Pro Gaza MP defends cousin marriage in Parliamentary debate

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.”

He said that “the matter needs to be approached as a health awareness issue.”

Mohamed continued to say that “for many people, this is a highly sensitive issue and in discussing it we should try to step into the shoes of those who perhaps are not from the same culture as ours to better understand why the practice continues to be so widespread”.

Instead of stigmatizing the practice, the pro-Gaza MP said: “A much more positive approach would be to facilitate advanced genetic test screening for prospective married couples as is the case in all Arab countries in the Persian Gulf”.

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.

“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”.

“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 bill will be read a second time on January 17, 2025.

However, it is unlikely to become law unless it receives the formal backing of the government.

Along with Jeremy Corbyn, Mohamed and four other MPs were elected in July’s general election on explicitly pro-Gaza platforms. Since then, they have formed a parliamentary grouping called the “Independent Alliance”.

At the launch of her leadership campaign in September, Kemi Badenoch described their election as a negative development, saying that they were “elected on the back of sectarian Islamist politics; alien ideas that have no place here. The sort of politics we need to defeat and defeat quickly”.

Shortly after the general election, the JC revealed that Mohamed had told a rally of supporters to boycott “Zionist” sweets and to “go home and find every brand and every product that has been supporting Israel and Zionism from the beginning of time and throw it away”.