Meeting of the Parliament 11 March 2026 [Draft]
I understand and respect the points made by Jeremy Balfour and others. I want to make a few points myself.
First, in some of the interventions on Mr Balfour, members said that there is no alternative. There may be no alternative now, but there was a big alternative. Liam McArthur never hid that he was introducing this bill. We have known about it for years. At some point, the Government or the Parliament will have to reflect on the fact that we have left such an emotive and important bill to our final weeks in this session. We cannot get away from that.
The reason why I requested to speak is that, right now, we are considering a motion to sit for an additional day when we have not even reached the time limit within which we were supposed to debate the Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Bill tonight. That is what I am troubled with. Group 9 had only six amendments in it. Although we will have to sit for further days than scheduled, we should use the maximum time that is allocated on the days when we are due to speak about the bill. I am seriously concerned that, if we agree to the business motion today, we will have further scenarios in which we will stop early, which I do not think is acceptable.
I was more than willing and prepared to debate amendments to the bill until 10 o’clock and then get into the further procedures that we have to do today. I am unsure who took the decision, or why it was taken, not to start group 9, because I believe that it could have been finished. If it could not, we could have followed up to the amendments that had been debated and then restarted tomorrow. If we are not even going to be flexible around those issues, we might not even complete the business on the additional day on Friday.