Assisted dying campaigners have expressed fury and heartbreak after the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill was effectively blocked in the House of Lords, with supporters accusing peers of using delaying tactics to run down the clock. The landmark legislation, which had been backed by a majority of MPs in the House of Commons, ran out of parliamentary time on Friday, ending its chances of becoming law in the current session.
Campaigners React with Anger and Sorrow
Speaking after the debate, Labour MP Kim Leadbeater, who spearheaded the Bill, said she had received an outpouring of messages from the public expressing “rage and dismay.” She vowed to bring the legislation back after the King’s Speech on May 13, stating: “I am confident. I’m trying to stay positive, I’m trying to stay optimistic. We’ve got to do that. But there is a real sense of sadness and sorrow today.”
Rebecca Wilcox, daughter of broadcaster Dame Esther Rantzen, who has stage 4 lung cancer and has joined the Swiss Dignitas organisation, condemned the “petty few” who thwarted the Bill. “I hope this isn’t the end for us. It is absolutely the end for Mum and I’m so annoyed she hasn’t been able to see this go through,” she said. “We’ve got the stamina, we’ve got the energy, we will do it. We’re on the side of right. We’re on the side of choice and compassion, and it was a brilliant Bill. Whatever those extravagant fantasists may have said, it was a brilliant Bill, with safeguarding at its core.”
Devastation Among Terminally Ill Campaigners
Sophie Blake, a former Sky Sports and BBC TV presenter diagnosed with stage four secondary breast cancer, described feeling “devastated and angry.” She said: “The hope and relief we felt last summer when Parliament voted for this bill has been taken from us. We are devastated and we are angry. Like so many of my friends and fellow campaigners, living with terminal illness, it isn't death we fear. As heart-breaking as it is to have your future cut short, what we fear is how we might die.”
Blake added: “For the first time, we had a sense of peace, knowing that while we live with these cruel life-limiting diseases, we might at least be spared unnecessary suffering at the end, and that peace is then stripped away. A small group of unelected peers have denied the House of Lords the chance to vote on a legally passed Bill, a bill that was overwhelmingly had had public support. This was not scrutiny. This was an obstruction.”
Catie Fenner, whose mother Alison travelled to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland in 2023 after a motor neurone disease diagnosis, said the family still fears a knock at the door from police. “Seeing what has happened with this bill has been utterly heart-breaking, not just for the memory of my Mum and what she had to go through – and the fact that I wanted to stop any other family having to go through what we did – but for all the wonderful people, strong, brave, terminally ill, people that I have met on this campaign who will suffer because of this and the many, many others that we know of,” she said.
Emotional Debate in the Lords
During the final debate, Labour peer Lord Cashman revealed that his former EastEnders co-star June Brown had implored him to help her seek an assisted death. He said: “I also remember my dear friend June Brown, who implored me to get her to a country where she could die with dignity and the death that she wanted.”
However, opponents of the Bill argued it was unsafe and unworkable. Baroness Campbell of Surbiton, who has spinal muscular atrophy, said disabled people “fear unequal access to care shaping their choices, they fear subtle coercion that cannot be easily detected.” Paralympian Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson said the Bill had failed because “there are too many gaps in it” and there was “a lot of misunderstanding about what people might get” under a law change.
Gordon Macdonald, from the Care Not Killing campaign group, welcomed the outcome, stating: “The House of Lords scrutiny exposed this Bill as ‘skeleton legislation’ riddled with gaping holes. It is now clear that this Bill was both unsafe and unworkable.”
