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

The hon. Gentleman is again tempting me down a line of ifs and hypotheticals. I am sure, Madam Deputy Speaker, that you would not want me to go through such a list again. I wonder how important the change is that we are discussing. We have been given the idea, partly from what has been in the Daily Mail, that this is essential stuff that goes to the heart of everything, but I wonder whether that is slightly over-egging the pudding. In the debate in the House of Lords, Lord Falconer referred to the discriminatory aspect of the Act, but then said that""we should be clear that for all practical purposes, its effects are limited."" He went on to say:""There are 22 members of the Royal Family in line of succession after the Prince of Wales, all of whom are eligible to succeed and have been unaffected by the Act of Settlement. Only four living members of the Royal Family can be said to have been affected by the Act, but they come after the 22nd person in line to the throne. Therefore, to claim that the Act has a discriminatory impact is to ignore the improbability that any of those members of the Royal Family could, in practice, have succeeded."—[Official Report, House of Lords, 14 January 2005; Vol. 668, c. 511.]" He makes the point well—this is not rampant discrimination, but what one might call indirect discrimination, to put it at its strongest.