Merchant Shipping (Homosexual Conduct) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-01-20
Topic: Civil Rights
Iain Aitken Stewart (Conservative, Centre-right): I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to this debate at such an early stage. I serve on the Select Committee on Transport and am also an openly gay man, so I hope that I can bring my knowledge from both perspectives to our deliberations I start with the customary congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for Salisbury (John Glen) on his good fortune in securing such a high place in the private Members’ Bills ballot and on choosing this subject. If I heard him correctly, if the Bill is successful it will be his second change to the laws of the land. I imagine that will make him eligible for membership of a fairly exclusive club of Back Benchers who have secured not one but two changes in the law, but we must not get ahead of ourselves. This is only Second Reading, and there are many more stages to come in this place and the other place I welcome the important point that both my hon. Friend the Member for Salisbury and my hon. Friend the Member for Calder Valley (Craig Whittaker) made that the Bill is much more than a simple tidying-up exercise. Reading the explanatory notes and some of the briefings that were provided, I had some concern that the Bill’s sole purpose was to tidy up some clumsy legal arrangements in previous legislation. That is important, for the reasons that they set out, but I am glad that they appreciate the Bill’s wider significance in continuing the journey on LGBT issues that we have been on for many decades I appreciate that there would have been clumsiness in binding together the removal of discrimination in merchant shipping and in the armed forces. It would have been difficult to put the two together in a single measure in the Armed Forces Act 2016, and I am glad that the sensible decision was taken to decouple them and allow the welcome changes to the armed forces law to proceed without delay, rather than getting into a bit of a pickle by putting the two together. As both my hon. Friends have said, the Bill is the completion of a journey that has already been started. They gave a helpful précis of the changes that have happened, from the decriminalisation of homosexuality to the steps towards equality over the past few decades under Governments of all colours My hon. Friend the Member for Calder Valley touched on the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013. I would like to focus on it too, because there is a strong parallel between the process by which we arrived at that point and the Bill. If the House will indulge me, I would like to explain that thought When the Civil Partnership Act 2004 was introduced under Tony Blair’s Government, it was a recognition that it would be difficult to move straight to same-sex marriage in law. There was wide acceptance at the time that although that was a desirable ultimate goal, the legal difficulties and the objections of many of the Churches would have made it difficult to go to that point straight away. I was not a Member of the House at the time, but I was perfectly comfortable with the Civil Partnership Act, as it gave same-sex couples pretty much the same rights that heterosexual couples had under civil marriage. There was a small legal difference in the provisions, but it was about 98% the same, and I thought that was good enough.