An MP has been offered the use of a private ambulance to bring her to parliament amid fears the hugely controversial assisted dying bill could come down to just a single vote.
Sorcha Eastwood, a Northern Irish MP, announced earlier this week that she was unable to travel to Westminster for the crunch vote because she has Covid.
She has spoken out passionately against the proposed bill, but said she did not want to put others at risk of contracting the illness.
In response, the entrepreneur Declan Ganley contacted her on social media to offer to arrange transport in a private ambulance.
Earlier, the MP had posted on social media: “My heart is genuinely breaking that I can’t vote tomorrow”.
She said she did not believe the bill was “competent – either in law or the societal ramifications”.
Since the offer, she has posted photographs of her most recent Covid tests and said that if she tests negative on Thursday night, she will travel to Parliament for the vote.
The bill is on a knife-edge, with campaigners on both sides making their final pitches to wavering MPs.
MPs are sometimes ‘paired’ on key votes, in a system that allows two MPs with opposing positions to both miss the vote, without affecting the outcome. However, this only applies to government bills – which the assisted dying bill is not.
On Thursday night, four Labour MPs Markus Campbell-Savours, Kanishka Narayan, Paul Foster and Jonathan Hinder announced they were switching their votes from yes to no.
More than 60 disability organisations also wrote to MPs highlighting concerns over the potential impact of the legislation on those with learning disabilities.
They cited polling commissioned by the Down’s Syndrome Research Foundation, which found major fears about how people with learning disabilities could express informed consent when applying for assisted suicide.
Three-quarters of the public raised concerns about the prospect of disabled people being able to consent, the polling found. It also found that nearly seven in 10 people fear those with learning disabilities may be particularly vulnerable to the risk of coercion or manipulation into an assisted suicide if the bill passes.
The MP who brought the bill, Kim Leadbeater, made her own last-minute plea to MPs to support her assisted dying bill, warning that if it is rejected on Friday, terminally ill adults could face a 10-year wait before the issue is debated again.
Campaigners against the legislation made a last-ditch call for a delay to the crunch final vote, with 52 Labour backbenchers asking Sir Keir Starmer to step in and give MPs more time to scrutinise the bill.
But the prime minister rejected the call, saying there “has been a lot of time discussing it, both in parliament and beyond parliament”.
If the bill passes its final stage on Friday, it will then go to the House of Lords, where peers have warned that they intend to heavily scrutinise the legislation.
