Video: Leadbeater says talking a loved one out of suicide is ‘coercion’

Right-wing Labour MP’s ‘corporate-assisted dying’ bill – backed by Starmer – is full of danger for ordinary people

Right-wing Labour MP Kim Leadbeater’s so-called ‘assisted dying’ bill – which the government intends to turn into a corporate cash cow – is full of dangers to ordinary people and especially to those who become vulnerable.

In January, Leadbeater’s committee supposedly putting together safeguards to prevent abuse of her ‘unfit for purpose‘ bill was rightly criticised for voting to hold key discussions in secret, avoiding public scrutiny and raising serious doubts about her original claims that there would be full transparency in the debate and ample safeguards to protect vulnerable old and sick people from pressure to die.

Last month, Leadbeater announced that the assisted suicide process would now not, as at first promised, require sign-off by a High Court judge – instead only needing approval by a social worker or psychiatrist, supposedly because High Court judges would be too busy to look at applications for death and make sure that there was no coercion or pressure and that no one standing to profit would be influencing the wish to die.

Leadbeater has refused to exclude disability, Downs Syndrome, diabetes, arthritis or anorexia as a reason to kill someone despite international evidence that people suffering those conditions have been coerced elsewhere, ignored expert psychiatrist witnesses after lecturing them that they didn’t understand suicide in terminal illness and has been accused of treating the last months of someone’s life as “so self-evidently not worthwhile that there is no need to ask about, or offer help with” any issues relating to undue or ‘modifiable’ influences pushing someone toward suicide.

Earlier this month, the Starmer government confirmed it intends to farm out the killing process to corporations who will do it for profit and this week, Leadbeater – who has dismissed concerns that her proposed process won’t prevent people being coerced into dying either by families or by government seeking to cut costs – said, out loud, that anyone trying to talk a loved one out of suicide is itself coercion:

Under a government full of compassion and right thinking about the wellbeing of the poor, sick and disabled this would be worrying enough for its potential for abuse and the bullying of the vulnerable into ‘not being a burden’. Under a government of sociopaths who are waging war on the vulnerable and freely use ‘useless eater’ rhetoric that disability and sickness benefits are ‘unsustainable’, it is chilling.

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