UKIP splits

Last night saw the UK Independence Party sack the chair of their youth wing, Olly Neville. His crime? To publicly take a different position from the party policy to oppose equal marriage. He sets out his side of the story at The Independent: Exclusive: So much for the libertarians! How Ukip sacked me after I said I support equal marriage. Others in the youth wing have resigned in protest.

Yet UKIP has not sacked others who've spoken out controversially in recent times, most notably Winston McKenzie, their candidate in the recent Croydon North by-election and spokesperson on the Commonwealth, in spite of his public homophobia. And then there's the party leader who openly disagrees with his party's policy on drugs. It seems there's one rule for Nigel Farage and bigots, another for libertarians.

This exposes the fundamental contradictions at the heart of UKIP as Farage has tried to construct it. On the one hand it pretends to be a libertarian party and has attracted members as such. On the other hand it has also accumulated social authoritarians. Inevitably the two were going to clash at some point.

And this just adds to the long history of vicious splits in UKIP. Let's not forget the long list of others who've fallen out, including:

• Alan Sked, founder and first leader
• Michael Holmes, the leader under whom they first won election to the European Parliament
• Roger Knapman, the only leader to serve even a single full term and under whom the party was put on the map with help from...
• Robert Kilroy-Silk and His Ego, who drew huge publicity
• David Campbell-Bannerman, former deputy leader
• Nikki Sinclaire, former leadership contender

And that's just some of the highest profile. Quite a number of MEPs have dropped aside as well. For a party that's only been around twenty years that's quite a legacy of viciousness.

Relatively little has been written on UKIP's history, especially on the pre-Kilroy era, and many of the splits passed the wider political world by. In the case of Holmes, relations between the party leader and the national executive got so bitter that eventually the membership forced them all to stand down. It truly is the case that the smaller a party, the more vicious the internal feuds. There have been several other parties formed as splinters of UKIP, including Veritas, We Demand a Referendum, and no doubt others formed by even more obscure people.

I suspect Olly Neville's sacking in itself will soon be forgotten. But once again it has exposed the mess that is UKIP and why it is all anger and no delivery.

Update: Nikki Sinclaire confirms that of the 18 UKIP MEPs there have been to date, Nigel Farage has fallen out with no less than 9 of them.

When marriage was "redefined" (sic)

And he shall prick that annual blister,

Marriage with deceased wife's sister.

Have you heard about the time when civilisation collapsed because the restrictions on who could marry whom were relaxed? When marriage was "redefined"?

No, neither have I.

It was the social issue that raged throughout the Victorian era - could a widower marry his sister-in-law?

It had been restricted under the old Marriage Acts but then was fully outlawed under the 1835 Act. But almost immediately a movement sprang up to remove the restriction and allow widowers to marry their sisters-in-law. The reasons why they might wished to do so could vary considerably - at one end of society high levels of maternal mortality meant that in many working class households unmarried woman found themselves taking on the maternal role from their deceased sister. At the other end it was common for families without male-line heirs to pass property through marriage and if the first daughter died young then remarrying her widower to another daughter would preserve the arrangements and keep the property within her family.

(Julian Fellowes, if you're reading this, please do not use this as a plot for a future series of Downton Abbey.)

The debate lasted many years with the first bill to change the law being presented in Parliament in 1842. Thereafter the issue came back almost every year, sparking the above verse in Iolanthe. In part the opposition stemmed from the view that marriage isn't just the union of two individuals but of their families as well. But it also stemmed heavily from religious interpretations, with many arguing it was wrong to go against the traditional Church list of forbidden unions.

Sound familiar?

Many widowers found themselves in this position, but perhaps the grandest was Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hesse, the widower of Princess Alice, daughter of Queen Victoria. After his wife's death in 1878, there was hope of his marrying her younger sister Princess Beatrice. This led to the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII) making a rare Royal intervention in the House of Lords when he gave support to the reform but it still failed to pass. The head of the Church of England described the opponents as "those bigots".

There were many further attempts that were blocked despite clear majorities in favour in the Commons, although the Lords was a stonier prospect. One such attempt fell in 1902 due to a filibuster by the "Hughligans", a ginger group of young Conservative MPs centred around Lord Hugh Cecil and including Winston Churchill. Notably at the time they were all bachelors.

Eventually the law was reformed by the passage of the Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Marriage Act in 1907, although the equivalent provision for widows to marry their brothers-in-law wasn't passed until 1921. The Act was straightforward in allowing the marriages, but also made provision to allow individual clergy to decline to perform such marriages themselves (and enable them to allow another clergyman in the same diocese to perform them in their own church or chapel).

Does anyone now find the idea of a widower being able to marry his sister-in-law objectionable? Who actually argues about this issue at all? Has the institution of marriage suffered because of this change?

And this is hardly the only reform whereby marriage is defined differently by religion and civil law. Divorcees cannot get married in some churches and only with special dispensation in others, yet the law did not stop Camilla marrying Charles in a registry office.

Let's hope the next reform of the marriage laws doesn't take another sixty-five years.

Put your own house in order first Gordon!

Gordon Brown has attacked the ban on same-sex marriage recently passed in California. (BBC News: Brown attacks US gay marriage ban & PinkNews: Exclusive: British Prime Minister Gordon Brown declares Prop 8 gay marriage ban "unacceptable") Perhaps he should first look at the situation in the UK, where he can do something about it.

Under the enactment "Proposition 8" the situation in California is that mixed-sex couples can get married and same-sex couples can get inferior civil partnerships. This is exactly the same unequal arrangement that exists in the UK. Worryingly people are now calling for civil partnerships to be extended to mixed-sex couples, with some unable to disguise their hope that it will lead to the extinction of marriage.

So here's a simple suggestion. Let's sweep away this two-tier, pseudo "separate-but-equal" arrangement, abolish civil partnerships and make the state marriage laws gender blind and available to all. Any couple should have the right to enter into this great institution, to partake in the responsibilities it involves and derive the benefits from it. Those who do not wish to enter into marriage should not be entitled to the benefits by any side provision.

It will be an equal system. And there are other benefits as well - it will be a simpler system than there is at the moment. It will protect marriage in the way the current arrangement does not by removing inferior alternatives and allowing more people to partake in it. And if the UK Prime Minister wants to condemn inequality in other parts of the world, he will not be a hypocrite.

A battle of equalities - or the onset of culture wars?

It's hard to know what to make of the Lillian Ladele case. But it has plenty of elements to make various people's blood boil. Discrimination on the basis of religion. Discrimination on the basis of sexuality. (Which puzzles me as talking about equality between marriage and civil partnerships is a total oxymoron.) And of course it had to happen in Islington.

Now I've not yet had a chance to read the tribunal outcome but from what I've seen in the media the tribunal focused on the point of whether or not she was being bullied in the workplace for her religion and whether Islington was still able to deliver the service rather than over whether she was right to refuse to perform civil partnership ceremonies. (As an aside if you were entering into a civil partnership wouldn't you want a registrar who actually wanted to do the job, rather than one who was forced to by their employer and the law?) Also a point that hasn't received that much attention is that the nature of the job has changed since she took it - until late 2007 Islington registrars were effectively working freelance and thus her colleagues were taking civil partnerships and so it wasn't an issue. (The Guardian: Paying to be discriminated against - The decision in favour of a registrar who refused to deal with gay couples sets a hugely dangerous precedent) So it's not a case of someone taking up a job even though they disagreed with part of what it entailed - the requirements of the job changed whilst she was in post. This may also have some bearing on whether or not it was possible to resign.

But what is worrying is the way that so much of the reaction to the tribunal outcome is deeply polarised, going beyond the issue of the balance between equality of religion and equality of sexuality and into what feels scarily like the opening shots in something like the US "culture war". Some of the comments I've seen on the web have been incredibly anti-religious whilst other comments sound like a gloating victory over "political correctness". Naturally the case emerging from the UK's answer to San Francisco adds to fuel to the fire.

For a long time issues of both religion and personal behaviour have traditionally been regarded as "issues of conscience" and not made party political issues. Quite apart from the party management advantage it has also meant that the parties have not been divided down such lines and the UK has for the most part avoided the US "Red States-Blue States" divide that leads to radicals on each side almost demonising the other and making control over issues such as education ridiculously tense. And it encourages minority mentalities whereby particular groups in society get told they must support a party not because they agree with it on the basics but because only that party looks out for it and the other hates it. In turn it leads to a belief that when the other party is in control everything will be bad.

Some of that last paragraph doesn't sound too dissimilar to behaviour in certain quarters of UK politics does it? Is this really to the benefit of the country?