Performing principle: What the assisted dying bill reveals about Scotland’s hollow lawmaking

What the Assisted Dying Bill reveals isn’t only a moral dilemma, but a constitutional one – a Parliament that has learned to imitate conviction without ever risking.

Two hundred and eighty-seven amendments. Four committee meetings. A Parliament that admits it’s passing a Bill it doesn’t yet believe in.

You could almost call it a masterclass in modern Scottish lawmaking: legislate first, understand later.

The Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adult (Scotland) Bill has been presented as an act of compassion. In reality, it’s a case study in the limits of our Parliament – legal, constitutional, and moral. It exposes a legislature that has mastered the art of looking serious about reform while outsourcing both consequence and conviction.

Liam McArthur, to his credit, has done what few backbenchers dare: bring forward a Bill that forces Holyrood to confront an issue most would rather avoid. He pleaded with his colleagues to “vote for the principle” and reject the details later. In other words: please vote for it now, even if you plan to kill it later.

That’s not how lawmaking is supposed to work. Stage One is meant to establish principle; amendments are for refinement. What Scotland has now is a Parliament performing principle without committing to it – a choreography of conscience.

Even those in favour of the Bill recognise the contradiction. How can legislators claim to be voting ‘in principle’ on a law that has no settled meaning, no agreed safeguards, and no clear fit within Scotland’s constitutional competence?

This isn’t deliberation. It’s moral theatre. 

For all the talk of compassion, the Assisted Dying Bill occupies a peculiar legal space – one that Scotland may not actually control.

Assisted dying, by definition, involves the use of controlled substances. Those powers remain reserved to Westminster under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. If Holyrood passes the Bill, it cannot take effect without a Section 104 Order – the UK Government’s formal permission to let devolved legislation modify reserved law.

That means Scotland’s supposed right to legislate over life and death would still require Whitehall’s signature.

This is the quiet absurdity of devolution: we can debate sovereignty endlessly, but even our most intimate moral laws need London’s approval before they can function.  

It’s the same pattern we saw with gender reform, drug decriminalisation, and now end-of-life autonomy – a Parliament that can declare, but not deliver.

The 287 amendments now before the committee are less a sign of diligence than of dysfunction. Some are technical. Many are essential. But taken together, they reveal that the Bill was never ready for scrutiny.

Even McArthur’s own revisions – clarifying that a person is not ‘terminally ill’ solely by reason of disability or mental disorder, and introducing a ‘no duty to participate’ clause for medical staff – expose the fragility of the text.

Other proposed changes, such as extending the offence of coercion to every stage of the process, or tightening definitions around ‘capacity’ and ‘consent’, point to a deeper unease: that the Bill’s safeguards may not survive real-world complexity.  

The Law Society of Scotland has already raised the alarm over proxies and the Bill’s treatment of capacity and mental disorder. Its public policy committee warned that the current wording leaves too much room for interpretation – and with it, for liability.

That’s not a moral argument. It’s a legal one. If a doctor or solicitor misjudges a patient’s competence, who bears the responsibility? What happens when family members dispute consent after the fact? How will courts treat ‘assisted dying’ cases where coercion is subtle but real?

These are the questions of statute, not sentiment. Yet the Bill’s supporters often treat an amendment as reassurance – as though every added clause equates to safety.

In truth, the proliferation of safeguards often signals the opposite: lawmakers trying to legislate away uncertainty they don’t yet understand.

To see this Bill as an isolated case is to miss the point. What’s unfolding around it is a broader pathology of Holyrood governance – a Parliament obsessed with process because it cannot stomach consequence.

Each new piece of social policy follows the same arc: consultation, neutral stance, cautious vote, endless amendment, deferred reform.

“We legislate like a country afraid of itself. ”

Council Tax. Freedom of Information. Climate targets. Assisted dying.

Different issues, same choreography. A Parliament that specialises in appearing thoughtful while ensuring that no decision ever lands hard enough to offend anyone.

The Assisted Dying Bill is simply the latest expression of that pathology – the politics of permanent caution.

Even where Holyrood does have competence, it struggles with coherence. The Assisted Dying Bill proceeds as though palliative care were a separate issue, when in practice, they are inseparable. 

MSPs like Miles Briggs have pointed out that end-of-life care in Scotland remains a postcode lottery – underfunded, uneven and reliant on the charitable sector. The Bill’s architecture does nothing to address that. Instead, it creates a new legal pathway in isolation, without reforming the medical infrastructure around it.

That’s not compassionate design; it’s legislative fragmentation.

And this, too, is part of the deeper story: Scotland doesn’t legislate holistically. It legislates piecemeal, issue by issue, consultation by consultation – as though each Bill exists in its own sealed chamber, untouched by the failures of the system that surrounds it.

Perhaps the most telling feature of this entire process is the Scottish Government’s ‘neutral stance.’ The health secretary abstained from voting at Stage One to preserve that neutrality.

But neutrality isn’t impartiality; it’s avoidance.

When the executive refuses to take a position on a Bill of this scale, it signals something profound about the state of governance. We have ministers who act as administrators, not leaders – managers of legislative process rather than stewards of public ethics.

Neutrality is safe. It carries no political cost. And so the Government allows the Parliament to act out its own moral pageant, secure in the knowledge that even if the Bill collapses, the theatre itself will have looked respectable.

Assisted dying is one of the hardest issues any legislature can face. But the difficulty of the question is precisely why we should demand clarity in the answer. Instead, Scotland’s Parliament has produced a Bill that demonstrates how far it will go to simulate decisiveness while avoiding the risk of being decisive.

This isn’t about whether one supports or opposes the right to assisted dying. It’s about the kind of legislative culture we have built: one that measures seriousness in the number of amendments, the length of consultations, and the decorum of debate – but rarely in the quality of law that emerges at the end.

We legislate like a country afraid of itself.

At some point, a Parliament must decide whether it exists to manage complexity or to confront it. Whether its job is to administer moral questions or, answer them.

This Bill may yet pass. It may not. Either way, it will leave behind a record of what Scotland’s Parliament has become: a chamber where moral conviction is drafted in the passive voice, constrained by devolved competence and bureaucratic self-consciousness.

We could have written a law that faced the issue head-on – that defined capacity clearly, integrated palliative care reform, and set out a framework that balanced autonomy with protection.

Instead, we wrote a process that hopes to become a law later.

That’s not governance. That’s performance.  

The Assisted Dying Bill might ultimately change Scotland’s approach to end-of-life choice. But for now, what it really exposes is the state of Scottish lawmaking itself: procedural, partial, and permanently afraid of its own shadow.