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

No, we should not, and that is a point that I made earlier. Muslim and Jewish people are quite rightly very sensitive about discrimination, and we have to make the point that if there were a similar provision on the statute book affecting them, it would not last five minutes. The situation is tolerated only because the 4 million Catholic people in this country are so easy-going that they are almost horizontal, as I am for much of the time about many political issues. We do not make a fuss about it, but the Government should not prey on our good and easy-going nature and leave the provision permanently on the statute book. If anybody thinks that all this is ancient history, they might not know that the last Catholic relief legislation was passed only in 1927, in the lifetime of many of our parents. Before then, if a Jesuit or a Dominican priest entered the country, they had to register with the Home Office as a suspected disloyal person who might subvert the constitution. We should not think that this is somehow ancient history, but it goes right into the modern age.