Relative Family Values

Since there are no more important issues facing the country, let alone the Conservative Party, a private member's bill has been introduced to place a legal ban on marriage between first cousins. The private member in question, Richard Holden MP, is the kind of third cousin to the human species who runs an anti-litter campaign one year and gets fined for litter-dropping the next, and the matter has been thought through with expectable scientific precision. As children can only be born in wedlock, and as about six per cent of children from cousin marriages suffer congenital health problems, such unions patently pose an unacceptable risk to the quality of the nation's breeding stock. Outside the aristocracy, who would no doubt receive an appropriate dispensation, the majority of cousin marriages in the UK happen to be Islamic ones; but that's just a coincidence.