TOMORROW, MPs make a huge decision about whether terminally ill people should be assisted to die. It is a massive step for a state, which has been dedicated to keeping its people safe, to be hastening their deaths.

It is, though, a step that, in principle, we support. Everyone would like a nice death, free from pain, surrounded by those they love the most.

Furthermore, we live in a free country, where people have the choice to – within reason – live as they want so they should be able to die as they want.

And the current system is not working. Some people suffer drawn-out deaths in excruciating agony while others sneak off to Switzerland and pay to get the job done.

It is a mess that needs to be sorted – but does today’s Bill improve the mess or make an even bigger one?

There are concerns about how the NHS, already with record waiting lists, will cope with people taking lethal cocktails; there are concerns about how the judicial system, already with records waits for hearings, will be able to find expert judges to hear these new cases.

There are concerns about how judges will decide, or doctors will declare, that someone has the mental capacity to make an informed choice when they are pumped full of painkillers; there is real concern that coercion, that we are now discovering goes on insidiously in marriages involving people who are fit and well, will go on undetected as elderly and vulnerable people opt to die.

There are concerns that there is evidence from other countries that spending on palliative care goes down when they adopt assisting dying – yet today our palliative care and hospice sector is already creaking and in desperate need of more resources, not fewer.

And then there is a fear that this Private Members Bill is being rushed through just weeks after the election when really we need a commission of experts to take a year to think through practical responses to these concerns before MPs decide whether Britain will be improved by taking this massive step.