To Have And To Hold

We did this one months ago. Historical figures have been on the banknotes only since 1970, and Winston Churchill only since 2016. That’s right. 10 years. Ten. I had hoped that if he were to be replaced with wildlife, then it would be the grey squirrel. That would have made GB News worth the licence fee on its own, whether for the contributors who insisted that it was an Atlanticist, Anglospheric and Canzukian beast, or for the absence of such, as the case may be.

You see, America is not some sort of Big Britain. For example, the acronym in Britain is “EDI”. “DEI” is American, the E stands for something different, and those two letters are a universe, although there is still a great deal of work to be done to give effect to the principle that equality and diversity must include economic equality and class diversity, regional equality and regional diversity, the equal sovereignty of diverse states, and equal respect for diverse opinions within a framework of free speech and other civil liberties, including due process of law with the presumption of innocence, requiring that conviction be beyond reasonable doubt.

Speaking of the courts, will the change in name from the Chancery Division to the Business and Property Division result in any practical improvement? No doubt there are problems, as there are in anything. Is one of them the name? The quest persists to find anything for David Lammy to do. There are his plans to restrict trial by jury, and to abolish the automatic right of appeal from the Magistrates’ Court to the Crown Court. There is his revival of the last Conservative Government’s mercifully brief wheeze to nationalise cohabitation while effectively abolishing legal marriage and civil partnerships.

And there is his proposal, lost in the noise around cohabitation as the attack on the right of appeal has been lost in the noise around juries, to make prenuptial agreements legally binding. There may be a few very exceptional cases such as the inheritance rights of the children of previous unions, but I do hope that the Catholic Church, and as many others as may be rallied, will make it clear that they would refuse to marry almost anyone with a prenuptial agreement, and certainly if that agreement anticipated a divorce, since any such couple simply did not believe in marriage as the Church understood it.

From where is parliamentary opposition to come? Danny Kruger did vote against his then party’s Divorce, Dissolution and Separation Act 2020, but Nigel Farage is divorced from his first wife, separated from his second wife, and cohabiting with a woman who is not his wife. Richard Tice is divorced, and he cohabits in Dubai with a woman who has certainly been married to the father of her children, as she may still be. Lee Anderson is on his second marriage. Donald Trump is on his third, as is Kruger’s old patron, Boris Johnson, who has twice left his wife for a next wife who was already pregnant, something that even Henry VIII only ever did once. Nancy Reagan was the second Mrs Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher was the second Mrs Thatcher.

Still, Lammy, of all people, has opened up the debate. Never having needed to be consummated, civil partnerships ought not to be confined to unrelated couples. But now that they are available to opposite-sex couples, then divorce can and should be made far more difficult, since anyone who had not wanted that could always have had a civil partnership instead. Any marrying couple should be entitled to register their marriage as bound by the law prior to 1969 with regard to grounds and procedures for divorce. Entitlement upon divorce should in any case be fixed by Statute at one per cent of the other party’s estate for each year of marriage, up to 50 per cent, with no entitlement for the petitioning party unless the other party’s fault were proved.

Furthermore any religious organisation should be enabled to specify that any marriage that it conducted would be so bound, requiring it to counsel couples accordingly. Statute should specify that the Church of England and the Church in Wales each be such a body unless, respectively, the General Synod and the Governing Body specifically resolved the contrary by a two-thirds majority in all three Houses; the General Synod has been flexing its muscles on marriage of late, even if it will have same-sex marriages as soon as a member of the Royal Family wanted one, and no one will leave, because they never do.

The Methodist and United Reformed Churches also exist pursuant to Acts of Parliament, which should be amended to apply this provision to those bodies unless, respectively, the Methodist Conference or the General Assembly resolved the contrary by a two-thirds majority. And there should be such an amendment to the legislation relating to the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy, with no need of a get-out clause.