THE ASIAN INDEPENDENT UK
Bal Ram Sampla
Geopolitics
Eighteen months. That’s how long Richard Holden’s bill to ban first-cousin marriage has sat untouched, without so much as a second reading, while ministers hide behind the flimsy excuse of “broader reform of marriage law.” It is not reform. It is paralysis dressed up as prudence, and it is the public who pays for it.
The facts are not complicated. Children of first-cousin marriages face roughly double the risk of recessive genetic disorders. Labour’s own Health Secretary has admitted as much, calling the practice “high risk and unsafe.” Yet admitting a problem and refusing to act on it is not caution, it is cowardice. A government happy to legislate on almost everything else suddenly discovers a taste for “nuance” the moment the issue touches a politically sensitive community.
That is the real story here, and everyone in Westminster knows it. Labour will not say the practice should stop, because saying so risks upsetting voters in seats where cousin marriage is common. So instead ministers reach for delay: “reviewing the law,” “considering the issue,” “no timetable yet.” These are not the words of a government wrestling with a hard question. They are the words of a government that has already decided the political cost of acting outweighs the human cost of not acting, and is too embarrassed to say so out loud.
The recent tribunal case, in which a Sudanese woman could not be deported because her marriage to her cousin was ruled legal under UK law, should have been a wake-up call. Instead it was met with the same shrug that has met every other prompt on this issue for the past year.
A law untouched since 1540, when Henry VIII lifted a medieval-era ban for his own convenience, is apparently still too delicate a subject for a modern government to revisit.
Silence is not neutrality. When a government refuses for a year and a half to say plainly whether it supports or opposes a practice its own ministers call unsafe, that refusal is itself a position , just one it doesn’t have the courage to defend in public.
References
1.https://www.gbnews.com/politics/labour-cousin-marriage-vote-richard-holden
2.https://www.foxnews.com/world/british-pm-criticized-blocking-bill-banning-first-cousin-marriage-amid-mounting-health-concerns.amp
3.https://www.absolicitors.com/news/159-britain-considers-banning-first-cousin-marriages-what-this-means-for-uk-law
