A decade from now, for what will the Starmer government be remembered? It won’t be a Macmillan-style legacy of mass housebuilding. Nor will it be masterful stewardship of the economy, or tackling mass immigration. Renationalising the railways? An administrative fiction — the Government is simply letting short-term contracts lapse, rather than delivering fundamental reform. Bridget Phillipson’s assault on schools? Perhaps.

But there is a strong case to be made that the most significant developments of this Labour government will be in the realm of social policy: namely, this week’s decriminalisation of abortion up to birth, and — barring intervention by the House of Lords — the legalisation of state-assisted suicide for the terminally ill.

These are each very significant developments which, in their own ways, transform the state’s relationship with vulnerable people. Yet neither of them are — or, at least, were — Government policy. You will find no mention of either in Labour’s 2024 manifesto, and the Government has tabled no primary legislation to bring them about.

Assisted dying was farmed out to Kim Leadbeater, a backbench MP, and delivered via a Private Member’s Bill. Normally reserved for relatively trivial changes, this process bypasses most of the scrutiny mechanisms to which ordinary legislation is subject. It also gives enormous power to the bill’s sponsor, which Leadbeater has exploited to the full. Her legislation was not published until a couple of weeks before it was introduced in the Commons. There were no impact assessments, and critical witnesses — including from the royal colleges — were excluded from testifying to MPs.

Overall, the Leadbeater bill has received a fraction of the parliamentary time a change of this magnitude deserved. Health Secretary Wes Streeting is opposed, and both the Work and Pensions Secretary and the Disability Minister abstained on third reading. Yet it will now likely be bulldozed through the House of Lords — because a PMB, unlike an ordinary bill, is vulnerable to being killed off — and become law.

All that is a veritable cornucopia of democratic transparency compared to the dramatic change in Britain’s abortion law, however, which was simply sprung as an amendment to the Policing and Crime Bill and came almost as a surprise. The UK has been lucky to avoid an American-style political war over abortion, and that it has done so is testament to the parliamentary process. MPs spent over 600 hours debating what became the Abortion Act 1967, and the result was a settlement which, while not entirely pleasing everyone, produced a consensus that endured for over half a century. No government has ever formally proposed changing that settlement and having the debate in the open. Instead, it has been unpicked by stealth.

First, MPs provided for the at-home provision of abortifacients during the Covid-19 pandemic. This was presented as an emergency measure, and rushed through on those terms, avoiding the debate a permanent change deserved. Two years later, MPs simply refused to repeal it. Naturally, this change — which removed the in-person oversight of doctors — made it easier for women to procure the means to undertake illegal abortions. The prosecution of these women then justified this week’s decision, not to restore the status quo ante, but to completely exclude them from criminal consequences.

The implications of this are significant, and not just because people like Sarah Catt, jailed in 2012 for terminating her full-term pregnancy to try to hide an affair, will now get off without charge. Given that abortion up to birth has merely been decriminalised, not legalised, that means that killing a pre-natal child after the abortion limit is still a crime under the Offences Against the Person Act. Thus, the legal position of the British State is that there is now a category of person, who is legally a person and whose killing is a crime — but a crime that will not actually be punished.

If there are compelling cases for either of these significant changes, they should have been made in public, and advanced openly by a government prepared to submit to Britain’s full democratic process. Keir Starmer’s time in office may come to be remembered for its evasions of this very process.

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Henry Hill is Deputy Editor of ConservativeHome.

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