January 22, 2025 - 1:20pm

Back in November, MPs with doubts over the assisted suicide bill were told to wait and see. When introducing the bill, Labour’s Kim Leadbeater told the House of Commons that voting for it was not so much a vote for assisted suicide as “a vote to continue the debate. It is a vote to subject the Bill to line-by-line scrutiny in Committee.” That was the deal, and many wavering MPs seemed willing to take it.

Yesterday, the first meeting of the committee, was Leadbeater’s chance to show just how strong that scrutiny would be. First, we learnt that Leadbeater had introduced a last-minute motion: the crucial part of the meeting — the debate on which witnesses to call — would be behind closed doors. Journalists and the public would be asked to leave; Hansard would be left blank; those of us watching parliamentlive.tv would see a message reading “Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill is currently in private.” Leadbeater said this was to protect the “privacy” of witnesses, though other committee members responded that they couldn’t see why that would be an issue. But there was another aspect to the story.

As we discovered during the public parts of the meeting, a major row was breaking out within the committee. The root cause is the powers given to Leadbeater with a private member’s bill such as this. With a Government bill, the pro side and the anti side both pick witnesses. Here, although Leadbeater asked for suggestions, the list was all up to her; she sent round a provisional list last week, and then an updated version at 10 o’clock yesterday morning. While the committee had a chance to amend it, Leadbeater had picked the committee as well, and in yesterday’s votes all challenges to her were easily defeated.

So why all the debate over the list? Simply put, it contains a surprisingly large number of vocal advocates for assisted suicide, and a noticeably small number of opponents — or even neutral figures who might raise difficult points.

There are eight witnesses from other countries, and they all back a change in the law. For example, there is no room for Theo Boer, a member of the Dutch Health Council who once enthusiastically worked for the euthanasia review board but now thinks his country made a terrible mistake.

Of the nine lawyers invited to speak, six are active supporters of assisted suicide and at least two of the remainder seem to be neutral. The committee will hear from Sir Nicholas Mostyn, the former senior judge who backs a law change. It will not hear from former senior judges who have criticised the bill — such as Sir James Munby, who says the safeguards fall “lamentably short”, or Sir David Bodey. There is nobody representing a disability organisation when the biggest, Disability Rights UK, leads a coalition of 350 such organisations against a change in the law.

Labour MP Simon Opher defended the imbalance, claiming that “a split of 38 to 20 […] is appropriate and actually reflects the vote in the House.” But the House split 55-45 just on whether to keep debating the bill. This is 66-34 in favour of passing it. And if scrutiny is the goal, then it should really be the other way round, given that it’s your opponents who are more likely to make you clarify points and address weaknesses.

The most startling moment of all was when Labour MP Naz Shah proposed an amendment to hear from the Royal College of Psychiatrists on crucial questions such as capacity and coercion. Leadbeater’s committee voted it down, by 14 votes to eight. Only this morning, after a storm of bad publicity, did Leadbeater decide to invite the Royal College after all.

Some MPs were alarmed by all this. Conservative James Cleverly tweeted yesterday: “This is not reassuring me that getting good legislation is the priority for the proponents of the bill.” Fellow Tory Saqib Bhatti claimed that it “completely undermines the promises made at second reading […] Plenty of MPs relied on those promises and lent their votes accordingly.”

How many MPs share those concerns? We won’t know until Third Reading, possibly as soon as April, when MPs get their last chance to vote. Then, Leadbeater’s strategy may turn out to have been recklessly overconfident — or brilliantly ruthless. Either way, yesterday undermined the idea that a Parliamentary committee is an impartial process operating above the messy realities of politics. To all appearances, Kim Leadbeater is playing to win.


Dan Hitchens is Senior Editor of First Things and co-author of the forthcoming Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Johnson.

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