Succession to the Crown Bill

Gerald Howarth Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd January 2013 Commons Chamber

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

May I answer the question? The Sovereign Grant Act 2010 makes a very important change that touches on the succession to the Crown as far as the Duchy of Cornwall is concerned. As the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) may know, the convention is that the male heir to the throne has the title of Duchy of Cornwall conferred on him, but a female heir to the throne does not. The Bill does not change that situation, but the provisions of the Sovereign Grant Act mean that the financial support provided via the Duchy of Cornwall can, in future, be provided to female heirs to the throne as well. To that extent, there is a link between this very tightly circumscribed Bill and the provisions of the Sovereign Grant Act.

The drafting of the Bill has been a long and careful process. I pay special tribute to Rebecca Kitteridge, New Zealand’s Cabinet Secretary, for her extraordinary work in making sure that these proposals can be effected across the Commonwealth realms. Agreeing constitutional change for 16 states, each with its own Government and legislature, is clearly a challenge. From the point at which the realms backed the reforms in principle in 2011, it took one year and two months to get full agreement in writing from everyone. In a phenomenal coincidence—one that I know is hard to believe—we received the final consent just hours before the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge announced that they are expecting a baby.

[Sir Gerald Howarth (Aldershot) (Con)]

rose—

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

I will make a little more progress and then give way.

The palace has, of course, been actively involved in the process from the beginning, and both the Church of England and the Catholic Church have been kept informed throughout.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for putting that on the record. Later in my remarks I will repeat verbatim the form that that support from the Church of England took.

[Sir Gerald Howarth]

On the Commonwealth, the Deputy Prime Minister said that the 16 realms had given their approval just prior to the announcement of the royal pregnancy. However, that approval was still subject, was it not, to parliamentary endorsement in each of those countries? Therefore, will the Bill come into effect only once the relevant legislation has been enacted in all those countries? If so, when does he expect that that might happen?

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

My understanding is that it needs to come into force in all the realms. Interestingly, two of the realms, Jamaica and Papua New Guinea, do not, for their own reasons, need to go through the full legislative process. That is partly why we are so keen to keep the precision of the terms of the Bill and the narrowness of its scope, such that it can be easily adopted and digested under all the different parliamentary and legislative conventions that exist in the 16 Commonwealth realms. We now have a very short Bill of five clauses and a schedule. I urge the House to bear it in mind that, as I have explained, the Bill must be kept narrow in order to be adopted across all 16 Commonwealth realms.

I have heard it suggested that we should use the Bill to tackle the gender bias in hereditary titles whereby titles and the benefits that come with them leapfrog eldest daughters and are handed down to younger sons, or can be lost entirely when there is no male heir. Personally, I am sympathetic to that reform and can see why this seems like the natural time to do it, but, for purely practical reasons, it cannot and will not be done in this Bill. Nor can we can use the Bill to mop up any other constitutional odds and ends. Put simply, it cannot be broadened to include UK-specific reforms, because they are not relevant to the realms of the Commonwealth.

Turning to the all-important so-called Catholic question, the coalition Government are seeking to remove the current ban on heirs to the throne marrying Catholics; or, as the current legislation says, rather insultingly, depending on one’s point of view, from “marrying a Papist”. That law is a reflection of the times in which it was written. It followed nearly two centuries of religious strife within England, Scotland and Ireland; the threat of conflict with Louis XIV’s France and other Catholic powers; and tension with Rome. It was an era when legal defences seemed vital against a dangerous threat from abroad.

That does not just apply to the royal accession—in the 40 years after the Glorious Revolution a whole range of restrictions were put in place. Catholics could not vote, they were excluded from all professions and public offices and they could not go to university, could not teach, could not be the guardian of a child, could not buy land with a lease of more than 31 years and could not own a horse worth more than £5. Edmund Burke called the laws

“well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and degradation of a people…as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man.”

Many of the laws were repealed relatively quickly. The ban on owning land was repealed in 1778 and that on voting and serving in the legal profession in 1793. By the time the ban on Catholics from serving in this House as MPs and from serving as judges was lifted in 1829, most of the main restrictions were gone.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Gerald Howarth (Aldershot) (Con)]

This has been a fantastically interesting debate and I am sorry that there has not been a greater attendance in the House. Let me draw the House’s attention to the following, which the House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution said in 2011:

“The fundamental nature of our constitution means that it should be changed only with due care and consideration”.

We have heard this afternoon, particularly from my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg), about how little the Government have taken into account the potential unforeseen consequences that could arise from this measure, which has been described by Andrew Roberts in The Daily Telegraph as “blithely fiddling” with the constitution.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex (Nicholas Soames) made an incredibly powerful speech on the importance of the constitution, the Crown and all the traditions, eccentricities and contradictions that are so much part and parcel of 1,000 years of this nation’s history and which we tinker with at our peril. The hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) rightly made the important point that once we start unpicking the thread, we never know where it is going to end. I am pleased to be able to agree with him on that, if not on everything else. The constitution is incredibly important, which is why we should have more time to debate this measure.

My second point is that the idea that the European Court of Human Rights should have any say in our deliberations on this matter is so fatuous and offensive that it should be struck out completely—how dare it ever seek to interfere with what we discuss on these matters in this House.

My third point relates to the question of female succession. I had the privilege of serving as Parliamentary Private Secretary to the greatest Prime Minister since the grandfather of my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex. I refer to the noble Baroness Thatcher, to whom I am utterly and irredeemably devoted. She was the salvation of the nation, and so I cannot argue against the idea that female succession is in the interests of the nation—Margaret Thatcher clearly proved that it is. Our sovereign has also done this country astonishingly good service. I do not believe that any sovereign has so lived up to their coronation oath as Her Majesty the Queen, and this nation is beginning to understand the contribution that she has made to the stability of this nation. That confirms everything that my right hon. Friend said.

My real problem is with the risk to the established Church that arises from the Bill. I believe that the established Church and the Crown are indissolubly linked. We will be allowing the heir to the throne to marry a Catholic and, as my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset has pointed out, under the rules of the Catholic Church the children have to be brought up in the Catholic faith. There would therefore arise a potential conflict of interest in the mind of that person as to which was going to command their loyalty—their loyalty to their faith or their loyalty to the Crown. The issue has not been properly examined, and I support amendment 16, tabled by the hon. Member for North Antrim (Ian Paisley), which would spell it out and make things crystal clear—it is not anti-Catholic.

I say to my hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset (Richard Drax) that my mother wrote a book called “A Plain Man’s Guide to the Glorious Revolution, 1688”. It was on sale in this place and it sold many copies. The point my mother always made was about how Catholicism was seen in the 17th century. People were not prejudiced against it; they feared it, because it was seen as owing allegiance beyond these islands. That was why Catholicism represented a threat; it is rather like how some of us see the European Union today or how some of us saw communism in the latter part of the 20th century. To measure the Catholicism of those times against our views today is a mistake; we should put it in its historical context. I salute my hon. Friend and his ancestors for what they did.

There are serious issues that we need to consider. We need to address the question of what happens if the heir to the throne were to marry a Muslim or a Hindu. What would that do to the United Kingdom?

[Daniel Kawczynski]

rose—

[Sir Gerald Howarth]

I will not give way because the Minister needs to wind up the debate.

All the points made in this House today by my hon. Friends and Members of all parties have illustrated that we should have had much more time to discuss this Bill on the Floor of the House.