A furious Lord Falconer has threatened to override the Upper Chamber using the Parliament Act, which would likely trigger a constitutional crisis.
JONATHON VAN MAREN
Kim Leadbeater’s assisted suicide bill has bogged down in the Upper Chamber, and Lord Charlie Falconer is livid. The former justice secretary has proposed ramrodding the legislation through using the Parliament Act, which would allow the House of Commons to override rejection or delay in the House of Lords—and likely trigger a constitutional crisis.
To accomplish this, an MP would have to table an identical bill. If the legislation passed twice in the Commons, it would become law without approval by the House of Lords.
The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life Bill) passed third reading in the House of Commons on June 20 by a majority of only 23, and the law headed to the Lords, where explosive debates over the radical legislation have dragged on for months. Suicide advocates now fear that it will effectively die if it does not pass before Parliament is prorogued.
Even though support for the bill plummeted with each vote and voices warning of the catastrophic social consequences of its implementation have grown louder, Leadbeater and her allies refused to implement the most basic safeguards, including amendments to “ensure an appropriately high test for mental capacity” and making it illegal to “encourage” someone to commit assisted suicide.
Indeed, Parliament’s Bill Committee even rejected an amendment that would “protect people from choosing assisted suicide because they feel they are a burden.”
Lord Falconer, the bill’s sponsor in the Upper Chamber, has proven as rigid and bloodthirsty as his parliamentary counterpart. He affirmed, in one exchange, that pregnant women should be able to commit assisted suicide. He has also openly acknowledged that money and resources will play a role in decisions surrounding assisted suicide “because there’s only so much money to go around.”
Many peers are horrified by this. They are demanding a series of amendments, including an explicit removal of pregnant women from eligibility; stringent assessments of mental capacity to request suicide; limiting eligibility to those who cannot receive relief by treatment; raising the minimum age to 25; and lengthening the “reflection period” between eligibility assessments. These amendments seek to address or blunt the concerns of vulnerable communities.
Falconer, however, has grown tired of ethical objections and disability rights concerns, and stated that it is “very, very difficult” to see how the assisted suicide bill can be passed this year without a “fundamental change” from his fellow peers. Falconer will not consider the safeguards desperately requested by vulnerable communities and has instead made a threat: If the bill is not passed by the King’s Speech in May, the Parliament Act should be used to circumvent the House of Lords entirely.
Ironically, Falconer accused his colleagues of “filibustering” and ordered them to “stop all this smoke and mirrors and focus on making the bill better”—all while opposing the very amendments the peers have put forward to accomplish that. Leadbeater is making similar accusations, ludicrously claiming that the bill is “very robust” and has “plenty of support.” If that were true, the suicide pushers would not be resorting to threats of bypassing the House of Lords to force its passage.
The Labour Party’s election manifesto made no mention of assisted suicide, and Leadbeater’s bill is not government legislation. Health Secretary Wes Streeting, Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, and Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood voted against it; Keir Starmer voted for it but emphasized again recently that the government remains neutral. The government has also ruled out reintroducing the legislation as a government bill, and a government source told the BBC that many ministers now believe the bill will not survive the Lords.
Labour opponents of the bill have reacted with fury to the proposal that it be forced through; one senior Labour MP, in a veiled warning to Keir Starmer, stated that the move “would provoke a massive split amongst Labour MPs and the prime minister is not strong enough to bear that.” The BBC noted that a “source close to Labour MPs and peers opposed to the Bill said the threat of using the Parliament Act ‘is the act of a bully who knows they are losing the argument.’” Falconer, the bully in question, insisted that the Act is an “established part of our constitution.”
Starmer will be reluctant to trigger a crisis over a non-government bill that eight of his own ministers voted against. “People need to be very clear,” the source told the BBC. “Using the Parliament Act to force this through would mean that none of the known issues with the bill would be fixed. Every MP who voted to force it through would bear responsibility for the inevitable suffering and deaths of vulnerable people.”
Labour MP Jess Asato concurred, stating that “a bill like this with such profound life-and-death impacts … must not be forced through without the scrutiny it deserves.”
For their part, Kim Leadbeater and Charlie Falconer cannot even agree on which fearmongering tactic they should use. Leadbeater has solemnly warned that if her bill does not pass, the conversation on assisted suicide will be “over.” (One is tempted to ask her if that is a promise.) Falconer, on the other hand, has taken the opposite approach, insisting that if the bill fails to clear the Lords, it will “lead to the thing coming back again and again and again,” which sounds like a personal commitment.
The rhetoric coming from the increasingly shrill suicide pushers has been vile and contemptible. Every single one of the more than 350 disability rights groups in the UK has condemned the bill, yet the privileged Dame Esther Rantzen accused the peers of “inventing fictitious excuses” to delay the bill’s passage. Rantzen could have corrected her insidious ignorance if she had bothered to speak with some of the wheelchair-bound disability rights activists weeping outside Westminster when the bill passed while she celebrated.
Dame Rantzen might have had to crouch down so that she could look them in the eye rather than looking down on them, but perhaps that way, she might have heard them.
Jonathon Van Maren is a writer for europeanconservative.com based in Canada. He has written for First Things, National Review, The American Conservative, and his latest book is Prairie Lion: The Life & Times of Ted Byfield.
This article (UK Assisted Suicide Bill Halted by Last Stand in the Lords) was created and published by The European Conservative and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Jonathon Van Maren
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