This bill opens the door to scandal, abuse and injustice, disabled activists say after assisted dying bill vote

Disabled people’s lives will be increasingly in danger because of MPs’ failure to understand the risks posed by the assisted dying bill, devastated activists warned on Friday after the legislation was approved by the House of Commons.

Disabled activists had started gathering outside parliament at 6.30am last Friday in preparation for a crucial debate on the terminally ill adults (end of life) bill before a vote that determined whether it passed to the Lords.

The bill was eventually passed by the Commons by 314 votes to 291 on Friday afternoon, although disabled MPs strongly opposed the legislation (see separate story).

Before the vote, supporters of Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) and Not Dead Yet UK (NDY UK) held up traffic in front of the House of Commons with a last-minute direct action (pictured), accompanied by chants of “we are not… dead yet”.

Author and activist Ellen Clifford, who has helped lead disabled people’s opposition to the bill over the last year, said she trusted the Lords to improve the bill more than MPs, some of whom she said had acted on “naked ambition” and the principle of assisted dying, rather than what was in the bill.

She said she hoped the bill’s passage through the Lords would improve the safeguards and provide opportunities “to show what a shambles the bill is”.

Among those disabled people outside the Commons was musician and activist John Kelly, who said after the vote was announced: “The truth is, our voices haven’t been listened to.

“What this does is open the door for injustice.

“To rely on a panel to decide my life of social workers, and psychiatrists, have you not read how many injustices and mistakes those people have made, how much abuse and how many rights have been denied disabled people?

“And what they have done is open the door to allow in yet more scandals, yet more abuse.”

Disabled activist Anna Landre told Disability News Service (DNS): “A lot of us are scared about the prospect of enshrining a state-funded ability to die when we don’t have properly-funded state services to live with dignity, let alone to thrive, let alone to get disabled people into work, like this government claims it wants to do.”

She said: “I most certainly don’t feel safer now.

“I think it’s going to create an atmosphere for disabled people that is increasingly unsafe, when our services are being stripped from us, when we’re going to have to fight even harder to get the basics, the scraps that we can already barely access and now in any medical, in any doctor’s office we enter, we face the prospect of being offered a death, of being offered [an assisted suicide].”

She said it was particularly unsafe for disabled people who face multiple marginalisations, including disabled women, who are more likely to be in an abusive relationship; disabled people of colour, who are more likely to be doubted by their medical practitioners; and disabled people of low socio-economic status, “who are looking at not being able to pay rent next month”.

She added: “As a disabled woman, I’ve been trying to access a cervical cancer screening for over two years.

“I wish this government would work on that rather than working on streamlining my access to suicide.”

Another leading activist, Simone Aspis, said that, as a disabled woman with learning difficulties, it was “a very sad day for our community”.

She said the bill was “really, really dangerous”.

She said she believed that, for her and other people with learning difficulties, assisted dying will become the “de facto” treatment option given to them by doctors.

She said: “The government keep saying that there is not enough money to go around, so we are going to spend money on creating an assisted dying service?

“Where is this money going to be found? It’s going to be taken away from education, from care, from housing, from anything that supports us to have good lives.”

Aspis also pointed out that people with learning difficulties had been “excluded from this debate” because the bill had not been made available in easy read.

Dermot Devlin, co-founder of DPAC Northern Ireland, said that, with the government’s cuts to disability benefits coming in, it was “a dangerous country now if you’re disabled… but we will keep fighting back.”

Chelsea Roff, a researcher and founder of the US-based charity Eat Breathe Thrive, who has fought for months to alert MPs to the risks the bill poses to people with eating disorders, said: “I’ve spent the last six months trying to raise awareness about this loophole, and hundreds of experts have warned parliament: charities, people with eating disorders, physicians, doctors, lawyers…

“I did that because I thought it was the right thing to do because I thought if MPs understood the evidence, they would act on it and amend the bill.

“I’m really disappointed and I think the evidence was minimised, it was dismissed, it was not meaningfully engaged with.”

Michael Lorimer, from DPAC Northern Ireland, said he was concerned that the bill gave ministers “massive executive powers”.

He said: “Given what they’re doing on benefit cuts, we can’t trust them to represent our best interests in terms of implementing this legislation.

“It’s getting to the stage where Labour are a clear and present danger to disabled people’s lives here because of the benefit cuts and because this bill has gone through, giving them almost unlimited powers in terms of how they shape this legislation.

“And they’ve been clear through the benefit cuts that they don’t value our lives.”

Jason de Souza said he believed the new law would be “a catalyst for a much wider agenda against disabled and vulnerable people, especially people who are in a situation where they need palliative care and support”.

Earlier, disabled activists had gathered nearby to share their final thoughts before the vote, after months of campaigning.

Devlin had told fellow protesters: “As a disabled person, this assisted dying bill breaks my heart. It terrifies me.

“It tells me that my life, already pushed to the margins, already made harder by endless cuts and cruelty is… now disposable, it [turns] the language of choice and dignity into something darker.

“I want to live, I deserve to live, but this bill makes it clear to them that lives like mine are just too expensive to bother saving.”

The disabled crossbench peer Baroness [Tanni] Grey-Thompson fought back tears as she thanked disabled activists for attending the protest “despite the discrimination they face in their daily lives and inaccessible public transport”.

She said there was “so little safety in this bill, and so little understanding of the lives of disabled people, and the current government’s plans for welfare”.

Kevin Caulfield, former chair of Hammersmith and Fulham Coalition Against Cuts, said: “The bill, and what is happening with the universal credit and personal independence payment bill, really indicates disabled people’s position in society, because we have been sidelined all the way through this process.

“People with life-limiting illnesses are disabled people and that’s in practice and in law and yet they have successfully managed to portray this bill as having very little to do with disabled people, and that’s a f*****g disgrace and it’s disgusting and the same is happening with the benefit cuts.”

Caulfield was given a terminal diagnosis 28 years ago, and says he “might well have decided to take the option” of an assisted death if it was available then “because I was a newly disabled person, I didn’t have access to other disabled people, I had no access to mental health support, and it may well have seemed like a reasonable option”.

But he said he was “still here 28 years later”, and there were “going to be many people in a similar situation to me, tens of thousands of people that will end up being dead as a by-product of this legislation”.

Disabled actor, writer and activist Liz Carr, said the number of disabled activists who had attended the protest was “amazing” in the context of spending cuts and “the struggle to survive”.

She told fellow activists: “You make me know that we’re right and that even if this goes through today and goes through to the Lords, we just keep going there because we know where this goes, we know what it means, we know how it will impact our community and other communities.”

Paula Peters, who had been the first to start the protest, at 6.30am outside parliament, said: “Whatever the outcome, we keep going, and we keep fighting, and we keep resisting… and we are not dead yet.”

Jamie McCormack, another disabled activist who refused to accept defeat, said: “We will fight on, we will fight for assistance to live, not to die.

“We will fight to our very last dying breath.”

And George Fielding told fellow activists: “Our most precious public services, and the things on which we all rely, rely on doing no harm.

“This bill will do harm; its very premise is to kill people, it’s a pre-designed process.

“We are on the right side of history, always have been, and the resistance starts as soon as we hear the result today.”

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