\n<\/p>\n
The leader of the Blue Labour group has said he will vote against the assisted dying bill \u2013 one of the most high-profile switchers \u2013 as both sides make their final pleas to MPs before Friday\u2019s crunch vote.<\/p>\n
It comes as campaigners and bereaved relatives joined the Labour MP Kim Leadbeater ahead of the third reading of the bill, to urge parliament to back the reforms, saying it would be at least a decade before another chance to change the law.<\/p>\n
The bill would legalise assisted dying for mentally competent adults in their final months of life.<\/p>\n
Dan Carden, who previously abstained, said it was core Labour vales that drove him to vote against the bill. \u201cLegalising assisted suicide will normalise the choice of death over life, care, respect and love,\u201d he said. \u201cI draw on my own family experience, caring for my dad who died from lung cancer three years ago.<\/p>\n
\u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
The MP for Liverpool Walton, whose group seeks to promote culturally conservative \u2013 or what it says are blue-collar \u2013values within the party, added: \u201cFor people who live with the reality of rundown public services, particularly palliative end-of-life care, poverty, hardship and broken-down communities are a fact of life. They will be impacted very differently. And that\u2019s something the political class doesn\u2019t dare discuss.\u201d<\/p>\n
At a press conference on Thursday morning, MPs backing the bill said a failure to pass legislation could condemn thousands of terminally ill people and their families to years of more trauma, secrecy and fear of prosecution.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt has gone through hours and hours of scrutiny, and colleagues have had this bill since November,\u201d Leadbeater said on Thursday. \u201cIf we don\u2019t pass this law tomorrow, it could be another decade before this issue is brought back to parliament. And in that time, how many stories [of suffering] will we hear?\u201d<\/p>\n
About 15 MPs who backed the bill or abstained at its second reading have now said they are likely to vote against it. MPs in November backed the principle of assisted dying for England and Wales by a majority of 55 . Should it pass its third reading on Friday, it will go to the House of Lords.<\/p>\n
Keir Starmer has indicated he will continue to back the bill, saying his position on assisted dying is \u201clongstanding and well known\u201d. But the former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown has described Leadbeater\u2019s bill as fundamentally flawed and urged MPs to reject it.<\/p>\n
In the office of the Conservative MP and former minister Andrew Mitchell on Thursday, campaigners shared raw testimony of being failed by the current law. Anil Douglas told the story of his father, Ian, who died by suicide after ordering opioids on the dark web.<\/p>\n
He was suffering from secondary progressive multiple sclerosis, and was no longer able to face the pain, Douglas said. \u201cOn the night he died, I found him still alive. I cracked and called the GP, she had a legal obligation to call an ambulance, and soon paramedics arrived.\u201d<\/p>\n
They tried to resuscitate his father. \u201cA couple of days later, a police investigation hung over our heads for more than six months. Nothing can prepare you for that experience of grief in real time, that kind of trauma.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pamela Fisher, a Church of England lay preacher with terminal breast cancer, said she supported the bill not in spite of her Christian faith, but because of it. \u201cI don\u2019t want to die now, but I\u2019m in terror at the prospect of how my final weeks may turn out to be,\u201d she said. \u201cEven the best palliative care has limits.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fisher rejected religious objections to assisted dying as misrepresenting Christian values. \u201cMy God is not a harsh and controlling God,\u201d she said. \u201cMy God is a God of love who invites us to work with him to create conditions of greater compassion [in] society. Religious arguments against the bill also sometimes overlook the concept of free will.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Vincent Nichols \u2013 who is opposed to assisted dying \u2013 has previously argued that the suffering of human beings is \u201can intrinsic part of our human journey, a journey embraced by the eternal word of God, Christ Jesus himself\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The leader of the Blue Labour group has said he will vote against the assisted dying bill \u2013 one of the most high-profile switchers \u2013 as both sides make their final pleas to MPs before Friday\u2019s crunch vote. It comes as campaigners and bereaved relatives joined the Labour MP Kim Leadbeater ahead of the third<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8673,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[140,142,133,137,136,141,134,135,138,139],"class_list":{"0":"post-8671","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-crime-justice","8":"tag-assisted","9":"tag-bill","10":"tag-blue","11":"tag-carden","12":"tag-dan","13":"tag-dying","14":"tag-labour","15":"tag-leader","16":"tag-switches","17":"tag-vote"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8671"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8671\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8673"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}