Succession to the Crown Bill

Lord Carlile of Berriew Excerpts

Thursday 14th February 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Carlile of Berriew]

My Lords, I declare an interest as father and stepfather of five admirable females, each of whom tends to treat me graciously as a kind of loyal subject.

The Bill is timely. It seeks to ensure the stability and the acceptable continuity of the realm. I happen to be, like a number of other Members of your Lordships’ House, the first member of my family ever born in the United Kingdom. My father could have gone to the United Kingdom, the United States of America or possibly elsewhere. He was born in 1904, and from an early age was a fervent Anglophile. Part of what brought him here, as he told me many times, was the sense of historical continuity given by the Crown. The Bill and the negotiations that have preceded it are a mark of the willingness of the Crown to embrace modern values and diversity in society, particularly relating to the role of women.

I will raise four points with my noble friend the Minister, of which he has had advance notice. I acknowledge the part played in these by a brilliant and unusual constitutional lawyer called Graham McBain, who has written copiously and persuasively about this subject and about redundant statutes. Although I will not be moving amendments at later stages of the Bill, as it would be inappropriate on this Bill, these are anomalies which the Government should consider.

The first relates to the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829. The Government have remembered in the Bill to amend the Regency Act 1937 so that a person who fails to obtain the consent of the Queen to their marriage cannot be regent. This is reasonable. The Regency Act also prevents a Catholic from being regent by reference to the Act of Settlement 1700. However, the Bill provides that the Act of Settlement is now subject to the Bill. The result is quite simple: a Catholic can now be regent.

Except that it is not quite so simple, because the Government appear to have forgotten another Act of Parliament: the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829. It, too, prevents a Catholic from being regent. By not repealing the 1829 Act, we will have one Act that allows a Catholic to be regent, and one that does not. I do not know if anyone will brief me to apply for judicial review if we ever have a Catholic regent, but it seems that this is the sort of issue that ought to be tidied up.

[Lord Deben]

As I understand it, the regent is not Supreme Governor of the Church of England, which rather suggests that the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, was right to suggest that there ought to be some simple side-stepping of this to get over the whole problem. Would my noble friend not agree?

[Lord Carlile of Berriew]

I respectfully agree with my noble friend and the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, on this point.

My second point, which I was going to make in greater detail but will not, has already been made by my noble friend Lord Lang about consent to marriage and whether six is an adequate number. I would have taken the opposite view—that six is too large a number—on an entirely different point of principle. However, we should be able to debate this issue and determine it in relation to this Bill. It is a right in modern times for a man and a woman to marry whom they wish. Indeed, according to my rather dog-eared copy, the European Convention on Human Rights did not design that right but it makes clear that that right exists, not just in the United Kingdom but throughout the countries of the Council of Europe.

To prevent people from marrying whom they wish is quite an intervention in their human rights. To extend it to as many as six people is to extend it too far. I say to my noble friend Lord Lang that we live in a different era from the one in which Queen Victoria became the monarch. I have my doubts as to whether what happened then could happen now, or whether it is in the realms of reality given the welcome size of our modern Royal Family.

Thirdly, I suspect that the Government may have forgotten another law. Even before the Royal Marriages Act 1772, the sovereign had a right, and exercised it, not under statute but under the common law, to prevent marriages of other members of the Royal Family—for example, to prevent a dowager Queen from remarrying. It is possible that that right still applies and that, under the common law, the sovereign could enforce his or her consent in the case of the marriages of brothers, sisters, cousins et cetera. Therefore, I respectfully suggest to my noble friend the Minister that any anomaly in the common law should be abolished in this Bill so that we do not have another unforeseen problem.

My fourth point arises mainly from the fact that I was brought up in east Lancashire in the county palatine, where at every dinner I would be shocked if I did not hear the loyal toast made to the Queen, the Duke of Lancaster. Of course, that is a sovereign’s title, but there are other titles which the sovereign’s eldest child inherits, which already have been mentioned by my noble friend Lord Trefgarne. I would have drawn particular attention to the Duchy of Cornwall and, as someone who represented a constituency in mid-Wales, the earldom of Merionethshire, which is regarded with great value in that beautiful, if hard to access, part of rural Wales.

If His Royal Highness Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge have a girl, she will, thanks to the Bill, be able to become Queen. However, she cannot as of right become Duchess of Cornwall or Countess of Merionethshire. That seems to me to be an anomaly. I understand why the Government do not want to get involved in this Bill and in the hereditary peerage at large—that is a private grief enjoyed by a number of my noble friends in this House into which I would not wish to interfere. But surely we could engage in titles that belong to the heir to the Throne. In that, I support my noble friend Lord Trefgarne.

I raise these issues because, as I was thinking about it, I realised that we are unlikely to return to this subject for a few hundred years. That may be a blink in the evolution of your Lordships’ House—I would add “thank heavens” from my personal position rather than from my political position—but if it is to be a few hundred years before we return to this subject, should we not deal with it now? Should we not take into account these and other difficulties that might arise, sort them out and iron them out?

Finally, I am sure that your Lordships’ House would wish to join me in offering our warmest good wishes for the challenges of parenthood for the royal couple.