I am really very proud of having blocked a lot of particularly senseless Bills which came before the other House. I am certainly very proud of that aspect of being an executioner.
I hope that when the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, has recovered from this discussion, he will make representations to the Government that we ought to have a government Bill in the very near future dealing with this whole aspect of the law on titles, so that gender equality can be established.
Having congratulated my noble friend Lord Lucas, I am bound to say that I am extremely unhappy that there should be a discretionary element in the way that
an eldest female child can inherit a peerage. When the eldest child is a girl, I believe that her succession to a peerage should be automatic. The Bill as it stands makes it discretionary. Given everything that that implies about attempts to get agreement within a family, I cannot think of a surer way of causing disagreement and resentment within families than by making it discretionary.
I fully support Amendment 10, moved by the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty. At the same time, I want to make some remarks about Amendment 34 in my name, which is taken with this general grouping. I well recognise that in some families arrangements have already been made, and expectations already exist, about the inheritance of a title. I have no interests to declare—my title makes me a day-boy, if I may call it that, in your Lordships’ House—but it would be very unfortunate if we were to pass laws about the inheritance of titles that took away from living people expectations that they may have and led to the aborting of arrangements that will have been made and that will be almost impossible to take back.
I believe that the Bill should be effected only for children born after the Bill becomes an Act of Parliament. By doing that, we would not take away any expectation of succession or arrangements that had been made for living people, and it would mean that from the day when the Bill became law it applied to children born after that date. I hope that the House will accept that amendment, and I am most pleased to be able to support the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, in his efforts to achieve a much fairer method of gender equality.