by Dan Hitchens, Compact Magazine
What do opponents of assisted suicide fear? It isn’t just that thousands of people will request lethal drugs because they feel like a burden, because their care is too expensive, because they are depressed, because they were let down by the system. It isn’t just the deaths from coercion, manipulation and malpractice. There is something else as well, harder to describe but nevertheless important.
Last week, the MPs examining Britain’s assisted suicide bill voted through a very remarkable subclause. A single sentence, tabled by the bill’s chief architect Kim Leadbeater, quietly altered the definition of the National Health Service. The NHS’s original legislation in 1946 laid down that it must “secure improvement in the physical and mental health of the people of England…and the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of illness.” None of which really includes assisted suicide. If Leadbeater’s bill manages to pass its future votes in the Commons and Lords, this might have opened the government to a legal challenge.
Hence the subclause, which allows the Health Secretary to declare that “commissioned VAD [voluntary assisted dying] services” are in fact part of the NHS’s legislative charter. The subclause doesn’t explain why: It just ensures that the government can say so. Which, as the Tory MP Danny Kruger observed, effectively admits that the National Health Service would turn into a different kind of institution. It would, through this tweak to its founding legislation, become the National Health and Assisted Suicide Service. But the alarm was loudest on the other side of the Commons. Labour MPs tend to regard the NHS as their party’s definitive achievement, the greatest edifice of the postwar welfare state built by Clement Attlee’s government. After the subclause went through, six Labour MPs signed a letter calling the bill “irredeemably flawed and not fit to become law,” noting—among a dozen other issues—that it makes “a change to the founding language and purpose of our NHS.”