Civil Partnerships, Marriages and Deaths (Registration Etc.) Bill

Neil O'Brien Excerpts

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Friday 26th October 2018 Commons Chamber

[Neil O'Brien (Harborough) (Con)]

There are many extremely good things in this Bill, the first being the righting of the wrong, which has been in existence since the Victorian era, of not being able to include mothers’ names on marriage certificates. When I got married in 2012 and was told I could not include my mother’s name, I thought that there had been a mistake and that they were using an old book. I had not realised that the law could still be so ridiculously out of date in the modern era. Members such as the hon. Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson) and my hon. Friend the Member for Solihull (Julian Knight) have reminded us that that is a really important change for some people.

Likewise, the opportunity for parents who have lost a baby before 24 weeks to register the life of their child is hugely important, as are the new powers for coroners. I congratulate my hon. Friends the Members for Colchester (Will Quince) and for Banbury (Victoria Prentis) on all the work they have done on that hugely important subject.

I rise today, however, with more mixed emotions than ever before about any proposed legislation, because I do not agree with the extension of civil partnerships to heterosexual couples. To be clear, I support—and supported—equal marriage for gay people. I ran the think-tank Policy Exchange at the time—I was not in this House—and published a paper arguing in favour of it. I thought, and still think, that it was really important for everybody to be treated the same and for everybody to be able to get married, as a further step towards reducing prejudice against gay people in this country.

It is very easy for heterosexual people not to notice the high levels of prejudice that continue to exist in this country, even in this modern era, and not to see that suicide rates for gay people are still higher. I went to school in the 1990s, which was not that long ago, and remember a lad walking up four flights of stairs with kids all around him chanting, “Gay. Gay. Gay.” at him. I do not even know if he was gay, but I am sure he remembers that and will do so for the rest of his life. It is a reminder that prejudice is still out there and still very strong. So, for me, equal marriage was a really important and brilliant reform.

Civil partnerships, however, were, for me, only ever a stepping stone towards creating equal marriage. I thought that, rather than creating two types of marriage, we should have got rid of civil partnerships at the point when marriage was opened up to same-sex couples.

I respect and understand why other Members do not agree with that, and we have heard some of those arguments today. However, I do not accept in particular the argument that we should legislate in this House today because there has been a court case. I think that it is profoundly the business of elected politicians in this House to make such decisions, not unelected judges across the road.

[Chris Philp (Croydon South) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making a case as to why civil partnerships should not be equally available; indeed, he is suggesting that civil partnerships should not be available to anyone. However, does not the term “marriage” carry very long-established religious connotations? Some people may not want to sign up to that. Should not the individual have the liberty to make that choice themselves, rather than be prevented by this House from doing so?

[Neil O'Brien]

I hear my hon. Friend’s argument, but I do not agree with him. During the process of arguing the case for equal marriage, one of the important points made was that it did not affect religious institutions. It did not affect religious marriage; it affected civil marriage. In fact, that is all we have the power to do in this House; we do not and should not control people’s religious practice.

[Justine Greening]

I appreciate that my hon. Friend is making what is in many respects an intellectual argument, but this Bill is about matters of emotion and matters of the heart as much as anything else. I have not received a single letter or email from constituents asking for civil partnerships to be scrapped, but I have had emails and letters from constituents asking for them to be extended. If this place is basically about taking people’s priorities and making them ours, why would we argue to do something different?

[Neil O'Brien]

I recognise absolutely that this an incredibly emotional debate, and I want to tread as carefully as I can for that reason, but perhaps I will come on to some of the reasons—all kinds of reasons—why it is not just an intellectual case I am making, but an important pragmatic one.

I really worry about the attempt to create, in effect, two tiers of marriage. Apart from any of the other lovely things about it, marriage is what social scientists call a “commitment device”: it is a way of binding ourselves in for the future. That is one reason why it is a big public occasion and if a couple get married in the Church of England everyone will be asked to shout, “We will” to support them. I am aware that I am playing into my right hon. Friend’s point about sounding too intellectual when calling it a commitment device, but it is lots of other things, too. Why is such a device needed? It is because life is hard, as is staying together. If people are lucky enough to have children, they find that is incredibly tiring and hard, and they are more likely to split up in the years when the children are small. One big problem, and one of the reasons why relationships often break up—we are not trying to create a perfect happy families world in this House; we have no power to do that—like many of the world’s problems, comes down to men. Men, in particular, have a habit of sliding rather than deciding; they want all the benefits of being in a relationship but they do not want to lose the option to bale out. So there needs to be a moment when they fully commit.

About half the children born today will not be living with both parents by the time they are 15, and it is profoundly sad that they would be more likely to have a smartphone than to grow up with a father living at home. I grew up in a very average household, but I consider myself rich because I was lucky enough to grow up with two parents who got on and got on with us. Not everybody in this House has had that benefit. Parents who are married before they have a child are far more likely to stay together, and nearly all parents—about 93%—who stay together until their children reach 15 are married rather than cohabiting. Cohabiting parents account for about 19% of couples with dependent children but for about half of all families with family breakdown.

It worries me that we would do something that creates a status that is sort of halfway between marriage and cohabitation—a sort of marriage-lite. Some of the reasons given for doing this make me nervous. People say marriage is a patriarchal institution, but it is not; I am not oppressing my wife by being married to her. People say it is a religious institution, and actually there is a profound difference between civil marriage and religious marriage—

[Luke Graham]

Does my hon. Friend’s argument not surely mean that civil partnerships are a step in the right direction, because they allow couples to formalise their cohabitation and make a formal commitment to each other? Does he not agree that we in the Conservative party are champions of individual freedom and we should be providing people with the opportunity to make their choices? This issue is before this House and out for consultation in Scotland. Does he not think this House should lead so that the rest of the UK can follow?

[Neil O'Brien]

I hear the argument my hon. Friend makes and I say, “Of course”, but the thing I gently point out is that a lot of other Members have made the case for civil partnerships as a final status for people who do not want to get married and said that we should deliberately create a halfway house, not as something that people can be in a for a time but for something that they—

[Chris Bryant]

In a way I am sorry to do this, but as someone who is in a civil partnership, I really want to steer the hon. Gentleman away from this idea of civil partnership as being some kind of halfway house or second-rate version of marriage. It is a settled fact now in British society that we will have this form of relationship available for gay couples. The question is simply whether it is going to be available to others. It feels like a fully endowed relationship to me—not second-rate at all.

[Neil O'Brien]

I am always grateful to take interventions from the hon. Gentleman, who is so thoughtful on all these issues and has worked on them for a long time. I do not mean in any way to suggest that people do not have committed relationships or that they are in some sense second-class because they are in a civil partnership; all I would say is that I am nervous about some of these arguments. If we had a system where everybody—gay people and straight people—can get married, what would be the argument for creating a new tier of marriage? Imagine a world in which we just had these two things. What would the argument be for that? I would be happy to take an intervention from the hon. Gentleman, because I think he has something to say—

[Chris Bryant]

One difference between the two is that people do not have to have a big ceremony. We did, though—we had a great old party. The gays have probably added to the wedding industry quite significantly. Many people, especially if they have been in a relationship for a long time, do not want to feel that by suddenly having a big event they are invalidating the previous 30 years for which they have been together. They just want the legal certainty of making that commitment to one another and to have the legal privileges that the state affords them. That is the difference.

[Neil O’Brien]

I am genuinely grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his thoughtful intervention. It has been brilliant to go to some of the equal marriages that have happened since the change in the law. One learns some wonderful things and hears people’s stories in a way that one would not have done had those marriages not existed. I am glad that they are also powering the marriage industry. I do not, though, buy the argument that people need to spend more to be married than to have a civil partnership. I think that is a canard. I hear the argument about not wanting to feel like what went before is invalidated, but I just do not think that that is true. Getting married does not invalidate the fact that a couple were together happily before it. I hear all these arguments, but ultimately I am not persuaded by them—

[Chris Philp]

rose—

[Neil O’Brien]

Here comes another, more powerful one.

[Chris Philp]

A moment ago, my hon. Friend asked why we need to have civil partnerships when marriage exists and people are perfectly at liberty to choose marriage as an option. The answer is this: marriage has existed for thousands of years and has a profoundly religious connotation for most people, as a social practice dating back millennia. Some people, exercising their own choice, are not happy to enter into an institution that has that religious connotation and therefore want an alternative arrangement. That is why we need civil partnerships as an alternative.

[Neil O’Brien]

I almost always agree with my hon. Friend about almost all things, but on this issue we find ourselves in disagreement. Marriage in this country predates almost any religion that one can name. I am worried by the argument that is being made in the House today that if someone enters into a marriage—I had a civil marriage; I am an atheist—they are in some way being lured into a religious institution. I just do not think that is the case. I did not notice it. In fact, people who have a civil wedding are not even allowed to play something like Madonna’s “Like a Prayer”, because apparently it is a religious thing. There is a clear distinction in my mind between civil marriage and religious marriage.

I feel that I have made my points. I respect Members from all parties who have made arguments to the contrary, but I feel differently.