After dying a natural death in the House of Lords earlier this year, Labour MP Kim Leadbeater’s assisted suicide bill has been resurrected and put on life support in Westminster by MP Lauren Edwards on June 17—just five days before Prime Minister Keir Starmer, a supporter of the bill, resigned. Starmer’s successor is unlikely to be enthusiastic about a suicide campaign that increasingly resembles a desperate crusade.
👎DISCREDITED ASSISTED SUICIDE BILL RETURNS, AMIDST PREDICTIONS OF DEFEAT
Ignoring pleas from fellow MPs and warnings from Royal Colleges & disability and domestic abuse charities, Lauren Edwards has defied Andy Burnham’s concerns by reintroducing the assisted suicide Bill.🧵 1/ pic.twitter.com/YvqlxbgFt5
The euthanasia lobby and their parliamentary supporters insist that bringing back Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill is necessary because the public is demanding it and that the peers ran out the clock by bogging down the process with a record 1,200 proposed amendments. By bringing back the identical bill, activists hope to circumvent the House of Lords entirely and ram the bill through using the Parliament Acts.
But there is another reason for these extraordinary measures. While public opinion favors assisted suicide in principle, the debate surrounding the bill rallied an unprecedented coalition in opposition, including prominent disability rights groups, the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the Association for Palliative Medicine, and the British Geriatrics Society, and many others; the British Medical Association also raised strong objections.
Euthanasia activists fear that if this opportunity is lost, the debate might be over for years. Leadbeater warned of this outcome explicitly. Euthanasia activists exposed their extremism during the debates—Lord Charlie Falconer affirmed his view that pregnant women should be permitted to access euthanasia—and the British press covered the debate in detail. The defeat of Scotland’s assisted suicide in March heightened their fears. Leadbeater’s bill lost votes with every reading.
Despite the claims of euthanasia activists, their agenda is losing public support. In April, a YouGov poll found that 56% of Britons now fear that people will choose assisted suicide because they believe they are a burden, 64% believe that there will be a high risk of elderly people being pressured, and 58% believe that people with disabilities will be at a higher risk. These views were likely exacerbated by the fact that Leadbeater’s assisted suicide committee voted down proposed safeguards on every single one of those counts.
In June, a mega-poll of 10,000 people conducted by Whitestone Insight found that only 7% wanted assisted suicide to be a top three priority for their local MP over the next year. “Even in Spen Valley, the constituency of the sponsor of the assisted suicide Bill, Kim Leadbeater, 61% of people agreed that they would not want their MP to support a law pushed through without approval from the House of Lords and the House of Commons without full scrutiny,” Right to Life UK noted. “Only 8% of people disagreed.”
In short, the only people desperate for the UK bill to pass are euthanasia campaigners. “This polling clearly shows that the public does not want assisted dying introduced via the back door using the Parliament Act,” stated Fiona Mackenzie, CEO of The Other Half, the think tank that sponsored the poll. “In every constituency in Great Britain, voters say they do not want their MP to back a law pushed through without the approval of both Houses of Parliament.”
