British Prime Minister Keir Starmer refused to support a bill banning first-cousin marriage, drawing criticism from conservative lawmakers.
A report from Fox News details that Conservative MP Richard Holden said during a debate, “A marriage between first cousins carries significant health issues, many of which aren’t even knowable until post-birth.” He later added, “When practiced generation after generation, there is a significant multiplier effect.”
Starmer replied to Holden: “We’ve taken our position on that Bill, thank you.”
Chairman of the Great British Political Action Committee Ben Habib told the outlet that “marrying cousins was a practice which exited Western culture over a hundred years ago. It’s now back with a vengeance. Why? Because we’ve had mass immigration from cultures which haven’t kept pace with ours.”
“Instead of requiring them to adopt our approach, the British government allows them to continue this debilitating practice,” Habib explained, declaring that liberalism is “reversing cultural advancement.”
Health Secretary Wes Streeting has also come out against first-cousin marriage, although he did not go as far as to support its ban. “First-cousin marriages are high risk and unsafe, we see the genetic defects it causes, the harm that it causes. That’s why that advice should never have been published,” Streeting said, as reported by GB News.
Meanwhile, Under Secretary of State Sarah Rogers implied the Labour Party’s failure to ban the practice is a “civilizational” concern.
“I’ve received some questions about what we mean, in our National Security Strategy, when we invoke ‘civilizational’ concerns. So I’m tweeting a relevant news item,” she wrote on X, sharing a video of Starmer’s failure to block the ban on first-cousin marriage.
