Orders of the Day — Civil Partnership Bill [Lords]

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 6:24 pm on 12 October 2004.

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Photo of Edward Leigh Edward Leigh Chair, Public Accounts Committee, Chair, Public Accounts Committee 6:24, 12 October 2004

No, as I have been told that I have very little time.

I have explained my concern about this Bill. We need a corpus of marriage law, and we have one. I have personal views about marriage. For many years, I have said that we must try to sustain it, just as I have argued against easier divorce laws, but that is a subject for another debate.

We must now create another corpus of law, either with this Bill or with a Finance Bill, to relieve the unfair burden placed on people who have lived together a long time and who want to leave pension rights or property to each other, or who want to visit each other in hospital or enjoy all the other benefits that have been mentioned today. Whatever such a Bill might be called—the Sharing of Long-Term Domicile Bill is one possibility—it would allow us to do what the Government want to do with this Bill.

The Government have tried to pull our heart strings on this matter. We have heard powerful stories about people called Chris or Rex, and about people who have been living together for 40 years who want to leave their property to each other but who cannot. We realise that that is unfair in the modern world. It is unfair that sisters who have lived together for many years in a non-sexual relationship should be placed in such difficulty and it is a problem that we must address.

I accept that the amendments passed by the House of Lords may be unworkable in their present form. I am trying to put my argument in an honest way but if the Government are serious about addressing anomalies that hit people who have been living together for a long time, they should use this Bill or the Finance Bill to introduce proposals that could work to help such people. The Bill as it stands does not provide that.

We are not homophobes or anything like that, but we are saying that this Bill does not do what the Government seem to want it to do. We must be honest about these matters. Chris Bryant made an honest speech, in which he gave a powerful exposition of his point of view. There is no doubt that there are people in this House who believe that gay people should be allowed to go through a form of marriage. If they love each other and have made a commitment to each other, why should gay people be denied something called marriage when the rest of us are allowed it? However, a person would have to be utterly credulous to believe that, by enabling people to register a civil partnership at a register office and by providing that a long-term relationship can be ended only after it has suffered irredeemable breakdown—in other words, by replicating what is contained in our ordinary marriage laws—we are not creating a form of gay marriage.

Why cannot we be honest about it? It will come and the next step will be for the gay community to insist—rightly, in their view—that gay marriage be recognised, that it should be an offence to attack homosexuality and that it should be taught in schools on equal terms. That is the agenda. Let us not be mealy-mouthed about it. That is why the mediaeval wing of the Conservative party, as we have been described, is standing foursquare against the Bill and why we will vote against it tonight. We believe that by voting against the Bill, we send a powerful message that there are still people in this House who are prepared to stand up for traditional values because they believe passionately that such values are the building blocks of a just, fair and right society.