I beg to move,
That this House has considered Government policy on marriage between first cousins.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dame Siobhain. I rise to speak on a topic that many in our country assume is already settled. People assume that the marriage of first cousins is prohibited, as it was for 1,000 years in England. Yet that is not the case today. Despite deep cultural, medical and societal reasons to avoid such unions, our laws have remained unchanged since the era of Henry VIII. To many, that is a source of bewilderment and bafflement—as it was to me, until I dug deeper and realised some of the real dangers that widescale first cousin marriage can bring.
The Church banned first cousin marriage in the fifth century. By the 11th century it had prohibited marriage up to sixth cousins. That ban was reversed by a Tudor monarch with a perhaps chequered marital record and we have remained broadly silent on the issue ever since. However, the rights and freedoms of individual citizens, society and our broader understanding have moved on, and our laws must do the same.
This is not a call for a legislative knee-jerk reaction. Silence, as Matthew Syed has powerfully written in The Times, does not constitute neutrality. Silence is a fundamental choice with serious consequences, both for children born with preventable disorders, and even more so for men and women denied basic freedoms and for communities fragmented from wider society. I urge the House and the Minister to recognise the scale of the issue and—I hope—the moral imperative to act. My argument rests on three key tenets: freedom, social cohesion and health.
During the last Parliament I worked with campaigners to end virginity testing and hymenoplasty. In doing so I stood on the shoulders of giants: brave women from many organisations who support young women trapped in oppressive familial and extended family tribal systems. I pushed for a private Member’s Bill, and then via amendments to the Health and Care Act 2022, with Baroness Sugg in the House of Lords helping as well; the Government accepted the argument by tabling their own amendments. When I picked up that campaign, via a chance encounter with an item on BBC Radio 1’s “Newsbeat”, there was no politician of any party leading the charge in this House. Some of the activists involved might have been a bit miffed that a new, unknown Back-Bench Tory MP was leading their cause—but they got me, and we managed to push through some of the changes that they had been fighting for so bravely and with such strength for such a long time.
What was the reason behind women being forced to undergo procedures that are at best pseudo-scientific, and at worst deeply harmful? It was unscientific concepts of virginity linked to gender-oppressive ideas of purity in an oppressive patriarchal culture. Often those were linked to forced marriages. Some of their stories will never leave me: young women who had had their education and ambitions cut short being sent to marry men they had never met—men chosen not for compatibility or affection, but to preserve family alliances, assets or bastardised notions of honour.
Such arrangements are not just about culture; they are also about control. The system is upheld by pressure and enforced through silence, and people attempt to justify it through tradition. When marriage is confined within families, the cost of refusal rises astronomically: it is not simply turning down a partner, but rejecting grandparents, parents, uncles, aunts and the entire network of family and friends—and that has a price. Choice under those circumstances is no choice at all. That is why I see the legislation that I put forward in my private Member’s Bill, the Marriage (Prohibited Degrees of Relationship) Bill, and the debate we are having today as an extension of the work I did in the last Parliament.
We have heard, rightly, about patriarchal systems that rob women of autonomy, but in cousin marriage those systems are particularly resilient. Why? Because the families are not just connected, but fused—inextricably joined. The pressure is not just external, from legal systems; it is intimate and wholly inescapable, especially when it is generation after generation.
Men are trapped too; I have been told of British Pakistani men forced into such arrangements by community and familial obligations, terrified to defy expectations and cut ties with cousins whom they often consider, because of the closeness of their relationship, almost as siblings. There are even cases of gay men and women who have been forced to marry out of familial obligation. That is not hypothetical: since raising this issue, I have been contacted by scores of youth workers, healthcare professionals and ordinary members of the community who have thanked me for raising it and asked me to keep going. They need politicians to speak up, because they feel that they cannot.
Beneath the surface and behind closed doors, there is support and a real hunger for change in these communities. Sadly, what is lacking is the political courage to match that quiet majority—and it is a quiet majority in all parts of our community: polls show that support for reform is not linked to the black, white or other populations, and a YouGov poll just a few weeks ago showed that a majority of British Bangladeshi and Pakistani communities back a ban on first cousin marriage. The vain virtue signallers who said that moves in this direction would be racist must take a look at themselves; they are the ones opposing a majority of the communities that they play-act at representing.
For people in the communities I am speaking up for—most of the British Pakistani community, where this is a big issue, and to a lesser extent the Traveller community—cousin marriage is entangled with status, tradition and expectations, and speaking out can be very dangerous. As with forced marriage and female genital mutilation, silence only enables the system. Only sunlight breaks the cycle, and that means naming the issue, debating it and legislating against it.
Some critics say a ban would infringe upon people’s freedom—but what freedom are we protecting? The reality for so many is a life predetermined by bloodline and birth order. We are not protecting a freedom; we are perpetuating oppression. Whose freedom, if any, are we protecting? Purely the freedom of the oppressor to oppress and keep down—not the freedom of the individual. The state already intervenes where power dynamics distort consent. We rightly outlaw relationships between teachers and pupils or therapists and clients, because of the imbalance. The same must apply here.
Let us not forget that most cousin marriages are not one-offs. In some cases, they are multi-generational. With each generation, the chance to choose diminishes further. The net tightens and lives are lost in the gaps.
I move now beyond individual freedom to the broader issue of social cohesion. Patrick Nash, an Oxford theologian, argues that cousin marriage undermines trust in public institutions; when communities marry inward, loyalty is channelled inward to extended families and clan structures, rather than to the important shared civic values of the nation state and wider society.
At Harvard, Joseph Henrich has documented how the decline of cousin marriage helped to build western liberal democracies. When families are forced to look beyond their kin networks for marriage partners, new alliances form. Societies move beyond tribal loyalty to a broader civic trust. Studies show that, where cousin marriage continues, there is reduced integration, lower social mobility and higher incidence of corruption. Why? Because when job, marriage, dispute resolution and identity all sit within the same extended family structure, wider society fades from relevance.
If we want a society that functions on the basis of fairness, where the rule of law prevails and where people engage beyond their own, we cannot allow closed family systems to continue to flourish unchallenged. So-called community leaders—often unelected and unaccountable—who derive their authority from familial networks become gatekeepers for those people and communities. They decide who speaks, who marries whom and who gets heard. This system is self-perpetuating. These are not British values, and those who perpetuate such systems should be exposed. In many cases, those leaders are the ones resisting reform, not because the arguments for change are weak, but because their own power depends on those structures being preserved. Reform threatens their influence. That is why this issue matters so much.
We must remember that cousin marriage is not a religious obligation, but a cultural tradition, and traditions can and must change. Other nations have already exhibited powerful leadership in this area; we should look towards countries such as Norway, Sweden and Denmark for a steer. Those countries are liberal democracies with incredibly strong human rights records. They are not reactionary or anachronistic, but fundamentally progressive. Why, then, are we allowing Britain to lag behind? We hear concerns about cultural insensitivity—I have been accused of it myself—but is it not far more insensitive to ignore the pleas of those trapped within those structures? Is it not condescending to assume that communities cannot adapt or reform?
We should be empowering individuals, not entrenching power in extended family hierarchies. The state’s job is not to ratify patriarchal bargains, but to protect liberty, health and the chance of every citizen to live a full and independent life. When cousin marriage is prevalent, society and integration suffer, and shared spaces become fewer; school catchments, neighbourhoods and even workplaces can fracture along the lines of extended kin. That is not diversity at its best, but division at its worst. It is not about faith or race. It is about what sort of country we want to live in: one ruled by fear masquerading as family loyalty, or one where each citizen stands equal, with rights and responsibilities to each other deeper than those of family and clan. Those fundamentals are the foundation of a modern nation state and ones I believe this Parliament, this Government and this House should uphold.
Finally, I come to science and the health issue, because the best understood point against cousin marriage, though it is not core to my argument, is health. The Born in Bradford study, one of the UK’s most comprehensive birth cohort analyses, has followed 11,000 children.