Left to right – Wikimedia Commons: Jess Asato MP portrait cropped, Official portrait of Florence Eshalomi MP crop 2, 2024
In a letter to fellow Labour parliamentarians, a group of Labour MPs have called out the Leadbeater Bill as “irredeemably flawed and not fit to become law”.
Six Labour MPs authored the letter that was sent to colleagues within the Party after the conclusion of the Committee stage scrutiny of fellow MP Kim Leadbeater’s assisted suicide bill.
“Our efforts have not succeeded in improving the bill and we cannot recommend a vote in favour of it”, the letter said. “It is our hope that the bill will not progress in its current form, and that a better way can be found to take forward the vital conversation about choice at the end of life.
“But a flawed and dangerous bill that places the most vulnerable people in society at unacceptable risk is no choice at all, and we urge MPs to vote against it.”
The six Labour MPs also slammed the “reckless and loose language in the bill”, adding that the promise that the Bill would be strengthened during the Committee stage “had not been kept”.
One of the signatories of the letter, Jess Asato MP, separately criticised Ms Leadbeater’s “chaotic” Committee and its “substantial last-minute changes…
“We’ve seen the NHS’s founding principles amended, the High Court protections ditched and now the timeline for the whole process changed. This isn’t how good laws are made.”
The roll-out of MP Kim Leadbeater’s assisted suicide bill has been delayed until 2029, should it be passed into law, after she was reportedly informed by ministers that her law was “unworkable” because of already existing burdens on the NHS and judiciary.
Ms Leadbeater’s move to replace the High Court judge sign-off provision with an assisted suicide panel provoked fury among many cross-party MPs who concluded that the initial policy was a “ruse” to gain their support.
Because of the U-turn, over a hundred MPs have indicated they may now withdraw their support for the Bill after voting for it at Second Reading last year.
Various other safeguarding amendments were also rejected by the Committee, led by Ms Leadbeater, which included a measure to guarantee an opt-out for hospices not wanting to participate in assisted suicide.
A professor of palliative care medicine warned that the Bill without this opt-out was a “disaster” waiting to happen, having heard that at one hospice “the entire consultant body has decided they will leave en masse” without such a provision.
Earlier this month, the British Medical Association (BMA) voted in favour of a motion stating that assisted suicide is not healthcare and presents “serious moral hazards to consultants”.
Sitting on the Committee, Conservative MP Danny Kruger also warned that the Leadbeater Bill is “a direct contradiction of the Hippocratic oath, which requires doctors to save people’s lives and do nothing to bring about their death – including giving them lethal drugs. It is right there in the Hippocratic oath.”
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