The Assisted Dying debate in the House of Commons will be well worth re-reading or watching in full: it has been one of the best. The Bill will not progress any further, after MPs voted 330 to 118 against giving it a second reading.
You can listen to some of the very best speeches from a morning of thoughtful, respectful, passionate debate here. But one speech that elicited unusually loud noises of dissent from across the Chamber was from Labour’s Paul Flynn, who suggested that assisted dying is already happening in hospitals. He said that doctors who reassured family members that patients would not suffer any pain were ‘going to operate the practice of double effect’, adding:
‘They will give the patient a lethal dose usually of morphine to kill them, they play a mind game of self-deception, pretending that that lethal dose is to relive pain. It’s not, it’s to kill the patient.’
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He claimed that ‘people are being killed without their own permission’ – something Anne Main objected to on the basis that her husband was given a high dose of morphine when he was dying of cancer, but that this was not to kill him, but because of his unbearable pain.
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