It is a biting winter’s evening in Cambridge and apparently we are making history. This is the first serious public discussion in the UK of the law on cousin marriage, and the desirability of legislating against it, since the mid-Victorian era. At a time when British universities seem more interested in discussing diversity, equity and inclusion and decolonising the curricula than engaging with the great issues of the day, there is an unmistakable frisson as we gather around a long beechwood table in the brightly lit Weston Room of the interfaith Woolf Institute. A portrait of the no-nonsense Princess Anne, its patron, smiles down upon us.
Charles Darwin, who was married to his first cousin Emma Wedgwood, sought to include a question on first cousin marriage in the 1871 census. Parliament rejected the attempt as being of ‘particular sensitivity’ and ‘unacceptably intrusive’. One hundred and fifty years later, it remains an issue of ‘great controversy’, as Nazir Afzal, a former chief crown prosecutor, chancellor of Manchester University and one of the evening’s expert speakers, acknowledges.
