Government of Wales Bill

My Lords, I have listened with particular interest to what has just been said by the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford. I have always understood the Liberal Democrats’ position on referendums and, as my noble friend Lord Kingsland said, one can also understand the general objection to referendums. There seems to have been an increase in confidence on the part of the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, as the Bill has proceeded. On earlier occasions, he indicated his reluctance to move on to the Part 4 option because of anxiety about his ability to win a referendum. I would like to refer to this act of confidence in a moment, in the context of some observations made during our proceedings by the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan. One of our difficulties with a Bill of this kind is that, although the grouping of amendments has been perfectly proper, it makes it quite difficult to debate in their proper relationship two crucial parts of the Bill—Part 3 and Part 4. We found that in Committee, when we got on to Part 4 only late in the evening, after the dinner break. Today, we will again get on to Part 4 fairly late in the evening. Yet the two parts are intimately related. The noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, said on Second Reading:"““I consider Part 4 to be the heart, core and kernel of the Bill””." He went on to say that Part 3,"““is a transitory bridge that enables the whole question of Part 4 to be approached””.—[Official Report, 22/3/06; cols. 278-9.]" I have made it perfectly clear that, like my noble friend Lord Kingsland, I intensely dislike Part 3 and infinitely prefer Part 4. The noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, probably does, too—he would like to go to what he described earlier as Gladstonian home rule. I have a certain amount of sympathy with the noble Lord’s lack of confidence in his ability to persuade the Welsh electorate that his views are right; I understand perfectly well that, with his experience, he has these doubts. He spoke with considerable force on Second Reading and in Committee about the bruising experience of having led the yes campaign in 1979, when he failed to convince the electorate in a single county in Wales. His parliamentary experience has been pretty bruising, too. He fought four elections as the Plaid Cymru candidate and did not win them. Then, wrapped in the embrace of the Labour Party in the Wilsonian era and warmed by the white heat of the technological revolution and all that kind of thing, he won the Cardigan seat and held it in the 1970 election, when he and I first met. However, there was a shattering blow when in both elections in 1974—when my party was given a bloody nose and the Labour Party was returned to power—he was rejected by the electorate of Cardigan. After the awful blow of losing the referendum, he must have thought that he had found a safe haven in Anglesey when he succeeded to the seat that Cledwyn Hughes—the much missed Lord Cledwyn of Penrhos—had made his own, only to lose it to a young Conservative, Keith Best, who was a Brighton councillor. If I had had such an experience, I might, like the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, have withdrawn to another career. He did—