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512  5 November 2002   

Unmarried Adoption?
Liberal pitfalls

Like all liberals, I am delighted that the Government has stuck to its guns and extended the adoption laws to unmarried couples, both heterosexual and gay. The Tories have proved only that nastiness comes in widely differing forms.  Opposition crocodile tears about "the interests of the children" merely hid a desperate populist appeal to the nastiness of Middle England.

But as a lawyer, I must add a note of caution. Because in the midst of an arid and unloving debate, the Tories had one good point.  It is that, when a cohabiting relationship breaks up (whatever its gender composition) a legal jungle awaits the former partners.  The jungle is basically one of property law: there are no general guidelines on the division of property, shares in the house, shared savings accounts and so on.   Although the term has come to be used widely in society, there is no such legal status as a "common law marriage" or a "common law wife", and many people are mistaken in their beliefs about that.  And that legal thicket is bound to become more difficult to resolve, if the partners are both adoptive parents, with children still requiring continuing care.

Since 1994, the august Law Commission has been working on a new "legal code" to regulate the division of "household" property, when there is a break-up of cohabiting households.  In June this year, however, they reported that - after seven years of deliberation - they had failed: see The Guardian.  They concluded that the sheer diversity of human circumstances - ranging from the bachelor son or daughter living on with parents to every kind of multiple-person household, defied systematic regulation.  They admitted failure, leaving the law where it stands: the Courts have to apply 19th century trust law, property law and contract law, to sort out a particular solution for each case. It is a long and painstaking process, with legal costs eating deeply into any disputed property. Each set of relationships, said the Law Commission, would have to be addressed separately, and a solution propounded.  That is what we must now do.

For cohabiting couples, the solution is to create a new form of binding civil partnership, permitting any two individuals to each each a formal public registered commitment, of the same degree of solemnity as marriage, and carrying the same property consequences.  My old friend Lord Lester, the Liberal Democrat peer, last year introduced such a Bill into the Lords, and I applaud him for that - presumably, it will "die" next week.  The civil Registry Office procedure could easily be used for such purposes.  That new partnership status would import automatically the same obligations of mutual support and sharing as now characterises a formal marriage relationship.

Given registered civil partnerships, a new legal platform would be created, for the regulation of household break-up - and the interests of children would be taken into account by the Authorities, as with the children of conventional heterosexual relationships. 

• But we liberals should not ignore this issue - the Tories did have one good point.

513   8 November 2002   

What's in a name?

Quite a lot, if it's Hrothgar Habakkuk.  He was the august Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University, who died this week. I heard him lecturing at Cambridge, when I was studying History (1957) and he was the Chichele Professor of Economic History at Oxford (also an exotic name, it seemed to me). 

He was a Welshman, a South Walian born in Barry and educated at the local state school.  His father was Director of Education for Glamorgan, also a founder of the Cardiff Fabian Society, in 1939.  He was egalitarian Welsh to the core.

So where did the name come from? 

• Habakkuk  Formerly Jones or Evans or Williams or Thomas, probably.  Because it was the gimmick of one of the big American revivalist campaigns in the 1890s (there were several, which raged through the religious valleys) that the Evangelist (Alexander, or Sankey, or whoever) called upon the converted to mark their dedication to Christ by changing their name.  The whole ritual of name-change by deed-poll contributed to the formality and solidity of the conversion process (apart from being very good for local solicitors).  To this day, Welsh telephone Directories are full of Habakkuks, Abrahams, Isaiahs, Ezras - even Jeremiahs - who have never seen the inside of a synagogue - the offspring of zealous Chapel folk all, the Billy Graham converts of their time.
• Hrothgar  His father, a scholarly Director of Education for the huge county of Glamorgan, was a great enthusiast for everything Anglo-Saxon.  He wanted to call his son Roger - but that is unambiguously of French extraction (Roger or Roget) and so he chose the nearest Anglo-Saxon equivalent, which is the name Hrothgar, as found in Beowulf.

And that, dear children, is how a nice Welsh boy ended up at the top of the English academic tree - with a very odd name like that.

Not many people know that.

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