Article
Assisted dying
Comment
Politics
4 min read

The assisted dying bill is an undignified mess

Literally life-changing legislation needs a parliament at its best not its worst.

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A parliamentary committee meets, sitting at wooden raised desks in a wood panelled room.
The bill committee meets.

The first clue came when MP Kim Leadbeater’s private members’ bill passed in the House of Commons at the end of November. She came outside to greet pro-euthanasia campaigners like she was emerging as a winner from the Big Brother house, in tears of joy, whooping and hugging and high-fiving, with prime minister Keir Starmer gurning awkwardly in her wake. 

For her and her supporters, this was indeed great news. But these optics were far from great. It was as though she was celebrating the consequence of the legislation she’d introduced: “Whoa! Wonderful news everybody! We’re going to be allowed to help people to kill themselves.” 

It’s not a good look, even to those who may wish for such assistance. Where was the dignity, the key word that assisted-suicide lobbyists have appropriated for their cause? Not in this carefree triumphalism, this cork-popping celebration of the prospect of death-on-demand. 

Since then, the bill’s faltering passage through parliament has been characterised by this absence of dignity, a kind of cowboy rustler pushing a herd of supporters in a single direction, towards statute. And this lack of dignity matters. Not just because it is, literally, the most life-changing legislation any of us will see in our lifetimes, but because the dignity of parliament matters very much indeed. 

I don’t mean the ritual flummery, the state opening by the monarch, people marching about with wigs and sticks, Black Rod and all that. I mean dignity in the sense with which we honour our democracy, the way in which we frame our legislature seriously and with due process. 

Leadbeater presents as a good person and there is no apparent evidence to the contrary. But she is an inexperienced parliamentarian. Her selection for the seat of Batley and Spen, now Spen Valley, was rushed through in 2021, memories remaining acutely sharp of the murder of her older sister, Jo Cox, in the constituency in 2016. And, naturally, she has sat on the Government’s backbenches for less than a year. 

 Her inexperience of parliamentary process and scrutiny has shown. Committee hearings have been rammed with those who support assisted suicide and held in unseemly haste, such is the rush to get it into law. Before her bill’s second reading, she described it as having the strongest safeguards in the world, each patient requiring a sign-off from a High Court judge. When this proved impractical, the judge was replaced with a social worker, which apparently was “even safer”. So, safer than even the strongest safeguards in the world?   

But more worrying still is how the passage of the bill has been factionalised. Leadbeater has alienated the mild-mannered by calling opposing voices “noise”, which is a bit like lamenting that a debate should have two sides at all. And she’s called those who disagree with her “unconstructive” and complained that opponents have “mobilised”. Well, duh. That’s how parliament works. Indeed, it’s part of its dignity, rather than a simple inconvenience for an MP in a hurry. 

The media have noticed this lack of respect for procedure. I’m not sure that there’s ever been such resistance to proposed assisted-suicide legislation in the public prints before. Even the Guardian, which might be relied upon to see it as a progressive cause, has turned more than ambivalent. Only columnist and assisted-suicide flagbearer Polly Toynbee is available for a piece that amounts to saying we should move along, there’s nothing to see here and Leadbeater’s bill is doing just fine. 

She, too, claims absurdly that opposition is only coming from people who oppose assisted suicide. Well, blow me down. Try as I might, I can’t trace her complaining that Lord Falconer’s supposedly independent Commission on Assisted Dying of 2011 was both funded and packed with his cause’s supporters.  

In passing, it should be noted what an underminer of parliamentary dignity is Falconer too. He has claimed that justice secretary Shabam Mahmood’s opposition to the bill should be discounted because of her “religious beliefs”. Mahmood is a Muslim. For a constitutional lawyer, Falconer shows scant regard for our constitution. We might as well say that his views should be discounted because he’s a progressive secularist.  

One might expect PM Keir Starmer to bring some quality to this, as an alleged stickler for legal procedure. It remains a mystery, as a supporter of the principle, that he’s left assisted suicide to a private members’ bill. If he really wanted it, it should surely be a Government bill. Cynics among us wonder if he has honoured a promise given to the terminally ill Esther Rantzen with token support for a private members’ bill, but knows it will fail.  

Again, lack of dignity. If dignity in dying means anything since it was misappropriated as a campaign slogan for assisted suicide, then it should be accompanied by dignified debate and amendment in parliament. This bill has provided precisely the opposite. Let it die.

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Article
Comment
Freedom of Belief
Politics
War & peace
5 min read

Iranians long for regime change, but weigh up the cost

Dreams are easier to utter than act upon

Steve is news director of Article 18, a human rights organisation documenting Christian persecution in Iran.

Smoke rises from the site of a bomb amid a high wide view of a city at twlight
Tehran.

I received an unexpected response from an Iranian friend of mine this week after asking how he and others were feeling in the wake of the ongoing crisis. 

My friend - like many, a staunch advocate of regime change in Iran - told me that despite his long-standing enmity against the Islamic Republic and its leaders, the conflict had if anything brought Iranians together against a new, common enemy. 

For while he and many others would love to live in an Iran that offered them greater freedoms, they are also fiercely proud of their country and, as he put it, will seek to defend it at all costs. 

Both this friend and other Iranians that I have spoken to since the bombs began to fall last Friday have highlighted how Iran’s “territorial integrity” has been breached by Israel, in violation of international law. 

And so while some might perceive an attack on a tyrannical regime and its nuclear arsenal to be an exception to this rule, it should hardly surprise us that those within the country affected may take a different view. 

Both the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the exiled crown prince of Iran, Reza Pahlavi - whom many perceive to be the most realistic leader of any new revolution - have used their platforms to call on Iranians to seize this moment to rise up and reclaim their land. 

Yet, with bombs falling all around them and a weakened regime still known to be capable of brutally responding to any attempts to revolt, such dreams are easier to utter than to act upon. 

Meanwhile, as Tehranis are encouraged to flee their city and some have already seen homes, loved ones or livelihoods destroyed, it may well be that Iranians have other things on their minds at present than attempting to overthrow their oppressors. 

One very present concern for many Iranians at the moment will be the fate of loved ones who remain in prisons as the aerial bombardment continues. 

Tehran’s Evin Prison, for example, is on the edge of District 3, which residents were told they must evacuate on Monday ahead of another onslaught. 

But as the Australian-British former political prisoner Kylie Moore-Gilbert noted in an interview with Sky News, the prisoners in Evin had no option to flee and instead found themselves locked inside tiny cells, hearing the sound of bombs and rumours of what was taking place but without any real clarity. 

“Nobody's going to have a clue what's going on, and it's utterly terrifying to think that you're locked in a place, you can't flee, you hide, you can't take action to protect yourself, and you don't have access to information,” she said.  

There is not even any guarantee, Moore-Gilbert noted, that these prisoners will be being taken care of by the prison guards, who will no doubt have other things on their mind. 

“There are literally thousands, dozens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people in prison in Iran, most of them Iranian civilians,” she said. “The prison population inside that country is enormous. The conditions are dire in the best of days. Do they even have electricity? Do they have running water? What on earth is going on? My heart goes out to them.” 

Among the many prisoners in Evin are a handful of Christians, detained or serving sentences on charges related to their religious activities but framed as “actions against national security”. 

Like many Iranians, Christians, as a long-oppressed minority, have every right to hope for a change in the country and a future Iran that would better embody the prophetic words from the Book of Isaiah, believed to have found their fulfilment in Jesus, of “freedom for the captives” and “good news for the poor”. 

And yet Iranian Christians must also wrestle with the biblical command to “submit to the governing authorities” and to “give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s”. 

It is, then, perhaps no surprise that in recent years, as hopes of regime change have regularly come and gone, that Iran’s Christians have tended to focus their prayers instead on the increase of “God’s kingdom”, as many more Iranians have continued to find new hope in the Christian faith. 

Such hopes, in theological terms, are built on firmer foundations than any dreams for a change in the nature and essence of tyrannical regimes like the one currently still clinging onto power in Tehran. 

And whatever the future brings, when this current crisis is over, the Iranians who have found their ultimate source of hope and joy in Jesus Christ will know that they still have something to hold onto, whatever they may have lost: the promise of God’s presence with them today and a bright future for tomorrow. 

It may be that another revolution is what many Iranians crave, but there is also something revolutionary, I believe, about the prayer that Jesus taught, which leaves the ultimate course of our lives in the hands of God. 

“Your will be done,” Christians have prayed throughout the centuries; and Iranian Christians will continue to pray this whatever the future holds for them. 

It is perhaps little wonder, then, that it is the Gospel message that Iranian Christians have continued to preach, in spite of persecution, and regardless of whichever direction the whims of popular support have turned. 

One of the passages that an Iranian colleague of mine most frequently recites in our team meetings is the call for us to “act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God”, and I was reminded of this as I noted the response of British-Iranian bishop Guli Francis-Dehqani to the current crisis. 

The bishop, the bookies’ favourite to be the next Archbishop, prayed simply for the Lord to “have mercy”. 

As a lover of The Lord of the Rings, I am also reminded of the line from Gandalf, when Frodo is claiming that Bilbo should have finished off Gollum when he had the chance: 

“Do not be too quick to deal out death in judgment. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.” 

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