Clause 115 - Dissolution
Civil Partnership Bill [Lords]
10:15 am
Mr Christopher Chope (Shadow Minister, Environment and Transport; Christchurch, Conservative)
I do not know whether you have read the Official Report of the last sitting, Mr. Cook. My hon. Friend sought to provoke me to recant for having nominated him to be a member of the Conservative party candidates list. I do not recant from that nomination because I think that the House would be a much poorer place without the presence of my hon. Friend.
However, I thought that my hon. Friend understood the procedures of Parliament. Although we cannot express the amendments as being ''in the alternative'', that is essentially the way in which amendments Nos. 236 and 237 should be viewed. If amendment No. 236 is successful, I shall not seek to put amendment No. 237 to a vote. Amendment No. 236 seeks to simplify the way in which the arrangement can be brought to an end, by means of cessation, rather than requiring all the complications of dissolution. That is the answer to the hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland.
If I am unsuccessful in getting amendment No. 236 to the vote and winning that vote, the alternative—if one was doing pleadings, whether in Scotland or in
England, one would put that the latter pleading was ''further'' or ''in the alternative''—is amendment No. 237. That amendment accepts the decision of the Committee on amendment No. 236 to continue to pursue dissolution as the means to end the partnership. In amendment No. 237, I say, ''If you're going to insist on same-sex marriage in all but name, we might as well give the partner to that same-sex marriage the ability to bring that marriage to an end on the grounds that the person with whom he or she is living has been guilty of an act of sexual infidelity.''
I turn the argument back to my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (Mr. Bercow). If, as I think he is, he is in favour of what are effectively same-sex marriages, why does he not think that sexual infidelity on the part of one of the partners to the marriage should be a ground for its dissolution?