Health and Care Bill

Debate between Baroness Henig and Lord Howarth of Newport

Lords Hansard _ Part 1 & Report stage
Wednesday 16th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Henig) (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Howarth of Newport, is taking part remotely. I invite the noble Lord to speak.

[Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, in moving this proposed new clause, superficially so bland, the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, beckons us along a path which leads towards constitutional and moral anarchy.

What is dangerous constitutionally about this amendment is that it would undermine the way we do parliamentary government. Forcing the Government to lay a Bill before Parliament and to enable Parliament to consider the issue, as the proposed new clause requires, would be a coup. This Back-Bench amendment would usurp control of the parliamentary agenda from the democratically elected Government. In the last Parliament we saw Back-Bench MPs, with the collusion of Mr Speaker Bercow, contriving to set aside Standing Order 14(1), which gives precedence to business tabled by the Government, in order to substitute their own agenda on Brexit. I believe the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, was very much opposed to that.

Parliament proceeds by precedence, and these are dangerous new precedents, as any noble Lord who sees their party as a party of government must surely agree. While it is for Parliament to interrogate government and hold it to account, it is not for Parliament to claim for itself the role of the Government. Parliament is incapable of governing and it should not dictate the parliamentary programme. If Parliament makes exceptions to that principle to gratify a faction of its Members in either House, and if the principle that it may do so becomes established through reiteration so that the Government no longer control the legislative agenda, the ability of Governments to govern will suffer. Our system of parliamentary government is battered and unsteady as it is; we should not injure it further.

The moral anarchy that lurks in this new clause is that it would legitimise in a new way the taking of human life by other human beings. I readily acknowledge that the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, and other proponents of what they call assisted dying are motivated by compassion and kind intentions. I profoundly believe, however, that their approach misreads human nature and that legislation to permit assisted suicide would create more suffering than it would alleviate. The offspring of this compassion would be a coarsening of our society and a diminution of the value we place upon life.

Some people make a moral case for assisted suicide on the basis of personal autonomy. I understand the appeal: I want, or I think I would want, such choice and control for myself at the end of my life. But that is not a good enough argument. Our responsibility is not just to ourselves, or even to those individuals we love the most, but to our community. For a community to be healthy, it must have norms. It has been a norm in our culture to place an especial value on human life. We reaffirmed that value when we abolished capital punishment. Since then, we have subjected our society to decades of laissez-faire ideology and chaotic individualism, and among the consequences of that have been a dissolution of community bonds and new harshnesses.

If we continue to dissolve our traditional norms, we are at risk that there really will be no such thing as society. As we look at our society now, at lethal child abuse and domestic abuse, at murderous assaults on women, as we look across the world at the millions consigned to death in the pandemic by the refusal of rich countries, including our own, to share intellectual property and technology to enable poorer countries to have vaccines, and as we witness increase discriminate mass killing in Ukraine and Yemen and genocide in Xinjiang, do we really think we should be preparing to sanction a new class of killing?

The new clause requires that a vote in Parliament on the intended legislation must be a matter of conscience. Let us examine our consciences very carefully indeed as we consider the proposal the noble Lord has put before us.