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This morning, education secretary Bridget Phillipson became the third cabinet minister to state her intention to vote against the assisted dying bill when it is debated in the House of Commons on 29 November.
Phillipson’s comments see her join justice secretary Shabana Mahmood and health secretary Wes Streeting in opposition to the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill.
She told Sky News: “I think all of us weigh up the very strongly held views on both sides, and often they’re very passionate and quite understandable reasons that people set out their position around change in the law.”
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Phillipson’s position isn’t especially surprising, that said, given both she and Mahmood voted against similar legislation in 2015. Streeting, however, was a supporter of assisted dying and one of 118 MPs to back the 2015 bill (versus 330 noes).
It makes Streeting’s strident opposition noteworthy indeed. The health secretary told Times Radio last week that legalising assisted dying would have “resource implications” for the NHS that would “come at the expense of other choices.”
Two Labour grandees and former ministers, Baroness Hodge and Baroness Harman, have also rebuked Streeting. The former told the BBC’s Politics Live programme last week: “If you look at the NHS budget, most of it goes on the last six months of life… to argue that this is going to cost extra sounds to me a bit daft.”
And speaking this morning, Baroness Harman suggested Streeting had “compromised the government’s neutrality” with his comments. It was a reference to the advice distributed by Simon Case, the cabinet secretary, who told ministers in early October that the government’s neutrality on assisted dying (a matter of conscience) meant they “should exercise discretion and should not take part in the public debate”.
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Overall, the picture within the cabinet and wider parliamentary Labour Party is extremely complicated. Five cabinet ministers have spoken in favour of Leadbeater’s bill, including Ed Miliband, Lisa Nandy and most recently chief whip Sir Alan Campbell. A further four, including Keir Starmer, are understood to be supportive but haven’t publicly outlined their position.
Meanwhile, Rachel Reeves and Angel Rayner, whose seniority is only surpassed by Starmer himself, reportedly hold misgivings about the legislation. “No way will she support this”, a Labour “insider” told the Mail on Sunday of Rayner’s position. (Rayner voted against the 2015 bill, and Reeves abstained).
As things stand, the cabinet ministers we expect to support Leadbeater’s bill are sticking relatively closely to Case’s advice and only, for the most part, indicating their preference. Streeting, whose comments as health secretary carry particular weight, has taken a very different approach.
The result is that the arguments in favour of assisted dying have been made, largely, by junior MPs who cannot compete with Streeting’s political gravitas or authority. All this means that momentum is building against Leadbeater’s bill at a most crucial juncture.
The prevailing discourse over assisted dying, shaped by Streeting’s intervention, will be crucial to determining whether the legislation passes at second reading on 29 November. With the largest proportion of MPs said to be undecided on the issue, such statements could yet prove decisive.
And there are other considerations at play here. Some MPs say they plan to oppose the bill at second reading as they do not think it is being given ample commons time — either at this stage or in future phases (committee stage and third reading). Alec Shelbrooke, a Conservative MP, asked Starmer at PMQs on Wednesday to grant additional time to debate the legislation. The prime minister denied the request.
The optics of the debate, in these regards and others, are becoming difficult for the Labour Party and, increasingly, the prime minister. Starmer promised Esther Rantzen, the veteran broadcaster with terminal lung cancer, that he would make time for a vote on assisted dying if Labour won the general election. Speaking in 2023, he told reporters that he does think “there are grounds for changing the law.”
Since Starmer’s comments (which he has refused to repeat in recent weeks) and the introduction of Leadbeater’s bill, the debate has gotten far messier. Is this, therefore, the prime minister’s mess to solve?
At most, the current tenor of the debate suggests Starmer has misread the mood of his party, which doesn’t appear to view assisted dying legislation as a priority. But, given the government’s position is neutral, this is not an explicit test of the prime minister’s authority — and it should not be treated as such.
It’s therefore difficult to treat the comments of Sam Coates, Sky News deputy political editor, likening the debate to the Brexit war (2016-2019) today, as anything other than wide of the mark.
Perhaps a stronger comparison could be made to the 1975 referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Community (the common market), which saw then-PM Harold Wilson suspend cabinet collective responsibility. But deeper still are the parallels between the current debate and that held within the Conservative Party over same-sex marriage in 2013.
As More in Common’s Luke Tryl notes, this was a free vote that divided the party and government, often noisily. But the debate “didn’t reflect a fundamental split in the party on a core ideological issue”. Crucially, the Tory divide on same-sex marriage hasn’t featured in wider political discourse since 2013, and David Cameron even cites the Marriage Act as one of the defining successes of his premiership.
Nor should the current assisted dying debate be viewed as only having consequences for Labour unity. At second reading, 121 Tory MPs will divide themselves up, potentially pretty evenly, between the separate voting lobbies.
Conservative MP Neil Shastri-Hurst, a former clinician and barrister, writes for Politics.co.uk today that Leadbeater’s bill “introduces a series of practical, robust measures to ensure the protection of the vulnerable whilst, at the same time, not sentencing another generation of patients to face the unenviable choice of travelling to Dignitas.”
Danny Kruger, meanwhile, has written extensively about his opposition to the proposal, which he calls “assisted suicide”. “Doctors should not be state executioners and nor should judges”, the senior Tory wrote in one recent post to X/Twitter.
Not so long ago, there was a time when Leadbeater’s bill looked certain to sail comfortably through the House of Commons. But because of recent developments, epitomised by Streeting’s intervention, that time has well and truly passed.
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