My Lords, I rise briefly to support Amendment 48. As has been made plain throughout the debates on the Bill, marriage is a vital institution and, as such, the subject of redefining marriage touches people’s deepest feelings and beliefs. It is not a change that should ever be countenanced without a clear manifesto mandate. I know that some noble Lords have tried to suggest that it is not always necessary to have a manifesto mandate. In response to that, however, I agree strongly with everything that the noble Lord, Lord Anderson of Swansea, has said.
There are some changes that perhaps it is possible to introduce without a mandate, although I have to say that it does not seem particularly like best practice unless one is responding to an urgent national security imperative. When it comes to changing the definition of something that has been defined one way for millennia and in relation to which there is a real sense that Parliament has not so much defined marriage, but rather reflected a pre-existing definition, it is absolutely imperative to have a manifesto mandate. I find it shocking that such an innovation should have been produced without one.
I know that there is a notion that the Conservative Party’s A Contract for Equalities is somehow a manifesto mandate, but I believe that that does not stand up to
scrutiny. In the first instance, that document was not the manifesto. In the second instance, it talked in terms only of considering same-sex marriage, but did not make a pledge to redefine it. The change it said the party would “consider”, on page 14 of the document, was to reclassify civil partnership as marriage. That is a considerably more moderate proposal than what has been presented in this Bill. In the third instance, it was not published until three days before the election, long after postal voting had begun.
The problems associated with the failure to approach the very far reaching changes proposed by the Bill without respect for the basic rules of democracy have been greatly compounded by the subsequent disregard for constitutional due process: the lack of a Green Paper, a White Paper, a draft Bill and pre-legislative scrutiny. Of particular concern, however, has been the way in which the one consultation on the Bill was conducted. The noble Lord, Lord Anderson of Swansea, has already commented on that.
10.45 pm
The sense of disregard for due process has continued during the scrutiny of the Bill. In another place, although there was a clear desire for full scrutiny on the Floor of the House during Committee, the Bill was sent to a Committee of only 19 MPs. The BBC’s Mark D’Arcy was not far off when he commented on the Committee’s deliberations as,
“a bit of a ritual. The dissenters dissent and the supporters support, and the whole thing is as mannered as a minuet danced at the court of Louis XVI”.
Huge numbers of the British population have had their beliefs overlooked. There was no mention of the Muslim population, the Hindu population, and the Sikh population during public evidence sessions. There was no mention of the ethnic minority churches. Indeed, in a joint letter to the Daily Telegraph, an alliance of pastors and elders, which includes the leadership of the UK’s biggest so-called black majority churches, accused the Government of turning their backs on traditional values to satisfy the demands of a “white, liberal elite” while ignoring growing ethnic minority communities who might otherwise be part of their core vote.
There is a clear need to intervene and correct these failings by giving the people a say through a referendum. If the Government receive a mandate for their policy through a referendum then all the other procedural failings to date would become an irrelevance. The resulting legislation would not suffer from ongoing questions about its legitimacy that would inevitably gnaw away at and undermine it. Moreover, Amendment 48 would help to redeem our reputation as a democracy committed to constitutional due process and fair play. Therefore, I strongly commend Amendment 48 to the House.