Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill

Debate between Lord Alli and Lord Lester of Herne Hill

Monday 15th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alli]

My Lords, I thank the Minister and my noble friend Lady Royall of Blaisdon for making this amendment possible. I am glad that the Government will re-look at this issue and that if they can they will change the law.

This is also my last opportunity to speak on the Bill. I want to say thank you not just to the Front Benches on both sides of the House but to the House. I have been truly humbled to have been part of the Bill in this place. This week will mark the 15th anniversary of my entry into your Lordships’ House. As a gay man, over those 15 years you have changed my life. You have given me dignity where there was sometimes fear, you have given me hope where there was often darkness and you have given me equality where there was sometimes prejudice. Those who want radically to reform this place come with their plans. Let me say this to them: witness this day; witness this Bill; judge us on the creation of the liberties that we protect and extend.

This is a special place and I am proud to have figured in it. My life and the lives of many others will be better today than they were yesterday, and I thank the House for that.

[Lord Lester of Herne Hill]

My Lords, I am glad that I put my name to these amendments. I add my support to the Minister for the wisdom of the amendments. It is an open-ended consultation that is not prejudged, it is time-limited so there will not be undue delay, and if there are changes it will be subject to affirmative procedure, which means that Parliament will be able to be properly consulted, as the public and all the interested groups will have been.

To add a further point, if change is brought about it will avoid the need for further litigation that could finish up in the European Court of Human Rights, as I read its case law, because if there is to be change it will remove a source of discrimination that, it could be strongly argued, is not compatible with convention rights. For all those reasons, I am very glad to support this.

The noble Lord, Lord Alli, has described me in the past as a lone ranger, but I was not sure that that was a compliment. I sit among my Liberal Democrat tribe not as a lone ranger; we are full of support for that team. I should say, though others will also say it from these Benches, that we are very proud of the fact that we were the first to think of civil partnership, to do civil partnership in a Private Member’s Bill and then to support the admirable Equality Act, so I do not think that I am a lone ranger. Anyhow, I do not watch cowboy films because I am too frightened of what will happen to the horses of the Indians.

I join in the tributes to the Minister and her extremely skilled team. Part of that team was responsible for the Equality Act 2010, which I have described as the best civil rights legislation in the world, and that I believe to be the case. The Minister has had to deal with the Bill in difficult circumstances; there are some in the House who are strongly opposed to it. However, the way in which amendments have been considered and debated across the House honestly and transparently has been extremely important, and I have learnt a great deal from listening to those debates.

I joined the House 20 years ago and I can tell those who are a bit younger that it would have been quite inconceivable for the House to have been able to approve this measure then. It would have been fairly impossible 15 years ago. What has changed for the better has been the modernisation of this House through appointments, and I pay tribute to the previous Government for the appointments that they made that I think have secured a House that is truly countermajoritarian and truly concerned with individual rights and with protecting minorities against the abuse of powers by the tyranny of the majority.

Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill

Debate between Lord Alli and Lord Lester of Herne Hill

Monday 8th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alli]

I understand the point the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Crosby, is making, but it undermines her argument when she and the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, seek to rubbish the national panel for registration and the opinions it gave and question the core of what registrars are saying. They are saying that they do not want this.

In Committee, I said that we have to divide church and state, and this is the other side of the coin. If the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Crosby, wants me to accept what she just said, would she accept that the church has made it very clear that it wants an absolute opt-out? It has insisted, quite rightly, and I am happy that it has done so, that any individual priest or cleric, no matter how strong their belief in same-sex marriage, should not be allowed to opt in until the religious organisation has agreed. There is a blanket exemption, so if I were a priest—the Bishop of Salisbury—and I deeply believed that I should be allowed to marry gay couples, why could I not opt in? There is a blanket ban from the churches. Individual opt-in and opt-out are not on the table. The churches themselves ruled it out at the beginning of this process. No priest can opt in; no registrar can opt out. If we accept the case for religious organisations barring individuals from opting in, we, too, must accept the case for civil registrars not being able to opt out. We have discussed this issue at length; we need to resolve it today.

[Lord Lester of Herne Hill]

My Lords, I cannot remember whether the Race Relations Act 1976 had already come into force when I got married 41 years ago in the Brixton register office. However, suppose that that Act had not come into force at that time. In Brixton, there are a lot of black people. If I had wanted to marry a black person and we turned up at the Brixton register office, where the registrar looked at us and said, “I’m very sorry, but I have a conscientious objection to mixed marriages. I don’t wish in any way to undermine you, but I just can’t do this”, that would be impermissible. A public servant who is performing statutory duties must not discriminate on any forbidden grounds.

Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill

Debate between Lord Alli and Lord Lester of Herne Hill

Wednesday 19th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lester of Herne Hill]

My Lords, I am a lapsed humanist. When I was at Cambridge I was a member of the most privileged club which was the Cambridge Humanists and I lapsed because it was too religious. My most memorable experience was asking EM Forster to give a lecture. He said he would give a lecture on whether Jesus had a sense of humour. I said, “That is a splendid subject”. I was just thinking that now you could not give a lecture like that. You could give one on whether God had a sense of humour. I am not sure you could give one on whether the Prophet had a sense of humour. But certainly the proposition at the time was very interesting in Cambridge.

I completely agree with the speeches in favour of these amendments for all the reasons that have been given. One further reason why I am in favour is because both the Equality Act and Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights recognise the rights not only of those of religious belief but also of those of no belief, and the Strasbourg Court has repeatedly explained that in a plural society agnostics, atheists and non-believers have as much right as believers of all kinds to equality of treatment. I have no doubt that there is inequality of treatment at the moment between humanists as a belief system and others. If you look at those registered as religions, they include, for example, theosophists. It is very difficult to distinguish between a theosophist and a humanist except that one believes in God and the other does not. And Buddhists and Jainists are registered but they are not theistic religions. I believe that, in terms of equality and common sense, we must move on this, and not only because my party thinks so.

My noble friend Lord Deben said that unlike the United States we have orderly systems in this country when we legislate and I am a bit concerned that in the other place they do not seem to take Long Titles seriously. I cannot imagine that these amendments would have slipped through if this legislation had been introduced into this House because, as the Long Title says, the Bill is to make provision,

“for the marriage of same sex couples in England and Wales, about gender change by married persons”,

et cetera. It says nothing at all about the rights of humanists or anybody else. Therefore, being boring about it, this falls completely outside the purpose of this Bill. I do not want to do anything to jeopardise the coming into force of this Bill but the poor old British Humanist Association has already gone through hoops to get to the position we are in. Originally, it tabled amendments just for humanists and then the Attorney-General said, “That is discriminatory”. It quite rightly changed the amendments to include all belief systems and now I am saying that this is not an appropriate vehicle for doing so.

It seems to me that there must be movement on this and if this Bill is not to be the vehicle, then either there has to be a Private Member’s Bill with government support on this separate issue to comply with Article 9 and 14 rights or some kind of inquiry leading to action. Noble Lords—the noble Lord, Lord Alli, in particular—will recall that we had similar problems when we introduced the concept of religious discrimination but did not include discrimination based on sexual orientation. He, with my support, found an ingenious way round that with a regulation power which enabled us to deal with homosexuality as well as with religion. Although that may not be the right way forward here, the Government need to be imaginative and think of ways of giving effect to the object of these amendments without being able to support them in this Bill.

[Lord Alli]

My Lords, I am not a humanist; I am afraid I am a closet believer in God. But I wanted to add my support to the legislation for humanist marriage and the inclusion of this amendment in the Bill. The Bill is about equal marriage, and allowing fellow citizens to conduct their own legally recognised weddings within their own framework of humanist beliefs seems to me to be a proposal that we should support.

I also believe that there is popular support for this proposal. I suspect the other place was minded to move forward with this but the Attorney-General’s advice at the last minute that the amendments as drafted would breach the European convention and put the quadruple lock at risk meant that there was insufficient time to deal with this. As with so many other issues, the ball is now in our court. I understand that these amendments have been changed to address the issues raised by the Attorney-General and I have seen and even read the advice from Matrix Chambers to support that case. There is huge support for this in my own party, in the Liberal Democrats and on the Cross Benches. I think that this House is minded to pass this and would like the Government to find a way to make this happen. The Government should put their best minds together to see whether we can get these amendments through. On behalf of those who have worked in this area for many years, waiting for a Bill to come along that will allow this to happen, I ask the Minister to look carefully at this.

Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill

Debate between Lord Alli and Lord Lester of Herne Hill

Monday 17th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lester of Herne Hill]

Is that quite right? The amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Dear, states:

“Nothing in this Act takes away the right of a man and woman to enter a traditional marriage”.

Nothing in the Bill takes away that right. It is not a question of one right trumping another. The rights of the traditionalists are protected completely under the Bill, and the rights of gay people are also protected.

[Lord Alli]

Amendment 9, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Dear, would create a separate register—so there is a difference in the noble Lord’s amendment, which would create a new category of marriage. More broadly on the noble Lord’s point, I contend that we have to consider the emotional response of the communities involved. The issue cannot be gauged simply by the words in the Act. I argue very strongly that it is not acceptable to have a differentiation in wording or name between different types of marriage. That would be exacerbated outside this Chamber the moment the legislation went through.