Left image – Wikimedia Commons: Official portrait of Naz Shah MP crop 2, 2024
Labour MP Naz Shah was forced to leave fellow MP Kim Leadbeater’s assisted suicide committee yesterday because her hearing aids ran out of charge after 15 hours of use. Shah had raised her disability needs “repeatedly” before.
Ms Shah, the Labour MP for Bradford West, apologised on X last night after being forced to leave the Committee hearing yesterday on 18 March. Explaining her difficulties, she posted:
On 18 March, the first Committee hearing ran from 9:25 am to 11:30 am, and the second hearing took place from 2 pm to 9:17 pm.
Disabled Labour MP Andrew Pakes, commenting on the incident on X, said:
Rajiv Shah, a former special adviser at the Ministry of Justice, posted:
Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill for England and Wales proposes to legalise assisted suicide for terminally ill adults given six months to live. It is currently being scrutinised at Committee stage before being put to another MP vote, set to take place in late April.
“The harmful ethic of assisted suicide is exposed”
SPUC’s Michael Robinson, Executive Director (Public Affairs and Legal Services), said: “Naz Shah being forced to leave early yesterday ‘because of disability’ exposes the Committee’s shocking lack of empathy for disabled people.
“The Committee had been notified ‘repeatedly’ about Ms Shah’s needs, but it seems that her concerns were ignored. The lack of forethought demonstrated yesterday shows the fears of disability campaigners about assisted suicide to be entirely justified.
“If the Leadbeater Committee cannot make provision for one disabled MP’s needs, how can it ensure that disabled people are provided for and protected from an assisted suicide bill that tells them that they might be better off dead?
“Every day the harmful ethic of assisted suicide is exposed for what it really is. Vulnerable people, including the disabled, have the most to lose, yet these are exactly the individuals who are being ignored in the mad rush to legalise a fundamentally unsound and dangerous piece of legislation.
“The only reasonable response to this mortal threat is to reject all assisted suicide laws. MPs must open their eyes to what is going and take action to protect all people before it is too late.”
Disabled expert sounds the alarm against assisted suicide
Last February, Dr Miro Griffiths was one of the few disability experts to testify before the Leadbeater Committee.
“I am overwhelmingly against the principle of and the clauses set out in the Bill”, said Dr Griffiths. “It coalesces with the systemic injustices faced by the disabled people’s communities in the UK.”
A concerned Dr Griffiths told the Committee that “Section 6 of the Equality Act 2010 states that a disabled person is somebody who has a ‘physical or mental impairment’ and the impairment ‘has a substantial and long-term adverse effect’ on their ‘ability to carry out… day-to-day activities’.
“If you have a terminal illness, it is likely that you will be defined within the terms of what is outlined in Section 6, so it is a fundamental flaw, because disabled people will be incorporated within this.”
Dr Griffiths, the co-director of the Centre for Disability Studies at the University of Leeds, also warned about “a lack of advocacy services available to disabled people… The infrastructure to support [disabled] people either to respond to coercion, or to understand that they do not have to be in that position in the first place, is non-existent.”
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