My hon. Friend expresses very well the position we are in now. The Silk commission, after an exhaustive inquiry, made certain recommendations. We were promised that the Government would reply in the spring, then the summer, then the late summer and then the early autumn, but when will they actually respond? Carwyn Jones rightly said over the weekend that this is a major problem. An urgent bypass is required in Gwent and other constituencies that suffer continual traffic congestion, such as that of my right hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen (Paul Murphy), in order to find an alternative route for the M4. As Carwyn Jones said, the situation is frozen. The Welsh Government cannot move forward until there is a response to the Silk commission and action is taken on that.
In a few weeks’ time, on 4 November, Newport will recall the great day when thousands of Chartists made their protest against the Government of the time. They
intended to establish a republic. The plan was to stop the mail going from Newport—that is the Royal Mail, not the Daily Mail, although there may well be riots about that now—so that the signal would go to the rest of the country that a revolution was going on and that a republic was to be set up. It was very good of Her Majesty to organise a party tonight to give me enough time to explain what happened. Those people wanted to run their own affairs and to have autonomy 174 years ago.
I will conclude, because I am sure that my hon. Friends will want to contribute to the debate, by reading a poem about that march in 1839 by Gillian Clarke, who concludes by saying that the “grudged gift” of devolution was given sparingly:
“Their bones ached from the shift, wind in the shaft,
the heat of the furnaces, yet on they marched,
their minds a blaze because their cause was right,
through darkness from Ebbw Vale, Blackwood, Pontypool,
faces frozen and stung by the lash of rain,
trudging the roads to Newport through the night.
At the Welsh Oak, Rogerstone, betrayed by daylight,
Frost’s men from the west, Williams’s from the east,
Jones’s men never arrived. The rest struck on
To stand united, of one heart in the square
before the Westgate. Had they stood silent then,
had they not surged forward, had they not been shaken
by rage against injustice, had they muzzled
the soldiers’ muskets with a multitude
of silence, had reason spoken,
those steely thousands might have won the day.
But they stormed the doors to set their comrades free,
and shots were fired, and freedom’s dream was broken.
A score dead. Fifty wounded. Their leaders tried,
condemned, transported. The movement, in disarray,
lost fifty years. Then came, at last, that shift
of power, one spoonful of thin gruel at a time,
from strong to weak, from rich to poor,
from men to women, like a grudged gift.”
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