Lord Field says he backs assisted dying Bill after announcing that he is terminally ill
THE Labour politician Lord Field has announced he is terminally ill, as he backed the Assisted Dying Bill in the House of Lords.
The peer is a former Labour MP, minister and chairman of Parliament’s work and pensions committee. He was ennobled after losing his Birkenhead seat in the 2019 general election.
He announced yesterday he had changed his mind on the issue of assisted dying, and is supporting a Bill that would give patients of sound mind with less than six months to live the right to take life-ending medication.
In a statement read on his behalf by Baroness Meacher, he said he had decided to support the Bill after an MP friend, who was slowly dying of cancer, was unable to take their own life. “I’ve just spent a period in a hospice and I’m not well enough to participate in today’s debate,” the statement said.
“If I had been I would have spoken strongly in favour of a second reading.
“I changed my mind on assisted dying when an MP friend was dying of cancer and wanted to die early before the full horror effects set in but was denied this opportunity.”
Chris Bryant, the Labour MP, described the news of Lord Field’s illness as “very sad”. The Assisted Dying Bill received the support of peers in the House of Lords yesterday, but will not become law because of parliamentary time constraints and opposition from ministers.
Boris Johnson is thought to be against the move, while Sajid Javid is expected to vote against any assisted dying legislation.
The Most Rev Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, warned that a change to the law could lead to “pressure” on patients to die. The Archbishop said mistaken diagnoses and “intangible” coercion on patients could lead to people dying who do not need to.
“What we want is assisted living, not assisted dying,” he told the BBC yesterday. “There is no difference between us in compassion. It is our concern about the effectiveness of the safeguards and the care for the vulnerable.
“Sadly people make mistakes in their diagnosis. It leaves people open to very, very intangible forms of coercion and pressure. I have sat in places where I have known that people were having pressure put on them in ways that would never come out.”
Lord Carey, the former archbishop, said he was “out of step” with the nation by opposing the reforms.
Baroness Davidson, the former leader of the Scottish Tories, used her maiden speech in the House of Lords to argue that assisted dying was “the most grave and personal of issues”, and expressed regret at voting against it six years ago. “It has nagged at my conscience ever since,” she said.
“My Christian faith, the position of my church, the views of my sister as an NHS doctor, all played a part in me voting against. Even at the time it felt like cowardice.” She added that her personal experience of IVF had changed her mind because it had “blown apart the mystique of birth as something uniquely God-given”.
Baroness Grey-thompson, the Paralympian, said she opposed the bill because it risked ending the lives of disabled people too soon.
“The reason many disabled people are worried is because the conditions they have could very easily be fitted into that six-month prognosis,” she said. “We know doctors really struggle to give an accurate prognosis on end-oflife.
“We have to look at how you make that mental capacity judgment about a true and a settled choice.
“There is a cost that comes to that, and are we willing to pay the cost to do the investigation to make sure that it is genuinely someone’s choice?”