Government of Wales Bill

If the question is, do people wish to be governed by Order in Council moderated in its detail by the Welsh Assembly, that is a matter—[Interruption.] That is the question, and if the question cannot be put, perhaps that is a good reason for not embarking on the project in the first place. The complexity of the Government’s proposals is one of the reasons why I find them objectionable and why I am anxious about them. The proposals will deprive the House of its ability to carry out its function of scrutiny of primary legislation, but it does not hand that function lock, stock and barrel over to the Welsh Assembly. It hands it over to a hybrid system in which the key linchpin is the Secretary of State. To that extent, the other model, which is to give primary legislative power to the Welsh Assembly, is certainly constitutionally much neater, but it runs the risk of being rejected. I am afraid that I have very little doubt, as was pointed out eloquently by some Members who participated in the debate, that the reason that the Government have not embarked on the referendum is that they do not think that they will carry the Welsh electorate with them. The success of devolution has not been sufficient to justify it. We cannot support the most important part of the Bill, and that explains why we must table a reasoned amendment. As it is the central part of the Bill, how can we possibly not register our displeasure at an early stage about the way in which the Government have chosen to proceed? There are all sorts of unanswered questions about the procedure. The Government say that there will be pre-legislative scrutiny, but they completely gloss over what will be subjected to such scrutiny. It will be only Orders in Council. Assembly measures cannot be subjected to pre-legislative scrutiny because they will not exist. The Government are thus misleading the public and some of their Back Benchers about what will happen. The capacity of the House to have any real input into the detail of legislation will be affected. I always remember Tam Dalyell’s comment that the devil lies in the detail, which he rightly said repeatedly in the devolution debates of the late 1990s, and our inability to examine the detail is the absolute Achilles heel of the way in which we legislate in this country. Even if the Assembly is well meaning and works hard, I do not think that it is an adequate substitute for what we do in the House. If it were to be such a substitute, the proper way of achieving that would be to transfer primary legislative functions to the Welsh Assembly. If the people of Wales do not want that, the Secretary of State should accept that they perhaps want to work within the existing system, not along the lines that the Government propose. I think that my hon. Friend the Member for Ribble Valley (Mr. Evans) said that the Bill was a sleight of hand. It is in fact a deception because it proposes a major constitutional change, but denies a referendum to the Welsh people through which they can express their view on it. On those grounds alone, we would be entitled to vote against the Bill on Second Reading, but because we wished to support certain aspects of it, the proper course of action was to table a reasoned amendment. I encourage hon. Members on both sides of the House to give serious consideration to supporting it. On the electoral system, we are in danger of embarking on a theatre of the absurd. I am a believer in first past the post. I did not like it when we introduced proportional representation systems, and I still do not like them. However, if we are going to have them, we have jolly well got to accept the consequences of having them and try to ensure, as a Parliament, a degree of consistency in respect of them. The exceptional measures that the Government have decided to apply only to Wales—not to Scotland or the London assembly—do not stand up to close scrutiny. Elected Members of an Assembly or Parliament are members of a body corporate. If we decide to give people alternative ways of getting in there, we have to live with the consequences. The purpose of getting into Parliament or an Assembly is to participate in the decision-making process. Parties exist because they wish to promote individuals who they think can participate in that process and make a contribution. Fettering that discretion because the political classes in Wales do not like the fact that losers get in by an alternative way that they themselves enacted in legislation eight years ago is not an adequate response. If the House wishes to devise another system, I am only too happy to co-operate with the Secretary of State or the right hon. Member for Torfaen to achieve that. However, I am not prepared to see tinkering with a system that has been justified and explained to the House on numerous occasions after being brought in, but has suddenly ceased to be flavour of the month.