Why did the assisted dying bill fail? | Lord Moore vs Lord Falconer
Coffee House Shots
The Spectator
4.4 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 30 April 2026
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The assisted dying bill has stalled in the House of Lords – but is it dead, or merely delayed?
After weeks of fraught debate, multiple amendments and accusations of filibuster, supporters of the bill are considering whether it could return to the Commons – and whether the Parliament Act might ultimately be used to force it through. Lord Falconer, who has long championed assisted dying, argues that a small group of peers used procedure to block the will of the elected House. Lord Moore disagrees, warning that the bill was deeply flawed, that the Lords was simply doing its job of scrutiny, and that using the Parliament Act on a matter of conscience would be ‘horrendously divisive’.
In this special Coffee House Shots conversation, Charles Moore and Charlie Falconer debate where the bill went wrong, whether the Lords overreached, and whether assisted dying can ever be safely introduced into the NHS.
Produced by Oscar Edmondson and Patrick Gibbons.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, the Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast. I'm |
| 0:08.8 | Oscar Arlington, and today you're going to be hearing an in-conation between our chairman, |
| 0:12.9 | Lord Moore and Labour peer, Lord Falkner, on the issue of the assisted dying bill. Now, |
| 0:18.5 | key-need listeners will remember that Lord Moore and Lord |
| 0:20.9 | Faulkner spoke about 18 months ago on this podcast on the same topic. At that point, |
| 0:24.9 | the bill was in its infancy and just about to be presented to the Commons. Fast forward, |
| 0:28.9 | and after a huge amount of debate, it has stalled in the House of Lords. Charles, I'm |
| 0:33.2 | to start with you. Could you start by setting out exactly where the bill is now and where you see it |
| 0:38.5 | fell down? Well, Charlie probably understands better than I exactly where it is now, and we'll come to |
| 0:44.5 | that about any form in which it might come back. But I think that there are two things I'd like |
| 0:51.6 | to bear in mind in all of this. One is in no way Charlie's fault, and the other is partly Charlie's fault. |
| 0:58.8 | And the first one that's in no way his fault is that the Labour government, despite having a massive majority, has more or less collapsed since we last spoke. |
| 1:08.4 | And, of course, there's not literally true. |
| 1:09.8 | It's still the government, legitimate government. But there was a great wind in the sails of sort of left liberalism that came in with |
| 1:16.0 | the huge victory in July 2004. And a part of that was that things like assisted suicide were |
| 1:26.2 | bound to happen. |
| 1:30.2 | And it was the will of the Prime Minister that it should be so, |
| 1:32.5 | even though this is a private member's bill. |
| 1:36.4 | And now the sort of politically and culturally feels quite different, |
| 1:39.5 | which is that the Prime Minister's endorsement is a disadvantage, |
| 1:42.1 | and the wind is out of those sales, |
| 1:45.0 | and it's much, much harder going. And I feel that Charlie, very understandably, thought that all would be well, |
... |
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