Succession to the Crown Bill

Angus Brendan MacNeil Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr MacNeil]

It occurs to me that, together with the need to style Queen Elizabeth as Queen Elizabeth II, the obsession with whether or not the monarch is Catholic only really applies in England—it does not seem to apply to Wales or Scotland, and it certainly does not apply to the other realms. It is so important at the moment because the monarchy resides within England, which colours or clouds the rest of the debate. I wonder whether the hon. Gentleman agrees.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

That is an interesting point. I am sure that Her Majesty’s other realms will consider whether or not the whole of clause 2 is a matter of great concern to them, because Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the other realms do not have established Churches and so need not worry whether or not the sovereign is married to a Catholic. I accept the hon. Gentleman’s point that it is essentially a matter of concern in so far as Her Majesty is the Queen of England, rather than Queen of the other territories.

My amendment is very narrow. Clause 2(2) reads as follows:

“Subsection (1) applies in relation to marriages occurring before the time of the coming into force of this section where the person concerned is alive at that time”.

Who does that mean? It could mean a person who was excluded from the succession many years ago as a result of marrying a Catholic and who happens to be alive at the time the Act comes into force. Therefore, we might find that we will need to rearrange the whole succession because the clause is not clear about who that person is. I think that the Government’s intention is that that is the person who contracted the marriage to a Catholic. To put a name to it, we are talking about someone such as His Royal Highness Prince Michael of Kent.

[Mr MacNeil]

Once it has been established who is first, second and third in line to the throne, the line of succession is in many ways academic. I am sure that whoever was 10th or 20th in line was not considered much in the time of Robert the Bruce, Edward I or whoever happened to be the monarch in these islands at the time. It is purely an academic matter to be discussed at many dinner tables across the land. I wonder what the hon. Gentleman’s opinion is.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

That is an interesting thought, but I think that it is important that the line of succession should be clear and in no doubt. I think that legislation relating to the succession to the Crown needs to be unambiguous and not allow potential risks to come in because of a mistake in the drafting. We want to know who our sovereign will be, to whom we owe loyalty and all such things, and that might not be possible if we do not know the line of succession.

It is also worth bearing in mind that the succession can leap about. We have been fortunate enough in recent generations to have had a very clear succession and large royal families, but we can sometimes get down to a very small number of heirs, and we see that ordinary hereditary titles can sometimes go to very remote cousins, so who is in line to the throne is very important.

Obviously, there are other amendments that I have tabled. I have concerns about the clause as a whole and whether it should stand part of the Bill—

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[Miss Smith]

I am glad that the hon. Gentleman asked that question again because there was unfortunately little time to answer it in detail when winding up the Second Reading debate. It might be worth looking back at some precedents. The point about whether, under clause 3, the monarch would be advised by Ministers was also raised on Second Reading. I hope you will forgive me, Mr Bone, if I deal a little with clause 3 in this debate. In 1967, when there was a question about the marriage—in that case, marriage following a divorce—of a member of the royal family, the then Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, devised a formula that ran along these lines: “The Cabinet has advised the Queen to give her consent and Her Majesty has signified her intention to do so.” That provides an insight into how such advice to the monarch might operate. We have had many debates, connected to this topic and more widely in the media, about advice to and from the monarch and the publication of such correspondence, and I will not stray on to that territory now. However, it should be perfectly reasonable and practical to imagine that there would be such advice to the monarch.

The hon. Gentleman asks specifically whether that would include withholding consent to marriage because the person is a Catholic. I will not answer that today because, for a range of reasons, there should be space within such advice with regard to consent. As I explained at the end of Second Reading, it is not unreasonable to have the notion of consent to marriage. After all, we are dealing with those who may become Head of State in due course, so there is a matter of public interest. I hope that that begins to provide an answer to the hon. Gentleman.

[Mr MacNeil]

If I recall correctly, the Minister mentioned the monarch being Protestant. Does she mean Church of England, or could the monarch be a member of any other Protestant Church?

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[Sir Alan Beith]

I am glad to be under your chairmanship, Mr Bone, as we discuss the details of this provision. Clause 2 is an important clause, but it raises complications and difficulties, to which hon. Members of all parties have been right to draw attention in order to check whether we are getting this right and achieving the objective.

We are in a different world from that in which the legislation that the Bill will change was created. As hon. Members have said, that was a time when Catholicism represented an actual political threat to the United Kingdom, because of the behaviour of some Catholic powers in Europe. We are long past that era now—indeed, we are in an era in which Catholics and Protestants are aware that they have more things in common—some very important things in common—than they have matters of difference, and an era in which there are many mixed marriages between Catholics and Protestants. We should recognise that people find ways of accommodating and even sharing in the benefits of both approaches to the Christian faith.

A further fact that we cannot simply cast aside is that we have a long national tradition associated with a Protestant monarchy and an established Protestant Church in England—the Church of England—which has its own long and complex history, including its own Catholic elements. We have a long-established situation in Scotland, dating from the Union of the Crowns, whereby the monarch is expected to uphold the position of a national Presbyterian Church in Scotland and to conform to it and attend its services when in Scotland. Protestantism is also a resonant feature of life in Wales and Northern Ireland, as, indeed, is Catholicism in both places. All that is part of our history and we cannot throw it lightly aside.

[Mr MacNeil]

The right hon. Gentleman touches on the past. It strikes me that perhaps the great worry in the past was not theological as much as it was about the imperialist ambitions of neighbouring nations—France, probably, and Spain to an extent.

[Sir Alan Beith]

The hon. Gentleman is right to say that that is at the root of the bars and prohibitions that we are discussing now. There were of course strongly felt theological differences, and there was a time when to be a Member of this House, a person had to swear an oath against transubstantiation and the Pope’s ability to relieve them of any obligations resulting from falsely swearing such an oath. It was very stringent. Later, and rightly, it was changed.

The hon. Gentleman comes from an island with an extraordinary and honourable tradition of adherence to the Roman Catholic faith, without a break, since before the Reformation. It is an unusual part of the British Isles in that respect. Where he lives. there has always been diversity in these matters.

[Mr MacNeil]

The right hon. Gentleman mentions the geography and history of my constituency, and he is correct that the island that I happen to be from has that Catholic tradition associated with it. The recent census showed that the southern part of the Hebrides had the most Catholic areas in Scotland, but also that the most Protestant areas in Scotland were in my constituency, in Lewis, Harris and North Uist in the northern isles. It is interesting to note that there has never been any religious tension between the two at all.

[Sir Alan Beith]

The two versions of Christianity live side by side remarkably happily in the Western Isles.

The purpose of the Bill is not to change the Protestant succession, as the Minister has made clear. If it were, we would have to spend a lot longer on it considering many more detailed and complicated clauses, and there would be many more concerns to deal with. Nor will it disestablish the Church of England—it retains the monarch’s position as Supreme Governor of the Church of England—or change the situation in Scotland, where the monarch will continue to be expected to be a loyal supporter of the Church of Scotland and its work, as the Queen notably is, while having good relations with the other religious communities in Scotland.

The problem that arises is the one that I refer to as the early age problem. A decision to bring up a child of such a marriage as a Roman Catholic, whether taken entirely voluntarily or under the provisions of some Roman Catholic law, would result in that child being debarred from taking up the Crown unless they renounced the faith in which they had been brought up. That is perfectly possible, as was mentioned earlier, but it is quite a limitation to place upon a child.

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[Mark Durkan]

I want to take up the Minister’s point that this clause removes a line of discrimination from law. That is clearly what it does—up to a point. It removes a blatant bit of sectarian discrimination that would prevent somebody from remaining in the line of succession if they married a Roman Catholic. However, as we have heard, it still requires us all to subscribe to the notion that the Crown must remain Protestant and that somebody can only be Head of State in the United Kingdom on the basis of one particular faith. That is a sectarian provision.

[Mr MacNeil]

For clarity, it is more than the Crown must remain Protestant; the Crown must remain Church of England. If we are talking about the personality of the monarch’s faith, surely when the monarch crosses a border or moves across the sea, his or her religion does not change.

[Mark Durkan]

Well in some respects, as I understand from the current debate, the sovereign’s religion does change when they cross a border. The Church with which they are deemed to be in communion changes when the sovereign crosses the border from the Church of England to the Church of Scotland, not the Episcopal Church in Scotland. That is just from listening to this debate. We are getting into areas that I know little about and do not particularly want to know a lot about. Some of this debate reminds me of the old advert for Baxters soup: “The difference is in the thickness.”

Yes, obviously there is an emphasis on communion with the Church of England because of the role of the Crown and the governorship of that Church, but there is also the Protestant line of succession, as the Minister has said.

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[Mr MacNeil]

I will try not to be too thick about this. Given what the hon. Gentleman has said, would he be happier if the terms were “must be Church of England” rather than “cannot be a Catholic”? To put a political dimension on the matter, as a Scottish nationalist and a monarchist, I would be quite happy to share a monarchy with England if the monarch had to be Church of England. That would be no problem for me.