My Lords, I declare an interest as father and stepfather of five admirable females, each of whom tends to treat me graciously as a kind of loyal subject.
The Bill is timely. It seeks to ensure the stability and the acceptable continuity of the realm. I happen to be, like a number of other Members of your Lordships’ House, the first member of my family ever born in the United Kingdom. My father could have gone to the United Kingdom, the United States of America or possibly elsewhere. He was born in 1904, and from an early age was a fervent Anglophile. Part of what brought him here, as he told me many times, was the sense of historical continuity given by the Crown. The Bill and the negotiations that have preceded it are a mark of the willingness of the Crown to embrace modern values and diversity in society, particularly relating to the role of women.
I will raise four points with my noble friend the Minister, of which he has had advance notice. I acknowledge the part played in these by a brilliant and unusual constitutional lawyer called Graham McBain, who has written copiously and persuasively about this subject and about redundant statutes. Although I will not be moving amendments at later stages of the Bill, as it would be inappropriate on this Bill, these are anomalies which the Government should consider.
The first relates to the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829. The Government have remembered in the Bill to amend the Regency Act 1937 so that a person who fails to obtain the consent of the Queen to their marriage cannot be regent. This is reasonable. The Regency Act also prevents a Catholic from being regent by reference to the Act of Settlement 1700. However, the Bill provides that the Act of Settlement is now subject to the Bill. The result is quite simple: a Catholic can now be regent.
Except that it is not quite so simple, because the Government appear to have forgotten another Act of Parliament: the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829. It, too, prevents a Catholic from being regent. By not repealing the 1829 Act, we will have one Act that allows a Catholic to be regent, and one that does not. I do not know if anyone will brief me to apply for judicial review if we ever have a regent, but it seems that this is the sort of issue that ought to be tidied up.