Labour’s chief whip in the Lords, Roy Kennedy, has indicated that he will not give the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill more time before the May deadline, when all legislation must have passed or automatically falls.  As there are only six sitting days left before May, when the King's Speech is due, it is now expected the legislation in its current form to fail. For it to have any chance of success it will need to be picked up again in a new parliamentary session.  The bill’s outspoken campaigner Esther Rantzen has taken this news badly accusing peers of ‘sabotaging’ the bill and describing them of being ‘cruel’, ‘inhuman’ and ‘undemocratic’.  That the bill looks likely to fail will also be a serious blow to the lobby organisation Dignity in Dying who were confident in June that Labour MP Kim Leadbeater’s private members’ bill would succeed.  Back in June, Sarah Wootton, Chief Executive of Dignity in Dying, confidently declared: ‘This vote will go down in history as the moment Parliament finally caught up with the public. The momentum behind change is now unstoppable; a credit to this people-powered movement for choice.’  Such words now look to be premature with a lens now being shone on the way that the lobby group has been frustrated by the passionate debate of many dozen parliamentarians, most recently in the Lords. Many were determined to thwart the controversial bill which was widely regarded as poorly drafted. The Bill had ignited passionate debate in parliament and across the country. MPs, voting according to conscience, broke party lines to form ideological coalitions and rare alliances. Jeremy Hunt sided with Sir Keir Starmer to push through Kim Leadbeater’s bill, while Sir Edward Leigh and Diane Abbott wrote under a joint byline in the Guardian to oppose it. A striking 93 per cent of MPs turned out for the third reading on Friday 20 June, with the bill passing by a narrow majority of 314 to 291. The build-up to the vote had been nearly a century in the making. In 1936, the Voluntary Euthanasia (Legalisation) Bill was defeated. The most recent Commons vote came in 2015, when Rob Marris’s Assisted Dying Bill was rejected by 330 to 118. Unsurprisingly, this momentous lobbying effort has been backed by substantial financial support. In the last issue of The Mace, in an article called 'Money and medicine', The Mace set out the chilling financial modelling that projected big savings for the NHS in ‘unused’ end-of-life care if the bill had passed. Our findings can be seen below as well as some estimated lobbying costs to fund the campaign. Dignity in Dying, the most prominent organisation campaigning for assisted dying in the UK, and its partner group, Choice in Dying, received £2,699,475 in 2023, with a surplus of £653,977, up by nearly £1 million from 2022. Much of their funding comes from membership subscriptions, but a large portion comes from significant donations made by individuals and charitable trusts. Among these is the Bernard Lewis Family Charitable Trust (a UK registered charity), primarily funded by the Lewis family, founders of the River Island fashion chain and owners of Cavendish Asset Management. The trust has also donated to the Zionist Federation and to the Henry Jackson Society, a think tank which has shifted so far to the right that its co-founder, Matthew Jamison (now a board member at YouGov), has publicly disowned it, calling it a “deeply anti-Muslim, racist” outpost. The trust gave £1.5 million to Dignity in Dying and Choice in Dying between 2022 and 2023, likely making it the organisations’ single biggest benefactor. The Dignity in Dying lobby group launched a major billboard campaign in Westminster tube station, featuring terminally ill patients advocating for assisted dying, with slogans such as: “My dying wish is that my family won’t see me suffer and I won’t have to.” Public indignation against the advertisements mounted, with many being vandalised or covered with posters from the Samaritans. Organisations opposing the law were much less well organised and certainly less well funded. Not Dead Yet, an anti-euthanasia group established as a company limited by guarantee, declared assets of just £9,383 in April 2024. Care Not Killing is the principal voice opposing a change in the law. It is a broad alliance of more than 40 organisations, including Nurses Opposed to Euthanasia and Disability Rights UK. With a turnover of under £632,000, it is listed as a micro entity and not required to publish detailed accounts. The group lists only a CEO and campaign manager as staff, suggesting modest means. In 2021, however, it received a £90,000 donation from Scottish businessman and Stagecoach founder Brian Souter. Where the financials become more dystopian is in the government’s own projected savings from implementing assisted dying. The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill impact assessment (as amended in public bill committee), released...