Rod Liddle: UK Correspondent on the End of Live Bill having its first reading in the UK's House of Commons

A divisive bill has had its first reading in the UK’s House of Commons. 

Labour MP Kim Leadbeater has introduced her Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, setting off an emotional debate.  

It would allow mentally competent, terminally ill adults with six months or less left to live the right to choose to end their lives with medical help.  

UK Correspondent Rod Liddle told Mike Hosking that there’s a “fairly clean” split in the House, the left largely in favour of the bill, and the right largely against.  

He says the bill is controversial, difficult, and very emotive, and will be debated at the end of November.  

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
In Britain, Rod Little in the morning to you more
to your age? Now are you excited about mister Tuckle
speaking of sport? Is he the man for the day,
or the age or the hour?

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Whoever takes up this poison Chalice has my full support,
sympathy and benediction when they leave. I think he's a
good idea. He's a very good football manager. He's been
very successful, he's won tournament. The objections over here are
a that he's had a rather tangled sexual life, which
doesn't bother me at all. This is based on the

(00:35):
fact that most famous manager, Sir Ralph Ramsey, who won
the World Cup, probably never had sexual intercourse at all.
Number two is that he is He failed at Chelsea,
but everybody fails at Chelsea. It's a club which would
suck the last bit of light out of the universe.
And thirdly that he's German of course, but you know

(00:59):
people who think that our football manager has to be
directly descended from King Alfred, that Voat has gone and
went a long time ago. We've had Tenure and Ericson,
We've had Fabio Capello. This guy seems to be a
good bet. I would slightly have preferred it if it
had been Pep Guardiola, but for a four million quit

(01:22):
a year. I don't object to commuted to a Cherman
good stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:27):
I want to get to the House of Lord's vote
in a moment. But there's assister dying bill. How I
assume it's as controversial beer as it is everywhere around
the world.

Speaker 2 (01:37):
Well, you guys are a bit ahead of us here.
I mean you went through for you in three, three
or four years ago. It is controversial. It is subjected
to the not quite clean but fairly clean left right
split in that the left is by and large in
favor of it, and it's being introduced as a private

(01:57):
members will by a labor NP kim led better. But
it doesn't quite break down like that. We've had the
Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, who made an intervention today
and said, you know, it's a slippery slope. There was
no mention of the sanctity of life, which you might
have expected from the head of our established church. By

(02:21):
the same token, someone on almost as grave an ecumenical
tower as Justin Welby. Esther Ransom, Dame Esther Ransom, she
of that's life, and so on, has also intervened. She
is signed up to dipictaus in Switzerland because she has
stage four lung cancer and which is not to prolong

(02:43):
her existence for very much longer. So yeah, it's controversial,
it's difficult, it's very very emotive. The bill will finally
be debated at the end of November. But I think
that the guests, looking from the way that public is
and the way the Parliament is, it will go through.

Speaker 1 (03:03):
As regards the Lord's vite, which is sort of on
its mery way as well. Is that remotely controversial or
just one of those bits of business that needed tidying
up and sorting a long time ago and no one
got around and doing it.

Speaker 2 (03:18):
I don't. I don't think there's an enormous amount of
controversy in that. Uh you know. I think I think
there's a lot going on at the moment which is
problematic for the government, which is also obviously problematic for
the opposition. And I don't think that it's scarcely registered

(03:39):
over here. But then very often what what the what
the House of Rules doesn't register over here at all?
That other people are more.

Speaker 1 (03:48):
Interested than we are, interesting that the white loss Jabs
thing strikes me is that controversial, because it's it's I
get what Starmer's watching Starmer and standing outside I'm attend
yesterday saying it's good for the health system, it's good
for people, it's.

Speaker 2 (04:03):
Good all that.

Speaker 1 (04:03):
I get all that. But if you're overweight and your
work but you don't have the money for the JAB,
how is it by being the same size and yet jobless,
the government will how does it square?

Speaker 2 (04:15):
Yes, it's very difficult, isn't it. It's very difficult. My
argument has always been the way you get people back
into the workforce is by making the difference between being
on the dole and being in work significant for an
incentive I cannot see. And I think the hereditary peers,

(04:36):
by the way, might well have vote in favor of this,
but they're all vast in size. But that's besides the point.
I think. I don't think they've got this quite right.
There is undoubtedly a movement in this country and across
the world, and you've probably seen it as well, which

(04:56):
welcomes these weight loss drugs such as a sempit with
open arms and thinks that it might be a pantasy
for all of our reals. It may well be I'm
not a chemist. I'm not a physician, but I've read
an awful lot about the good that it can do.
What I don't think that it can do is is

(05:18):
cure slows. Yes, if I can put it like that,
I don't think that it will. I don't think that
it can do that.

Speaker 1 (05:25):
No, exactly, we thought we might have moved on with
the business of the freebies. But he gets the tickets
to the Swift concert, and I can't remember the name
of the woman who was a minister who was on
the radio the other day who also got tickets to
the Swift conference, and then she was busy trying to
justify the whole thing because they were difficult to get
and the kids were whining they wanted to go. Then

(05:45):
we come to Soakia, who gets the Swift tickets but
then gets to meet Swift.

Speaker 2 (05:52):
Yes, it seems to be inconceivable that he would have
been able to meet Swift had it not been for
the fact that he answered Card and various other members
of the Labor Party lob with the Metropolitan Police to
make sure that Taylor Swift got a very good escort,
the sort of escort you would give to someone like
Vladimir puted if he decided to come to the country.

(06:13):
It's very difficult to argue otherwise because this all happened
subsequent to that decision being made. He apparently had a
ten minute audience with Her Highness. I don't know what
they talked about. Hopefully he tried to tell her about
his great British energy consortium, which will have riveted her
to the spot for those ten minutes. But this is corruption,

(06:38):
you know, it's very low level. You know, this isn't
Russian oligarch stuff, but it is a form of corruption.
And there were ten senior labor politicians who've got these
freebies to go and see Taylor and sit in boxes
and have a bit of shampers, you know, while listening
to this vacuous drivel, and it just rubs the public

(07:01):
up the wrong the wrong way, especially the people in
the in the country who would have very much liked
Taylor Swift tickets. And we're probably more appropriately aged tab them,
I you know, ten or something. So it does it
does play with the public.

Speaker 1 (07:18):
Yes, it does. Go well, Mike will catch up on them,
catch up on I was going to say we'll catch
up on Thursday, but given it's already Thursday. Let's let's
make it Tuesday, shall we. For more from the Mic
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