What are the political repercussions of the assisted dying vote?

It plainly matters that MPs have voted in favour of the principle that the terminally ill could be helped to accelerate their deaths.

But as I said on News at Ten on Wednesday, this is the beginning of the important debate: it is by no means certain assisted dying will become law.

What the House of Commons did this afternoon is give its conditional approval, subject to much further debate.

This is important. Because in sanctioning the idea of doctors helping the sick to die, and in a country with an established Church, a Rubicon has been crossed.

But even though MP after MP said that the compassionate decision was to help those in unbearable pain for whom medicine could neither offer recovery or respite, many of them weren’t yet persuaded that there would be adequate safeguards or protections for the vulnerable.

So for them today’s vote is the purchase of the opportunity to improve the bill through revisions in the Commons and the Lords.

And if they fail, they said, they would vote against when the bill comes back.

So to reiterate, the religious “sanctity of all life” argument has been rejected by MPs.

The pragmatic argument, that the bill would only accelerate the deaths of the terminally ill who are in full possession of their faculties and not under duress, is yet to be accepted.

Finally, although this was a conscience vote, it will have party-political ramifications, if only by stealth.

The overwhelming majority of the shrunken new parliamentary Tory party, led by Kemi Badenoch, voted against.

They included Badenoch. Farage voted against. Corbyn and most of the Corbynista left voted against, whether still in the Labour Party or ejected (John McDonnell was an exception).

A majority of Labour, LibDem and Green MPs voted in favour, along with a small number of diehard Cameroon Tories.

So it is possible to see this apolitical vote as nonetheless defining the new political divide in Britain, between a kind of secular soft left, who are in favour of assisted dying, and a large traditionalist and sometimes religious minority.

This divide will have ramifications for the UK well beyond the important assisted dying question.

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