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

I was going to come to that. The hon. Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon and others say that this Bill is not intended to disturb the position of the sovereign—the King or the Queen—as head, or supreme governor, of the Church, in ecclesiastical matters as well as in temporal matters. I fully accept that that is the hon. Gentleman's intention in moving his Bill. The law at present does not prohibit someone who is in communion with the Church of England but who is not a confirmed Anglican from being head of the Church, because they would then be in communion with the Church. The difficulty—this is one of the complexities of what he proposes—is that he has not thought through sufficiently the potential consequences of his proposals on the sovereign's position as head of the Church, and this matter needs to be thought about very carefully. The monarch is the supreme governor of the Church of England, and Catholics, under the laws of their Church—this is the point—cannot enter into communion with the Church of England. Thus, there would be the anomalous position where if there were a supreme governor, a monarch succeeding to the throne, who was a member of the Roman Catholic Church—[Interruption.] I understand the point, but we need to think things through a little, because the Bill proposes to allow members of the Catholic Church to be in the line of succession and one of the issues that we must—