Succession to the Crown Bill

Debate between Mark Durkan and Lord Beith

Monday 28th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Sir Alan Beith]

I want to get on to amendments 1 and 2, because I am anxious that we get this right and I am interested in what the Government have to say about them.

It seems to me that the wording in the Act of Settlement might well preclude someone who, let us say, as a teenager or young adult chooses to be in the Church of England rather than the Catholic Church, having had experience of both in their lives. They could be automatically excluded by those features of their early involvement with the Roman Catholic Church that fell within the extended definition in the Act of Settlement of what constitutes having been a Catholic. Unless we deal with that, our legislation will be defective and will fail to fulfil its intended purpose, because at some future date it might exclude someone from being the sovereign even though they were in communion with the Church of England and wanted to uphold the Protestant reformed religion, as the coronation oath requires.

[Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)]

I have attached my name to amendments 1 and 2, but not to new clause 1. That is not because I particularly disagree with the point that the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) is trying to make in new clause 1, but in many ways because I am sensitive about such issues, as someone who is not a British national, but a citizen of the Irish Republic—that is the passport I carry; therefore I see myself as a citizen of a nation that does indeed have an elected Head of State.

I come to this House not to disrespect any of the institutions that are cherished by other Members and that are part of the British constitutional settlement. Where I can, I will support moves to remove and relieve aspects of discrimination wherever we find them. I said last week that this Bill does two valuable things in that it removes a layer of gender discrimination in the succession to the Crown and it lifts one layer of religious discrimination —the bar on a Catholic marrying the heir to the throne. However, as we heard in last week’s debate, those proposals in themselves leave many questions. As we heard, for some of us, one question concerns the remaining areas of discrimination, whereby anybody who at any stage in their lives had either been a Catholic or been deemed to be a Catholic would be barred from being an heir to the throne. In effect, it is the McCarthyite question: “Are you now or have you ever been a Catholic?” For anybody who has ever been a Catholic in any shape or form, that is it—they are out; they count as dead for these purposes. Clearly that is wrong and anomalous. I do not believe that, in passing this Bill, the House should choose to say, “Well, we still want to keep that—it’s about right that we keep it.”

Succession to the Crown Bill

Debate between Mark Durkan and Lord Beith

Tuesday 22nd January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Sir Alan Beith]

I do not want to be drawn into clause 3. We are considering whether the effect of clause 2 might be undermined by clause 3, and that has much to do with clause 2, but I suspect—I do not intend to say this again when we debate clause 3, so I will say it now —that it is something we will have to live with in order to produce a sensible outcome. The Bill as it stands provides a reasonable outcome to the problems I have described, but there is no escaping the fact that some problems will remain.

[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.