Starmer’s feigned neutrality on assisted dying unmasks a grave moral betrayal. Nichols and bishops decry the bill’s slippery slope to euthanasia.
Newsroom (05/12/2025 Gaudium Press ) In the corridors of Westminster, Keir Starmer’s assisted dying bill – Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill – is presented ostensibly as a private member’s effort led by Kim Leadbeater and Charlie Falconer – is, in truth, a Government-orchestrated assault on the inviolable dignity of the human person.
This is not mere political sleight-of-hand; it is a profound betrayal of the Gospel imperative to cherish every life as a sacred gift from the Creator, echoing the words of Pope Francis: “Even the weakest and most vulnerable… are masterpieces of God’s creation, made in his own image.” Yet, as the bill limps toward potential enactment amid whispers of a 2029 delay, the shepherds of England and Wales – led by Cardinal Vincent Nichols and the Catholic Bishops’ Conference – have risen in fierce, unified rebuke, their voices a clarion call against this legislation’s insidious peril.
Starmer’s personal entanglement with the euthanasia ethos is no recent epiphany but a thread woven through his career, now fraying the moral fabric of a nation baptised in Christian witness. As Director of Public Prosecutions in 2008, he declined to pursue charges against the family of Daniel James, the paralysed rugby player who travelled to Dignitas for a lethal cocktail – a decision that, while sparing immediate grief, signalled to the vulnerable that the state might one day wink at self-destruction. The following year, his guidance on assisted suicide drew fire for its perceived leniency, a bureaucratic backdoor to normalization that critics decried as tantamount to legalization by stealth. Fast-forward to 2023: as Opposition Leader, Starmer pledged support for reform; as Prime Minister, he has greenlit this bill’s parliamentary runway. Neutral? Hardly. This is the zeal of a convert, one who has traded the scales of justice for the syringe of expedience.
Leaked Memos expose pre-planning
More was revealed with the Guardian’s leaked 2023 Labour memos, exposing advisers plotting to cloak a Government-backed push in private member’s garb. Why? Because legalization “polls well, particularly amongst hero voters in areas we must win back” – those grey-haired swing seats haunted by ageing parents in terminal throes. This is utilitarianism triumphant, where human worth is bartered for ballots. As Cardinal Nichols thundered in his April 2025 pastoral letter, read from pulpits across Westminster’s diocese, such a bill is “deeply flawed” and under-scrutinised, a “sad reflection on Parliament’s priorities”. “What is needed,” he insisted, “is first-class, compassionate palliative care at the end of our lives,” not the poisoned chalice of state-sanctioned suicide – a plea rooted in the Church’s unyielding doctrine that euthanasia “is a grave violation of the law of God,” as the Catechism solemnly attests (CCC 2277).
The Bishops’ Conference, in lockstep, mobilized with pastoral urgency, their November 2024 joint statement with Scottish prelates “Genuine compassion,” they proclaim, “means to enter into and share the suffering of another person. It means never giving up on anyone or abandoning them.” They warn of a “duty to die” stealthily imposed on the frail, where the “option to end life can quickly… be experienced as a duty,” pressuring the elderly, disabled, and depressed to view themselves as burdens rather than bearers of divine image. Bishop John Sherrington, Lead Bishop for Life Issues, branded the bill “flawed in principle” post its Commons second reading, decrying inadequate safeguards that crumble before the waves of expansion as seen in Canada, Belgium, and Oregon – jurisdictions where initial “terminal-only” strictures ballooned to encompass mental anguish and economic despair. Archbishop John Wilson of Southwark echoed this post-vote lament in November 2024: the Commons’ 330-275 nod marks a “seismic and concerning shift” in caring for the vulnerable, a rupture in the covenant of care that Christ exemplified on the Cross.
This bill is no abstract policy but a Thomistic outrage against natural law: the deliberate hastening of death usurps God’s dominion over life, perverting the physician’s oath from “do no harm” to a macabre “duty to kill,” as Nichols starkly phrased it in his October 2024 letter. The Catholic Medical Association amplifies this, terming the legislation “dangerous” for palliative care and the sacred doctor-patient bond, with “weak protections for conscientious objection” that could coerce Catholic hospices into complicity – a violation of religious liberty. “Incurable cannot mean that care has come to an end,” the bishops affirm, yet this bill decrees precisely that, consigning the suffering to isolation rather than the embrace of community and sacraments.
Hiding behind a Junior members’ bill
Starmer’s dodge – shielding behind Leadbeater’s novice banner – yields a Frankenstein’s monster of a bill: over 1,000 Lords amendments attest to its hasty, evading Cabinet vetting, public consultation, and moral accountability that a true Government measure demands. This evasion spares him the whip against his own 160 dissenting Labour MPs while insulating him from scandals. But the bishops see through the fog: in their March 2025 missive, Bishop Sherrington reaffirmed the Church’s eternal opposition “in every circumstance,” urging investment in hospices that “truly provide assistance to those who are dying” over this “grave violation.”
In a Government that preaches equity yet starves palliative care, even as Health Secretary Wes Streeting – a Christian voice in the wilderness – warns of NHS strains that could “cause cuts elsewhere.” Nichols, in rallying Catholics to bombard MPs anew, invokes the slippery slope: “Can MPs guarantee that the scope… will not be extended? In almost every country… it is wider than was originally intended.” The Conference’s July 2024 poll underscores public wariness, with majorities rejecting implementation amid woeful end-of-life provisions.
Starmer, the erstwhile process purist, here forsakes rigour for ruse – no royal commission, no free-vote manifesto pledge, just a back-alley bill that the Lords, unburdened by electoral fealty, may yet dispatch. The bishops implore prayer and action: novenas against this “threat to genuine compassion,” letters to MPs echoing Evangelium Vitae’s cry against “structures of sin” that devalue life. In this crucible, the Church stands sentinel, not as obstructionist, but as herald of authentic mercy – accompanying the afflicted to Calvary’s foot, where suffering transfigures into glory.
Labour’s leaked cynicism proves the “neutrality” a lie, another ledger entry in a litany of leadership lapses. As Nichols urges, “Be careful what you wish for; the right to die can become a duty to die; being forgetful of God belittles our humanity.” The faithful must rise, lest Britain’s soul slip into shadows from which even resurrection’s light struggles to emerge. May God help us, indeed – for in defending the least, we defend the Lord Himself
- Raju Hasmukh with files from Unherd, OSV News, CNA, CbCew.org.uk
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