Mick Hartley

A couple of weeks back we had Labour MP Tahir Ali calling for a law to "prohibit the desecration of all religious texts and the prophets of Abrahamic religions". Now it's cousin marriages – in defence of – from MP Iqbal Mohamed:

An independent MP elected on a pro-Gaza stance has spoken against a proposed bill to ban first-cousin marriage in the UK.

Speaking in Parliament on Tuesday, Dewsbury and Batley MP Iqbal Mohamed told the Commons that while he accepted that there were “health risks with first cousin marriage”, he didn’t think it was right to “empower the state to ban adults from marrying each other not least because I don't think it would be effective or enforceable”.

He added: “The reason the practice is so common is that ordinary people see family inter-marriage overall as something that is very positive, something that helps build family bonds and helps put families on a more secure financial foothold.”…

The bill was proposed by former Conservative Party chair Richard Holden, who told MPs that first-cousin marriage was particularly prominent among Irish traveller and British Pakistani communities.

“Cousin marriage has no place in Britain. The medical evidence is overwhelming. It significantly increases the risk of birth defects,” the MP for Newark said.

He added: “The moral case is clear. We see hundreds of exploitative marriages that ruin lives. Frankly, it should have been stamped out a long time ago.”

“The consequences of extreme intergenerational cousin marriage within the Hapsburg monarchy of Spain eventually led to the demise of the house itself and the war of Spanish Succession”, the MP for Basildon and Billericay said, adding: “Today the health risks are explicable in granular scientific detail” and spoke of the increased risk of the children of first cousins in getting severe illnesses.

Earlier in the day, shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick had urged the government to back Holden’s bill and called the practice “medieval”.

My post from a couple of months back:

Pakistan is the country with the highest rate of consanguineous marriages, and the practice has come over here with immigration. A 2005 report, commissioned by MP Ann Cryer, revealed that the Pakistani community accounted for 30 per cent of all births with recessive disorders, despite representing 3.4 per cent of the birth rate nationwide. From that same period Dr Peter Corry, Consultant Paediatrician at Bradford Royal Infirmary, said his hospital saw so many recessive genetic illnesses that it had became a centre of excellence for the treatment of some of them. They'd identified about 140 different autosomal recessive disorders among local children: he estimated that a typical district would see 20 to 30.

It's not just the overwhelming medical evidence. The practice has been banned across Scandinavia chiefly because of the coercion:

The Swedish minister of justice, Gunnar Strömmer, correctly argues that a ban could help combat marriages entered into under pressure or coercion. Cousin marriages are frequently arranged or forced. In some cases, refusing to go through with the marriage can result in violence or even so-called honour killings. By banning cousin marriages, the Swedish government aims to break the cycle of coercion and control rooted in these practices.