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Royal Marriages and Succession to the Crown (Prevention of Discrimination) Bill

I congratulate the hon. Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon (Dr. Harris) on introducing the Bill, and I support wholeheartedly his comments in favour of it. However, despite what will be said in the Chamber later and what the Prime Minister and the Deputy Leader of the House said on Radio 4, I am absolutely certain that there is no prospect of the Bill's advancing unless it gets a Second Reading today. The Second Reading will transform it. Why do I say that there is no chance that the Government will pursue the Bill's intent with vigour? I shall explain why. I do not doubt that the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister—and, indeed, every member of the Treasury Bench—recognises that the law needs to be addressed at some stage. But they have no intention of doing that yet. Other hon. Members have said today that surely the current monarch is not opposed to the Bill, and I imagine that in principle she is not. Somebody else raised the issue of whether other countries whose Head of State is the Queen would object, and of course they would not. However, the matter will not be as simple as that unless the Prime Minister and the Lord Chancellor demonstrate real political will and enthusiasm. Frankly, their track record on the matter has not been very good. For the record, and to buttress my point—I hope that the Lord Chancellor will seek to prove me wrong—I should say that after the Labour Government were elected, I asked for action on a small, archaic area of discrimination. It prevented somebody ordained in the Catholic Church who had became laicised from being elected to the House of Commons. In canon law and United Kingdom law, a Catholic priest is always a Catholic priest—once a priest, always a priest. However, the person would have stepped down from those offices. I wanted to lift the impediment that prevented such a person from being elected to the House of Commons. I asked the Government to do that at the earliest legislative opportunity, and the reply was no. My party then selected a man who had been a Roman Catholic priest to be the candidate in Greenock and Port Glasgow. A Bill was then swiftly enacted to enable that, so we did the right thing for the wrong reasons. However, the tale demonstrates the deep conservatism of Government Ministers, including the Lord Chancellor, on these issues. Those listening carefully to what the Prime Minister and the Deputy Leader of the House said on Radio 4 this morning will have noticed that they betrayed the fact that they had not really researched the issue. Their terminology was all wrong. They said that they would have to talk to members of the Commonwealth. Actually, that is constitutionally incorrect; they need to talk with and get agreement from states whose Head of State is the Queen and that are by coincidence members of the Commonwealth. The overwhelming majority of the about 56 countries in the Commonwealth are republics. The issue could very well be dealt with at the margins of the Commonwealth Heads of Government conference—that occasion could be a good vehicle, but the issue is not within the competence of the Commonwealth Heads of State as such. I relate that story because it demonstrates that the Prime Minister had not been adequately briefed or had not understood the point at issue. Of course, he needs to understand that to begin to address the matter. The hon. Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon is the architect of the Bill, but even his approach is slightly flawed. I wish to amend the Bill in Committee. Clause 4(2) is about consulting the Commonwealth; again I say that consultation should take place not with the Commonwealth, but with countries where the Queen is Head of State. Furthermore, the matter is not one of consultation; there has to be simultaneous agreement. The Bill would need to be amended to say that it would come into force after there had been agreement with the Governments and legislatures where the Queen is Head of State. Why do I say that? We have to understand the Statute of Westminster 1931, which was a benchmark in our constitutional development and then that of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and what was then known as the Irish Free State. In its preamble, the Statute of Westminster says that""united by a common allegiance to the Crown, it would be in accord with the established constitutional position of all the members…that any alteration in the law touching the Succession to the Throne or the Royal Style and Titles shall hereafter require the assent as well of the Parliaments of all the Dominions as of the Parliament of the United Kingdom"." In my view, the Bill should proceed on to the British statute book, amended so that it empowers us to trigger the changes once there is agreement with the legislatures and Governments of these other countries. This is not an academic issue. One has to understand the events of December 1936, when—I have read the debates many times—Archibald Sinclair, Clement Attlee and Stanley Baldwin managed to get through this House, under the provisions of the Statute of Westminster, the abdication Act of 1936, which was a one-clause Act that permitted Edward VIII to abdicate, by an instrument, on the following day. It was done under the Statute of Westminster because the then Dominion Prime Ministers of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa exercised their rights under the Statute of Westminster by asking what was then called the Imperial Parliament to enact on their behalf, as they saw a need for dispatch in this matter. The abdication Act was passed here, but then triggered the law in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. That could not happen today because the constitutions of Canada and Australia, in particular, have moved on, and that would prevent them from derogating to this place a law altering their Head of State legislation. I expect that it would also be politically offensive and unacceptable in all those other states. There needs to be simultaneous agreement, which I think would be forthcoming. I referred to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, but another Dominion was involved—what was then called the Irish Free State. It was not a republic, but part of the realms of Edward VIII. The then Prime Minister of the Irish Free State, Eamon de Valera, said, "Hang on a minute. You're not going to pass at Westminster legislation affecting my country's Head of State—I'll pass my own and exercise my right under the provisions of the Statute of Westminster." Then he introduced into the Parliament of the Irish Free State a law ending the title and office of Governor-General—the representative of the King—and creating the office of President of the Irish Free State. He did not move to a republic, but he altered by some degree the constitutional arrangements. There are two significant elements to that, the first of which is an interesting anomaly: Edward VIII was King of Ireland for one day longer than he was King of the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa. Furthermore, under the precedent created by Eamon de Valera, as we consulted all the 16 other states about changing the law, that would raise domestically in their jurisdictions issues relating to moving to a republic, or if not going that far—I intervened on the hon. Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon about this earlier—the question of the Head of State not having to be the follower of a particular faith, because many people, especially in Australia and Canada, would find that offensive. It would open up a can of worms. I believe that, if I may use the phrase, the palace is not unsympathetic to the issue raised by the Bill, but it is concerned that it will open a Pandora's box, not just here in the United Kingdom—perhaps least of all here—but in all the other countries—