Holyrood on a slippery slope with assisted dying law

You might think that a parliamentary process stretching back years and involving not one but two public consultations would produce a bill of unimpeachable security. You would be mistaken. The Scottish government’s gender recognition reforms will pass, but the process has not always shown Holyrood at its best.

MSPs have persistently failed to grapple with the import of the legislation that they are considering. Wholly reasonable concerns are brushed away without proper consideration. The concept of unintended consequences appears to lie some distance beyond many MSPs’ intellectual capacities. There has been no real clash of ideas, just two sides talking past one another. None of this has been creditable and none of it inspires confidence that the Scottish parliament is capable of legislating prudently in contentious areas. If this were a one-off it might be less concerning but the tortuous progress of the hate crime bill is a further reminder that Holyrood is not overly blessed with parliamentarians capable of understanding the implications of their own legislation.

Which brings me to the question of assisted dying. Liam McArthur, the Liberal Democrat MSP for Orkney, has spent the past couple of years working on a bill that would legalise euthanasia in Scotland. Last December I wrote a Times column broadly supporting his proposals. This, I noted, was a subject upon which parliamentary opinion lags far behind the public’s view of the issue. Polling consistently shows that voters think people afflicted by terminal illness should be able to control the manner and moment of their death...

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