Campaigner and actress Liz Carr of the "Not Dead Yet" campaign, which opposed the Assisted Dying Bill, joins a protest outside the Houses of Parliament on November 29, 2024 (Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images)
With the assisted dying bill looking like it will now fail, The Mace looks at how lobby groups were a driving force behind the controversial bill.
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 …
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