Today, we will find out if there is a conservative party left in the United Kingdom. After only five hours of parliamentary debate, and without a single impact assessment, most Conservative MPs are set to vote against Labour backbencher Kim Leadbeater’s rushed assisted suicide bill. Yet an eclectic minority of Tory MPs—supported by former Prime Minister David Cameron—are set to be the deciding factor to push Leadbeater’s bill across a critical vote this week. 

If you squint, it is a bill with “safeguards and protections,” at least according to the preamble. In theory, Leadbeater’s bill will allow two physicians and a judge to prescribe a lethal concoction to adults with a terminal prognosis of under six months. It will prevent coercion, though it fails to specify how. It will ensure a rigorous oversight, because Leadbeater said so to The Guardian. It will be limited to mentally competent adults free of external pressure, never mind that Leadbeater also said that “being concerned about being a burden” is a “legitimate reason” to die under the bill.

Yet there is no time to ask these questions, or even to ask if the public is interested in Leadbeater’s modest proposal for legalizing suicides of the sickest or those most disabled. Besides the well-moneyed euthanasia lobby, it is unclear if there is any substantial constituency for this bill. According to Dying with Dignity’s own poll, only 43% of Britons want their MP to vote for the assisted suicide legislation, while another poll by an anti-euthanasia group found that just 11% support the bill when told of its specifics. 

Public skepticism is an understatement. Given that judicial oversight would require an already stressed court system to oversee thousands of additional deaths, dozens of retired senior judges have warned that this bill will destroy the courts entirely. The two Labour cabinet ministers responsible for administering assisted suicide—the justice secretary and the health secretary—both oppose it, as do four former prime ministers. Even proponents of assisted suicide in principle, like Liberty, a human rights group, have rejected the proposed bill as badly conceived.