Parliaments used to have nicknames. Barebone’s Parliament of 1653 was named after the improbable Fifth Monarchist agitator Praise-God Barebone MP. A few years previously, the Rump Parliament was what remained of the Long Parliament after it was purged by military force. Somewhat surprisingly, there was only one Useless Parliament, which was dissolved after offending King Charles I.

If the current parliament goes down into history, it will be known as the Death Parliament. For today, MPs voted by 314 votes to 291 in favour of the principle that there are some lives which are not worth living, that killing your patient is a form of healthcare, and that the state has a duty to enable suicide as long as the correct forms are filled out.

This day has been long in the planning. Dr Killick Millard founded the Voluntary Euthanasia Society as long ago as 1935. The horrors of the Second World War were a serious setback to his cause — although they did not prevent him from defending Nazi doctors who had performed “involuntary euthanasia” on concentration camp inmates, such was his commitment to the idea.

Later, the VES discovered the magic of public relations. Now trading under the name Dignity in Dying, and the real force behind Kim Leadbeater’s bill, it has managed to convince parliamentarians that, by voting in favour of legislation which would allow the sick to kill themselves if they feel like a burden and doctors to harass patients with offers of assisted suicide, they are acting out of compassion and doing the right thing.

It had become a shibboleth to praise the bill’s second reading debate as “Parliament at its best”. Today, rather fewer MPs used that expression. Everyone, by then, knew that it was a lie. As proponents of the bill traded in cherry-picked factoids, few could express these sentiments with a straight face.

In the midst of all this, there were some heroes. Mother of the House Diane Abbott, obviously ill and struggling, asked MPs what would be more unjust than to die due to “appallingly drafted legislation”. New Labour MP Jen Craft held back tears as she spoke about society’s treatment of the vulnerable — her daughter, who has Down’s Syndrome, uppermost in her mind.

There was the Tory former minister Tom Tugendhat, who highlighted the fundamental dishonesty behind using the term “assisted dying” for what is really “assisted killing”. And there was Adam Jogee MP, who had to leave the bedside of a dying relative to vote because proponents of the bill had refused to help him fulfil his constitutional duties by “pairing” their vote with his. Labour whips were nonetheless happy to help Dan Norris MP, who has been accused of rape and child sex offences, to vote by proxy. He voted Aye.

Leadbeater, who introduced the bill last year, opened the debate with a hoary joke about death and taxes. Then, perhaps with her behaviour during the gerrymandered committee stage in mind, she told MPs that they were not voting on “parliamentary procedure”. Liberal Democrat MP Josh Babarinde defended the possibility of people self-coercing themselves into an early death on the grounds that a choice was a choice. His party colleague Luke Taylor argued that, since the House had begun the week by voting to decriminalise abortion up to birth, it should “bookend” it by voting to legalise killing the sick.

None of this mattered. None of the criticism mattered. Reasoned arguments landed on the deaf ears of those who just wanted to shunt the bill up to the House of Lords and be done with it. To many new MPs, legislating for death seems to be the last frontier of progressive politics, the last taboo to be broken.

When the tellers announced the results of the vote, the House fell into a hushed silence. Perhaps MPs, many of whom did not seriously engage with the bill until now, had realised, at least momentarily, the enormity of what they have done. At second reading, some MPs who voted in favour said that they did so in order for the debate to continue. No one who went through the Aye lobby this afternoon can have the same excuse.

In the coming years, when abuses inevitably occur, when the public mood sours on the reality of an idea it superficially backs, each of the 314 MPs will have to account for the choice they made this afternoon.

---

Yuan Yi Zhu is an academic and writer.

yuanyi_z

---