Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill

Debate between Lord Fowler and Baroness O'Loan

Monday 24th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fowler]

Hang on! The noble Lord spoke for 20 minutes. I have spoken for one, so he might retain a little patience.

We are being asked to support a referendum in two years’ time—two years after both Houses on a free vote have overwhelmingly voted in favour of the legislation. That is the fact of the matter. All the arguments put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Anderson—

[Baroness O'Loan]

My Lords—

[Lord Fowler]

I shall give way in a moment. All the arguments put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, were made on Second Reading. He may not like it but they were rejected massively and overwhelmingly in both Houses of Parliament. I give way to the noble Baroness.

[Baroness O’Loan]

That is most gracious of the noble Lord. I would like to suggest that perhaps the vote on Second Reading in this House was not an overwhelming endorsement. There was rather a feeling in this House that the Bill should be given a Second Reading, the other place having voted so overwhelmingly in favour of it. It was a vote in favour of Second Reading rather than anything else, and I do not think that it is quite accurate to portray it as anything else.

[Lord Fowler]

My Lords, I do not think that the noble Baroness or anyone else has the right to keep on going back to the votes and saying, “Although we lost by two to one, actually it really was not right. They should have taken this into account and that into account”. The fact is that those results were massive and, in my opinion, almost unprecedented for a free vote.

The only point I want to make in what is intended to be a short speech is that all the arguments we have heard so far have been put before and have been rejected. I am sorry to put it in that way—

[Baroness O'Loan]

My Lords—

[Lord Fowler]

If the noble Baroness does not mind, I am not going to give way again.

I do not think that we can or should try to double-guess what is taking place in the other place, or the process that it goes by, or the way it comes to a vote. We will get into a terrible mess if we do that. Not surprisingly, this proposal is going to be seen as a wrecking amendment in the hope, I presume, that it can be defeated when it comes to a referendum. I leave aside the dispute about opinion polls, although every poll I have seen actually appears to suggest that there is a healthy majority in favour of this proposition and not the other way around.

My major reservation is this—it is a point that was touched on by the noble Baroness—concerns the role of this House. We do valuable work checking and improving legislation. What we do not do is stand in the way of legislation so clearly passed by the other place and, incidentally, endorsed in this House. That is what the debate about the future of the House of Lords was all about: what our place was. It was not a sort of double-guessing on major things that come from the House of Commons. I do not think we can possibly defer for two years a piece of legislation that has been—I say it again—overwhelmingly passed by both Houses. We would not dream of doing that for any other legislation I can think of, saying that we would have a referendum in two years’ time, although it has been passed in this way. I do not think that we should do it now. In this case, the proposition of a referendum is misapplied and wrong.