As things stand, “assisted dying” is illegal in England and Wales under section two of the Suicide Act 1961 — but will this change under Keir Starmer’s government? Lord Falconer’s Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults Bill had its first reading in the House of Lords last week and has just been published.

The bill is similar to the one he proposed a decade ago, which made it to a second reading in the Lords in 2015. In the same year, a bill in the Commons proposed by then MP Rob Marris, was defeated by vote. More recently in 2021, Baroness Meacher’s bill received second reading in Lords but failed to progress before the end of the parliamentary session.

However, supporters of Falconer’s new bill are optimistic this time round, in part because the Prime Minister has promised time for it to be debated, and there is progress with similar legislation in the Isle of Man, the Channel Islands and in Scotland, where a deadline for expert evidence ends later this month. But many critics of euthanasia legislation assert that “assisted dying” is merely a euphemism for “assisted suicide”, and if such legislation were to pass, they fear it would be prone to abuse by those who want to exploit vulnerable relatives or friends for material gain.

Of course, this is by no means a straightforward debate. Polling indicates that two thirds of Brits are in favour of legalising assisted dying and in the last two decades, 540 Brits have travelled to Dignitas in Switzerland to end their life. Disability rights campaigner and Silent Witness actress Liz Carr, however, has been a vocal opponent of “assisted dying” for more than a decade. Her documentary Better off Dead? was compelling viewing, exposing the inherent risks of legislation for the disabled.

On moves to change the law, Carr told the BBC, that in countries where assisted dying has been legalised, complications have arisen. She said: “What we are seeing in countries like Canada[…] the Netherlands and Belgium, is that these safeguards that begin, they whittle away, and when we say it’s going to be for a small group of people it extends, either the definition extends, or the number using the law extends.”

She’s not wrong. In Canada, where medical assistance in dying, or Maid, became law in 2016, there has been controversy surrounding people in poverty with chronic health conditions who failed to get social housing and opted for assisted dying instead. The law changed in 2016 to permit those whose death was “reasonably foreseeable” to have an assisted death, and then in 2021, it additionally captured those “suffering unbearably” with a medical condition. The deeply contentious proposed extension of the law to those whose sole reason for Maid is their mental illness, has been delayed twice. Carr is right, this is indeed a slippery and dangerous slope to be on.

Nevertheless, the UK appears to be inching closer towards passing a bill of some description. Spokesperson for Right To Life UK, Catherine Robinson, pointed out that Lord Falconer’s assisted suicide bill is his seventh parliamentary attempt to change the law on assisted suicide since 2009, working out at almost once every two years for the past 15 years. With 100,000 seriously ill people who need palliative care dying each year without having received any such care, Right To Life suggests that the government should work to fill those significant gaps.

Potential exploitation by avaricious relatives or friends obviously remains an issue to consider, despite several sensible safeguards within Falconer’s Bill. The question is, can any law truly deter subtly coercive “vultures”?