Today, we will find out if there is a conservative party left in the United Kingdom. After only five hours of parliamentary debate, and without a single impact assessment, most Conservative MPs are set to vote against Labour backbencher Kim Leadbeater’s rushed assisted suicide bill. Yet an eclectic minority of Tory MPs—supported by former Prime Minister David Cameron—are set to be the deciding factor to push Leadbeater’s bill across a critical vote this week.
If you squint, it is a bill with “safeguards and protections,” at least according to the preamble. In theory, Leadbeater’s bill will allow two physicians and a judge to prescribe a lethal concoction to adults with a terminal prognosis of under six months. It will prevent coercion, though it fails to specify how. It will ensure a rigorous oversight, because Leadbeater said so to The Guardian. It will be limited to mentally competent adults free of external pressure, never mind that Leadbeater also said that “being concerned about being a burden” is a “legitimate reason” to die under the bill.
Yet there is no time to ask these questions, or even to ask if the public is interested in Leadbeater’s modest proposal for legalizing suicides of the sickest or those most disabled. Besides the well-moneyed euthanasia lobby, it is unclear if there is any substantial constituency for this bill. According to Dying with Dignity’s own poll, only 43% of Britons want their MP to vote for the assisted suicide legislation, while another poll by an anti-euthanasia group found that just 11% support the bill when told of its specifics.
Public skepticism is an understatement. Given that judicial oversight would require an already stressed court system to oversee thousands of additional deaths, dozens of retired senior judges have warned that this bill will destroy the courts entirely. The two Labour cabinet ministers responsible for administering assisted suicide—the justice secretary and the health secretary—both oppose it, as do four former prime ministers. Even proponents of assisted suicide in principle, like Liberty, a human rights group, have rejected the proposed bill as badly conceived.
Then there are the physicians. Despite Leadbeater’s assertion that vulnerable patients—including those who are suicidal or those with anorexia nervosa—would not qualify, the chair and deputy chair of the faculty of eating disorders say her bill is unsafe and a direct threat to their patients’ lives. Louis Appleby, who leads the National Suicide Prevention Strategy, decried that if a bill that legalized some suicides passes, it will mean “we have lost something we may not get back.” In short, more than 350 disability rights organizations, the Association for Palliative Medicine, the British Geriatrics Association, the Chief Rabbi, and the Church of England all oppose the bill.
And yet, Leadbeater claims that she has the votes. That this vote is even possible is because of Conservative recklessness. It is now ancient history that Kemi Badenoch told Conservative voters that she opposed assisted suicide during her nomination fight as party leader, yet she has remained curiously silent since. In her absence, 16 Conservative and one Reform MPs stated that they are in favor of voting for assisted suicide, including Pater Bedford, a co-sponsor of the legislation. Another 19 are undecided. Reform MP Rupert Lowe, meanwhile out of ideas, launched an online poll.
“The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes,” G.K. Chesterton wrote. “The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.” Labour Home Office Minister Jess Phillips concedes that “the NHS is not in a fit enough state” to administer assisted suicide, but “you cannot stop progress happening.” It should send an immediate shiver through conservatives; instead, it persuaded David Cameron to change his mind to support assisted suicide. Maybe he thinks it is Brexit all over again.
None of the conservative arguments in favor of a rushed and dangerous assisted bill make much sense. David Cameron, for instance, claims that there are “extremely strong safeguards,” prompting a former legal advisor for the Conservatives to ask “with respect” if he has even read the bill. It wouldn’t have changed much if he had. Cameron equally claims that “this proposal is not about ending life, it is about shortening death,” which is almost identical to the World Medical Association’s definition of palliative care.
Then there is Shadow Housing secretary Kevin Hollinrake, and his stance that “this isn’t the state having that choice, it’s the individuals. People already have that choice because many people take their own lives of course.” It is a curious logic—people take their own lives for a variety of reasons. Should we expand assisted suicide to everyone suffering from a broken heart or desperation? It also is a mislaid hope that suicides drop after legalizing assisted suicide. In the United States, the casual impact of legalizing assisted suicide led to an increase of total suicides by 18%, a dramatic increase for a single policy. In jurisdictions like Canada, the total suicide rate tripled after euthanasia was decriminalized.
Andrew Mitchell, the Conservative MP for Sutton Coldfield, meanwhile made the case for assisted suicide by claiming that “These laws are working well. In all those jurisdictions not a single case of abuse has been evidenced.” We seem to have different definitions. Consider the legislative testimony of Stephanie Packer, a California mother who “shortly after California passed its law to legalize assisted,” was denied lifesaving medical treatment by her insurance company: “I was stunned that much cheaper lethal drugs would be available to me rather than treatment to save my life.”
Even the very first known assisted suicide death in Oregon was a woman who was rejected by two physicians for assisted suicide because of her depression, only for an assisted suicide lobby group to connect her with a physician that signed off her death. Now, despite the identical requirement for a terminal illness in the U.S. with a six month prognosis, vulnerable Americans qualify and die from what should be ineligible conditions like arthritis, sclerosis, and dementia.
Then there are the other arguments in favor of this bill—just think of those dying in pain, oftentimes from the failing NHS. Rousseau quipped that cosmopolitans love the Tartars, the warmongering descendants of Genghis Khan, to avoid loving their neighbours. For the Conservatives in favor of the Leadbeater assisted suicide, it is their love of the terminally ill—mothers, fathers, unnamed or enumerated constituents.
Yet for years, these same politicians have said nothing as the National Health Service has been reduced to a shambles and hospices reduced to hold bake sales to stay financially afloat. Instead, their plan, as Diane Abbott, the longest running Labour MP rightfully pointed out, is to “soon have a national suicide service fully funded by the NHS, while palliative care is 30% funded, at best.”
These arguments in favor of assisted suicide would be laughable, if the topic was not quite so serious. It is the fruits of a ‘conservative’ movement that rejects the defining principle of the conservative movement and the West, the sanctity of human life. It treats life as dispensable, as something that can be excused by society if it is too burdensome on the NHS or others.
Yet intuitively, we know the value of a human life, the eternal principle that the blood of your neighbour runs no redder than your own. The foundational texts in the Bible make no exceptions for those who are disabled or sick, those unemployed or unproductive. The mighty are shaped in the same divine image as the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. It is from this idea that makes democracy possible, the basic equality of human dignity at the ballot box.
A conservative movement that compromises on the value of life, the basic right from which Locke argued flows all other rights, is a conservative movement that will—inevitably, as a fact of nature—compromise on all other values and positions. It is conservative in name only, populist in the grossest sense of the word.
We can see the reality in front of us. Far too many of the conservative elite believe that their conservatism is best reified in Thatcher or Reagan not out of principle but on the contrary because it challenges none, at least until a convincing hologram of Reagan is invented. It is a conservativism that knows nothing, feels nothing. Its proponents can regurgitate snippets promoting the conservative instinct or love of family, but it rings hollow. If the party leader—be it Nigel Farage or Kemi or Starmer in a pink tutu—bellows out an order, they will vote for it and find a Roger Scruton quote to approve it.
Assisted suicide—or what we used to call in a less confused world culpable homicide—is merely the most blatant of this descent into value-less, identity-less, and feckless conservatism. It is the most aggressive symptom of this disease, the same symptom that forces the lifelong skeptic to call for an ambulance or a hearse. Yet if untreated, the virus and the body both die.
There is no possibility for a conservative worldview without an appreciation of the family. And when life is viewed as disposable—as when Matthew Paris of The Spectator wrote in 2015 that “soon we will accept that useless lives should end” or in 2024 that it’s “not a bad thing” for increased “pressure … on the terminally ill to hasten their own deaths,”—it is a dead end. Assisted suicide is the acid that dissolves all. It is mercantile, it commodifies the role of healers to be paid by a fee for each killing; it is anti-family, for it forces the family to be conditional, that life should be discarded if the state or family members find it useless or too burdensome. It forces society to not only accept the normalization of suicide, but moreover to pay for the deaths of its most vulnerable. It forces hope to die.
Even if those conservatives talk of tax breaks and write-offs, even if they strengthen the military and implement the entire conservative tool book, it will not be enough to undo these wrongful deaths of the disabled. In every jurisdiction that has legalized death-on-demand for a select few, we know that those deaths are wrong, and yet they expand onwards. ‘Two-tier’ Kier is bad enough without adding new tiers to the list. Before the votes are heard, the philosopher A.C. Grayling, a patron of Dying in Dignity, the main and well-funded lobby for assisted suicide, is lobbying to expand the bill to the “wheelchair bound” and the “clinically depressed.”
Life’s value must be firm. To equivocate, to whitewash the suicides of some, is to fail the deaths of every co-citizen or family member who wakes up one day with the thought that their lives are better off dead. It is rightfully called an intrusive thought, because we know that suicidal feelings pass, because we know that suicidal feelings as valid as they might seem, as untreatable, remain in the final analysis treatable, preventable, and curable.
Winston Churchill asked in a speech “what is the use of living?”—though his answer was “to strive for noble causes and to make this muddled world a better place for those who will live in it after we are gone.” The old generation of conservative leaders instead seem to prefer to answer in the negative. It is up to us to answer differently.
If the Conservative Party and the Reform Party MPs cannot tell right from wrong, life from death, the pleas from the “wheelchair bound” and the “depressed” with the siren song of a backbench Labour MP, they should submit their resignation letters, quickly.
