The trouble with clichés is you forget they’re actually true. For years I have nodded along with thinkpieces explaining that there is a split in the contemporary left—between a politics of solidarity and economic justice, which is Good, and an individualistic, libertarian impulse, which is Bad. After a while, you get so used to this narrative that you start to wonder whether it’s actually worth saying more. And then, suddenly, you see it for real, unignorable, and undeniable.
Assisted suicide, in the current British context, is a fight within Labour. The Tories are always going to be mostly against it. The third biggest grouping in parliament, the Liberal Democrats, are always going to be mostly in favor. The question, given Keir Starmer’s huge majority of members of parliament (MPs), is which way Britain’s major party of the left will go.
“In her powerful speech, you could hear a tradition coming to life.”
“As a Labour MP,” Jess Asato told the House of Commons last Friday during the Commons’ second and final debate on the assisted suicide bill, “I reflected on why I joined the Labour party. Our commitment to protecting the vulnerable and fighting for equality; suspicious of individualism and narrow notions of choice which turn a blind eye to the impact of that choice on others.” Even as Asato moved on to denounce “the patriarchy, racism, trauma”—not the kind of rhetoric which usually strikes a deep chord with me—I could feel tears starting to my eyes. Because in her powerful speech, you could hear a tradition coming to life.
It’s the tradition of R.H. Tawney, for so many decades the most influential thinker for Labour MPs, with his relentless anger—but expressed in the most gorgeous prose—against the hoarders of power and wealth who had benefited from the ideology of individual “rights.” Or of George Orwell, firmly putting F.A. Hayek in his place in 1944: “a return to ‘free’ competition means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse, because more irresponsible, than that of the State.” At its reforming best, the Labour Party has known that “autonomy” and “choice” may leave a great many people behind.
In the last month that tradition found its voice, and—more movingly still—it seemed to do so almost of its own accord, rising up from so many different corners of the party. Asato is a new MP, but she voted against the bill alongside the longest-serving member Diane Abbott, who told parliament: “We will hear over and over again in this debate about choice. It may be choice that this bill produces, for those of us—like almost everybody in this House–who has for the entirety of their adult life been confident in dealing with authority and institutions… But what choice does this bill hold for someone who all their life has lacked agency?”
Then, strikingly, she quoted on this point the former Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown, never much of a friend of Abbott’s hard-left politics. As Brown argued, is it a choice if assisted suicide is fully funded and readily provided, whereas good palliative care is unavailable?
While the bill’s supporters folded their arms and frowned, Labour MPs spoke with righteous anger about the marginalisation of the disabled, the repeated failures of public authorities, and the vulnerability of large swathes of society to a bill which opens a broad pathway to receiving lethal drugs—for any reason whatsoever—as long as you meet a vague definition of “terminal illness.” Others spoke of the impact on the National Health Service, the Labour Party’s proudest achievement, which this bill would redefine and perhaps endanger, of the grim prospect of a profit-making assisted suicide service.
The London Times’s parliamentary sketchwriter—no partisan on this issue—found the day “more and more unsettling as the hours wore on… for four hours, MP after MP rose to say why they thought it was a terrible idea.” In fact there were an equal number of voices in favour of the bill. But their speeches were noticeably less vivid and—above all—more repetitive. People “should be able to make this deeply personal choice,” said one Labour MP, “just as they can make choices about so many other elements of their life.” “At the heart of it,” said another, “this Bill is about choice: those who wish to exercise their choice can do so, and those who do not wish to do so simply do not have to.” (As easy as that.) Yet another argued for “the sanctity of human dignity, and fundamental to that is surely choice.”
So it really was as the thinkpieces said. One kind of left spoke of our responsibilities to the defenceless, of our need to sacrifice some individual autonomy for the good of others. The other kind of left played, over and over again, the two chords of “choice” and “autonomy.” (One Lib Dem MP, asked to consider the people who might feel a duty to die to help their families, replied placidly: “Self-coercion is a choice.”)The winners were the libertarian left. Yes, by a slim margin—just 314 votes to 291. Yes, with a clear movement towards the opposition, who more than halved the margin from November’s vote. And yes, the Bill now has to make it through the House of Lords, who may be more sceptical than the Commons; so last Friday’s vote may not ultimately be decisive. But the defeat of the solidaristic left in the Commons still feels epochal. In the most significant Commons vote of the decade, they had all the eloquence on their side. They had the voices of the medical bodies and civil society groups who have spoken out against the bill. They had, frankly, the amateurishness of those pushing the bill. And they still couldn’t make any headway against the tide of individual rights.
Was it, then, just a tradition coming to life? Or was it also the end of something? Like the autumnal Japanese Maple in Clive James’s poem of that name:
... a world that shone
so brightly at the last, and then was gone.