The best speeches on the Assisted Dying Bill today were intelligent and sensitive – but not terribly new. The arguments were more or less the same as those in every debate on euthanasia for the last 80 years. Free choice vs concerns about the threat to public safety. So it was in 1936 and in 1969; so it was in the House of Lords with the Joffe Bill in 2006, and the amendment to the Coroners and Justice Bill in 2009, and in the Scottish Parliament earlier this year. Each time parliamentarians have voted to defend the vulnerable. They did so today by 330 votes to 118.
Stewart Jackson (Con, Peterborough) said that this is a ‘once in a generation’ result, while Iain Wright (Lab, Hartlepool) tweeted: ‘The scale of the vote…means it’s unlikely to come back for years’. That doesn’t mean assisted suicide campaigners will give up – but this result does feel more decisive than any previous one, for two reasons.
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