Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Lord Alderdice Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 12th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alderdice (LD)]

My Lords, although I am the first Liberal Democrat to speak in this debate, I am not speaking on behalf of all Liberal Democrat Peers because, as in all the other groupings in your Lordships’ House, there is a divergence of views on these issues. The divergence is not just between Members; it is often within each of us. There are dilemmas of an almost insoluble kind in some of these questions.

The two previous speakers have addressed some of the technical questions surrounding this Bill admirably. I want to speak about it in a different way. The first time I had to think about these questions was as a young doctor, when I found myself with patients who were suffering a great deal of pain and wanted to bring their lives to an end. For me, the question was, “How should I help them manage?” I can recall getting into a conversation with one elderly lady in her 90s who was suffering from a cancer in her gullet, which meant that she could not swallow anything. I said, “We have two choices here. One is that we can put a tube down so that we can keep you alive for as long as possible and relieve your pain as best as possible”. Before I went on to say anything further, she said, “Young man, I am now in my 90s. I’ve had a fair life, with its ups and downs. I do not want tubes going down. I just want you to keep me as comfortable as you can. I know that you cannot relieve all the pain; but keep me as comfortable as you can”. That is what I did, as best as I could, because, however much we wish to rid people of their pain and discomfort, it is not always possible, even with the best will in the world and the best medication available.

Sometimes, though, the situation is much more difficult than that. A close friend of mine was a very distinguished and highly respected teacher in one of our communities in Northern Ireland. He was the chairman of the Alliance Party—the party I led. He had a son who was a doctor and a wife who was suffering from an illness from which she would not recover. She was in a terrible state about it, and getting worse. She made him promise that, if it got to the point where she could not bear it any more, he would assist her to pass away. When the time came, one night, he put a pillow over her face. She passed away and he went straight out and drowned himself in a nearby lake. He could not discuss it with his son, who was a doctor, because that would have implicated his son, and as we have heard before, that would have been a difficult thing.

The point in raising these questions is that they are not academic questions. They are real human challenges that can only be engaged with not by rules, regulations and protocols but by engaging with people in terrible dilemmas. The only way we can really understand what we are trying to do here today and next week is to put ourselves in the same position. Some of us will say, “Whatever the pain and discomfort, I simply want to be around for as long as possible”. Some may even say, “I want to be around for another month because my first great-grandchild is going to be born; but after that, it is a different story”. Others will say, “This is intolerable. It’s excruciating. It’s dreadful. I desperately, desperately wish to be relieved of it”. I rather suspect that, in those circumstances, most of us would want the help to do what we wanted to do and to be relieved of the excruciating pain, emotional or physical.

Amendment to the Motion

Moved by

Hezbollah: Threat to the United Kingdom

Lord Alderdice Excerpts

Tuesday 5th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alderdice (LD)]

My Lords, I have listened with great interest to the various contributions to this debate on the threat to the UK from Hezbollah. My concern for a peaceful outcome to the tragedy of the Middle East goes back many years. After the negotiation of the Belfast/Good Friday agreement in 1998 and the IRA’s decision in 2005 to decommission its weapons, I explored similar possibilities elsewhere. I met with Hezbollah in Beirut in July 2005, and it asked me to prepare a paper on the decommissioning of weapons. After it received and studied the paper, it asked me to return and discuss with it the possibilities for a process, and I did that. Sadly, the 2006 south Lebanon war destroyed the prospects for that initiative: of course, groups do not give up weapons if they think they might need them. Since then, as the noble Lord, Lord Bew, said, the situation has deteriorated, and we face a very different world now.

Every community has the right to defend itself, including ourselves in the United Kingdom. Tonight we focus on the defence of the United Kingdom. My concern, however, is that, while it is appropriate, and indeed vital, for the security services to do all they can to protect us and for the Government to take this seriously—we will listen with interest to what the Minister says—it is important for us not to focus all our thoughts on the escalation of rhetoric and force. That is happening globally and is leading us to an existential crisis that could envelop the whole of that region—and much more widely—in a terrible war, going beyond even that which there has been.

For that reason I particularly welcome the intervention by the noble Lord, Lord Carlile of Berriew, talking about trying to engage with those constructive people in the Middle East and more widely. Of course it is true that this may not work, but we must be careful not to focus all the time on force as the way to address it. This is why I called in the SDR debate for us not only to build up our forces and our matériel but to focus on the stratagems for de-escalation. In all the wars we are currently facing, the situation is getting worse; people are increasingly tossing around the possibilities of the nuclear option in almost all these conflicts. It is said so easily—it drops so easily from the tongue—and I think that people have forgotten the consequences of any kind of nuclear intervention: they are utterly catastrophic. So in all that we say and do, while we take care to defend and to oppose those who do and say what is wrong, we must try to de-escalate rather than add fuel to the fire.