Our Survey is clear on recent matters of life and death, but are such issues becoming more party political? And should they?

Last week my family celebrated my eldest’s 21^st birthday.

I mention it only because the year they were born the ebullient then Labour MP, Stephen Pound, hit a conundrum.

He’d agreed with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme to be involved with something called “The Listener’s Law”. An audience poll of a range of policies, the winner of which the veteran MP had volunteered to advocate in Parliament.

It ended in an awkward impasse, when quite against his, and the BBC’s expectations, the winner of the poll was the idea that homeowners should be absolved from prosecution for taking the life of anyone burgling their home. Other media called it a public vote for the death sentence, and Pound who refused to take such a view forward, ending up branding the idea “a ludicrous, brutal, unworkable blood-stained piece of legislation” and branding the listeners who voted for it “bastards” on air!

Life, death, and the state. Here was an MP who decided (and there were many at the time who agreed) that the public (even those they’d assumed would be ‘progressive’ in their deliberations) shouldn’t get to decide – if they decide the wrong way. Democracy is a complex beast, right?

Parliamentarians can be very defensive about who should decide moral, philosophical or ethical questions, particularly on issues around birth and death and yet for many years in deciding it should be them (and I have no real issue with that) they have unshackled themselves from the party system to do so. Changes to abortion law, assisted dying or suicide, have by convention, and long before the recent votes on those subjects, been ‘votes of conscience’ or  ‘free votes’ in Parliament. Often votes where opinion is divided within parties, and even friendship groups, and ones that by mutual agreement – party politics should stay away.

But can you really ignore party political views on such questions?

In our latest survey Conservative members are pretty clear on their opposition to just the principle of assisted dying, or assisted suicide as some MPs call it. The total number of those who support it (26.3 per cent) is the same as those who oppose it, until you add in the  38.3 per cent who strongly oppose making that 64.6 percent sending a pretty forceful message.

When it comes to the specific Leadbeater bill that MPs passed, narrowly, on assisted dying it gets even starker.

Over half (50.9 per cent strongly oppose) over a further quarter oppose (26.3 per cent) that’s 77.2 per cent against the Bill. Any form of support doesn’t make 20 percent.

The picture is similar with the recent vote on changes to abortion law.

Here the issue is opposed in total, by 82.6 per cent of members.

Now on Friday former MP Tom Hunt, openly against both proposals, explained on ConservativeHome how the very nature of Labour’s loveless landslide, has meant party politics allowed an assisted dying private members bill to even be attempted. Quite apart from the almost unprecedented drop in support numerically for the Leadbeater Bill during it’s Commons passage, the majority dropping to just 23 at Third Reading, he also pointed out that 82 per cent of Tory MP’s who voted were against the Bill.

One Labour MP, also against the Bill, complained to me that too many of their colleagues, particularly new members, didn’t really engage with concerns about the safeguarding aspects of the Bill saying that they had “trusted that if Kim said it was ok, it was ok, and anyway Kim’s one of us, we should be supporting her in this“.

On an issue of such import it really shouldn’t be controversial to point out that’s not the reason you support, or oppose.

The blurring of moral questions through the lens of partisan loyalty is something some MPs are bothered about. One Tory ‘big beast’ told me there was a ‘lazy thoughtlessness’ to the Assisted Dying debates, where detail was skipped past just to get to the over used “wrong or right side of history” line – being ‘for’ something being progressive (‘good’) and anything against is done in ‘bad faith”.

Well once again, ‘faith’ in the literal sense tends to play a role in these questions, but often identified as a negative input, whereas naked party loyalties are perfectly fine. I’ve talked before about how quickly some jump on the Alastair Campbell bandwagon that politics shouldn’t ‘do God’.

Let’s just state a basic rule of thumb. All moral, philosophical and ethical questions have a political element. Most political decisions have a moral, philosophical and ethical element. Where we should end up is really a calibration.

ConservativeHome columnist Miriam Cates is clear. She’s in favour of embracing party politics in these areas and ditching free votes. She feels it’s more honest and more democratic. She told me:

“What could be more political than deciding under what circumstances the state is allowed to end the life of its citizens? Such matters are of fundamental importance to our society and yet, because they are not whipped, Parties do not take a manifesto position on these issues and so voters are never able to indicate their views at the ballot box. At the General election in 2024, no one voted for assisted suicide or abortion to birth and yet MPs have delivered both, less than a year later.”

One suspects our survey results lend such a view some weight.

One shadow cabinet member would not go so far as to scrap free conscience votes altogether, but thinks since social issues are increasingly bubbling to the top of the political agenda not having some kind of co-ordinated party cohesion on such issues is probably a mistake, as much for the way you tackle the issue, as for the standing and integrity of the party.

Political parties don’t like it when not just the public but actual members feel adrift from official party policies. It is after all the big thing thrown at the Conservatives to explain their current woes after the 2024 General Election. People on doorsteps that had voted Tory in the past telling campaigners and candidates: “I don’t know what you stand for anymore. I don’t know what you are for”

Whilst the conventions and consensus around how MPs decide the big life and death questions have perhaps served us all well, but since the radical reshaping of the modern political landscape we are seeing, I’m struck by another message on the ‘free vote convention’ from a party big beast:

“Perhaps we have been lucky in defying gravity for so long”

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