Kim Leadbeater’s statement treats a lost conscience vote as if the process itself was illegitimate. What a load of twaddle... The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill was a private member’s bill, not a government bill. MPs had a free/moral vote. The Salisbury-Addison convention; the idea that the Lords should not wreck manifesto government legislation, does not apply. The Lords Constitution Committee said so before second reading: because this was a PMB on a morally significant subject, the Lords were entitled to give it close scrutiny and, if so minded, amend or reject it. That is the opposite of “a few peers abusing procedure.” What actually happened is more ordinary, and more awkward for her case: The earlier version passed the Commons, then ran into heavy opposition in the Lords. Hundreds of amendments were tabled... it is what is commonly called scrutiny of a life-and-death bill; which it is supposed to get. The bill then fell at the end of the session. After that defeat, Leadbeater’s statement still blamed “a few Peers” for delaying the bill and said the Friday vote “should never have happened.” A PMB on assisted dying is exactly the kind of bill Parliament is allowed to stop. The Commons did stop it. Calling the unelected chamber the villain after an elected House has also said no looks less like a constitutional argument and more like refusing to accept that the numbers were not there. People who opposed the bill did so for reasons that are not obscure: weak safeguards, pressure on vulnerable people, the difficulty of policing “six months to live,” mission-creep seen in other countries, and the fact that a PMB is a poor vehicle for rewriting the criminal law on killing. A more accurate version of events is simple: it was a contested moral PMB, the Lords were constitutionally entitled to scrutinise it, opposition was large rather than “a few,” and the Commons then rejected the reintroduced bill. Complaining that this “should never have happened” is not evidence of abuse. It is evidence that she is acting like a spoilt child because the vote did not go her way!