Government of Wales Bill

This has been a fascinating short debate. The Minister made two arguments, really. In defending the role of the Secretary of State, he said that we must have the national view as well as the view of the people of Wales. That comes pretty close to the words of a former Liberal Prime Minister that I quoted some hours ago, who said that there must be an English veto. What else did the noble Lord’s words mean? Then he declared that one should not have a referendum unless one was certain that one was going to win it. What he was really saying was that the people of Wales would not be allowed a choice until Ministers were absolutely confident that they could not lose. He advocated an alternative solution based on subterfuge and deceit: ““Step by step we will get there, and only when we have got there will we allow the people of Wales a choice””. The position of the Liberal Democrats is remarkable—it is not to have a referendum at all. Well, the fact is that the Bill provides for a referendum, so the real question is: should the people of Wales be allowed to go ahead and be given their choice or should the Welsh Assembly be allowed to decide whether to ask the people of Wales, albeit at a date effectively to be decided by the Secretary of State and the UK Government acting in what has been described as the national interest? It was suggested that I, or those who think like me, would fiddle the wording of the referendum, but our Amendment No. 83 proposes that the wording of the referendum question should be decided after consideration by all the political parties in both Houses of Parliament. So that was not a strong suggestion. I welcomed the return of the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, to this House after a long absence and reminded him of when we used to speak in Cardigan Mart many years ago. The noble Lord said that he was not impugning my motives and went on to impugn them robustly. He questioned the genuineness of my attitude. He said that I was trying to rush the Welsh people. Rush the Welsh people? I am not. I am saying that the Welsh Assembly should have the choice. He believes in a Welsh assembly but does not think that the Welsh Assembly should be able to take the decision. I quite understand why he is nervous in his approach; he is living in a past of very bad dreams, because he confessed his role in that 1979 referendum, when only 13 per cent of the people of Wales voted on his side of the argument. Although the noble Lord has a long memory, he was wrong to suggest that if a referendum was lost, the door would be closed. He criticised our amendment, but that amendment would allow a referendum to be brought forward again in four years. As I pointed out earlier in the debate, the noble Lord, Lord Richard, does not believe that we are going to have a referendum anyway in that timescale. No one who has argued the case on the other side has put forward the proposition that the Welsh people will be given a choice in the next four or five years. Indeed, I think that some hope that it will be 10 years or more before the Welsh people are given a choice. I was asked what my position would be. My first position is that the people of Wales should be allowed to choose. Whatever doubts I may have had in the past, given a choice between the subterfuge and deceit of Part 3 and going the whole hog of Part 4, I would unhesitatingly campaign for Part 4. I think that Part 3 is wholly disreputable and dishonest. I quoted the criticisms of the mechanism by noble Lords on the Liberal Democrat Benches and by the noble Lord, Lord Richard. The mechanism is deceitful and unacceptable because effectively, step by step, it takes us down the road to devolution without allowing the people of Wales any say in the matter at all and then, when they have got there and the door is closed, the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, turns round and says, ““Now you can vote on it. And by the way, there is no point in voting against it because we are there already””. I call that a dishonest approach and I will not have anything to do with it.