When Kim Leadbeater MP announced that she was using her private members’ bill lottery win to table assisted suicide legislation, its success seemed certain. The press was broadly sympathetic and, more importantly, so was the Prime Minister.

Now, however, the Government’s whip in the Lords has confirmed that no more time will be given to the Leadbeater bill. Prorogation will take place in a few weeks, and the bill will die. Advocates claimed that peers had stalled its progress by proposing over 1,000 amendments to push for a delay. The bill may be revived after May but, at the moment, the next stage is unclear.

As to how we got to this point, it should be remembered that the architects of the bill did get carried away. In other countries where assisted suicide has been legalized, more limited measures were introduced and then expanded when no one was looking. For example, the Canadian Parliament passed a bill in 2021 that effectively allowed people whose death was not reasonably foreseeable to access assisted dying plans, before widening the program.

But Leadbeater went too far, too fast. The safeguards were thin and some, like the requirement for judicial approval, were inserted so they could be discarded as unworkable when the bill passed in the Commons.

Then there were the procedural dirty tricks. This is politics, and such things are tolerated most of the time. But this particular bill is about issues of life and death, and the sponsors’ contempt for their opponents did not pass unnoticed. Especially egregious was their failure to publish the bill in time for pre-debate scrutiny. But there was also the stacking of the bill committee with handpicked supporters who treated their colleagues on the opposite side with disdain.

By the time the assisted dying bill was sent up to the House of Lords, both the bill and its backers had lost much of their shine. Leadbeater and her proxies consistently asserted that any issues could be fixed in the Lords. But once the Lords tried to do this, the pro-assisted dying camp began to cry foul. Then, Leadbeater and the bill manager in the upper chamber, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, insisted that real scrutiny was undemocratic.

But the real issue was always that the assisted dying bill was deeply flawed, unsafe, and impossible to make work in practice. Its supporters may be up in arms about the number of amendments by peers, but the truth is that the bill needs fixing. Even Falconer himself tabled 35 amendments, which reveals what a dog of a bill the Commons voted for.

The bill’s supporters have already vowed to do it again in the next parliamentary session. If they pass the same flawed bill twice, they want to use the Parliament Act to force the bill through without the Lords. But whether their colleagues will want to repeat that bruising and politically costly experience is an open question.

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Yuan Yi Zhu is an academic and writer.

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