Civil Partnership injustices
by Catherine Utley, Mailonline:
You may not remember the story about the Burden sisters. Both unmarried, they lived their lives in a house in Wiltshire inherited from their parents. Good, kind, dutiful people, they devoted themselves to looking after a succession of elderly relations in their home.
But as they grew old, they grew worried. They began to fear about what would become of the surviving sister after one of them died.
Especially, they feared for what would become of their jointly owned home, which was brimming with age-old shared associations, so dear to them both.
The problem was the taxman. For, though the sisters’ relationship was as close and long-standing as that of most husbands and wives — and (to speak the truth) greatly more so than many — the Government was not prepared, as it was for married couples, to protect the joint home for the surviving sister once she was on her own.
Instead, it would tax the deceased sister’s share of the property. Since its value had greatly increased in the many decades of their ownership, this meant the surviving sister would, on bereavement, be turfed out of her own home because she would need to sell it to pay the inheritance tax.
For years, the Burdens wrote to successive Chancellors at Budget-time to ask whether the Government would consider deferring the inheritance tax in cases like theirs until after both deaths.
Every time, they were told that this was only allowed for married couples.
When civil partnerships became law in 2004, extending the rights of married couples to couples of the same sex, the Burdens saw their chance and took their case to court.
They didn’t ask to be civil partners, but they did want to be treated in the same way for inheritance tax. There was nothing in the law to say that civil partners had to be in a sexual relationship.
Wasn’t it, they argued, unfair discrimination not to allow devoted, long-term cohabiting sisters equal treatment for inheritance tax purposes? In 2008, the European Court of Human Rights ruled against them. The sisters, by then aged 90 and 82, were told that without a binding legal commitment between them, they could not have the advantages that went with a binding legal commitment.
They could not enter a binding legal commitment because they were sisters. And there was no further explanation as to why sisters could not enter a binding legal commitment.
All this has become topical again: the Government is conducting a review on the future of civil partnerships because same-sex marriage has left things messy.
[…] If the Government believes platonic love is somehow inferior to sexual love outside of marriage and must be punished, then it must explain why.
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