Two Days in Westminster: Standing Close to History

I have just come back from a two-day trip to the Houses of Parliament. I was there informally, and had the privilege of two separate visits on consecutive days.

That gave me the time to spend with Baroness Suttie.

Baroness Alison Suttie has given the better part of three decades to public life. She spent ten years in the European Parliament, serving as press secretary and policy adviser to Pat Cox during his presidency, and worked across central and eastern Europe in the run-up to the EU’s 2004 enlargement. She went on to head the Liberal Democrat Leader’s Office in the Commons from 2006 to 2010, serving three leaders in turn, and was Deputy Chief of Staff to the Deputy Prime Minister in the first eighteen months of the coalition. She was made a life peer in 2013 and is now the Liberal Democrat Lords Spokesperson for Northern Ireland. Alongside that she has spent years on parliamentary capacity-building work overseas — in Jordan, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan and Tunisia among others — and campaigns on homelessness and on tuberculosis awareness at home and internationally.

I say all that because it would be easy to reduce someone to a list of posts held. What struck me was the opposite: how lightly she wears it, and how generously she gives her attention. Spending time with her was inspiring and illuminating in equal measure, and it is something I will never forget.

Being in Parliament today also felt historic, for a harder reason.

MPs voted on the Terminally ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, and it fell — 286 against, 270 for. Sixteen votes. An almost identical bill passed the Commons last year with a margin of twenty-three.

I want to be fair about how difficult that vote must have been. This is a free vote on a question of conscience, and every member who walked through either lobby will have done so carrying letters, surgeries, and stories they cannot unhear. I do not envy them.

But I felt sad. Because my first thought was not about the parliamentary arithmetic. It was: what happens now to the people who wanted to be heard today? They have not gone anywhere. Their circumstances have not changed. All that has changed is that the door closed again.

If I had been an MP, I would have listened to my constituents, I would have represented them, and I would have voted for the bill.

I would have done so for two reasons. First, because we are increasingly out of step. Country after country has moved to give people a say in how they die, with safeguards, with scrutiny, with panels and doctors and process.

Second, because a vote against is not a neutral act. It is usually framed as caution — as holding the line while we think a little longer. But no line was held this afternoon. Nothing was protected that was not already happening. People will still die in ways they did not choose and would not have wanted. Families will still absorb that alone. Those with the means will still travel abroad, and those without will not, and the relatives who go with them will still come home unsure of where they stand in law.