Robert Jenrick has made an emotional appeal against assisted dying, as MPs prepare for a momentous vote on whether to let the terminally ill end their own lives.
Writing for the Daily Mail below, Mr Jenrick reveals how he helped look after his grandmother, Dorothy, as a teenage boy – and how she continued to bring joy to the family as she defied a terminal diagnosis for nearly a decade.
The Shadow Justice Secretary says the prospect of legalising assisted dying ‘fills me with dread’, adding: ‘My Nana felt like she was a burden. I know how much she hated the indignity she felt at having to ask my Mum or us to help her with basic needs.
‘People like her – and there are many such people – may consider an assisted death as another act of kindness to us. How wrong they would be.’
He goes on: ‘Our society pays little regard to end of life care. We need to do much more as a country to help the elderly, like my Nana, in their final years.
‘But my experience has taught me that there can be dignity in death, and that even in someone’s twilight years, there is joy to be extracted from life.
‘So I’ll be voting No. And as I do so, I’ll be thinking of my great pal – my Nana, Dorothy.’
The appeal comes as MPs prepare for a Commons showdown over the contentious issue tomorrow.
MPs will hold a final vote tomorrow afternoon on whether to press ahead with the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, which would make it legal to help someone end their own life in certain circumstances for the first time.
It will apply only to those with a terminal illness and a diagnosis giving them fewer than six months to live, although critics warn it could be ‘the thin end of the wedge’.
Labour MP Kim Leadbeater said she was confident the Bill would pass. But campaigners opposed to the legislation last night said the vote was on a ‘knife-edge’.
The Bill cleared its first Commons hurdle in November with a comfortable majority of 55 votes. But some MPs have suggested they will switch their votes today or abstain.
The original legislation has now been amended dozens of times.
Ms Leadbeater herself has tabled a further 37, mostly technical amendments to be considered today, while opponents will launch a last-ditch bid to tighten up the Bill, including by barring its use by people suffering from anorexia.
Tory leader Kemi Badenoch labelled it a ‘bad bill’ that will not deliver and urged Conservative MPs to follow suit.
‘This has been a free vote. I’m somebody who has been previously supportive of assisted suicide,’ Mrs Badenoch said.
‘[But] this Bill is a bad Bill. It is not going to deliver. It has not been done properly.
‘This is not how we should put through legislation like this. I don’t believe that the NHS and other services are ready to carry out assisted suicide, so I’ll be voting no, and I hope as many Conservative MPs as possible will be supporting me in that.’
Former Labour frontbencher Dan Carden became the latest to say he will vote against the Bill after previously abstaining.
Mr Carden, leader of the Blue Labour group of MPs, told the Guardian that ‘legalising assisted suicide will normalise the choice of death over life, care, respect and love’.
He added: ‘I genuinely fear the legislation will take us in the wrong direction. The values of family, social bonds, responsibilities, time and community will be diminished, with isolation, atomisation and individualism winning again.’
Tory sources said that Rishi Sunak, who backed the Bill at its first stage, is likely to be one of many MPs who decide to miss tomorrow’s vote.
Downing Street would not say whether Keir Starmer, who backs the principle of assisted dying, will vote.
One government insider described the legislation, which has been introduced as a private member’s bill, as ‘a mess’.
‘Even among people who support assisted dying, there are a lot who are not sure this was the best way of going about it,’ the source said. ‘We would have been better to have let a Royal Commission look at it first.’
Supporters of the Bill insist they have put rigorous safeguards in place to prevent vulnerable people being coerced into ending their lives early. Anyone found to have pressured someone to kill themselves could face up to 14 years in prison.
But critics warn the protections are too weak – and point to the decision to drop the requirement for all applications to be considered by a High Court judge. The key safeguard was abandoned following warnings it would place too much pressure on court time. Instead, applications will now be considered by a three-person panel featuring a senior legal figure, a psychiatrist and a social worker.
A government impact assessment found that within a decade the legislation would see 4,500 people a year end their lives early. It forecast that the premature deaths would save the NHS almost £60million a year in ‘unutilised healthcare’.
The Government is formally ‘neutral’ on the issue. Health Secretary Wes Streeting, Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood and Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner are among senior members of the Cabinet who voted against the legislation in November, while Sir Keir and other senior figures such as Rachel Reeves and Yvette Cooper voted in favour.
The Government has said it will implement the Bill if it is eventually passed by Parliament. But ministers forced Ms Leadbeater to accept an implementation period of up to four years because of concerns it will prove difficult in practice.
My Nana felt like she was a burden. People like her may consider an assisted death as an act of kindness to us… how wrong they would be
By Robert Jenrick
It was never the plan for my Nana, Dorothy, to live with us. She’d moved from Liverpool to a sheltered flat near our home outside of Wolverhampton to be close to Mum and Dad.
But her terminal emphysema made that impossible at times. It was a dreadful thing, leaving her constantly struggling to breathe, reliant on powerful inhalers and later oxygen canisters.
So, after a hospital stay, when I was a teenager, she came to our house to recuperate for ‘a few weeks’. She ended up staying for years.
Her mind remained razor sharp even to the end, but her body gave up. The condition left her barely able to walk down a corridor or across a room. She was in considerable discomfort and often bedbound.
Throughout all that, though, her dignity was astonishing. Immaculately turned out. Neatly dressed. Hair coiffed. Every single day.
First diagnosed with emphysema, then cancer, doctors gave her a short while to live. They were wrong. She defied the odds and lived for almost a decade.
Throughout, my Mum primarily, but also my Dad, my sister and I were her carers. Fetching prescriptions, changing beds, running her to doctors’ appointments. There was nothing by way of help. In fact, the day my grandmother died, my Mum came home to a message from the council saying that her condition was not yet serious enough to warrant their support.
After Nana became seriously unwell, my mother was loath to leave her side.
Looking back, Mum showed a saintlike devotion. She put her whole life on hold for years, as so many carers across the country do. She received no recompense, no reward. This was a duty of love.
A multi-generational household has its ups and downs. Teenagers and octogenarians aren’t always natural housemates. She found our noise, robust family debates and occasional parties difficult and wasn’t shy about saying so. With only one television, battles over my desire to watch teenage comedies and her desire to watch Emmerdale or Corrie raged for years.
But there were many happy moments too. Long discussions about the past, the news, and politics, as we sat completing the Daily Mail crossword every day. She encouraged me to go to university and make the most of the opportunities she missed leaving school at 13.
Watching her deteriorate was heartbreaking. It affected us all. There was something particularly tragic about someone so sharp, so witty, so aware of the world, stuck in a failing body.
Increasingly, she felt a burden. She prized what remained of her independence and hated making a fuss. None of this came easily to her. In her youth, she’d done remarkable things like serving as a volunteer fire warden during the Blitz around St Paul’s Cathedral. She’d known the tough times and faced them all with a quiet stoicism.
The days before she died were terrible to watch. By then, each breath had become painful, and talking a struggle. It hurts beyond words to see someone you love in that state.
I’ll always remember the last time we saw each other. I went to see her in hospital. I held her hand and we spoke a little. I kissed her cheek as I left. She whispered, ‘we’ve been great pals, haven’t we?’ We had.
Tomorrow, I’ll cast my vote on the Assisted Dying Bill.
The legislation lacks basic safeguards. It would allow patients with anorexia to end their life without telling their families. The representative bodies of Pathologists, Psychiatrists, and Palliative doctors all oppose it. Our courts are bound, under human rights challenges, to expand eligibility yet further.
The safeguards our courts were supposed to provide when the Bill was first proposed, and which I warned at the time were utterly impractical to deliver, have been stripped out altogether.
Then there is the matter of how hard it is to predict when someone might die. This law is meant to only apply to those with less than six months less to live. But speak to any doctor and they’ll tell you just how hard that is to predict.
The doctors told my Nana that she had just a short while left. They were wrong, like they are in many cases. She lived for almost a decade until her death at the grand old age of 94. With assisted dying legalised, inevitable mistakes like this would be too terrible to contemplate.
But for me, it’s the examples around the world where assisted dying is legal that prove it’s a bad idea. In Oregon, under 30 per cent of the patients dying by assisted dying do so because they’re in physical pain. The overwhelming majority die because they fear ‘losing autonomy’ or feel a ‘burden on family, friends and caregivers.’ These numbers are the same just about everywhere data is collected.
That fills me with dread. My Nana felt like she was a burden. I know how much she hated the indignity she felt at having to ask my Mum or us to help her with basic needs. People like her, and there are many such people, may consider an assisted death as another act of kindness to us. How wrong they would be.
It’s easy to make laws that work for 80 per cent of people. It’s very hard to make them work for everyone. It’s Parliament’s role to represent that minority, but the Assisted Dying Bill leaves them exposed.
There will be people – we all know them in our lives – who are shy, who have low self-esteem, who have demons within them who will feel societal pressure to end their life early. I know plenty of these people. They are often poor. They are vulnerable. They are lonely.
Parliament must be their protector. But this Bill fails to uphold that duty. Thousands of people will lose months, if not years, of their life to avoid causing hassle for their family. Thousands more will be haunted by the thought of whether they should do so too. If it wasn’t obvious from the data, we know it instinctively.
Our society pays little regard to end of life care. We need to do much more as a country to help the elderly, like my Nana, in their final years. But my experience has taught me that there can be dignity in death, and that even in someone’s twilight years, there is joy to be extracted from life.
So tomorrow, I’ll be voting no. And, as I do so, I’ll be thinking of my great pal – my Nana, Dorothy.
