Succession to the Crown Bill

Jim Cunningham Excerpts

Monday 28th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I am in complete agreement with my right hon. Friend. The Act of Settlement deems somebody who has been a Catholic for a minute to be dead in terms of the succession, and it passes over them as if they were dead. Once we allow the marriage of a Catholic into the line of succession to the throne, that provision makes absolutely no sense. We could be arguing that at the point of a Catholic baptism, the child was a Catholic even though it had given no personal agreement to its religion and should be disbarred from the throne.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

What does the hon. Gentleman have to say about confirmation?

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

The hon. Gentleman is right that a child who decided to be confirmed as a Catholic would be excluded, but it is perfectly possible, not least because our Churches are coming closer together, for somebody to be confirmed a Catholic at the age of 12 or 13 but to decide on finding at the age of 23 that the throne was about to be offered to him that he might prefer to be an Anglican. We need to be clear about when people are excluded, so that if an heir to the throne decided that the religious bar meant that becoming King of England was worth changing religion for, the result would be clear and decisive. We do not want the monarchy to pass from one generation to the next only for us to have to go to court to work out who our sovereign will be based on the wording of a 1701 Act of Parliament.