Britain may reform succession laws for royal family

BRITAIN may reform 300-year-old laws that ban the monarch from marrying a Catholic and give male heirs prior claim to the throne, the government said yesterday.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has held talks with Queen Elizabeth on changing the 1701 law.

The Act of Settlement bars members of the royal family from becoming king or queen if they are Catholic or marry a Catholic.

It also gives male heirs precedence in the line of succession.

Brown said: “In the 21st century people do expect discrimination to be removed,” he told the BBC. “There are clearly issues that have got to be dealt with not just in Britain but... across the whole of the Commonwealth.”

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, head of the Catholic church in England and Wales, also wants the law to be reformed.

However, the prime minister’s office said it had no plans to drop the ban on a Roman Catholic from becoming king or queen.

“There is no question of changing the constitutional role of the monarch or of changing the role of the Church of England as the established church.”

The monarch is head of the Church of England and has to be a Protestant unless the link between the Church and the state is dissolved.