thanks! I saw this before and it's so tedious to read that I gave up. Why didn't they just make a table of the actual differences instead of separately stating what each category does? 🤦

Anyway, if I try to summarise, for the pension, in the case of reaching pension age after 6 April 2016, the only difference seems to be for:

• opposite sex marriage:

"Married men may be eligible for a lower-rate basic State Pension based on their spouse’s National Insurance contributions, provided their spouse was born after 5 April 1950."

This text is not there in the other categories (same-sex marriage, opposite-sex civil partnership, same-sex civil partnership). I don't know what it means practically, and I thought that state pension was so low anyway that you can't count on it for a proper pension...

Is that really the only difference?

PS: I also noticed that this is for England and Whales, while I'm mostly interested in Scotland, didn't expect it to mean different things between parts of the UK though..

To be fair I don't really understand it either, and I've lived here my whole life!

The difference in laws (terminology, application and the making of them) is pretty complicated and down to the chequered history of the British Isles (geographic).

There's a UK Parliament that makes laws applying to the whole nation (That's England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland). The latter three have their own parliaments (in NI it's called the Assembly). They have certain devolved...

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...powers around education, transport, health, policing and so on but each one has different levels of devolution.

Scotland and NI have their own legal systems which differ from those in England and Wales.

In the devolved parliaments, members make decisions for their own nation. In the UK parliament, members make decisions for the UK as a whole where they're not devolved powers.

England itself does not have a separate parliament.

Confused yet?

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It all basically boils down historically to those English people who had money, land, property, titles or some other form of privilege got bored of dominating their own underlings and decided to either fight everyone outside England or take over everything.

And we were really good at building ships, so once local control was complete, attempts to control the rest of the world followed.

I'll gloss over the European wars and royal marriages though 😉

@CellySally I found this, from a Scottish law firm, that seems to summarise the differences: gillespiemacandrew.co.uk/news-…

Their conclusion is that:

"although they are two distinct types of legal relationship recognised by the law in Scotland, the rights that civil partners and spouses have are nearly identical. Whether a couple wishes to enter into a marriage or civil partnership is down to their personal preference."

Civil Partnership or Marriage – What are the legal differences? - Gillespie Macandrew

We have prepared a helpful factsheet on the legal differences between becoming marital spouses or civil partners.

^{Lauren.Forgie@gillespiemacandrew.co.uk (Gillespie Macandrew)}