RUTH Davidson has given her maiden speech to the House of Lords.
Opening by saying that she had been advised to “be funny” and not to say “anything that could be considered controversial” on her first appearance, Davidson went on to argue for people to be given the “right to die”.
The former Scottish Tory leader, known in the Lords as Baroness Davidson of Lundin Links, said that when she voted against an assisted dying bill in Holyrood “it felt like cowardice”.
The bill she was referencing was brought by now Scottish Green minister Patrick Harvie in 2015, and lost at the first hurdle.
The Scottish Parliament did not agree to the principles of Harvie’s assisted dying bill, with 82 votes against compared to 36 for.
READ MORE: Assisted dying policy does not mean the same thing as assisted suicide
Davidson, Nicola Sturgeon, Willie Rennie, and Kezia Dugdale, at the time all party leaders, all voted against the bill. The 36 votes for the bill came from a rainbow of MSPs from all parties.
Davidson, who expressed her regret at having voted against the bill in a newspaper column in 2020, reiterated that view in her maiden speech to the Lords.
However, she said that it was the wording of the bill that had allowed her to strike it down in Holyrood in 2015 - although she did so at the first reading, before it was allowed to go to deeper scrutiny and potential adjustments.
The Baroness told the Lords: "I come here after a decade serving in the Scottish Parliament and the reason I wanted to speak in today's debate is because I have voted on this issue in Holyrood and another private member's bill six years ago, and it has nagged at my conscience ever since.
"In truth the manner of that bill's drafting was so poor that many of us, myself included, were able to strike down the text without ever fully taking on the difficult emotional or conflicting subject matter."
As she said previously in her newspaper column, Davidson said her experiences with IVF and seeing relatives with dementia had changed her view on assisted dying.
READ MORE: Andrew Tickell: If we don't talk about assisted dying now, when will we?
She said she had “watched a number of people close to me develop dementia, and to see the person that they were being consumed by a disease that strips them of themselves”.
She went on: "Like IVF, this seems a tangential point as no one with a cognitive impairment would come under the scope of this bill.
"In fact, they would be expressly prohibited, but it made me consider that to have the body able and the mind slowly dissolve is one thing; for the mind to stay clear, and the body to be crippled in unendurable pain with the certain knowledge of a slow death outcome where the law says 'endure you must' goes beyond conscience."
She finished by saying there was a clear imbalance in the argument, between those who sought to offer everyone a choice, and those who sought to deny it.
Another prominent Tory, former Scottish secretary Michael Forsyth (above), explained earlier this week why he had changed his mind on the matter of assisted dying.
Forsyth said that when visiting his father on his deathbed, he was told he was “to blame” for the pain.
Explaining the talk with his father, Forsyth said: “His view was ‘Look I'm in pain, I know what I'm doing, why should I be denied this right [to die]?’
“I didn't have an answer. He died within a week – it was the last time I saw him. That is why I have changed my mind.”
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