I start off by saying a huge thank you to the hon. Member for Spen Valley (Kim Leadbeater) for the extraordinary amount of work she has done across this whole debate.
This is the first time I have spoken in this debate, and, like many Members whose speeches I have heard, I come to it through personal experience. I have heard many stories of people whose relations have died; in my case, it was my mother who died. In 2012, she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. My father-in-law was a consultant, so I phoned him up and asked what that meant, and he said that she had a 90% chance of dying. I was prepared for it, but eventually the time came when I got the call saying that her health had started to deteriorate, so I went down to see her—I spoke to the Whips, and took time off work here—and watched the start of the decline from something as painful and difficult as pancreatic cancer, which, as those who have witnessed it will know, was not a nice moment.
My mother was not frightened of dying at all. She would talk about it; she knew that she was going to die. However, she was terrified of the pain, and on many occasions, she asked me and Caroline, my wife, if we could make it end. We could not, of course. She had very, very good care from the NHS—the nurses came twice a day, she was on a morphine driver, and the GP came to see her, so she was looked after well. However, as she deteriorated, we could see that she was in indignity and a huge amount of pain, until eventually, she died. It was, of course, not one of the happiest moments of my life.
Contrary to that experience, two or three years ago, I found myself going to the memorial service of one of my constituents, who was a truly wonderful person. She, too, had died of pancreatic cancer, but because she had been in Spain at the time—she spent quite a lot of time in Spain with her husband—she had the opportunity to go through the state-provided assisted dying programme that is provided there. I spoke to her widower very briefly, and it was fascinating to talk to him about it: he said it was an extraordinary, incredibly sad thing to have gone through, but that it was something that made her suffering much less. It was almost a sort of quiet Sunday afternoon when it happened.
I saw those two people—my mother, who had the indignity and the pain and the suffering that she was terrified of, and my constituent, who had the opportunity to end it in a dignified way—and when I came to this debate, I was absolutely convinced that this was the right thing to do. I have spent the past six or seven months engaging as hard as I could with those who I hoped would be able to persuade me of a different decision—to try to persuade me that I was wrong in my assumptions. I have spoken to a huge number of people; I have joined in meetings with campaigners; I have read every email that has come in; and I have spoken to doctors and religious leaders, and I have yet to be persuaded that this is a bad thing to do.
There has been a huge amount of debate here—over 100 hours of debate, when we add it all together. There have been loads of amendments, and people on both sides of the debate have been incredibly thoughtful, but are we possibly getting rid of the good in trying to find the perfect? I do not know—I am not the world’s greatest legislator—but having listened to these debates, and given what I have seen at first hand, at the end of the day, I can only go through the Aye Lobby to support the hon. Member for Spen Valley in all this extraordinary hard work. The time has come when we need to end suffering, where suffering can be put aside, rather than trying to do something super-perfect and allowing too many more people to suffer in the future.