I’M pleased I’m not alone in being gravely concerned that the deeply flawed assisted suicide Bill that was published at 10pm on Monday November 11 has only been subject to a little over two weeks of scrutiny and five hours of parliamentary debate before going to a vote at second reading this Friday.

The drumbeat for Kim Leadbeater’s Bill started in September with the conveniently timed verdict of a so-called “citizens’ jury,” commissioned by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics (NCoB).

You might have thought juries condemning people to death in this country were a thing of the past. August 1964 was the last time a death sentence passed by a British jury was carried out.

However, almost exactly 60 years on, this supposed landmark “citizens’ jury” on assisted dying delivered a verdict that has the potential to condemn untold thousands to early deaths.

Indeed, in Canada, a country with a population significantly smaller than ours, and where “medical assistance in dying” — Maid — was only legalised in 2016, the number of people (13,241, over 4 per cent of all deaths in the country) whose lives were ended by assisted suicide or euthanasia in 2022 alone was more than the total number of executions believed to have taken place in England and Wales from 1735 through to 1964 (10,935).

Citizens’ juries are a favoured vehicle of pro-assisted suicide activists’ campaigns.

In both Jersey and France, the verdicts of citizens’ juries on this subject have been used to persuade parliamentarians to permit the practice, conveniently giving politicians an excuse to suspend their own judgements and wave through controversial laws.

Up until now, the British Parliament has proven frustratingly stubborn for the Voluntary Euthanasia Society (now renamed euphemistically as “Dignity in Dying”) to succeed in this country.

In 2015, the last time a meaningful vote on the subject took place in the House of Commons, legalisation was rejected by a whopping 330 votes to 118.

But there is no “double jeopardy” law protecting vulnerable people from assisted dying fanatics pursuing multiple attempts at legalising state-assisted death (Lord Falconer recently introduced such legislation for the seventh time) and, refusing to take No for an answer, proponents turned to a citizens’ jury as a vehicle to justify their latest gambit.

Of course, the credibility of citizens’ juries should itself have been condemned to the guillotine after the constitutional referendums in Ireland earlier this year when the Irish public overwhelmingly rejected changes to the constitution previously supported by a “citizens’ assembly.”

However, the NCoB decided to persevere with its British project anyway. Jury trials in a court of law rely on a careful process to ensure jury selection is not only impartial but can be perceived to be so. However, the Nuffield project created the perception of a pre-desired outcome from the start.

The director of the NCoB, Danielle Hamm, was formerly the head of Compassion in Dying, a charity that campaigns for assisted suicide and was founded by Dignity in Dying. Seemingly unashamed about the optics of this, the NCoB has now appointed Hamm spokesperson for the project.

One of the NCoB council members is Compassion in Dying’s former chair, while the six-figure grant given to fund the project came from a donor who had previously given money to Humanists UK in support of “legalising assisted dying.”

Of course, on its own, none of this automatically necessitated the “jury” selected for the project would be biased, but it fatally undermined public trust in the jury’s conclusions — after all why would a pro-assisted suicide charity donate a vast sum towards a project unless it was set up in a way likely to reach a favourable outcome?

Any residual trust surely disappeared when a member of the advisory board the NCoB tasked with ensuring the project would be impartial was forced to stand down after her pro-assisted suicide tweets were uncovered.

To make matters worse, an “expert” group that oversaw the material given to the jury did not include a single member who was opposed to assisted suicide in principle.

Even the jury itself was deliberately set up to include a large majority who already supported legalisation — 17 people known to be in favour of assisted dying were selected for the jury, while only five members previously opposed the practice.

This is akin to a court of law asking potential jurors before a trial if they believed the accused were guilty on the basis of hearsay and then choosing a majority who held such a view.

It is hard to know how impartial the process was after jury selection had taken place because unlike in Parliament, where laws are properly made by elected representatives of the people to whom they are accountable and where all debates and evidence are publicly available, we have little way to assess exactly what was said or how jury members may have been influenced.

What we do know, however, is that the publication of the jury’s findings was seemingly brought forward from 2025 after Lord Falconer’s latest private member’s Bill on the subject was selected in a recent ballot in the House of Lords, and timed to coincide with the now successful attempt to persuade an MP chosen in the House of Commons ballot to take up such a Bill.

The NCoB statement that accompanied the publication of its report sought to spin the jury’s findings as support for a Falconer-type Bill. 

In reality, the jury supported something far more extreme — not only assisted suicide but euthanasia, which even Dignity in Dying purports to oppose.

Although the NCoB claimed that the jury was split on assisted dying for children, a proposal even Canada has yet to implement, there was in fact nearly double the support for their eligibility as there was dissent, while there seems also to have been more support for than opposition against euthanasia for the non-terminally ill. 

Far from the jury supporting a Bill with tight safeguards, it supported exactly the kind of dangerous law it is claimed Britain could somehow uniquely avoid.

The NCoB project was widely perceived as intended to create momentum for the legalisation of assisted suicide. It instead scored an own goal by highlighting the lack of transparency and fairness employed by its advocates, and the dangers of an assisted dying law running out of control. 

It is the concept of citizens’ juries, not vulnerable people, that should be granted an early death.

Sadly the citizens’ jury tactic is not the only way in which the assisted suicide lobby has sought to present a misleading picture as to where public opinion lies on this vital issue. 

Dignity in Dying has released polling claiming the public is crying out for assisted suicide laws. The reality is that the moment this polling data is subject to careful scrutiny, such claims fall apart — a majority may support legalisation in principle, but are very nervous about what it would like in practice. 

Moreover, when listed among 22 other policy areas, it ranks as 22 out of 23 in the public’s priorities. When it comes to the decision our elected representatives have to make this Friday, they must remember their solemn duty to look out for the most vulnerable in our society and the voiceless. One hopes that if enough MPs scrutinise the detail and reflect upon the many shortcomings of the Bill, they will ultimately fall on the right side of the argument and reject this rushed, flawed proposal.

Chris Whitehouse is a governor of the Anscombe Bioethics Centre and chair of lobbying agency Whitehouse Communications.