Kim Leadbeater is right to rethink assisted dying – but will MPs?

The admission that the bill was flawed may cause some MPs to withdraw their support, but it will probably survive, writes John Rentoul

Sarah Palin, the former vice-presidential candidate in America, caused a meltdown in Britain when her comments on the use of “death panels” to ration healthcare were said to refer to the way that NHS funding is decided. It is almost as if Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP sponsoring the assisted dying bill, is trying to prove her right, 16 years later.

Leadbeater has dropped the plan for her private members’ bill to require a High Court judge to sign off someone’s application to die. But she has replaced it with something similar to the “panel of bureaucrats” that Palin suggested made life-or-death decisions in the UK.

Instead, Leadbeater now proposes a “voluntary assisted dying commission” that would appoint a “panel of experts”, including a psychiatrist and a social worker, to approve assisted dying requests. The panels would be led by a KC, a retired judge, or someone with similar legal qualifications.

The U-turn shows that parliament is doing its job – there should be no shame in amending a bill after consulting people about how it would work. The bill’s opponents are too shrill in pointing out how Leadbeater said one thing, very definitely, and now says another.

It is true that she made a big deal out of the safeguard of a judge having to approve applications. But she is also doing the right thing by saying that she has listened to the consultations and is responding to the objections made – not least by judges, who are already burdened with huge court backlogs.

The “expert panels” seem to be a reasonable attempt, on Leadbeater’s own terms, to deliver the objective of a secure second layer of protection against patients being put under pressure – the first layer being two doctors – but they only illustrate how any assisted dying legislation is likely to lead legislators into deep water.

The main argument against legalising assisted suicide is that it puts people in authority in charge of the taking of a life – a fundamental change that is likely to have unintended consequences. Being aware of this, legislators are bound to design expensive bureaucratic structures to try to prevent the abuse of that power, which will create further unintended consequences along the way.

In November, the House of Commons considered these objections in the abstract, and decided to press ahead – by a decisive majority of 55. It seemed at the time that this would be enough to allow a cushion against doubters having second thoughts.

Opponents of the bill are trying to encourage those second thoughts by pointing out how many MPs commented in the debate on the importance of the judge’s sign-off. Their aim is to persuade 28 MPs to change sides and wipe out the bill’s majority when the amended bill returns to the floor of the Commons.

I don’t think this is likely. Although there are a lot of new MPs in parliament, they did not strike me as novices who had been bounced into a decision and might be bounced out of it again. They took their vote seriously and were well aware of the complex medical, legal and philosophical problems on both sides of the issue. They wanted strong safeguards, but they could see that a judge’s sign-off was not the best solution, so, having made a decision in favour of the bill in principle, they are likely to support Leadbeater’s expert panels – even if opponents call them “death panels”.

Wes Streeting, the health secretary, who opposes the bill, was in the Commons for health questions this morning, but he left it to his junior minister, Stephen Kinnock, to answer the only question about assisted dying. Kinnock, who voted for Leadbeater’s bill, said that the government’s position was one of “neutrality”, and that he looked forward to seeing her amendment. “Any comment will be based on the operationalisation of that amendment.” Non-committal waffle, in other words.

But I think MPs have made up their minds. I think the bill will go through its remaining stages in the Commons, and will sail through the House of Lords, where previous bills have already been passed unopposed.

Leadbeater’s U-turn ought to cause MPs to change their minds, in my view, because it exposes just how hard it is to protect against the abuse of such a fundamental change in end-of-life decision-making. But I don’t think it will change enough minds to stop the bill.