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We haven’t even got out of Oxford train station before it happens. A young woman rushes up, beaming with excitement, almost unable to get the words out:, “Are you Tanni Grey-Thompson?” Baroness Grey-Thompson — winner of 11 Paralympic golds in wheelchair racing, breaker of 35 world records, disability rights campaigner, member of the House of Lords, and according to Woman’s Hour one of the 100 most powerful women in the country — admits that she is. “Oh my goodness, this is amazing. Sorry! I don’t believe it. You are such an inspiration.” And she goes off wearing a huge grin, her day made. It must happen fairly often, I suggest. “It’s really nice, actually,” Grey-Thompson says.
She says “actually” quite often, which is appropriate for someone who has spent so much of her life correcting false perceptions. Used to being a role model, Grey-Thompson has always refused to tell her story as a triumph over adversity.
She was born with spina bifida and gradually lost the ability to walk during early childhood, but she describes it as no great setback and, indeed, something of an opening. “I’ve never cried because I’m in a wheelchair and I’ve never felt bitter,” she writes in her autobiography Seize The Day. If she comes across as strong- willed, Grey-Thompson says that’s down to personality, not hardship. In 2000, when she came third for BBC Sports Personality of the Year, the organisers had failed to provide a ramp and Grey-Thompson was left stranded in the audience, looking up at the stage. Characteristically, she took no offence, whilst seeing the fiasco as an excellent chance to highlight how society marginalises the disabled.
On her lap she carries a folder crammed with House of Lords business: copies of legislation, piles of research, letters from the public. Since entering the Lords in 2010, Grey-Thompson has become a prominent voice in the Upper House, especially on disability issues. “I was always interested in disability rights,” she recalls. “I didn’t feel it was right when I was competing to have a very strong personal opinion. But then when I retired [in 2007], it gave me the freedom to think more about what I wanted to do.” She became involved with Transport For London and the Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation, among several other positions. Then she was offered a place in Parliament as a crossbench peer, she tells me, “I might have liked to have done it a couple of years later, but you’d be stupid to turn it down.”
“The Lords listen to public opinion, and they spend a good deal of time researching and reading, but the one advantage of us not being elected is that people vote with their conscience and don’t have to think about the electorate. There is both good and bad in that.”
One might think that she would be intimidating — the great athlete turned distinguished politician — but part of the reason Grey-Thompson charmed the publicto begin with (apart from all those medals) was her unassuming warmth of character, tangible even on screen. When she won the 400m at Athens 2004, becoming at the time GB’s most decorated Paralympian, she was already a figurehead for disabled sport — no, make that British sport.
What was the career change like? “Transition out of sport is really hard because you have this completely and utterly regimented life. There’s all these people who tell you what to do and when to do it.” In the Lords, nobody tells you what to do, especially when you’re unattached to any party. “As a crossbencher, you have to kind of make your own legislation, you have to find your own way. People are incredibly nice and helpful. In sport, you get stabbed in the back; in the House of Lords, they’ll look you in the eye and stab you in the chest, which is really weird, but in some ways quite refreshing.”
One of the biggest disagreements has been over the changes to the Disability Living Allowance; changes that Grey-Thompson argued could “ghettoise” the disabled. Though her proposed amendment to delay the reforms was narrowly defeated, the government did make concessions. Her amendment to legal aid reforms was later overturned in the Commons. But she sees it as an ongoing task.
“There’s always some bit of legislation that you can use to discuss disability rights or access or transport.” She names her biggest concerns in the Lords as “welfare reform, legal aid, and this one. But this one feels like it’s been going on forever.” “This one” is Lord Falconer’s Assisted Dying Bill — though Grey-Thompson thinks “assisted suicide” a more accurate term. Even the vocabulary is disputed in this most fractious debate. Grey-Thompson is here tonight for a talk hosted by Oxford Students for Life (full disclosure: I’m one of them), entitled “What’s Wrong With Assisted Suicide?”. Falconer’s Bill proposes to allow doctors, in some circumstances, to supply the terminally ill with lethal drugs. Grey-Thompson has opposed the idea from the start.
“I get a bit frustrated when the media try to make it a very simple debate, painting assisted suicide as compassionate and caring and a lovely, peaceful end (and there’s lots of cases where that’s not happened); and those of us who oppose it as nasty people who want people to suffer. I think actually people on my side are as caring and compassionate, and we don’t want people to suffer.” So what’s the compassionate objection to Falconer?
For Grey-Thompson, assisted suicide threatens society’s most vulnerable, by making death an easier option. “It gets into this really uncomfortable debate about a person’s worth and contribution to society, which I don’t really want to have. If we start talking about whether people contribute to society — and I don’t mean to be flippant by this — there’s a whole pile of people I’d put on the list to get rid of before terminally ill people. So it’s really dangerous.”
The right to die, she says, can become a “duty to die” — an idea already put forward by one of her fellow members of the Lords. “Baroness Warnock has talked about people having a responsibility to end their lives, not to be a burden on society, and you go, wow, OK.” She compares the situation to Logan’s Run, a “really dreadful, naff science fiction movie”, in which everyone who reaches the age of 35 is killed. “But it’s a little bit like that if you look at the legislation in Europe.” Belgium recently introduced child euthanasia, which has long been practised in the Netherlands.
Grey-Thompson’s own experience suggests that a law which smoothes the way towards death might be all too convenient. Take a single phrase in the report of Falconer’s original commission, which said that assisted suicide should not be available to the disabled “at this point in time”. She finds that phrase chilling, given the attitudes she has seen. A doctor once told a pregnant Grey-Thompson that “people like you” shouldn’t have children (“People from Wales?” is her standard reply to this kind of thing.) She was recently told she had “no right” to go through a barrier at a railway station. “What else might I not have the right to?”
The idea of the disabled being pressured towards an early death might perhaps be classed as slippery-slopism; except that Grey-Thompson tells me she gets hundreds of letters and emails from disabled people saying they would feel that pressure if the law changed. Indeed, 70 per cent of the disabled, according to a Scope poll, agree that this is a likely prospect. Grey-Thompson can also remember less tolerant times. She couldn’t have had her education without the help of her headmaster, who concealed her existence from the authorities; during one snap inspection he had to bundle the teenage Tanni into a cupboard.
We’ve come a long way, Grey-Thompson says, but, based on the daily experience of many, not so far that we can be complacent. OK, but what about the safeguards in the bill? It only covers those with a terminal illness who are expected to die in the next six months. But six months is not the kind of period about which doctors can make confident predictions, she replies; it could encompass a large group of people. And assisted suicide would radically change the doctor-patient relationship. “I mean, this is really way off, but — pressure for bed spaces, funding. Do you then have a doctor who has to start weighing up — I mean, they already have to do it to some extent, about what medicines are given to certain patients, how expensive the medicine is… This completely changes the dynamic of someone’s worth.”
Last Friday, three days after our meeting, Grey-Thompson was putting some of these points at the Committee stage of the Falconer Bill. “For me,” she told the Lords, “this is about the constant drip-drip of ‘You’re not worth it.’ I am a very resilient person. If I got upset every time somebody said to me, ‘I wouldn’t want to be like you,’ I would be depressed.” Has Grey- Thompson always opposed changing the law? Her normal conversational pace unexpectedly slows. “My mum’s death wasn’t great, and my dad’s was slightly better, but I still wouldn’t have wanted a doctor…” She leaves the sentence unfinished. “My sister and I were very clear that we didn’t want my father to be in any pain, but we didn’t want them to end his life.”
She wants the debate to focus on more than the perils of changing the law. “I think we have to have a much bigger discussion about social care, palliative care, funding of hospices, that sort of thing. I’d rather try to sort some of that out before we talk about killing people. Because it’s a really long-term solution. You can’t go back from assisted suicide.”
