Whether you are for or against law reform to facilitate assisted dying, and whether or not you prefer to call it assisted suicide, we can all benefit from some assistance in arguing about ethics and law in matters of life and death. Indeed, this is the role of the William Temple Foundation, to promote faith in the public square. By public square, we mean all spaces, physical and virtual, where people can exchange ideas and show solidarity or respectful dissent.
The paradigm, for many, is when this culminates in a debate worthy of the name in Parliament, especially if the result is not a foregone conclusion on political party lines, but where there is what is deemed to be a vote of conscience. Whether this is what happens next month when Kim Leadbeater’s Bill receives its Second Reading in Westminster (and there is a similar debate in prospect in the Scottish Parliament) is not just up to the MP. All of us can make a difference, not least through listening attentively in the intervening weeks.
The Bill introduced this week is known in the media as the Assisted Dying Bill but its formal title is the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill. The last debate in the House of Commons on Assisted Dying, on Friday 11th September 2015, was enlightening and uplifting, with some MPs saying they had changed their minds since coming into the chamber because of the quality of other contributions. The speeches are still well worth reading. The Commons was at its best.
Expertise and experience ranged from senior lawyers to senior doctors via daughters and nurses. One newly elected MP, Sir Keir Starmer, took the opportunity to set out his experience as the Director of Public Prosecutions. He wrote the guidelines on when to prosecute, consulted widely, and had to consider 80 cases of assisted dying/suicide, deciding not to prosecute in 79.
Another newcomer on the Labour benches was Yasmin Qureshi, one of a trio who were in the 2015 General Election the first Muslim women to become MPs. She had been up at 5am that morning, having tea with her mother who had been told earlier that year she had three days to live. Her mother, in her eighties, had been distressed and worried that she was a burden to her family, but she had recovered and lived until 2020. Nadine Dorries, much criticised later for her devotion to Boris Johnson, also gave a moving speech in the Commons, relating her experiences as a nurse and friend of the terminally ill. Dr Philippa Whitford, then the Scottish National Party MP for Central Ayrshire, drew on her thirty years as a cancer surgeon to report that,
“Some 96% of palliative care specialists are utterly against this Bill. They object to the name of it; they consider what they do is assisted dying, and what this is is assisted suicide.” She insisted that, “We need to change our tone towards the people who live in our society, so that old and vulnerable people no longer feel that they should get out of the way.”
One MP after another disclosed how constituents had written and told their stories. There was a real sense of engagement and a clear vote against the Bill by 330 votes to 118.
Kim Leadbeater MP believes the mood of a much-changed Commons is now very different. If she secures a majority in the Commons, then the Bill will go to the Lords where there will be familiar voices in favour, Lord Falconer and Lord Carey, with some very powerful voices against, including Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson, the Paralympian, Baroness Finlay the long-serving palliative care consultant, and Lord Williams.
When he was Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams had previously presented arguments to Parliamentary Committees with the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor. They had also written to the media and to MPs with the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks. The Church of England and the Catholic Church had worked together on joint statements since the Hillsborough Disaster. The more faith leaders included this time round, the better. But this is not an issue of religious against secular. There is a group, for example, called Humanists Against Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia that also gave an impressive submission to a Parliamentary Committee. Joint submissions benefit from assisted arguing in their composition.
The stories which we will hear in the coming weeks are uneasy cases. They are hard but if you are not left with a sense of unease, whichever position you adopt, then you have probably not given enough attention to the counter-arguments. In that spirit, it is good that Kim Leadbeater MP has invited the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, a noted critic of her proposal, to a meeting, and has done so in gracious terms.
Less graciously, since writing Law & Morals in 1986, I have identified (for instance in Uneasy Ethics in 2003) what I regard as the main bad arguments which feature in such debates: to accuse the other side of playing God, to try to win the debate by terminology, name-calling, the slippery slope, the danger of activities going underground or into the back streets if you prohibit them, and the accusation of inconsistency. Nobody seems to agree with me on these, at least not when they are deploying such techniques.
I conclude with one simple point about our rhetoric on assisted dying. As with Henry Scott Holland being misunderstood on death, another one of Temple’s predecessors as a Balliol student is being quoted out of context. The mid-nineteenth century poet Arthur Hugh Clough captured imaginations with his couplet, ‘Thou shalt not kill; but need’st not strive, Officiously to keep alive’. But this comes from a poem which is sarcastic. Clough takes each commandment in turn and attempts to show how we only pay lip service to God’s will. A sermon by an Anglican layperson in the early years of the twentieth century puts this couplet in context. George W E Russell preached in St Stephen’s, Walbrook, in words that might apply also today to pollution of lakes, rivers and seas:
‘The maintenance of human life, the cultivation of public health as leading up to that, is one of the prime duties … yet I fear that during the greater part of English history, almost down to within the last twenty years, the creed of most public bodies with reference to sanitary administration has practically been that of the sarcastic couplet from Clough’s poem,
“Thou shalt not kill, but need’st not strive Officiously to keep alive.”
‘Well, our duty as Christian voters is exactly the opposite of that … sanitary legislation …care for a pure water-supply, the improvement of insanitary and overcrowded dwellings, are practical ways’ to make a difference.
Those who coin phrases, as with Temple for the ‘Welfare-State’, cannot control their use, misuse and abuse. But Russell’s explanation of Clough’s expression puts the latter firmly in the context of the social justice concerns which Temple, Beveridge and Tawney addressed all their lives, and which continue to animate this Foundation.
It is not enough to be against, or for, assisted dying. Our duty to those who are marginalised is one of assisted living, to live their lives to the full, contributing to the well-being or welfare of society, with proper investment in this case in hospices and supporting the terminally ill and their carers in their own homes, whatever happens to this Bill. One small step for those of us on the margins of debate in the public square is to offer assisted arguing, and then to commit ourselves to assisted listening.
Simon Lee is Chair of the board of trustees of the William Temple Foundation
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