Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 12th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak against the Bill and in support of my noble friend Lord Forsyth’s amendment, as amended by the noble Lord, Lord Carlile of Berriew. I speak as a former World Health Organization ambassador for Africa and the Middle East, and as chair of the AMAR International Charitable Foundation. The mandate of that foundation is health for all, as is the WHO mandate, and education for all, as is UNESCO’s mandate. In that capacity, with an outstanding board and uniquely committed professionals, we have in the last 35 years built 90 to 100 primary health centres and several small hospitals, and we have delivered medical consultations to 50 million people in greatest need. This has taken over 40 years, all in conflict countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, and Romania, Ukraine, Pakistan and Kashmir.

They are all local medical staff, so there has been no linguistic misunderstanding of what I am going to report. Working to WHO and UNESCO standards for the poorest of the poor in these conflict zones before, during and after their war, I have to report to noble Lords that not one single patient during that long time has asked for death. Every patient has asked for life, understanding, compassion for their suffering and, potentially, a future for themselves. The drive for life is so great that when I was in Damascus last week and saw skeletal figures on the street—I have not seen poverty quite like it for a very long time—they were not begging for death; they were begging to be given the opportunity to live. In other words, the thing to do is to bring joy to the patient who is in trouble and assist in every possible way to ease the pain—perhaps we should lift the restrictions we put in only a few years ago to stop medical professionals easing pain more easily—because the in-built desire to live is so great that in the most intolerable circumstances people beg to be kept alive.

The World Health Organization of course admits that the National Health Service is not yet perfect—for example, it has never really focused on preventive medicine, which is the key to success in the modern world—but this Bill destroys even that opportunity because it would take resources away and, worse than that, it would divert from the primary purpose of the National Health Service, which is to provide health and life to all. You cannot do both in any organisation. Those of us who have chaired companies, businesses and institutions know that you must have a single mission statement. You do not have a mission statement that tells you to turn right one minute and left the next. I recall very well a wonderful example of this from childhood that all noble Lords may remember, a tremendous animal that had a head both ends. It was called the pushmi-pullyu and was owned and looked after by Dr Dolittle. That is what will happen if we take this dreadful Bill before the House any further.

Humans are very imperfect creatures. We look at the example from Utah Valley University, a wonderful university I spoke at recently, where poor Charlie Kirk was slaughtered yesterday. Immediately, people said, “With what he said, he deserved to be killed”. Indeed, I do not wish to paraphrase it so precisely because the incoming head of the Oxford Union said something very like that, as did some local journalists. It is absolutely appalling. We are not perfect people. This Bill gives the opportunity for maximum damage to a huge number of individuals.