Danny Kruger says those who backed the bill did so under false premise after change to safeguards announced
Britain must respect Donald Trump’s “strong and clear mandate for change”, Peter Mandelson has said, but Keir Starmer’s government could “always make our views known privately and directly” to the US president.
In his Today programme interview Danny Kruger, an opponent of the assisted dying bill, claimed that getting rid of the requirement for a judge to approve assisted dying applications at a court hearing, and replacing that with scrutiny by an expert panel (see 9.29am), would make the process private. He said:
Crucially, [the expert panel] won’t be sitting under the normal procedures of a court. I presume they won’t be sitting in public. They won’t be hearing evidence from both sides, hearing arguments from both sides. It will be an approval process rather than a judicial process.
It wouldn’t be done in private. It would take into account patient confidentiality, but they would be public proceedings.
And I think it’s really difficult to suggest that, by having three experts involved in this extra layer of scrutiny, that is somehow a change for the worse. It’s absolutely a change for the better.
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