It’s a myth that the majority of the public ‘support’ changing the law.
When you dig a little deeper and ask other questions, ‘support’ drastically detoriates, which suggests that large swathes of the public remain fluid in their view.
Only 50% of the public claim to have familiarity with the Bill.
The debate has clearly not been conducted long enough, or thoroughly enough for the public to understand the basic facts of the proposed change.
Only six in ten people know that ‘assisted dying’ means giving people lethal drugs to end their lives.
Some think it means ‘giving people the right to refuse burdensome treatment, which is already legal. Others think it means giving ‘deep palliative sedation’, or hospice care, or even a DNACPR notice.
70% will initially say they support making it legal for someone to seek ‘assisted dying’.
But this switches to 70% opposition after the public considers the case against it.
When presented with 10 arguments against assisted dying, including facts about how it operates overseas, support for assisted suicide among the general population falls to just 13 per cent.
There is huge public concern about people feeling pressured into an assisted death, if it were legalised.
65% of the public agree that the Government should prioritise sorting out palliative, social and end-of-life care first before even thinking about ‘assisted dying’.
Fully one-third of the public knows someone who has been on receiving end of ‘unacceptably poor’ care from the NHS or social care system.
This is the elephant in the room that the public wants the government to sort out.
Many of the public believe the NHS is broken, underfunded, and difficult to access
35% say that quality of treatment is excellent once you get to the front of the waiting list
The public’s priorities for parliament over the next 12
months are dominated by reducing NHS waiting times (61%) which eclipses everything else.
Legalising assisted suicide (8%) is one of only three issues which scores less than 10%.
Six in ten (60%) people agree with Gordon Brown’s view that, with the current state of the NHS, this is not the time to change the law.
This includes 69% of 18-24s and two-thirds of all those over-65. It also includes almost seven in ten (68%) Labour voters and the majority of AD supporters (52%,with only 32% who disagree).
