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

Let me repeat—if the hon. Gentleman has been listening to my speech, he will have heard this—that nobody disagrees with that point. Nobody disagrees that we will move in the near future not simply towards the measures in the Bill, but—to use 17th-century terminology—to a more root-and-branch reform of the constitution. The evidence of the past 10 years is that even with a great reforming Government, as the Labour Government since 1997 have been, problems are thrown up. We tinker with such things at our peril, even if we do so for the best of motives. The hon. Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon is no longer in his place, which is perhaps opportune, because the last opponent of the Bill whom I want to quote is one whom I do not really think he should bother with. The editor-in-chief of The Catholic Herald said, in the most disparaging terms—I will explain why I am reading this in a moment—that the hon. Gentleman,""the Lib Dem MP nicknamed 'Dr. Death' for his creepy determination to make late-term abortions and euthanasia more widely available, now has a new cause: he wants to remove the ban on the heir to the throne marrying a Catholic.""You know something? Catholics don't want to be liberated from this constitutional discrimination by a politician who advocates an end to the requirement that any abortion requires the consent of two doctors, arguing that the 'procedure' can carried out by a nurse or even in the home.""I know I speak for many Catholics when I say that this man disgusts me. He is wrong about nearly everything, and wrong in a particularly nauseating fashion, too"." However, I do not want to continue reading that, because it is simple abuse.