It’s a mess, they know it, some regret it and it’s Sir Keir Starmer’s fault.
That’s the view of some at the top of government watching, dismayed, as the red-on-red conflict drags on over the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, aggravating a sore which crosses party lines, dominates the airwaves for the foreseeable and creates problems which bear some of the characteristics of the Brexit days.
Whatever way you look at it, there’s a feeling there’s been a miscalculation over their handling of the assisted dying issue, and some at the top of government are quite open about this to me.
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As some now acknowledge, the politics were always going to be fraught but they failed to spot this early enough, with the consequence the issue is now taking up more bandwidth than was assumed.
It has become a distraction from the main priorities of the Labour government – improving people’s living standards and securing the borders.
As a result, there will be few tears shed in influential parts of Downing Street, including by chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, if a week on Friday the assisted dying bill fails its first Commons test and ends its journey there.
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If MPs do not kill it then, the issue will hang over the government for at least the whole first half of next year, and quite possibly to the point of implementation in early 2026.
The sheer amount of parliamentary time it will take up has unnerved the whips’ office. The public don’t distinguish between government and parliamentary priorities.
The Labour leader’s ‘mistake’
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The mistake was made in March. Sir Keir promised broadcaster and campaigner Dame Esther Rantzen to “make time” “…early in the next parliament”.
At that point they thought they were being smart – not to commit a possible future Labour government on the issue one way or another ahead of an election and leave it to MPs’ consciences – and inside Labour HQ this must have sounded like a pain-free promise ahead of polling day by a party not wanting to annoy any section of the electorate.
But they appear not to have gamed the consequences.
Social liberals v Blue Labour social conservatives
This issue pits social liberals against Blue Labour social conservatives, with each side digging in and Sir Keir (previously on record in favour) now set to vote in the opposite side of the chamber to his deputy Angela Rayner.
Wes Streeting will be set against his own fellow health ministers, and symbolically – a Labour prime minister against a Tory leader of the opposition.
That there are two sides to this isn’t a surprise, even if the volume of complaining is now unnerving them.
Ministers can’t sidestep debate
A bigger issue for the government is they underestimated how ministers are being dragged into the centre of the debate, even though they are meant to be remaining neutral.
Ministers are finding they cannot simply sidestep this debate, as happened in previous votes of conscience such as gay marriage and abortion.
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This is because of the active and complex involvement of the government legal and health systems if the legislation passes and assisted dying is permitted in law.
This may be a private members’ bill, but it will be for the government to determine which doctors perform the assessments, and who carries out the end-of-life service for those that qualify.
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Take one question that has been left hanging: whether a newly formed part of the NHS provides the end of life drugs, or whether it is something that can be done by the private sector.
According to allies of Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP fronting the legislation, it is up to the secretary of state for health to decide whether this is done publicly or privately.
I’m told there’s a presumption this is done in the public sector, yet other countries have private services like Dignitas carrying out the procedure for a fee, and in an era of constrained resources, could this be an option?
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This part of the debate seems largely to have been passed over – yet there are huge cost benefits should the government allow the private, not public sector, to carry out the service.
Overall I’m told there will be no impact assessment – which sets out the costs of assisted dying legislation – until and unless the legislation passes second reading.
At that point it will be done by government, not parliament. This means MPs will be engaging in one of their most totemic votes of this parliament without access to all the facts – and being asked to commit on partial information. This has left some unhappy, unsurprisingly.
This was an easy promise – but it’s proving much harder to deliver than expected.
