course (statistics) that had a high failure rate. Unlike other subjects, answers were either right or wrong – you couldn’t fudge your way through.
The second semester i taught it, knowing it would be a struggle for many, i spent the first part of the first tutorial running through a 7-8 point guide for students. The message was clear: do these things (stuff like attend all tutorials and lectures, engage during class, do weekly exercises, etc) and you’ll pass. Simple.
I wanted to present a positive message, and my feeling was that the students received it well.
Later that day i received a call from the course coordinator. A young adult had attended the class, interpreted my message as ‘this is hard, you will fail’, gone home, cried, and had her mum call the university to complain.
Once i explained what happened, the coordinator told me not to worry and that he’d look after it. I believe there was a formal process involving the student union, but it didn’t progress far.
I wonder whether universities are only a symptom of a broader societal problem.
The silver lining is that kids like this are likely to be too frightened to ever have sex, so won’t be procreating.