Rantzen warns peers not to hamper progress of assisted dying law

Assisted dying campaigner Dame Esther Rantzen has urged members of the House of Lords not to block landmark legislation on the issue.

The Terminally Ill Adults (End Of Life) Bill cleared the Commons with a majority of 23 votes on Friday, but opponents have vowed to continue their resistance in the unelected chamber.

The legislation could face a difficult passage through the Lords, with critics poised to table amendments to add further restrictions and safeguards to the Bill.

Opposition

Dame Esther told BBC Radio 4’s Today: “I don’t need to teach the House of Lords how to do their job. They know it very well, and they know that laws are produced by the elected chamber.

“Their job is to scrutinise, to ask questions, but not to oppose.

“So yes, people who are adamantly opposed to this bill, and they have a perfect right to oppose it, will try and stop it going through the Lords, but the Lords themselves, their duty is to make sure that law is actually created by the elected chamber, which is the House of Commons who have voted this through.”

Dame Esther, who turns 85 on Sunday and has terminal cancer, acknowledged the legislation would probably not become law in time for her to use it and she would have to “buzz of to Zurich” to use the Dignitas clinic.

Paralympian and crossbench peer Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson told BBC Breakfast: “We’re getting ready for it to come to the Lord’s and from my personal point of view, about amending it to make it stronger.

“We’ve been told it’s the strongest Bill in the world, but to be honest, it’s not very high bar for other legislation.

“So I do think there are a lot more safeguards that could be put in.”

Majority

Conservative peer and disability rights campaigner Lord Shinkwin said the narrow Commons majority underlined the need for peers to take a close look at the legislation.

He told Today “I think the House of Lords has a duty to expose and to subject this Bill to forensic scrutiny” but “I don’t think it’s a question of blocking it so much as performing our duty as a revising chamber”.

He added: “The margin yesterday was so close that many MPs would appreciate the opportunity to look at this again in respect of safeguards as they relate to those who feel vulnerable, whether that’s disabled people or older people.”

Labour MP Kim Leadbeater, who steered the Bill through the Commons, told the PA news agency she hoped peers would not seek to derail the legislation, which could run out of parliamentary time if it is held up in the Lords.

She said: “I would be upset to think that anybody was playing games with such an important and such an emotional issue.”

A group of 27 Labour MPs who voted against the legislation said: “We were elected to represent both of those groups and are still deeply concerned about the risks in this Bill of coercion of the old and discrimination against the disabled, people with anorexia and black, Asian and minority ethnic people, who we know do not receive equitable health care.

“As the Bill moves to the House of Lords it must receive the scrutiny that it needs. Not about the principles of assisted dying but its application in this deeply flawed Bill.”

Meanwhile, one of the leading opponents of the Bill, Conservative Danny Kruger, said “these are apocalyptic times”.

In a series of tweets on Friday night, the East Wiltshire MP – who is at odds with his mother, Great British Bake Off judge Dame Prue Leith in her support for legalisation – accused assisted dying campaigners of being “militant anti-Christians” who had failed to “engage with the detail of the Bill”.