Left image – Wikimedia Commons: Official portrait of Kim Leadbeater MP crop 2, 2024
Kim Leadbeater MP has proposed that a panel of “experts” should sign off on assisted suicides instead of High Court judges, having previously stated that judges would safeguard against coercion. Slamming this “shameless U-turn”, SPUC said that the new proposal constitutes a “rigged jury that is no safeguard at all against pro-death believers”.
The Leadbeater Bill proposes to legalise assisted suicide for terminally ill adults in England and Wales. The draft law stipulated that a High Court judge would sign off each case to ensure that the applicant wasn’t being coerced.
However, Ms Leadbeater now proposes that this process would be overseen instead by a panel of experts, including psychiatrists and social workers, selected by a Voluntary Assisted Dying Commission.
While advocates of assisted suicide advance the measure as an extra safeguard, critics like Conservative MP Danny Kruger have questioned the impartiality of such a panel that would lack “adequate judicial safeguards”.
Ms Leadbeater had previously insisted that having a High Court judge “double-checking” a case for coercion was the ultimate safeguard.
“Why do people have so little trust in politicians, I wonder”, one user posted on X/Twitter last night following Ms Leadbeater’s U-turn:
At a committee hearing into the Leadbeater Bill, two American advocates of assisted suicide recently suggested that being a “burden” was enough reason to die. One doctor even said that it should be a “felony” for loved ones to “interfere with a patient’s right to make this choice”.
SPUC comment
A SPUC spokesperson said: “The mask has truly slipped in this shameless U-turn. Now we are seeing the true ideological motivations behind the Leadbeater Bill, which will put vulnerable people at the mercy of so-called ‘experts’: that is to say, true believers who advocate death as a solution to ‘problem’ patients.
“Judging by the American doctors who testified before the committee, this expert panel would be nothing more than a rigged jury that is no safeguard at all against pro-death believers who’d criminalise family members for persuading their loved ones not to die.
“This dangerous and immoral Bill must be rejected for the sake of all citizens. We are all potentially threatened by this radical proposal that would remove the final barrier between the patient and the doctor seeking to put them into an early grave.
“The goalposts have been moved, and it’s proposals like this that show that the government and some MPs cannot be trusted with assisted suicide laws. Once legalised, there is no knowing where this rapid slide towards death will end.”
