Paul Blomfield: My father's suicide made me rethink the law on assisted dying

The reason was that the Sheffield Central MP was recounting the death of his father, who took his own life after being diagnosed with terminal lung cancer.

British law prevented him from speaking to his family about his decision beforehand, leaving him alone and unable to say goodbye in his final moments.

Describing the experience so publicly was clearly difficult for Mr Blomfield, but he believes it was necessary to highlight the plight of so many families in similar situations.

“I think my experience reflected the experience of a lot of people around the country and certainly after speaking in the chamber lots and lots of people from all over the UK have written to me and shared similarly distressing circumstances.

“I had spoken about it before and found it surprisingly difficult to do again. I thought after eight years it would be easier but it’s not.

“But I thought that we need to base the decisions that we make on real experience and I thought that sharing it was important.”

The Labour frontbencher is pushing for a change in the law on assisted dying, which he believes would give people more control at the end of their lives.

But the issue has long been divisive in Westminster and in the country as a whole, prompting strong opinions on both sides of the debate.

Mr Blomfield explains: “My basic point was that those who are concerned about a change in the law are primarily concerned because they fear that people facing the last days of their lives with a terminal diagnosis will be encouraged by their family to go sooner than they might otherwise have done.

“I think very few families are like that. I think most families are like mine and would want to support elderly parents or others who are terminally ill to live for as long as they want to.

“The fact that the law prevented my dad talking to me about what he wanted to do meant that he had to take his life while he still could, sooner than he would otherwise have done.”

He adds: “There has been powerful, faith-based lobbying and it has some echoes of the abortion debate – those who believe in the sanctity of life above everything.

“As I said in the debate, I absolutely respect those values, live your life by them, choose your death by them but don’t impose them on other people and in doing so they are denying the fact that some people leave this world horrendously, in a way that they wouldn’t want to.”

Turning from the highly personal to the political, Mr Blomfield is concerned not just about the future of individuals but of Western democracy itself.

“There is a crisis across the liberal democracies,” he says.

“All the Western democracies are struggling in different ways with a dissatisfaction and I think that Brexit was Britain’s particular contribution to a wider crisis which is reflected in the States by Trump and in Italy by the rise of populism on both the left and the right and the rise of the AfD in Germany, the rise of Vox in Spain, Le Pen sitting in the wings hoping Macron will fail in France and I think all of that is deeply worrying.

“We take democracy for granted but actually it is something that you have got to work hard at.

“And within that you have got to recognise that it can’t deliver everything everybody wants at every moment and I think it is the expectation in that area that is causing the real problem at the moment.

“Theresa May was right to say that there has been a coarsening of the dialogue. Our politics is becoming more binary and more angry and people are saying ‘if it doesn’t do exactly what I want at this moment for me I reject it’.

“Somehow we have got to push back against that because there is no future in that sort of politics.”

As Labour’s Shadow Brexit Minister, he is at the heart of the party’s fightback, but Mr Blomfield admits that they have made mistakes since the 2016 referendum result that has cost them at the ballot box.

“The position we have now adopted – which is a referendum in any circumstances and a commitment on Remain in relation to any deal the Tories come up with or no deal – if we’d had that position before the European elections we would have won those elections.

“And that would have changed the narrative because Farage wouldn’t have won.

“So, it’s disappointing that it’s taken longer than we might have hoped, but the bonus is that it’s now a position around which the whole of the Labour movement has come together. The trade unions, the parliamentary party and right across the leadership of the party.”

On how we break the Brexit deadlock that has paralysed Parliament, he says politicians on all sides must recognise the enormity of the challenges ahead.

“I think that we have to start by recognising the depth of this political crisis. On a sunny afternoon in July... it doesn’t feel like a crisis of that proportion. But history never feels like history when you are living through it.”