The leader of the Blue Labour group has said he will vote against the assisted dying bill – one of the most high-profile switchers – as both sides make their final pleas to MPs before Friday’s crunch vote.
It comes as campaigners and bereaved relatives joined the Labour MP Kim Leadbeater ahead of the third reading of the bill, to urge parliament to back the reforms, saying it would be at least a decade before another chance to change the law.
The bill would legalise assisted dying for mentally competent adults in their final months of life.
Dan Carden, who previously abstained, said it was core Labour vales that drove him to vote against the bill. “Legalising assisted suicide will normalise the choice of death over life, care, respect and love,” he said. “I draw on my own family experience, caring for my dad who died from lung cancer three years ago.
“I genuinely fear the legislation will take us in the wrong direction. The values of family, social bonds, responsibilities, time and community will be diminished, with isolation, atomisation and individualism winning again.”
The MP for Liverpool Walton, whose group seeks to promote culturally conservative – or what it says are blue-collar –values within the party, added: “For people who live with the reality of rundown public services, particularly palliative end-of-life care, poverty, hardship and broken-down communities are a fact of life. They will be impacted very differently. And that’s something the political class doesn’t dare discuss.”
At a press conference on Thursday morning, MPs backing the bill said a failure to pass legislation could condemn thousands of terminally ill people and their families to years of more trauma, secrecy and fear of prosecution.
“It has gone through hours and hours of scrutiny, and colleagues have had this bill since November,” Leadbeater said on Thursday. “If we don’t pass this law tomorrow, it could be another decade before this issue is brought back to parliament. And in that time, how many stories [of suffering] will we hear?”
About 15 MPs who backed the bill or abstained at its second reading have now said they are likely to vote against it. MPs in November backed the principle of assisted dying for England and Wales by a majority of 55 . Should it pass its third reading on Friday, it will go to the House of Lords.
Keir Starmer has indicated he will continue to back the bill, saying his position on assisted dying is “longstanding and well known”. But the former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown has described Leadbeater’s bill as fundamentally flawed and urged MPs to reject it.
In the office of the Conservative MP and former minister Andrew Mitchell on Thursday, campaigners shared raw testimony of being failed by the current law. Anil Douglas told the story of his father, Ian, who died by suicide after ordering opioids on the dark web.
He was suffering from secondary progressive multiple sclerosis, and was no longer able to face the pain, Douglas said. “On the night he died, I found him still alive. I cracked and called the GP, she had a legal obligation to call an ambulance, and soon paramedics arrived.”
They tried to resuscitate his father. “A couple of days later, a police investigation hung over our heads for more than six months. Nothing can prepare you for that experience of grief in real time, that kind of trauma.”
Pamela Fisher, a Church of England lay preacher with terminal breast cancer, said she supported the bill not in spite of her Christian faith, but because of it. “I don’t want to die now, but I’m in terror at the prospect of how my final weeks may turn out to be,” she said. “Even the best palliative care has limits.”
Fisher rejected religious objections to assisted dying as misrepresenting Christian values. “My God is not a harsh and controlling God,” she said. “My God is a God of love who invites us to work with him to create conditions of greater compassion [in] society. Religious arguments against the bill also sometimes overlook the concept of free will.”
The Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Vincent Nichols – who is opposed to assisted dying – has previously argued that the suffering of human beings is “an intrinsic part of our human journey, a journey embraced by the eternal word of God, Christ Jesus himself”.