Government of Wales Bill

The resolution of that problem does not lie in the Lords amendment, because even if the Lords amendment were carried, the Assembly could not compel Parliament to do anything. In the event of, as the hon. Gentleman puts it, an anti-devolution Conservative Secretary of State—I suppose that there might be one of those creatures around in the future—wanting to do that, there would be an almighty constitutional bust-up. It would not be in Westminster’s interests and I do not even think that it would be in the interests of anti-devolution Conservative Secretary of State to behave in that way. It would cause a real conflict. If a Conservative Government were determined not to grant primary powers despite the Bill, and not to call a referendum, that would be a political battle that had to be had. That relates to the point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen. Despite the clear route map that the Bill lays out—when it gets Royal Assent, that will be on the statute book—towards primary powers via a referendum, if a hostile Conservative Government, who were never going to give Wales or the Welsh Assembly what they wanted in those circumstances, were determined to stop that, Parliament would be sovereign. However, that would create not just the constitutional crisis that I described, but a political crisis for the Conservative party that would be extremely damaging to its future prospects in Wales.