Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Debate between Lord Moore of Etchingham and Lord Winston

Committee stage
Friday 23rd January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moore of Etchingham (Non-Afl)]

The point that is being missed was made by the noble Lord, Lord Stevens, and it is the problem with what the noble Lord, Lord Winston, was saying. Can the noble Lord respond to it? We are talking about what the aim of this is, but it is not a health aim. The noble Lord, Lord Winston, spoke of better treatment for cancer and in vitro fertilisation. Are the noble Lords arguing that death is a health aim?

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords—

Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Debate between Lord Moore of Etchingham and Lord Winston

Committee stage
Friday 16th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moore of Etchingham (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I find it strange that the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, should be making the argument that the word “dying” tells us all that we need to know. If that were so, we would not need the Bill. The Bill is about a very specific thing, which is choosing to end your own life and getting help with it. The importance of clarity and frankness in language in the making of law is very great. It must be distinguished from perfectly legitimate what I shall call political language.

Take, for example, the right to life, which is one side of the argument in another matter, and the right to choice. Those are both perfectly good phrases about the subject of abortion, but they were not suitable phrases for law. When you talk about law, the word that should be used is “abortion”. That is what is actually happening. I am not saying that there is any dishonesty here, but it is inappropriate for the making of law.

I strongly support what the noble Lord, Lord Frost, said about possible ambiguities and misunderstandings. I give an example, which is nothing whatever to do with assisted dying, but it just illustrates the point. As we ran up to the 1983 general election, Labour had a policy of unilateral disarmament. The Tories were against unilateral nuclear disarmament and attacked it. Somebody wrote a letter to the Daily Telegraph saying, “I do not think people know what the word ‘unilateral’ means, and if you call it ‘one-sided disarmament’, people will understand what this is about”. The Tories seized that, suddenly changed all their propaganda to talk about one-sided disarmament and the polls shifted very dramatically against one-sided disarmament. The importance of normal English is very significant. Again and again, we can see public confusion, which must be avoided, about what is actually proposed in the Bill.

Finally, there is a contradiction in the arguments made by supporters of the Bill—I think that the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, was in this situation. Since the greatest thing that is being argued for by supporters of the Bill is autonomy, it is important to have a word or phrase that embodies that autonomy and shows who is making this decision and whose agency it is. The phrase “committing suicide” exactly establishes the agency and exactly shows the autonomy. It is contradictory to advocate for autonomy and then to take refuge in euphemism.

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

Many years ago, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, introduced a similar Bill. I, very misguidedly, introduced an amendment to the title of the Bill; I suggested that the word “euthanasia” should be in the Bill. I did this without believing either that the Bill should pass or that it should fail—I was genuinely uncertain—but, earlier that week, I had talked to a 16 year-old schoolgirl in a school. In the short conversation we had, she asked, “Do you think we always feel that we have to go for and strive for perfection?” I found that very difficult to answer, so I pondered on it.

One of the issues here is exactly what the noble Lord, Lord Frost, has just shown. He tried to demonstrate that there are no absolute meanings of words. In that case, I used Greek, but this is something that we need to go beyond now. These words will mean different things to different people. We waste a lot of time doing this sort of meddling with language when it is unnecessary and when there is no issue with the legal quality of the Bill, which, of course, must be paramount. It is clear that the language we have at the moment is undoubtedly intelligible and largely workable.