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

That would give the hon. Gentleman even more time to go through his concerns about the Bishop of Winchester, and I do not want to go down that route. The hon. Member for Ealing, North appropriately mentioned the right hon. Member for North Antrim (Rev. Ian Paisley). The hon. Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon suggested that we were out on a limb compared with other countries in Europe in the way we deal with these things. To me, that is a good thing. If only we were out on a limb regarding the European Union completely, I would be a happy man. The speech by the right hon. Member for North Antrim indicates that we may not be quite as far out on a limb as was suggested. Other countries have their own peculiar requirements as to who can succeed to the throne. Although they may not be of exactly the same nature as those that we have in this country, they could be construed as equally discriminatory, particularly indirectly. The hon. Member for Ealing, North mentioned Spain, where a successor has to be a member of a particular family who all happen to be Roman Catholics. One can argue whether that makes that system discriminatory as well. The argument that we are doing something horrible, shocking and discriminatory in this country while the rest of Europe is completely pure on these matters deserves a great deal of scrutiny. The right hon. Member for North Antrim made that point rather more impressively than I ever could when he spoke in the debate in 2001. The question is whether this measure is necessary; I am not entirely sure that it is. I can see that it is an issue that will exercise the minds of many people across the country, and I am sure that it comes up regularly in university debating societies. Such a motion might well come up for debate at Lib Dem conferences, along with debates on creating a republic, abolishing drug laws and all the other things they go on about—