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| This was the state of play on the evening of 14/02/2025 |
Amanda Hunter's Parliamentary Petition may be found here:
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/701838
This is the full text including "more details" as above:
We are petitioning for a National Referendum on Assisted Dying
We believe that the decision to introduce assisted dying legislation in the UK, is a matter of such fundamental import to the future of our nation and to us as citizens, that it must be decided as a nation, not by Members of Parliament alone.
More details
It is also our view that the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill 2024-25, now before Parliament, requires far more scrutiny and time for deliberation than will be afforded by a Private Member’s Bill, as is the case in this instance. In the interests of reaching a rational and reasoned decision on the matter, we believe it is imperative that time is set aside to discuss and reflect upon the economic, political and cultural contexts in which assisted dying legislation would be exercised.
Since this petition was published and more notably since MPs voted, often expressing grave personal doubts in the process, the most important safeguard (that of judicial scrutiny of all cases) in the bill which the MPs voted to approve, has already been discarded, presumably having served its purpose. This is a government-backed bill, strongly supported by the Prime Minister and many Cabinet colleagues, and yet it is going through Parliament as a private members bill (which normally means the issues are not contentious and not party-political in nature) and so much less Parliamentary time, and rather less evidence-gathering time and fewer resources, are available to both supporters and critics of the bill in Parliament than would be the case with a government bill introduced by a responsible minister with the power to authorise such evidence-gathering by the civil service. The nature of the bill is such as to largely exclude the expertise of the civil service from the whole process, which may please some people in both camps, but it does tend to remove most of the potential evidence from the strictly-limited amount of debate which we are likely to see. There are also resource issues with the practical drafting process in a private members bill.
Even if the issue of evidence-gathering resources had occurred to the petition author, I know from experience that the strict limit on the number of characters even in the "more details" extension of the petition form is in itself apt to exclude any actual evidence from the details of any petition!
Public information resources cannot properly be excluded from a matter of such great public concern and importance.
