Remarkable that this lengthy statement has not a single word to say about improving palliative and social care.

Tony Marra, who recently collaborated with Kim Leadbeater on a video promoting the AS bill, is now arguing that Britain has nothing to fear from a Canada-style MAID model. Is he right? One in 20 Canadian deaths comes at the hands of MAID, with a total of 60,000 between 2016 and 2023. The horror stories, at first shocking, have become almost routine: Roger Foley, a disabled man, was told by hospital staff that his care would cost $1,500 a day and did he want to discuss MAID? Sathya Dhara Kovac, who couldn’t afford home-care services, wrote that “ultimately it was not a genetic disease that took me out, it was a system.” Rosina Kamis told the assessing doctors that her suffering was physical, but confessed to her two dozen YouTube subscribers that her real motive was loneliness (“I think if more people cared about me, I might be able to handle the suffering.”) Then there’s the woman whose only condition was a hip fracture and was dismayed at what her last decade might look like. The depressed man whose qualifying medical condition was a hearing problem and whose family claim he was effectively “put to death” under pressure from medical staff. The anonymized “Ms. B,” who had a chronic illness but whose request for MAID was motivated by housing problems. The many patients who have had doctors or nurses, entirely out of the blue, ask them if they have considered making an early exit. Such stories make clear that MAID can be a substitute for care. Carla Qualtrough, a former disabilities minister in Canada’s Liberal party, remarked bluntly that in parts of the country “it’s easier to access MAID than it is to get a wheelchair.” Once, it was possible to claim that a few troubling cases had been exaggerated into a trend by sensationalist newspapers. That notion was exploded by the journalist Alexander Raikin, who obtained recordings of MAID doctors conducting seminars among themselves. Repeatedly, the doctors discussed the regular cases of (as one put it) “people who would opt to die, because the social supports are so poor.” Is that the future we want in the UK?