A tale of two committees

A lot of people are angry at the way the committee stage of the assisted dying bill has panned out.

Writing for Spiked, Lauren Smith comments:

As the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill has worked its way through the committee stage, we have seen just how low the pro-assisted-dying contingent is willing to stoop in order to ram this legislation through parliament.

The committee stage has been stacked massively in favour of the assisted-suicide lobby from the start. Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP who introduced the bill and has made assisted dying her pet cause, ensured that the MPs who sit on the committee are disproportionately on side.

As Conservative MP Nick Timothy has pointed out, 61 per cent of the MPs sitting on the committee voted in favour of the bill, versus the 55 per cent who voted for it in November at its second reading in the Commons.

I'm not sure it helps Smith's argument to talk about the 'assisted-suicide lobby' because that's a pejorative way of looking at assisted dying. Nevertheless, she has a point about the committee, which is shared by many people who have watched, agog.

What makes me sigh, though, is that the same could be said of the Tobacco and Vapes Public Bill Committee which has also been very one-sided and stacked with supporters of the Bill. Not once, but twice.

Last year the Guido Fawkes website reported that:

The government has now published the members the Tobacco and Vapes Bill Committee – they’ll be considering amendments to the bill in May. Guido is surprised to see that, despite 165 Tory MPs either abstaining or voting against the smoking ban, the 16-member Committee contains exactly zero MPs who who voted against it. The whips don’t want any more trouble from pesky fans of free choice…

16 of the 17 committee members voted for the bill and the one who didn’t, Labour MP Mary Kelly Foy, is vice-chairman of the APPG on Smoking and Health which has been pushing the ban constantly. Almost a quarter of the committee members are from the APPG, which is run by the anti-smoking lobby group ASH. Sorry news for MPs who hoped amendments might be considered fairly.

Simon Clark, director of smokers’ rights group Forest tells Guido: “Committees don’t need to be balanced but this is such an obvious stitch-up it’s embarrassing. The make-up of the Tobacco and Vapes Bill Committee is effectively a f*ck you to every MP who voted against the Bill, and every member of the public who opposes the generational smoking ban.”

Assisted dying is equally contentious, perhaps more so, and Leadbeater‘s bill deserves close scrutiny. But I would argue that the generational tobacco sales ban – which has far-reaching consequences for individual freedom – deserves the same unbiased scrutiny.

Instead, when we complained about the composition of the committee that was drawn up by party whips to consider Rishi Sunak's original Tobacco and Vapes Bill, one MP (who was on our side) airily dismissed it as something that was quite normal and we shouldn't get too het up.

I was disappointed then and I'm disappointed now because the public bill committee that has just finished scrutinising the revised Tobacco and Vapes Bill was just as one-sided as the first one.

No fewer than 15 of the 17 members of the committee were in favour of the Bill, most having voted for it as second reading in November.

In committee only two members were opposed to the main policy (the generational ban) but that issue never got properly debated because the only amendment that would have derailed it was an amendment to raise the age of sale from 18 to 25, and that was proposed by a Lib Dem MP who wasn't even on the committee (nor was it supported by the two Lib Dems who were on the committee!).

The only members of the committee who consistently questioned elements of the Bill were two Tories new to Parliament (Jack Rankin and Sarah Bool), but the principal Conservative voice on the committee was Dr Caroline Johnson, the shadow public health minister, whose enthusiasm for the Bill seemed at times to be even greater than that of Andrew Gwynne, her Labour counterpart.

At one point she even grilled the minister on why the Bill didn't ban vaping in public places where smoking is prohibited.

As for 'expert' witnesses, don't get me started. Actually, I've written about this already, but it's worth repeating that of the 22 witnesses invited by the committee to give oral evidence, all but three were in favour of the Bill, including the generational ban.

The other three (two of whom were from Trading Standards, the other from the British Retail Consortium) could be best described as neutral, but there was not a single 'expert' witness who was actively opposed to the generational ban or extending public smoking bans to outdoor areas.

Nor was there any attempt to question the evidence on harm caused to non-smokers from smoking outdoors. Hardly surprising, because there is none. Instead we had to listen to the argument that if you can smell it (tobacco smoke) it must be doing you harm. (Whatever happened to the 'dose is the posin' argument?)

In contrast, while the assisted dying committee was undoubtedly one-sided in its composition and choice of witnesses, it wasn't so one-sided as to exclude opponents completely. And yet few people seem bothered.

The problem is, if you turn a blind eye to bias on one issue that should be open to debate and unbiased parliamentary scrutiny, you create a precedent for the same thing to happen again and again on other issues.

Last month it was the Tobacco and Vapes Bill. Currently it's the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill. Next month it will be something else.

The irony is that, with the spotlight of the media on it, the committee stage of the assisted dying bill has been a disaster for proponents of the Bill, and I would be surprised if MPs don't vote it down at third reading.

Meanwhile the committee stage of the Tobacco and Vapes Bill passed largely unnoticed because the creeping prohibition of tobacco is no longer news – especially when you deliberately exclude every conceivable opponent, including retailers and consumers, from your panel of 'expert' witnesses whilst stacking the committee in your favour by 15:2.

See: Stitch up (how low will this Government go?)

Also: Who are the MPs who will scrutinise the assisted dying bill? (BBC) and The assisted-dying bill brings shame on parliament (Spiked).