1. Several misleading comments from Kim Leadbeater yesterday, but maybe the most glaring example was her comments to Martha Kearney later in this interview.

Kearney said there were fears that hospices “would find themselves dragged into the obligation to provide assisted death.”

https://twitter.com/BBCWorldatOne/status/1907438281773498714

2. Leadbeater: “Yeah, that isn’t the case at all.”

She then pointed to the “very clear section of the bill which talks about conscientious objection”.

That section of the bill very clearly only refers to *individual* conscientious objection, not institutions such as hospices:

1. The assisted suicide bill is being mis-sold to the public—not always with big untruths, but often with little misrepresentations and ambiguities.

Marie Tidball’s description of the panel here is a good example:

https://twitter.com/mattengland3011/status/1905591109251703216

2. Tidball claims that the panel will have a “really rich process”, taking a “psychosocial approach”. Implication is this is a profound, holistic assessment.

But the clause just says the panel need to be “satisfied” the person meets the criteria—terminally ill, not coerced etc.

Ten worst moments of the assisted suicide bill committee stage: 10. “It’s very important,” says Simon Opher, “that this committee doesn’t get too hung up on anorexia.”

Before revealing he is “not aware” of the crucial research about current anorexia treatment.

(The committee rejected all 5 amendments backed by eating disorders charities.)

1. The Orders of St John Care Trust is Britain’s second biggest not-for-profit care provider, with 3500 residents and 61 care homes.

So when the Trust says (in written evidence) that the assisted suicide bill poses a “substantial” risk to the elderly, it’s worth taking notice. 2. The crisis in the care system, the Trust notes, means that a lot of people are exhausting their life savings.

“It is without question,” they say, that some people will consider assisted suicide “to protect the prospects of their loved ones, and not because they wish to die.”

This week the assisted suicide bill came into focus as not only a danger to the vulnerable, but also a threat to the hospice sector.

Thread: 1. In January, Sarah Cox, president of the Association for Palliative Medicine, told the committee the bill could cause serious problems.

In a survey, more than two in five APM members said “if assisted dying was implemented within their organisation, they would have to leave.”

In written evidence, Disability Labour raise a dozen or so serious problems with the Leadbeater Bill.

The group, who represent disabled Labour members and carers, register “a strong sense that the needs of disabled people have not been as thoroughly addressed as we would like”. 1. Disabled people, they note, are only mentioned once in the bill.

The bill’s attempted exemption of “disability”, they add, seems to be based on ignorance: “There appears to be a worrying lack of awareness of the definition of disability contained in...the Equality Act.”

Six times in the last three months Leadbeater and co have weakened their policy on safeguards:

1. Jake Richards says he plans to guarantee palliative care options.

Then votes against an amendment to guarantee a meeting with a palliative care specialist.

https://x.com/ddhitchens/status/1894344910016311525

2. Alicia Kearns says six months is a key safeguard against coercion.

Then signs an amendment to raise six to twelve in some cases.

https://x.com/ddhitchens/status/1887454472798150895

Among today’s complex-but-important debates: “mental capacity” for assisted suicide.

—Should doctors be obliged to actively establish capacity?
—Should there be a higher standard of proof?
—Should it include understanding of key medical details?

Committee voted: no, no and no. 1. The bill says doctors should start by assuming capacity is there; this amendment would have required them to establish it.

Voted down 15-8.

LOROS, a hospice in Leicester, cares for 2500 terminally ill people a year. Its evidence to the assisted suicide committee is quite a reality check.

1. “Please,” it begins, “understand the catastrophic funding crisis Palliative Care finds itself in. This cannot be overstated.” 2. “This Bill is being considered at a time when Palliative Care services are in the worst financial situation since the pioneering work of Dame Cicely Saunders over 60 years ago.”

Most funding is donations—not enough given “increasing demand and complexity of patients’ needs.”

Powerful evidence to the assisted suicide bill committee from NHS doctor and psychiatrist George Gillett, worth quoting from at length:

1. “As a psychiatrist, I spend my working life talking to people who, inspired by principles of autonomy and control, wish to end their life.” 2. “I believe the so-called safeguards in the proposed legislation are entirely insufficient to protect vulnerable persons…

When I sit with patients who have resorted to suicidal acts, they often explain how these acts were motivated by feeling like a burden.”

As predicted, Kim Leadbeater is using highly misleading terms here.

1. She says the assisted suicide panel would have “an inquisitorial role”. In fact she has given the panel

—No power to compel witnesses to testify
—No power to hear evidence on oath
—No obligation to ask anybody even one question
—No power to see wills, financial records etc
—No mandate to meet the person in their home environment, produce a detailed report etc 2. She says social workers can help with “broader social context”. She has given the social workers

—No obligation to meet the applicant or even hear from them
—No mandate to discuss other options for care and support
—No mandate to check if they are being neglected
—No mandate to check if they are depressed, anxious, feel like a burden, etc
—No mandate for in-depth discussions with applicant, family and carers about anything except direct coercion/pressure and rudimentary mental capacity
—No knowledge of the applicant until very final stage of the process

Kim Leadbeater is misleading the public again.

Here she claims that if someone says “I am doing this because I am a burden,” that would be a “red flag.”

There is *no clause* in the bill that says that is an inadequate reason for assisted suicide.

2. She then claims: “You would have to have a much more detailed, complex conversation with patients about what their motivations were.”

Also false. There is no clause in the bill which says doctors have to have a detailed, complex conversation about anything.

Should lethal drugs be made available to homeless people? A thread. 1. In October 2024, Ontario’s Chief Coroner issued a report on “marginalization data perspectives” in the implementation of assisted suicide.

The report raised a possible link with housing issues. “The households and dwellings dimension showed higher rates of marginalization.”

Last week four Labour MPs warned their colleagues they weren’t being given the full picture on the assisted suicide bill.

If anything the MPs understated it. Here are 10 things we’ve learnt from the committee stage which Leadbeater and allies have studiously avoided mentioning: 1. Huge anxiety that the state of public services will incentivise assisted suicide.

Several witnesses talked about this, including the head of the Royal College of Nurses and, most eloquently, @doctor_oxford:

Kim Leadbeater is doubling down. A little extra bureaucracy, but very little extra protection for the vulnerable. Thread:

https://twitter.com/PaulBrandITV/status/1887072252019057104

1. A doctor would be able to ask you, “Have you ever thought about assisted suicide?” even if the thought has never crossed your mind.

Despite many objections to this clause, Leadbeater just will not abandon it. Her amendment merely requires the doctor to give other info too.

Kim Leadbeater’s witness list was 80%-20% in favour of the bill’s supporters.

9 lawyers were invited (6 pro, 3 neutral), alongside 8 witnesses from other jurisdictions (all pro), academics, medics, etc.

But who *didn’t* receive an invitation? Here’s an incomplete list: 1. The British Geriatrics Society.

“The BGS is opposed to the legalisation of Assisted Dying…Our assessment is that the risk for safeguard failure is at least moderate in a modern, well-run AD service which we find to be unacceptable when considering the needs of older people.”

It’s been said that the next UK political scandal is probably already happening in plain sight. And it is. It’s been happening all this week at the assisted suicide bill committee. A thread: The committee heard unambiguous warnings. That the state of the NHS would incentivise assisted suicide. That the bill lacks basic psychiatric protections. That it is unsafe for people with disabilities. That people will request lethal drugs because they feel like a burden.

When it comes to defining neoliberalism, HSBC’s marketing department continue to make the rest of us look like amateurs Reminder of who benefits when “openness” and “fluidity” are prized as the highest values

In “The Magic Lantern”, Timothy Garton Ash’s eyewitness account of the 1989 revolutions, there’s a passage which, to a reader today, just leaps off the page. It’s about conformism, lies and ideology. Garton Ash, who observed at first hand the changes behind the Iron Curtain in the 1980s, asks: How much was 1989 an *ideological* revolution? Surely, given that official ideology was scarcely believed even by Party leaders, there was nothing to overthrow?

Commonweal’s September cover story, by David Bentley Hart, argues that Catholics make “wildly inaccurate” claims about Communion and divorce, because they (we) don’t know any history: commonwealmagazine.org/divorce-annulm… But I’m not sure the facts are on his side here. Catholics, he says, rely on “easily discredited fictions about the Christian past…a concept of the early centuries of Christianity that borders on fantasy”. We would know that early Christianity had a “fluid and ad hoc” approach to divorce, if we read Origen, Basil, Epiphanius.