Kieran Mullan MP: speeches

Speeches

• 11 Sept 2026 · Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill · Hansard source

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  I will not; there is not time. While I do not seek to say that the Bill will be used in that way—to deliberately bring about an end to the lives of confused or elderly patients—my worry is about how it will insert itself into that battle in our country between the best and worst of our natures, in families, conversations and settings where people, as much as we do not like to believe it, actively, for selfish reasons, wish that their relatives were dead, and where those relatives know that their family wish that they were dead. I do not want a Bill, or a message from this Parliament, to go out to the wider country to say that not just Parliament but the mechanisms of the NHS—a wing of the state—will sometimes support and help them to end their lives. I remain deeply sympathetic to the scenarios and circumstances that people have described, and I can personally foresee a situation where I would want to make use of this Bill and feel that it would benefit me, but we should not legislate for what we might want. We have to legislate for what is in the broader interests of our constituents and our country, not least because, as many have articulated, the Bill has serious flaws. There is, in particular, the arbitrary decision to implement it in four years’ time, regardless of what might be happening with our palliative care services, which have, even recently, faced new and very real funding challenges. While I understand why people think the Bill would bring benefits for some people, and I acknowledge that it would, I think that the price we are asking some of the most vulnerable and in-need people in our society to pay, and the risk we are asking them to face, is simply too high.

• 11 Sept 2026 · Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill · Hansard source

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  I welcome the opportunity to give my personal views on this Bill, as colleagues in health have taken over responsibility for it. I have spent most of my life as someone who was highly sympathetic to the cause of assisted dying and imagined that I would support it if I ever was an MP, but that changed in 2018 when I read the Gosport War Memorial hospital independent panel report published in that year. The report should be more widely read, and I often wonder why it did not get the attention that it deserved. It found that between 1987 and 2001, more than 450 NHS patients had their lives prematurely shortened by healthcare staff. They were mainly elderly—the average age being 81—but some were as young as 61, and more than 70% of them had been admitted to hospital not needing palliative care or being at the end of their lives. The report describes what happened to some of them. One patient was admitted for respite care but deteriorated and became confused during his stay. Staff asked permission to give him diamorphine, but his daughter refused as he was not in pain. However, his wife later agreed, and he was started on diamorphine via syringe driver. He died the same day. A man admitted for dementia was started on a diamorphine syringe driver; staff asked his son for permission, and he gave it, but he felt that there was no explanation of what it meant to be given diamorphine. The dose was doubled, and his father died five days later. His son felt that the diamorphine had effectively killed him. Why did that happen? It happened because the staff in that hospital and on that ward had developed a culture of prioritising convenience in looking after patients over the value of their lives. It speaks to something that we often do not like to talk about and might feel guilty about: looking after people is not only challenging but can sometimes be deeply unpleasant. As a doctor, I have helped to look after people who, when someone approached them to give them care, would scratch or hit out at them. I have helped to look after patients who refuse to stay in bed even though it is in their best interests, and who continually wander the wards and need to be monitored all the time. Then there is something that perhaps seems benign but is sometimes very challenging: the patients who continually call out for help again and again and again, perhaps asking for a medicine or a meal that they have already been given, and refuse to be consoled. Most of the time, that brings out the best in our nature, as we would want—to be kind, caring and compassionate —but it can sometimes bring out the worst in our nature: our impatience, our intolerance and even our cruelty. While I have seen that happen in hospitals, I know that it goes on in private homes up and down the country every day.

• 4 Sept 2026 · Infants, Parents and Carers Bill · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to speak in this debate, Madam Deputy Speaker. May I begin by congratulating my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest West (Sir Desmond Swayne) on his achievement in bringing this Bill forward. We all know how a varied job being in this place is, and he is testament to that: after all these decades, he gets to do something brand new. That encourages us all to keep doing new things in this place, however short or long our time is here. I support this Bill, because it is about one of, if not—I would argue—the most important issue that sits before any society: how to successfully raise the next generation. The manner of that challenge has changed enormously over the course of human history. Even just a few hundred years ago, the single biggest thing that a parent could do to successfully raise their child was to get them to adulthood, as 50% of all children died before reaching adulthood. In this country, the equivalent figure now is about 0.5%. Although the loss of every child is a tragedy, those figures show the big change in the challenge that parents face. In fact, as another way of illustrating the difference, suicide accounts for a quarter of all deaths of older teenagers in this country. More than anything, the challenge for parents now is to raise content, productive children who go on to lead fulfilled lives as part of a much more complicated society. My interest in this area is one of the main driving forces behind my wanting to get into politics. It dates back to my time as a medical student and some of the experiences of meeting patients. In particular, I remember a lady who came to see me the first time I was in placement at a GP practice, when I was a student. She had come to see the GP because she did not know how to get her children to go to bed on time. I remember thinking, “What an absolutely valid thing to want help with,” but I wondered what was going on in wider society that resulted in the GP being the only person she felt she could get help from. I also remember from my paediatrics placement a dynamic professor who sat us down and gave us a seminar about attachment theory. I was astounded to learn that, at age four, a child can be tested for whether they are attached to their caregivers; if they are not, that is enormous predictor of their future health outcomes. All the way at the other end of the spectrum, as an A&E and general hospital doctor looking after older patients, I often wondered where their children were and what had gone on their family to lead to there being no bond or attachment—they often spent many days in hospital without anyone coming to see them. In my work as a volunteer policeman, I have met young people on council estates where membership of gangs and crime were rife. Some young people had managed to overcome those challenges, and the thing that seemed to stand out as a protective factor was their parental and family environment. We have heard a lot today about the challenges and perspectives of parents. I am not a parent—I hope to be one day, but I am not at the moment—so I wanted to offer that perspective that we have all had as a child on the receiving end of what we are talking about today. I began to reflect on how different the people I met and the scenarios I came across were from my own experience. My parents are divorced, so mine was not a perfect image of what a family looks like, but I felt incredibly supported and loved, and I was taught enormously the importance of values and morals in a way that only a parent a can, sometimes even in opposition to the state. I had an ambition to study medicine, and at a parents evening my A-level chemistry teacher told me I was predicted to fail that A-level and had no chance of getting into medicine. It was my mum who was determined that I would overcome that challenge. It was my mum who coached me after work in the evenings to pass my 11-plus, to get into grammar school. All those things came from my parents, including my dad in different ways.