Assisted dying vote

Thank you to everyone who wrote to me and spoke to me in the run up to the Assisted Dying debate and vote on Friday 29th November. 

Here is the speech I would have made had I been called to speak: 

'Thank you, Mr Speaker, I have wrestled with this issue and have found it difficult to decide on. I have now realised why.     This private member’s bill coming here today asks me to choose between compassion for the dying and protection of  the vulnerable innocents.

I have known friends die in pain, suffering and indignity. I wish they hadn’t had to. My friend Charlotte with motor neurone disease; Jacob my 19 year old constituent with osteosarcoma and metastatic spinal cord compression; Nick who couldn’t get pain relief over a weekend in a private hospital.

 If it were a member of my own family, I would do what they wanted and take my chances with the courts. I also agree that the State has the right to take life under certain circumstances. I was, after all, a soldier for 25 years.

I also believe in the right to commit suicide. Indeed, we have decriminalised it. And yet, if I were to see someone about to throw themselves off a bridge or under a train on the way home tonight, I would try to stop them.

It may be that there are some circumstances where individuals and even the state would be right to hasten death. And if there were a consensus among clinicians that there are one or two conditions which are always terminal over a very predictable timeframe and that palliative care doesn’t work in these cases, I’d be prepared to vote in that law for Charlotte, for Jacob and for Nick.

But I am not prepared to concede that principle for the Bill we have in front of us today. I see this Bill as a Trojan Horse. I am being asked not only to vote on the Bill tabled today, but also on the changes to it which will come over time if I do. And whilst I have compassion for my fellow man and woman, I also have a responsibility to protect the vulnerable from the darker side of human nature which also undoubtedly exists.

We need much more consideration of this. I welcome Gordon Brown’s advocacy for a Royal Commission on end of life care.

The fact that I am limited to just a few minutes in this chamber to speak on a matter of seismic importance to the social and moral fabric of our country, tells me and my constituents all we need to know about this rushed process for a bad bill.

I know that they say that hard cases make bad law. Well, if I have my way today, we will not be making any law at all.  For that reason, but with a broken heart for my dead friends, I will be voting against this Bill.'

During the further passage of the Bill, I will work to make it a much better law than the one I voted against on Friday. 

And if I can’t, I will likely vote against the Bill at third reading.