March 4, 2025 - 4:20pm
Ever since Labour MP Kim Leadbeater introduced her private members’ bill to legalise assisted suicide in England and Wales last November, many have characterised her plans as providing for the creation of a National Death Service. This could be interpreted either as a tongue-in-cheek indictment of the National Health Service’s lamentable state, or a more sincere attempt to grapple with the moral implications of a government helping its citizens commit suicide.
Now it seems that we may not even get that. As the Times has reported, ministers are thinking about allowing the NHS to outsource assisted dying to private clinics, such is the expected uptake for state-sanctioned suicide. Among the plans considered is a scheme similar to NHS dentistry, where clinics offer “services” to both private patients and NHS patients — the only difference being that dentistry, although it sometimes feels like it, is not intended to kill you.
It was also pointed out, quite accurately, that there is nothing in Leadbeater’s bill prohibiting the private provision of assisted suicide, raising the cheerful prospect of dying in, say, a Bupa clinic.
All of this naturally provokes all sorts of interesting questions. For instance, would payment for assisted suicide be made beforehand, or could families receive a bill in the post right after learning what their loved ones have done? (There is no provision in the bill for the family to be informed before the procedure.)
On the level of policy, would it have been better had the bill been preceded by some sort of impact assessment, so that ministers don’t have to scramble to try to figure out how an overstretched NHS, which cannot even deliver actual care in many cases, is supposed to end the lives of potentially thousands of patients each year? In fairness, Health Secretary Wes Streeting did commission something of the kind, which made Labour’s grande dame Harriet Harman apoplectic — it would be bad form to figure out that assisted suicide is unworkable before Parliament voted it through.
Of course, private provision of assisted suicide and euthanasia is not unknown in other countries. In Canada, there are doctors whose main source of income comes from killing their patients; they bill the provincial government according to a fees schedule. While most Canadian doctors recoil at becoming involved in these activities, a very small minority happily specialise in it. One, Dr Ellen Wiebe, claims she has been involved in the deaths of more than 400 patients, which she describes as “very rewarding”.
Not unrelatedly, some have been accused of cutting corners, such as approving requests to die after a single telephone call — time is money, after all. Dr Wiebe herself is currently the subject of two civil lawsuits: one alleging wrongful death for a man who did not qualify for euthanasia under Canadian law, the other claiming that Wiebe “negligently approved the procedure for a patient who does not legally qualify” after one Zoom meeting.
But English doctors can rest assured. Clause 26 of the Leadbeater bill provides for a complete indemnity from civil claims for anyone involved in the assisted dying process. This means that a doctor cannot be sued, for example, for negligently assessing someone’s life expectancy, or for negligently assessing that someone has capacity to consent to assisted suicide. Indeed, if the doctor got the dosage of the drugs wrong and botched the procedure, they would be immune from civil suits as well.
Leadbeater’s camp has briefed that she intends to amend her own bill to cap profits on assisted suicide at a “reasonable” rate. One cannot put a price on life. Soon, at least, we will know the price of ending one.
The more I read about this bill the worse it seems. Whether you agree that assisted dying should be legalised or not, surely this botched, partisan and under examined process is not the way to go about it.
At least Canada waited till it was law before they started down a slippery slope.
This is one of those issues that good people could argue on both sides with compassionate and moral authority. Until you come to the real world consequences when everything then screams ‘don’t do it!’.
And then you look at this Bill and the way safeguards are chipped away. No MP can, in good conscience, vote for this.
A conscience is a lot to expect from a politician. Peel away the phony piety and they are in it for the money and the power.
Today I learned that the committee has voted:
NOT to have safeguards for young people aged 16&17,
NOT to have safeguards for people with learning disabilities such as Down’s Syndrome
NOT to have safeguards for marginalised people.
NOT to exclude people whose lives can be extended if they accept medical treatment. Terminal illness now means not taking ordinary life-extending meds (insulin, thyroxine). This will bring anorexics into the definition of terminally ill.
They have also decided that doctors MUST offer assisted suicide to all eligible patients.
Psychosocial assessments need NOT be done.
No judges will be involved.
All the safeguards they breezily promised in the parliamentary vote have been abandoned.
The more extreme the Committees stance and the weaker the safeguards hopefully the more likely the Bill will be voted down.
I’m not so sure. The feeling I’m getting (here too) is that Governments and those running things generally are OK with quietly bumping off people (or allowing people to be quietly bumped off) who are no longer useful (as defined by governments) and who add to the pensions bill or the NHS bill.
Still it opens the door for all those class enemies, farmers and small business owners, deprived of hope by Rachel from customer services
Quelle surprise
Clearly, there is a push on to get rid of people and save money.
Convenient timing, with AI poised to throw millions into the “useless eater” category.
The NHS does not have to outsource. It is more than capable of killing its patients.
Reports put the number of unnecessary deaths caused by the NHS at up to 22,000 per annum. That’s right 22,000 per annum.
Indeed. If I ever did choose assisted dying It would most certainly not be on the NHS. There’d be an 18 month waiting list, so my terminal illness would kill me first.
You take your life in your hands when you get wheeled into one of their hospitals. But, hey, it’s free innit?
This bill will be savaged in the House of Lords and hopefully will never see the light of day. Shame on any MP who votes for it whether they favour assisted dying in principle or not. It should never have been a private members bill.
Today, the increasingly rushed Assisted Suicide Bill Committee rejected amendments to protect people with Down’s syndrome, autism and learning difficulties, and to prevent doctors from raising the option of assisted suicide with 16 and 17-year-old children.
There would be no cooling off period before a doctor could raise assisted suicide with a patient after a terminal diagnosis, nor before a terminal patient could apply for assisted suicide. But doctors would not only be permitted to suggest assisted suicide unprompted by patients, Kim Leadbeater twice confirmed that they would be required to do so.
Elsewhere, Ministers have confirmed that assisted suicide would be outsourced to private companies so as not to affect NHS waiting lists. Will there be prepayment plans? Will there be advertising? In Canada, there are “End of Life Doulas” trading under such names as “Death’s Apprentice”, “Daisy Death Care”, and “Dying the Dream”.
Any of those provisions would be bad enough. Now put them all together. This Bill must be defeated. Preferably in time for report stage, and certainly in time for Third Reading, we need George Galloway back in the House of Commons. Both to stop conscription. And to stop this.
I am not sure why anyone is remotely surprised by this, or for that matter can reasonably object to it. Once the State has made the first step of agreeing to facilitate suicide, as a matter of intellectual principle, as a civic and moral virtue…well, then every practical aspect of its facilitation simply becomes the next transactional negotiation over which to quibble. It’s not a ‘slippery slope’; there is no slope left to slide down. It’s just a collective freefall, waiting to happen. And we all fall as far as any one individual happens to decide they wish, and then duly quibble-negotiates as their State-sanctioned right, to fall. This, surely, is obvious? If it’s OK for the State to help ‘this one individual person’ in the village kill themself, then the State will bind itself to helping – must do so – every person in the village kill themselves if individual need be. Unless the State plans to play God. Do you plan for the State to play God, VAD advocates? Seems to me that’s exactly what you’re planning for the State to do. Only without having the spine or honesty to admit it to yourselves, or anyone else, explicitly, of course. Of course.
But if you’re not planning for the State to become God, and impose State-designated qualitative parameters on which lives do and do not qualify as ‘lives worth living in the State’s eyes’…then of course you can have no objections to unlimited VAD, with no State-imposed parameters whatsoever. If a society is going to facilitate suicide at all then it can only do so ‘on demand’: to everyone, equally and without limitation, question or challenge. And yes: at whatever price the Suicide Marketplace determines. (We are, after all, living in a capitalist economy, itself sanctioned by a democratic polity.)
Or…what, you VAD advocates think you get to tap-dance around this, do you? Are you getting squeamish, all of a sudden? You want to pick and choose who the State is ‘allowed’ to help to kill, to flatter your faux ‘progressive’ vanities and delusions? But, but…I thought this was all about individual choice!? But…but…surely you are not planning to place State limitations on that ‘individual choice’? You great big libertarian heroes, you? You big tough individualistic swingin’ d*cks, who have no need of the silly State telling you what you can and can’t do with your lives? Why, why…I’m shocked! What, are you moralistic wowsers or something? Are you all closet God-botherers, archaically beholden to anachronistic superstitions and patriarchal pulpit bullying?
Ha. Tyre-kicking lightweights, is what you VAD pretenders are. Go on, have the guts to do State-enabled suicide properly, Kim Leadbetter et al. If you’re gunna do it at all. I dare you. Or stop wasting everyone’s time and moral energy, that would be better served making ‘lives (allegedly) not worth living’…worth living, after all.
Equivocating moral chickensh*ts, is what the State suicide lobby are. Cake-and-eat-it narcissists. Weak as p*ss. Chortle.
(PS: F**k you, VAD. Progressive imposter.)
The U.K. could just copy the legislation from any one of the Australian states – seems to be working fine here.
This is the first serious attempt by Labour gov at balancing the budget, and reining in NHS cost.
I don’t think Kim is the sharpest knife in the drawer and no doubt her ‘private members bill’ was sponsored and written by the same party wonks who thought the budget would be a consequence free escapade.
A dying country making suicide easier — what could be more predictable?