Government of Wales Bill

Ah, yes; once bitten, twice shy. I thank my hon. Friend for reminding the House of the north-east referendum. When the Labour Government think they will win, they hold a referendum. If they think they may not win, or there is a chance that another view will be expressed, they have no intention of allowing that device to be used by the people. The next point that we need to consider is whether the proposal is for a fundamental change. Throughout the debate, the Secretary of State and the Minister have tried to talk up the Assembly Measures as a more radical devolution, or to talk down the Measures as merely a device of convenience to overcome legislative roadblocks. The proposal is a handling plan to appease the opposing factions in the Labour party. They should not try to pull the wool over our eyes in order to sort out their internal differences. When giving evidence to the Welsh Affairs Committee on 10 December the Secretary of State said that the device enabled the Government to"““get on with the job in the meantime and give substantial powers . . . to the Assembly through Orders in Council between 2007 and 2011””." On Second Reading the Father of the House, the right hon. Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams), who sadly is not in his place, raised concerns. He said that he believed it was technically possible under these provisions for the full legislative objective to be achieved without a referendum. He raised further concerns about what he described as a ““Trojan horse””. He said that"““if just one non-controversial, innocuous order is passed, a policy area is opened. Once that happens, the Assembly is free to introduce new measures with different policy objectives, without having to go for a further order. It is a form of creeping devolution.””—[Official Report, 9 January 2006; Vol. 441, c. 53.]" I hope the Minister will take seriously the words of the Father of the House. Last week in the debate in the Assembly the First Minister, who has been alerted to the possibility of having primary legislative powers in all but name and without the inconvenience of a referendum, said that every party in Wales would be able to start the process of preparing their manifestos on the basis of the extension of the Assembly’s law-making powers. He went on to boast that the third Assembly would have far greater law-making powers than the first and second, which meant more meat on the bones, more choice for the people and more power for the people of Wales. Let us be clear. There will not be more power for the people of Wales. There will be more power for the Labour Executive in Wales, whether the people want them to have it or not. The First Minister has no plans to ask them, either. The provisions extend significantly the powers of the Assembly and the people should be consulted first, not least as this is not what they voted for in the last referendum which, as everybody recalls, was won by a whisker. What did the people of Wales vote for? We are all more than aware of their lukewarm endorsement of the original Assembly provisions. However, I am more concerned with what the people of Wales think they have voted for, rather than reliving the referendum. I have examined the policy papers produced in August 1997. They make extremely interesting reading. In policy paper 3 the Government told the people that the Assembly would consider how new laws from the Westminster Parliament would be implemented in Wales, and that the Assembly would fill in the details of those laws by secondary legislation to reflect the needs in Wales. The policy paper answers those questions by saying that primary legislation will be made in Westminster, and that it effectively will be interpreted in Wales by the Assembly. So the people of Wales were led to believe that they were voting only for secondary legislation. More importantly, in answer to a question in policy paper 6, the Government answered the questionas to why the referendum would not offer a wide range of options such as full independence by saying that Ministers believed that those options had been rejected by the voters in the general election. They said that the purpose of the referendum was to seek endorsement of the Government’s ““detailed plans”” that voters had accepted in principle. In other words, the last referendum was specifically on the detailed plans that were enacted in the Government of Wales Act 1998, and not on the general outline. The people were certainly neither consulted on, nor led to believe that they would get, the system that is before us today.