Julian Huppert
Main Page: Julian Huppert (Liberal Democrat - Cambridge)Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill
Julian Huppert Excerpts
Mr Burrowes
No. The hon. Gentleman and I were members of the Committee, where we had a chance to have our say. I will not give way, because I want people to be able to have their say. That is the point of this debate. [Hon. Members: “Give way!] Opposition Members are calling for me to give way, but I am not sure whether they will be allowed to exercise their conscience when it comes to voting on the Bill, or whether they are even free to get involved in this debate. They will be whipped into voting against me whatever I say or think, so I am not sure whether it is worth listening to them at this precise moment.
New clauses 4, 5 and 6 and amendment 50 seek to protect freedom of speech, which, along with freedom of conscience, we should all cherish dearly. We should cherish the fact that we are able to stand up and make our points, whether they be for or against the Bill’s principles, and that we can all—Liberal Democrats and Conservatives can, at least—exercise our conscience on the amendments. We are concerned about constituents who will not be able to do that as easily, so we need to ensure that the Bill has clarity.
The Bill has provoked undoubtedly strong feelings across the country. People from all strands and strata of society have deeply held, carefully considered and, indeed, principled views. Some have tried to say that this is an issue for the young, not the old, and for metropolitan, not rural areas, but people—whether they are young or old, or deeply religious or assertively secular—have real concerns. Polls come up with a different figure for the numbers for or against, depending on the question asked. The nation is as divided as the Conservative parliamentary party on this issue. Indeed, we have picked an issue on which our division shows that we are very much in touch with the nation.
At the very least, we need to ensure that we properly protect those who do not agree with the way in which the state wants to redefine marriage. This Bill is undoubtedly a divisive measure, but it is meant to be permissive. However, due to a lack of attention or time, it does not provide against causing further division and isolation or against ostracising the millions out there who are passionately against the principle of the Bill.
This country has a great and honourable tradition—a civilised and progressive belief that we do not censor or ostracise those who hold different views from our own. Indeed, we will defend that right however much we might disagree with those views. The new clauses ask the House a basic and reasonable question: will we stand firm in that tradition? Will we stand with the greats of our political heritage to defend the whole breadth of society, or will we consider only our own particular views, needs and rights? Tomorrow we will gather again to debate the Bill’s Third Reading and we will divide in our usual way to vote on whether we agree with its very principle. We need to ensure that we stand together, despite the Labour Whip, and provide clarity.
The Bill Committee heard a lot of evidence and I am not sure whether everyone has had the chance to pore over the minutiae of our deliberations. We heard from a solicitor called Mark Jones, who represents a number of campaigners whose beliefs are being trumped by equality. When asked about freedom of speech, he replied that the Bill will have an impact
“anywhere where there is a conversation.”––[Official Report, Marriage (Same Sex Marriage) Public Bill Committee, 14 February 2013; c. 161, Q417.]
I was reminded of that just three days ago—on Friday—when a street preacher in Cambridge was nearly arrested for arguing for the traditional view of marriage. A member of the public called the police and told the preacher:
“Anyone who believes in man/woman only marriage should be sent to jail. Equality overrides free speech”.
The street preacher was filmed on mobile phones and a small crowd declared that they had evidence to put him in jail. Two police officers duly arrived and were shown the evidence. A police officer listened intently to the preacher’s words. Thankfully, common sense prevailed and the police went away, but it was a close call and that was before the change to the law. [Interruption.] The Minister of State may well laugh, but if he saw somebody exercising their freedom of speech and experienced that chill factor, I hope that he would stand alongside them and defend their right. I am sure that he is as concerned as others. Amendment 50 aims to avoid the extraordinary situation of somebody being criminalised for exercising their right to support traditional marriage.
Dr Huppert
Is the hon. Gentleman actually saying that if a teacher believes in creationism, they should be allowed to teach it to pupils in their class? That is very different from a privately held belief.
Mr Leigh
I am afraid that my hon. Friend is deliberately trying to take me down a track completely out with what I am arguing about. I am not arguing in favour of creationism or against it; I am simply making the point that if someone has a profound religious belief—having read the Koran or the Bible—that marriage is between a man and a woman, and if they state that on Facebook, in the classroom or anywhere else, they should be protected. That is the profound and simple point. Let us not get dragged down various alleyways and byways, because we need to do something.
It is true that people talk about controversial issues in the workplace all the time, but I think that same-sex marriage is different. It seems to many of us that if someone dares to disagree with the new orthodoxy that gay marriage is the best thing since sliced bread, they are somehow breaking a new social taboo and doing something in their workplace, particularly in the public sector, that they should not be doing. Some people say that the new clause is not necessary, but it is, because, as we all know, the tenor of debate on same-sex marriage is often characterised, I am afraid—not here, but in the public marketplace; we have heard of cases in the past —by hectoring, bullying and name calling. Given that, as I have said, most decent people will do anything to avoid a scene or do anything that risks the police getting involved, it would have a chilling effect.
Maria Miller
I really do thank my hon. Friend for his intervention, because he has made my point for me. At this point in time, there is of course no independent impact assessment because the issues have not been looked at in the kind of detail that hon. Members would expect before legislation is enacted. I hope that I will be able to change my hon. Friend’s mind about pressing his new clause to a vote. I hope that he will see that we need to get more evidence on this issue.
Dr Huppert
My right hon. Friend is arguing that there is a cost to the state whenever people get married or enter into a civil partnership. Is this part of a new austerity drive in which she will try to persuade people not to get married or have a civil partnership so that we can save on the pensions bill? That does not seem to be a very sensible approach.
Maria Miller
My hon. Friend seems to be driving at the same issue—namely, that we do not have the necessary information to hand. I think that hon. Members expect us to legislate based on fact, not on supposition or hypothesis. Much of what has been said on this matter has not really been based on facts. He is right to suggest that we want to encourage people to get married, but at the moment we do not know the exact implications of the proposal to extend civil partnerships. I think we would need to amend other legislation, including the Civil Partnership Act and the Gender Recognition Act 2004, which show that it is not just in the area of pensions where we would need to look at making significant progress in our understanding of the impact, as it would apply across a number of different pieces of legislation. It would be wrong for us to take decisions today without first having done that work.
Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)
We were grateful to you, Mr Speaker, for accepting our manuscript amendment (a) to new clause 16 this morning.
Let me start by repeating what my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) made very clear in Committee: the Labour equalities team supports the principle of extending civil partnerships to opposite-sex couples. We recognise that it would provide equality before the law. It would also recognise the choice some opposite-sex couples want to make not to marry but none the less to formalise their relationship. As civil partnerships will rightly continue for gay and lesbian people under this legislation, it would ensure, too, that they are not perceived simply as some sort of residual arrangement pending everyone moving to same-sex marriage. We can expect that many existing civil partners will want their civil partnerships to continue; they will not want to regard the history of the past nine years as a history of second best.
Dr Huppert
Does the hon. Lady also agree that some people will still prefer to have a civil partnership now, even if marriage is available? This is not just about the history; there will be people who will still want a civil partnership in the future.
Kate Green
I entirely agree. There are many reasons why some couples may feel that the historical or religious connotations of marriage are not for them, but who none the less wish to make the public commitment to each other that gay and lesbian people already do through civil partnerships.
Sadly, Ministers have until now been reluctant to recognise that the position they have been taking—in effect, privileging marriage—has led to the situation we are in now. There are a number of concerns about moving forward to regularise opposite-sex civil partnerships, but there is a complete absence of analysis of, and evidence for, the concerns Ministers have raised. Yet we have been raising the issue of the genuine concerns about opposite-sex civil partnerships ever since the introduction of this Bill.
On the face of it, the anxieties highlighted by the Secretary of State today are not insignificant. On 14 May, her colleague the Pensions Minister, the hon. Member for Thornbury and Yate (Steve Webb), put a high potential price tag on the extension of civil partnerships to opposite-sex couples: the sum was between £3 billion and £4 billion. The Secretary of State has also suggested there may be international and devolution implications. The predicted costs involve some big and untested assumptions, however. We do not know how many opposite-sex civil partnerships will be formed. There is uncertainty about the number of public sector pension schemes that do not already allow a cohabiting partner to be a named recipient for survivor benefits. There is also uncertainty about the assertion that extending civil partnerships to opposite-sex couples will reopen the whole question of widowers’ pension entitlements. Following the Cockburn case, we might feel somewhat sceptical about that.
Nick Herbert
With the greatest respect to my hon. Friend and constituency neighbour—indeed, my constituent —for whom I have a lot of time, he cannot have it both ways. He suggested that the proposal would be a way of dealing with the £44 billion cost of family breakdown. If the impact is small and very few heterosexual people want to take up civil partnerships, it will have little impact on the cost of family breakdown. The answer is that he does not know, the Government do not know and the Opposition do not know, because the work has not been done.
I fully accept that some Members genuinely wish to support the amendment because they believe it would somehow provide an extension of equality, and that they would therefore do so for the best of intentions, but let us be clear: some Members are supporting this amendment for precisely the opposite reason. I do not include my hon. Friend in that. Some Members are breathing the word “equality” for the first time. It sticks in the craw of many of us to be lectured suddenly now about equality by Members who have been opposing this Bill and equality and every single measure that has come forward to promote equality in the first place, including civil partnerships.
Some of the Members who have put their name to this amendment and who intend to vote for it, proclaiming the need to ensure equality and symmetry, voted against the civil partnerships legislation in 2004. One of those Members described that civil partnerships legislation as a buggers’ muddle and thought that was a funny thing to say at the time. Suddenly, within less than a decade, almost no Member of this House will say that they did not support the civil partnerships legislation, and suddenly some of the Members who did not support it stand up now and say, “Oh, it’s terribly important on equality grounds that this category of civil partnerships”—which they did everything they possibly could to oppose—“is extended to heterosexual couples.” It is a faux attachment to equality and it should not be taken at face value.
I do not take anything away from those who genuinely think that it would be a sensible status to create. I am with them, but we must not imperil this Bill by allowing others to play their political games. I assure Members on both sides of the House that those in the other place are waiting for the opportunity to declare that this Bill will need more time and they will have to look at it in much greater detail, and then suddenly we will find that it will not be returned to us, or that it will be returned to us in a form we do not like.
I urge those who wish to see a very important and genuine step forward for equality to recognise the sense of the compromise that the Government and the official Opposition have agreed, which is to review this matter immediately in order to assess whether there is a genuine need for such a change. Let us make sure we genuinely take forward this step for equality now, and that we are not seduced by false arguments.
Dr Huppert
It is a great honour and a privilege—and also a challenge—to follow the right hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert), who is very passionate about this issue and who has championed the cause of same-sex marriage with great authority.
People will want to arrange their relationships in a number of different ways. Some will want to have marriages; some will want to have civil partnerships; some will simply want to cohabit. The state should enable all those things to happen. The right hon. Gentleman rightly mentioned the Law Commission report and the Bill proposed in the other place by Lord Lester, and I hope we will see progress on that. I am delighted that my party acknowledges those different options. Three years ago, in a conference motion entitled “Equal Marriage in the United Kingdom”, we said that the Government should:
“Open both marriage and civil partnerships to both same-sex and mixed-sex couples.”
I absolutely stand by that.