Majority of disabled MPs voted against assisted suicide bill, figures show

A strong majority of disabled MPs voted against legalising assisted suicide on Friday, despite Kim Leadbeater’s private members’ bill easily passing to the next stage of the parliamentary process that could lead to it becoming law.

Analysis of the voting records shows that, of those MPs who have publicly self-described as disabled people, six voted against the terminally ill adults (end of life) bill while just two voted in favour.

Labour MPs Jen Craft, Marsha de Cordova, Vicky Foxcroft, Liam Conlon, Emma Lewell-Buck and Marie Rimmer all voted against the bill, while Labour’s Diane Abbott, who has a long-term health condition, also voted against.

Both of the disabled MPs who voted in favour of the bill – Labour’s Dr Marie Tidball and Liberal Democrat Steve Darling – said they were doing so to allow the bill to move to the next stage of the legislative process, where it will be discussed in detail by a committee of MPs.

Daisy Cooper, the Liberal Democrat deputy leader, who has spoken of having a “hidden disability”, but has never publicly identified as a disabled person, also voted in favour of the bill.

Other significant political figures who voted in favour of the bill included the care minister Stephen Kinnock; John McDonnell, who has been a powerful supporter of the disabled people’s anti-cuts movement; former prime minister Rishi Sunak; former Conservative work and pensions secretary Mel Stride; Labour work and pensions ministers Liz Kendall, Alison McGovern, Emma Reynolds and Andrew Western; and the prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer.

Those voting against the bill included the minister for disabled people, Sir Stephen Timms; deputy prime minister Angela Rayner; health and social care secretary Wes Streeting; Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey; and Labour MP Neil Coyle, a long-standing member of the work and pensions committee, who previously worked as a director of Disability Rights UK, and for the former Disability Rights Commission.

Debbie Abrahams, who chairs the work and pensions committee and has frequently spoken in parliament on disability rights issues (see separate story), had previously told her local newspaper that she opposed the bill, but she did not vote on Friday.

Tidball was the only disabled MP who spoke in Friday’s debate.

There is likely to be particular disappointment over her support for the bill among disabled people, as she spoke out during the pandemic – as coordinator of Oxford University’s Disability Law and Policy Project – about the possibility that discrimination within the NHS had caused disabled people to be at a higher risk of death from Covid during the pandemic.

She had also claimed in June 2020 that the Conservative government had “failed to protect the lives of disabled people” in the early months of the pandemic.

She told MPs on Friday of her experience of major surgery on her hips when she was six and was “in so much pain and requiring so much morphine that my skin began to itch” and asked her parents to let her die.

She said: “That moment made it clear to me that if the bill was about intolerable suffering, I would not vote for it.”

But she said this experience had given her “a glimpse of how I would want to live my death: just as I have lived my life, empowered by choices available to me; living that death with dignity and respect, and having the comfort of knowing that I might have control over that very difficult time”.

She added: “The choice of assisted dying as one option for adults when facing six months’ terminal illness must be set alongside the choice of receiving the best possible palliative and end-of-life care, or it is no choice at all.”

Diane Abbott spoke in the debate of her “many reservations” about the bill, particularly its insufficient safeguards.

She said: “Robust safeguards for the sick and dying are vital to protect them from predatory relatives, to protect them from the state and, above all, to protect them from themselves.

“There will be those who say to themselves that they do not want to be a burden; I can imagine myself saying that in particular circumstances.

“Others will worry about assets they had hoped to leave for their grandchildren being eroded by the cost of care.

“There will even be a handful who will think they should not be taking up a hospital bed.”

Vicky Foxcroft, now a government whip but previously Labour’s shadow minister for disabled people, spoke in late October of her concerns about the bill.

She spoke then of her concerns about the “necessary safeguards to protect vulnerable people while still offering the legal right to end one’s life”, and that the palliative care system “is not in the state it needs to be in to support assisted dying”.

She also said in October that she had spoken to many disabled people during her time as shadow minister who had “outlined very real fears on what legalising assisted dying might mean for them”.

She said this had had “a profound and moving effect on me and… reinforced my view that any consideration of assisted dying must come at a time when our public services are more resilient so that no individual sees assisted dying as their only option”.

Picture: The main Commons chamber during the debate

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