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

The Bill is about gender discrimination, but it is also about serious discrimination against members of the Catholic Church. I am an Anglican. I was brought up in that tradition and I am a communicating Anglican today. I never had to suffer the sense of pain that was referred to by my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North (Stephen Pound) when he described what it has felt like to come from the Catholic tradition and to be a Catholic in our society. That point was first brought home to me at university. Graduation day at Leeds university in 1967 happened to be on 12 July. For me, that was just another day in July. All our parents were coming up to see how some of us had managed to overcome, at least in part, the other distractions at university and had got ourselves degrees. I asked my friend when his parents were going to come, and he said, "I'm afraid my father's not coming." I think his mother had passed away. I said, "But they only live in Liverpool. My mother lives in the south. Where is your father?" "My father is an Orangeman," he said. He went on, "My father—I agree with him—regards it as more important that he should parade through Liverpool to assert the Protestant supremacy than that he should come and see me receive my degree." That is absolutely shocking, yet that was not in Northern Ireland, but in England. It illustrates the extent of the divide that was still there in our society even 40 years ago. In the old days, when I first came in to this House—they seem very recent to me, but they are not to many other people—if one wanted to introduce a ten-minute Bill, one was not sorted out conveniently by the Whips. In those days, one had to be the first Member through a door on the upper Clerks corridor, on the third floor above here, at 10 o'clock in the morning. That meant that one had to be the first person in that room in 5 o'clock in the morning—