Why does a civil partnership have to be sexual?
Ihave known the Misses Utley for nearly 40 years, but never until now have I seen them as being at the forefront of social reform. They are highly conservative (though very subversive) unmarried sisters. Older Telegraph readers will remember their father, the blind, late and great journalist T E “Peter” Utley.
Peter was my first patron in journalism. Virginia (“Ginda”) later became my secretary. When Catherine Utley had her daughter, Livvy, Ginda gave up her own home to live with her sister. They jointly brought Livvy up.
Now, however, they are campaigners. Last Friday, inspired by their example, Lord Lexden introduced a private member’s Bill in the House of Lords to confer new rights on people like Catherine and Ginda.
Over their many years of stable cohabitation, giving young Livvy a loving home, and sharing tasks so that both could work, they observed the idea of civil partnerships take hold. These were originally designed to enshrine for homosexual couples legal rights about things like property and inheritance similar to those of married heterosexuals. After a recent court case, civil partnerships will probably extend to straight couples as well.
It seemed strange to the Misses Utley that, despite their lifelong blood-fidelity, their joint child care, and their adult decades under the same roof, they had no such rights. They were excluded, it seemed to them, simply because their relationship was not sexual. They wondered why you had to perform sexual acts with, or at least pretend to fancy someone of the same sex, before the Government would give you the tax breaks.
They surely have a good case. The old-fashioned habit of siblings living together is a social good. Such partnerships are often longer-lasting than sexual ones, enduring, in some cases, from cradle to grave. They provide mutual help and comfort. Yet when either Ginda or Catherine dies, the survivor will be fully liable for any inheritance tax on their modest house (which, since they live in propertyprice-mad London, will certainly be due). Tens of thousands of sisters and brothers are in such a position.
The Government should get rid of this unfairness. Mrs May never stops talking about her search for a “deep and special partnership”. The Misses Utley have one, and her Government should recognise it.
Last week, we attended Alan Bennett’s new play about the NHS, Allelujah! The evening deepened the puzzlement I have long felt about the author: why is this man seen as a national treasure? He is certainly talented, witty and observant, but how did the idea set in that his artistic vision is kindly and humane?
The hospital in the drama, which is threatened with closure, is called the Bethlehem – a play, I suspect, on the fact that the Bethlehem Hospital, often pronounced “Bedlam”, was England’s first lunatic asylum. We are in the geriatric ward. Bennett depicts a madhouse.
The play transmits every tired moral nostrum about the NHS currently available – that administrators are uncaring, hospitals are underfunded by a government that wants to sell them off, and everything is Mrs Thatcher’s fault. The white nurse is cruel and hard; the black one is warm and lovely and gets the oldies singing. The audience duly cheered, especially at a gratuitous passage in which the Indian doctor is threatened with deportation and makes a virtuous speech about why we need people like him.
Yet the underlying pull of the story is dark and cold. The elderly patients are absurd, and there is no point in them living. Bennett has an obsession, notable in some of his other writings, with old women’s urinary and bowel movements. In Allelujah!, these become central to the plot, because the white nurse hates soiled beds so much that she murders patients who are incontinent. Her obsession with this subject mirrors Bennett’s: he seems closer to her than to his paper-thin good characters.
Nowadays, the word “nasty” means unpleasant and malicious, but in the Bedlam days it had a more exact meaning. Dr Johnson’s mid-18thcentury dictionary defines it as “dirty; filthy; sordid; nauseous; polluted”. Bennett’s work is nasty in that strict sense.
It has become fashionable for opinion polls, and those who want a second referendum, to divide Brexit opinion into three camps – those who support Mrs May’s Chequers terms, those who favour a “no deal” Brexit, and those who want to Remain. The Remainers’ fantasy is a referendum designed as a three-way and second-preference affair, because this is the only way that polls can currently be persuaded to show a Remain majority.
Such polls ought to make clear, however, that Remain is the only one of the three options which is definitely not available (though the Chequers terms may not be available either).
Parliament long ago voted to trigger Article 50. We are leaving at the end of March next year. No referendum could be legislated for to take place before then. By that time, it is hard to see what three-way choice there would be. Getting back in is a completely different proposition from staying in, requiring different terms. Indeed, after March next year, the word “Remain” changes its meaning to “Remain outside the EU”.