MPs back assisted dying: what next?
Coffee House Shots
The Spectator
4.4 • 2.1K Ratings
🗓️ 20 June 2025
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
MPs have voted – by a narrow 23-vote margin – in favour of legalising assisted dying. Bizarrely, the 51.9 to 48.1 per cent breakdown is the exact same as the 2016 referendum result, although hopefully this issue doesn't divide the Labour party in the same way that Brexit did for the Tories.
The whole process is far from ‘Parliament at its best’, as it has often been claimed. Despite hours of passionate and emotional debate, key concerns about the drafting of the bill forced some who would naturally back assisted dying to oppose it. The overwhelming feeling is that a private member’s bill was not the right forum for this kind of legislation.
So what comes next? The bill will now pass to the House of Lords, after which comes the business of putting the measures into practice. This raises a multitude of problems for the Labour government, as it must now decide, for example, whether the responsibility will fall on the NHS or private doctors; who will pay for it; and what legal protections will be given to doctors and nurses. Other key questions remain: did Keir Starmer break a voting pact with David Lammy? And how could the decision to go against the party impact ambitious members of the shadow cabinet?
Lucy Dunn, James Hale and Rajiv Shah, former adviser in No. 10, discuss.
Produced by Oscar Edmondson.
Transcript
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| 0:38.7 | involves risk. Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots. I'm Lucy Dunn and the DM joined |
| 0:47.5 | by James Heel and Rajiv Shah, former number 10 advisor who's been in Parliament today at the |
| 0:51.8 | assisted dying debate. The bill has been passed in the Commons by |
| 0:54.8 | 314 votes in favour to 291 votes against, which works out at a majority of just 23, and a ratio |
| 1:02.6 | that works out at 52% to 48%. I wonder where we've heard that one before. We'll start just James, |
| 1:08.6 | first of all, you know, were we expecting the bill to pass today? |
| 1:11.7 | Yes, I think that was what the opponents were saying and that's what the proponents were advocating to. |
| 1:16.0 | I think the figure that was doing the rounds a lot was 20 and it was 23. It passed by a majority. |
| 1:21.3 | Sinifley down on the 55 majority that we saw in November. And I think that's interesting because as I discussed on this morning's edition, you know, private member's bill says normally a tradition that if it's going to pass |
| 1:31.1 | into law, it tends to accrue support rather than lose it. And that seems to have been what's |
| 1:36.2 | happened here. And I think today we saw yet more cases perhaps in the parliamentary debate of |
| 1:41.1 | some of the questions going on answered. I think that's why some MPs who |
| 1:44.4 | previously were willing to speak up in favour of raw principles, looked at it and went actually |
| 1:49.1 | no, I'm against, because I've seen the specifics. But the key point, of course, is that it does |
| 1:52.8 | now pass into the Lords. Some of those Lords have been talking to journalists at the last |
| 1:56.5 | couple of days, explaining how annoyed and infuriated they are, the of them having to perform a |
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