I am grateful for the advice about how I should vote. Since I will not have a vote, it does not make much difference.
I want to say something about British Muslims. It is a very important subject. There are 2.7 million British Muslims, I believe, in this country. There are 300,000 British Jews in this country. Because of the injustice of British Jewish orthodoxy about the so-called chained wives, I and others introduced a Private Member’s Bill, which was supported by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, to enable an injustice done to a very small number of orthodox Jewish women to be remedied. How did we—the noble and
learned Lord, Lord Mackay, and the rest of us—do it? We did it by saying to orthodox Jewish men, “If you want to leave your wife for somebody else without getting a get”—a written consent—“you will not be able to get a civil divorce and you will therefore not be able to remarry”. We put that in a Bill because the Chief Rabbi and a small number of Jewish victims needed it.
I was then told that my Bill was discriminatory because we did not give the same benefit to Muslims, so we amended it to give the same benefit to Muslims if they asked for it to be applied to them. The male-dominated hierarchy of British Muslims did not do so and the position is exactly as the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, said: many Muslim women are now extremely vulnerable because they do not have registered civil marriages; instead, they have unsatisfactory arrangements that give them no protection if the men treat them very badly. I am not suggesting that the whole of this Bill is designed to deal with that—not at all—but I am suggesting that it is not something that we can ignore on the grounds that this is a small minority, if that is what the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, meant to say.