My Lords, my attention was drawn to the subject of my amendment by my interest in the apparent haste in which the Bill was introduced in the other place and spirited through it in such a short time, since when our Select Committee commented on that and the Government have changed the pace of the legislation. My anxiety about this is reawakened by the resolute rejection by my noble and learned friend of even the best argued, most cogent and simple cases that have been put to him. I begin to wonder what it is that makes it so important not to change any part of the Bill.
When I was preparing for this debate, I thought that I would see whether the Bill had been amended already. I was surprised to find that it had in the House of Commons. The words which my amendment
seeks to delete from line 20 are the words “from the marriage”. Until Committee on the Floor of the House of Commons took place, the subsection read:
“The effect of a person’s failure to comply with subsection (1) is that the person and the person’s descendants are disqualified from succeeding to the Crown”.
One would think that that was perfectly straightforward. These people are the people who are brought into the Bill for consideration by subsection (4), which is the subsection abolishing the provisions in the 1772 Act, and subsections (1) and (2) then proceed to substitute other provisions for a smaller number of people—we have just been debating what number.
As far as I can see, the effect of adding to the words “the person’s descendants” the words “from the marriage” would be to eliminate from the provisions of this clause the illegitimate progeny of a number of people. Therefore, when I looked in the House of Commons to look at the Minister’s arguments in favour of it, I found that in total, the whole of her argument was:
“Clause 3 is, as a Member put it earlier, one of the more arcane provisions in the Bill. The Royal Marriages Act 1772 currently requires, subject to some very limited exceptions, the descendants of George II to seek the consent of the monarch before marrying”.
So it did, but, as I have demonstrated, subsection (4) deals with that. We are now looking at those who remain, the descendants of the six—or 12 or four, whatever we finally put in—who have or have not got the consent of the monarch to marry. That, she said,
“probably affects hundreds of people”.
They must be a prolific bunch if there are going to be hundreds of them, or else we are talking about somebody else. I find that quite extraordinary. She then said that,
“we do not think that such a sweeping provision continues to serve a useful purpose today”.—[Official Report, Commons, 22/1/13; col. 273.]
Actually, I do not think that relates to the insertion of those words at all; one has to look for a different reason.
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It may be that what struck the draftsmen rather late in the day, too late for Second Reading, was that if a person who had had to apply for consent from Her Majesty to marry married without it, and then divorced or was widowed and then married again and got consent, those children would be legitimised whereas the others would not. Some explanation is required because of the confusing nature of the explanation we have already had.
The second issue, which again has come to the front of my mind because of the way in which the Bill has been handled this afternoon, is to seek the mechanism by which the realms and territories come into conformity with what we finally do, because that appears to be the timetable that we are marching to. Can my noble and learned friend tell us the intended date for the actual bringing into effect of this Bill, because that is the deadline, I presume? Is it so set in stone that in fact we cannot alter a jot or tittle of what is before us? Obviously not, because it has been done in the House of Commons already, so can my noble and learned friend tell us what was the mechanism by which that became acceptable and did not delay the Bill so long that we could not tolerate it, and why this same
procedure cannot be used with the amendments that we are dealing with now and, more particularly, to which we shall return on Report? I beg to move.