Government of Wales Bill

I wonder whether it is reasonable to remind the House that those of us who represent English constituencies but come from Welsh stock also have a concern to promote the best possible government for Wales, and have no concern to remove the devolution arrangement, which is now part of our history. Whatever the arguments at the time might have been, that is the point that we have reached. The question that we are asked to discuss today is whether the change being made is sufficiently large to invalidate the decision made when the referendum was held, and to demand another referendum to ensure that the people of Wales wish to make such a step. As the House will know, I am a disbeliever in referendums, which I consider to be a foreign and non-parliamentary activity. I would not have had a referendum in the first place—if the imperial Parliament, as it was once called, has decided to devolve its powers, that is a decision that the whole nation makes. That is not what happened, however. In this case, we established that a decision was reached as a result of a referendum. I have voted against referendums in every other circumstance, and I only think it possible to hold one in this case because of continuity with a previous decision that was made as a result of such a referendum. Having said that, the Government are being peculiarly difficult in trying to pretend, on the one hand, that the changes are so minor that they do not require this reference to the people of Wales, and on the other, that they are too complicated for the people of Wales to make a decision. The Minister cannot have it both ways. The truth is that the changes are complicated because they are intended to hide the fact that they are so fundamental. The difficulty that the Minister must face is that I can find no parallel for this kind of legislative change outside of the desires of Napoleon III of France to avoid democracy. He used to so complicate the system that, at various points, people had a bit of a say, but, in the end, he gave himself the final say. Were I voting in a referendum in Wales, therefore, I would want to ask a lot of questions about the role of the Secretary of State, about where, in the end, the power will lie, and about whether I wanted this change, which removed the power from the democratically elected Parliament of the United Kingdom but did not give it directly to a democratically elected Assembly in Wales but rather passed it through a series of sieves, one of which was the Secretary of State for Wales, as well as many other mechanisms. It seems to me, therefore, that a referendum would give not just the people of Wales but the rest of us an opportunity to be quite sure what the Government are about. In a sense, the more complicated that is, the more important a referendum is. In a referendum, the details would have to be presented to the people of Wales in a form that would allow them reasonably to be expected to be able to make up their minds.