11 September 2026 - 5:00pm
By a vote of 286 to 270, MPs have voted to reject an attempt to revive the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, which was first introduced in 2024 by Labour MP Kim Leadbeater and passed by the House of Commons last year, only to fail in the House of Lords.
Had the bill passed through all its stages in the House of Commons, it would have been guaranteed to become law, thanks to the Parliament Acts 1911 and 1949 which allow legislation to be enacted without the assent of the upper house under certain criteria. But the bill’s promoters could not get enough of their supporters to show up this time, while opponents’ resolve, if anything, stiffened in the intervening period.
What changed? First of all, the departure of Keir Starmer from the scene certainly made a difference: it is no small thing for the prime minister to be personally in favour of such a measure, or indeed to be opposed to it, as Andy Burnham indicated a few weeks ago. While today’s was a free vote, many MPs will have seen the change at the top of the Labour Party as a sign that they could afford to skip this particular early Friday sitting.
Whether Burnham quietly put his finger on the scale is unclear, but a week before the vote the Government quietly released a new impact assessment which raised the initial estimate of the number of people dying through assisted deaths in its first decade from 13,500 to more than 25,000. It also admitted that vulnerable populations may be more likely to be coerced into suicide. That, and a stream of horrific news stories from jurisdictions where assisted dying is legal, must have had an impact too.
Meanwhile, the attempt at using the Parliament Acts clearly backfired. For the procedure to be invoked, the bill had to be reintroduced in almost exactly the same form as it stood when it passed the House of Commons last time. This meant that a bill which even its supporters acknowledged was flawed — witness promoter Lord Falconer’s 76 amendments — was put in front of the House of Commons, with no guarantee that its manifold problems could be fixed in the short time available.
The bill’s promoters attempted to cynically weaponise the upper house’s scrutiny in their favour, by casting the issue as a People vs Lords debate. But today’s life peers are not the hereditary backwoodsmen whom David Lloyd George stared down. Instead, they include disability activists, palliative care specialists, and social care experts: it was hard for many progressive MPs, even those committed to the abolition of the appointed upper house, to disregard entirely the opinion of such people.
Today’s debate could not be called Parliament as its best, the common refrain heard on the green benches when it voted for the bill at second reading. There were indeed many low points, such as Liberal Democrat MP Andrew George urging the Commons to vote for the bill so that “we don’t allow the Lords to have the victory they want,” as though the bill concerned a trifling issue instead of state-provided suicide. Lauren Edwards of Labour, to use the most charitable interpretation of her comments, demonstrated an embarrassing lack of understanding about the Parliament Acts.
But there were moments of greatness as well. No one who watched it will be ever able to forget the sight of Labour MP Ashley Dalton, suffering from Stage 4 cancer, urging her colleagues against succumbing to the emotional blackmail of stories of horrific deaths to enact the legislation in the name of people like her.
Assisted dying once seemed an invincible progressive juggernaut. Its promoters like to think of themselves as the contemporary suffragettes, gay rights activists, and anti-racism campaigners. But the cautionary tales from places such as Canada and the Netherlands, as well as grassroots opposition, have stopped its progress in the British Isles. Westminster has joined the Senedd and the Scottish Parliament in rejecting assisted dying, and only tiny Jersey has legalised it. Today’s vote is a victory for human dignity and a reaffirmation of the duties we have for each other, in life as well as near death.
