Dorries’s abortion amendment and the health bill

The Health and Social Care Bill was passed by the House of Commons on Wednesday 7 September 2011. This bill, which had received large amounts of protest and coverage in the lead up to and during the consultations about it, was passed with a majority of 316 votes to 251 (of a total of 650 MPs). On the same day, Nadine Dorries, a Conservative MP, had brought an amendment to the bill, objecting to abortion clinics providing counselling services and arguing for “independent providers” to do this instead.

With two big health stories on one day, one was threatening to overshadow the other. The mainstay of public attention until September had been on the health bill itself, with the royal colleges of general practitioners, physicians, and nursing noting serious concerns. Although the Future Forum had been charged with examining the bill for months before, Dorries’s amendment had received little attention except in the week or two immediately beforehand. On 31 August the Guardian newspaper columnist Zoe Williams predicted that “any discussion of the abortion amendment risks drawing fire away from the rest of the bill, which desecrates the NHS” (http://bit.ly/nA3url). She was right.

The BBC Radio 4 Today news programme had four minutes covering the “controversial health bill” on the morning of the vote (http://bbc.in/qyrjI7). By the evening the coverage had switched to focus on Dorries. Channel 4 News covered the story in the evening, but their choice of clip was of Nadine Dorries being subjected to immature humour in discussion of her proposed amendment (http://bit.ly/nRwvfY). Victoria McDonald, reporting from the Commons, described the debate on the health bill as “a bit like the lion that didn’t roar.” And of the concessions demanded by the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, she said, “Not a lot of those concessions seemed to have made their way into the bill.” Indeed, the debate seemed less robust than that against Dorries’s amendment. The health secretary, Andrew Lansley, introduced the bill at 18:31, and by just 19:14, and after the deputy speaker had urged only fast speeches by MPs, the vote was cast. McDonald also made the salient point that “we will probably see . . . a much more robust discussion in the House of Lords.” Sky News reported the health bill along with Dorries’s amendment, saying that the bill was passed with “a healthy majority of 65” (http://bit.ly/otLXj6).

But other media outlets did not report the ascent of the Health and Social Care Bill with the same accent. Although Dorries’s amendment was expected to fail by a large margin (it did, by 250 votes), neither had it attracted as many signatures to a petition against it as the Health and Social Care Bill. The bill was campaigned on more vigorously, by an impressive cross section of royal colleges and professional societies, and had an outcome that was less certain. The lead up to the vote contained a misleading assertion, from David Cameron, in unreferenced claims in prime minister’s questions on the same day, that “we now see the Royal College of General Practitioners, the Royal College of Physicians, and the Royal College of Nursing all supporting our health reforms” (Hansard, http://bit.ly/qyrDj7).

This was promptly reported by the BBC, along with contesting clarification from several royal colleges about their opposing position. Nick Triggle, for the BBC, said, “It forced the Department of Health press office back into rebuttal mode as they sought to clarify what both men meant. Of course, the rows will die down. But with the House of Lords preparing to sink their teeth into the bill next month, the government’s troubles are far from over.” Cameron’s claim, rather than the passing of the health bill, took prime reporting position. Trying to find information about the passage of the bill on 7 September, I struggled to find a newspaper website reporting the news on the same day. The radio and television news seemed to focus on the Dorries-Cameron exchange instead. Twitter users started complaining about the lack of outcry.

The bill now goes from the democratically elected House of Commons to the unelected House of Lords. Was Dorries’s amendment a distraction? Worse, were politics at play? Dorries wrote in the Daily Mail about Evan Harris, “a former Liberal Democrat MP and now an influential official within the party.” She said, “He had persuaded the Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, to blackmail the Prime Minister by insisting that if the Department of Health did not withdraw its support for my abortion amendment, Lib Dem peers in the Lords would vote down the entire Health and Social Care Bill” (http://bit.ly/pbIsoh). Was this true? Harris has not responded to my requests for clarification. Where has been the criticism of the lowly standard of debate or the lack of democratic influence over the vote?

The uncomfortable conclusion is that Dorries, in a vote that was unlikely to have got through, may have caused serious distraction. In May 2011, on BBC’s Andrew Marr Show, Clegg had said, “No bill is better than a bad one . . . Protecting the NHS rather than undermining it is my number one priority . . . I’m not going to ask Liberal Democrat MPs and Liberal Democrat peers to proceed with legislation on something as precious and cherished, particularly for Liberal Democrats as the NHS unless I am personally satisfied that what these changes do is an evolutionary change in the NHS, not a disruptive revolution”(http://bbc.in/oHtUD1).

The media should now be pulling this claim apart.