by James Johnson, Telegraph
The shape of Leadbeater’s legislation has altered and the public want nothing to do with it
Five years ago, I spent several evenings traversing England talking about death. Over more than 15 hours of focus groups, I explored every facet of the public’s attitudes to assisted dying.
I remember the conversations vividly. One woman spoke movingly of how her 25-year-old daughter died painfully of cancer in a hospice. A Conservative pensioner championed the policy on the grounds of personal choice. A businessman talked of the unfairness that other countries were moving towards a solution while Britain was not.
The polling backed it up, including that by my own firm. I wrote then, in 2021: “JL Partners’ research found very significant support… for assisted dying, by a margin of 72 per cent supporting and only 9 per cent opposing. In the context of policies I’ve tested over the years, that is a very significant margin – and it is even larger amongst Conservative voters. We also found that voters are persuaded of the effectiveness of the safeguards built into the proposed assisted dying laws, and that ultimately the vast majority of people see this as a matter of personal choice.”
My view was that the assisted dying proposal then – enabling people of sound mind, terminally ill with less than six months to live, signed off by two doctors and a High Court judge, to choose to end their own lives with specific medication – had the support of the British public to become law.
I now take the opposite view. As the proposal stands in 2026, there is not public consent for its passage. The public has not changed: it remains supportive of the principle of assisted dying. It is the shape of the policy that has altered and, when informed about what it looks like now, the British voter wants nothing to do with it.