Reckless Terminally Ill Adults Bill requires urgent scrutiny | Politics | News

The passing of the Terminally Ill Adults Bill was hardly unexpected despite the usual melodrama from the media about the vote being on a “knife edge”. However, clearly enough MPs had

reservations about aspects of the Bill to make it clear that they were, so to speak, “lending” their votes at this stage to enable further examination. It is not an unusual situation when highly contentious legislation is involved.

Much is made of the fact that Kim Leadbeater is to include opponents in her selection of committee members who will now examine the Bill line by line. In my day the convention for Private Members’ Bills was that the split on a Committee reflected the vote in the House and that often meant a large number of opponents, which is, of course, the way also to ensure proper scrutiny. I remember vividly, because I was serving on the committees, both David Alton’s abortion Bill and Michael Foster’s Bill to abolish hunting being run on those lines.

This Bill is riddled with horrors. For a start, unlike the 1967 Abortion Act, there is no proper provision for conscientious objection, even in theory. If a doctor will not assist a suicide himself, he must refer his patient to one who will. In other words he must, by law, still procure the suicide. As for the judges, as one pointed out to me last week, there is no provision for conscientious objection at all. Appeals work only one way: one can appeal against a refusal but a relative, concerned about suspected coercion, for example, cannot appeal against an affirmative decision and coroners cannot investigate.

Nobody, other than the sick person, should be able to initiate a discussion about assisted suicide but this Bill explicitly allows a doctor to do so. In the course of the debate Ms Leadbeater quoted the Health Select Committee in her contention that there was no slippery slope. What it actually said was that it found no evidence to suggest that, once passed, the law might be widened.

First of all that contradicts its own findings earlier in the report when it quotes examples of this happening in other countries but that is not the point. For the law to be widened there would have to be due parliamentary process and that is not my fear.

The slippery slope is where practice and culture change even when the law does not, as happened with the 1967 Abortion Act. The law did not change at all until 1990 but in that time the requirement for two doctors to agree had become a mere formality and yet that is the very provision in this Bill which is supposed to be a rigorous safeguard! And in those days GPs had rather more time than they have now.

So there is much work to be done and one can only hope it will be done well.

The Bishop of Newcastle, Helen-Ann Hartley, below, whines that she has been “frozen out” by the Church of England and “isolated” by the Archbishops of York and Canterbury. What did she expect? That she would be feted by them?

She will not have been the only Bishop in the C of E to call for Welby to resign but she was and still is the only one who did so publicly. Why on earth would they trust her or want her about when sensitive discussions are afoot? And that m’dear is what 15 minutes of fame does for you.

MPs want a shorter working day. I wonder how they would have survived when we had all-night sittings and sat till 10pm most days of the week? When we talked in all seriousness about an “early night” when the votes were over and done with by midnight? Now the poor little dears want to go home at 4pm, like schoolchildren. Aww, diddums.

Well, I suppose it might suit the government to have less scrutiny but it won’t do the public any favours if vast chunks of Bills go unconsidered and unamended. So, even if you are tempted to think that the less time MPs spend at Westminster, the less the potential for harm and over-regulation, think again. Holding government to account means taking the time to penetrate its proposals in detail and Members cannot do that if they have gone home to tea.

Gregg Wallace is a fool. Even if his observation has substance, to dismiss his accusers as “middle-class women of a certain age” was bound to add fuel to the flames. He would have done better to follow his denial with a dignified silence.

Surely he remembered the outcry about JD Vance’s “childless cat ladies” jibe? As a childless owner of a cat myself I laughed, but in this day and age the expected reaction is outrage, hurt and offence and mine was a minority response.

If I were advising Gregg Wallace, I should tell him to shut up and I suspect many have already done that, so perhaps he should swallow his pride and listen.

■ Twenty- four years ago, I proposed, as Shadow Home Secretary, comprehensive anti-drugs legislation dealing with everything from large-scale supply to small-scale possession, emphasising the need for a deterrent and for the police to have a speedy tool for dealing with the latter.

There was an outcry and none did more to harm my case than the Mail On Sunday, which ran a major story about Members of the Shadow Cabinet who admitted to taking drugs in their youth.

Last Sunday this same paper ran an editorial saying what I had said. Well, there is more joy in Heaven over one sinner that repenteth and it has only taken said paper a quarter of a century to arrive at my conclusion.

What grieves me is all the harm that drugs have caused in between.