Merchant Shipping (Homosexual Conduct) Bill

Jacob Rees-Mogg Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons
Friday 20th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend the Member for Spelthorne (Kwasi Kwarteng) led me astray, Mr Deputy Speaker, and you are quite rightly not allowing him to do that. I shall see him later to discuss Kempton Park’s closure.

My serious point is that this matter could have been dealt with many years ago if the 2010 Act had been scrutinised properly. The omission from that Act has meant that we have needed an entirely new Bill simply to correct a failure, and that is a great shame. The Equality Act 2010 (Work on Ships and Hovercraft) Regulations 2011 appear to be the final confirmation that this Bill is not going to change anything, because those regulations are the key piece of legislation relating to the 2010 Act that makes the original provisions redundant. Those regulations were made on 18 July 2011 and came into force on 1 August 2011.

I know that other Members wish to speak, so in the interests of time, Mr Deputy Speaker, I will not test your patience any further by reading out the part of the regulations that, in effect, makes the 1994 Act provisions redundant. They deal with the application of

“Part 5 of the Act to seafarers working wholly or partly in Great Britain and adjacent waters”

and make it clear that the 2010 Act does apply to seafarers and to ships working in this environment, so the position is clear. The regulations also come with an interpretation, which makes it clear that the 2010 Act is the Act that applies, goes through what is meant by a “United Kingdom ship” and a “United Kingdom water”, and sets out the legal relationship of a seafarer’s employment within the country.

The regulations therefore did make the position clear, but my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes South made the pertinent point that somebody who reads the 1994 Act might not know about the 2011 regulations. How many people in here know about the Equality Act 2010 (Work on Ships and Hovercraft) Regulations 2011? It is our job to deal with these things, but how many of us know about those regulations? How on earth can we expect the general public, who might well have been made aware of the law that was in place, to have known that it was superseded by the 2011 regulations? For that reason—normally I might have been tempted to say that the Bill is a solution looking for a problem, and therefore not necessary—I think that the Bill serves a useful purpose.

[Mr Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)]

Is it not further sensible to bring forward this Bill because the courts have watered down the understanding of implied repeal and built up a hierarchy of legislation? Therefore, as the principle of implied repeal has been weakened, it is more important that the legislation that we pass is clear.

[Philip Davies]

I hope that my hon. Friend will be able to give the House the benefit of more detail about his good point in a speech—he knows more about it than I do. I know full well that he will correct me if and when I am wrong, but my understanding is that constitutional legislation will always take precedence and, presumably, anything that is not constitutional that came earlier will be superseded by something that came later. He seems to be indicating that that is not necessarily the case, so perhaps he would like to have another bite of the cherry to inform us better.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

The historical understanding was quite clear: any subsequent Act implicitly repealed a previous one. In recent years, however, the courts have developed, particularly in relation to the European Union, an understanding of a hierarchy of legislation. They have decided what are and what are not constitutional Acts. We do not list Acts as constitutional and non-constitutional—all Acts that we pass are of the same level—so this is just about creating certainty.

[Philip Davies]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who makes a very good point. The Bill therefore does not just have the advantage of being symbolic and removing something from the statute book that I feel should not have been there in the first place, as he makes a good case for saying why it might well have a practical application in law, too. It certainly removes any doubt about the situation—we can all agree on that—which has to be a good thing.

Finally—I do not want to test the patience of the House too much—let me just raise the concern relating to historical cases. During the debates on the Armed Forces Bill, people raised the issue of historical cases in which individuals had been treated unfairly under the 1994 Act and asked whether something could be done. This touches on the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Calder Valley when he said that we cannot really do anything about what happened in the past, and what we can affect is what happens now and in the future. Although I wholeheartedly agree with the repeal of the 1994 provisions, I wish to raise a note of caution about the pardoning of historical cases. A private Member’s Bill has been introduced about the whole issue of pardons for those convicted for homosexuality in the past. I am not going to get sidetracked down that road—