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Sir Peter Emery: I thank the hon. Gentleman for his remarks. He will not expect me to become a judge of the variation of views among Welsh Members on that matter.
There was some criticism of cost, because the procedure will involve additional expenditure that has not been thought about or budgeted for. However, when we examined the probable cost, we found it to be quite
small--about £2,500 per sitting in Wales. That is small compared with the cost for the Scottish Grand Committee, which has to travel to Scotland.
Points were made about the Order Paper and the Official Report. In paragraph 10 of our report, I asked the House to note that those documents were produced by and for the House and therefore should be comprehensible to all Members of the House. There is nothing to stop any hon. Member producing his speech in the Welsh language if that is what he wishes, but the Committee did not think that it made sense to have a Welsh language Official Report or Order Paper, as they would not be understood by the vast majority of hon. Members.
We have attempted--I hope--to be practical in our recommendations to the House, which the Government have been willing to accept. I hope that they meet the wishes of the House and of all Welsh Members, who obviously have a particular interest in safeguarding a language that is theirs and that there is great reason to safeguard.
Mr. John Morris (Aberavon):
I, too, wish to thank the Procedure Committee for the speed with which it tackled its remit from the Leader of the House. I will not follow the arguments of the right hon. Member for Honiton(Sir P. Emery) on whether the English language should be known as the British language, for the central reason that this country is made up of four nations, so there is no such thing as a British language.
I very much welcome the proposal that Welsh should be capable of being used in parliamentary proceedings in Wales. The word "permitted" in the motion--in the context of the oldest living language in these islands, which has a special statutory status--strikes an odd note, although it is technically correct.
As Members, we should not pat ourselves on the back too much over the proposal to allow each Select Committee meeting in Wales to presume in favour of the use of Welsh for those witnesses who wish to use the language.
My hon. Friend the Member for Gower (Mr. Wardell), in his evidence, made this valid point:
My hon. Friend made the point that some other Committees sitting in Wales, such as the Agriculture Committee, might wish to take evidence in Welsh. I believe that it could. Paragraph 13(d) of the Procedure Committee's report says that Select Committees should give notice of any intention to allow evidence to be heard in Welsh. That is quite wrong. It should be automatically presumed that the Committees will take evidence in
Welsh, unless there is good reason to the contrary--for example, a lack of translation facilities. I do not understand why a decision should have to be made on each and every occasion.
I said earlier that we should not pat ourselves on the back too much. For a long time, other bodies set up by the House have done what my hon. Friend the Member for Gower emphasised. It is recorded in the archives of the House that one of my ancestors gave evidence in Welsh to a royal commission on land in Wales and Monmouthshire as far back as 28 April 1894. David Jenkins was called and examined through an interpreter. He had no language other than Welsh in which to express himself if the royal commission wanted to hear how his father had been dispossessed by the Earl of Lisburne from a farm in 1875, which had been tenanted by the family for four or five generations from as far back as 1797 or even earlier. If the royal commission wanted to hear about the hardship involved, it could hear it only in Welsh. It was happening then in the real world, so there is no reason why it should not happen now. I expect that David Jenkins was one of many people who could not express himself in any language other than Welsh.
We have moved on during the past 50 years and we have passed three important Acts, each in turn enhancing the status of our language. As my hon. Friend the Member for Dewsbury (Mrs. Taylor), the shadow Leader of the House, said succinctly in her evidence, it was inconceivable that, having obliged other bodies in Wales to provide a Welsh facility, we should not do the same. That is the crux of the argument.
There was no such thing as the Welsh Grand Committee until it was conceived by the joint efforts of Ness Edwards--who was the Member of Parliament for Caerphilly and the father of my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Mrs. Golding)--and Goronwy Roberts, the Member of Parliament for Caernarfon. It is right that, while English should remain the language of this House, the Welsh Grand Committee, when sitting in Wales, should be able to hear contributions in Welsh from hon. Members. If confined to that Committee, I see no great difficulty in having speeches in Welsh wherever the Committee sits, but that is my personal view. In practice, we are advocates and we seek to persuade, so I suspect that there will not be many instances of Members wishing to do that. Nevertheless, the principle of being able to do so should be established.
My hon. Friend the Member for Newport, East(Mr. Hughes), the Chairman of the Welsh Grand Committee, said in his evidence that, from his experience of the Council of Europe, he did not envisage much of a problem with the proposal. I have just returned from the European Court of Human Rights and the diversity of 14 judges from countries as different as Estonia and Turkey, advocates, members of the public, and so on--yet in the cases that I heard there was no difficulty with simultaneous translation. We have moved on and the facilities exist.
One important practical point is that the translators, especially the simultaneous translators, should be competent. Translating is a difficult art. Most of us who are privileged to be bilingual would not set up as simultaneous translators. It is a difficult art that requires special training. Those I know in that art--they are
international translators--either have a very mixed background or have immersed themselves in more than one culture. I believe that we in Wales have the advantage in our translators because we are brought up in a bilingual society.
No one should think that translating is an easy art to do well. Hence, one sees at international gatherings that translators usually do not operate for more than 20 minutes or half an hour at a time, when someone else has to take over, particularly if the subject is technical. I emphasise the importance of good translators.
Hon. Members have already mentioned the practical problems involved if a person switches during his speech from one language to another. Those problems are not insuperable. We are on a learning curve and, as the right hon. Member for Honiton rightly said, we should reconsider the situation as we go along according to how it develops. That was an important point, which I endorse fully. Let us make a start and see how it goes.
It is curious that one of the things that might happen--I disagree entirely with the hon. Member for Ceredigion and Pembroke, North (Mr. Dafis) on this issue--is that one might want to make a point or more than one point in one language and then switch to English for the remainder of the speech. That would not be tokenism and should not be disapproved of, if we can get over the learning curve; otherwise, the curious effect will be that someone who wants to make a point in Welsh will want to develop his entire speech in Welsh, whereas he might have been prepared to make most of the speech as an advocate, to seek to persuade and to ensure that the language is directly addressed to the majority of those who know both languages. That is an important issue, but it is not insuperable.
Many years ago, I attended the Canadian Parliament, in Ottawa. I do not know whether the right hon. Member for Honiton was with me on that occasion--it was a long time ago, but he may well have been. I think that it was a meeting of the North Atlantic Assembly. Pierre Trudeau was there, fielding questions as Prime Minister in two languages. If a question was put to him in French, he would reply in French. If it was asked in English, he would reply in English. Certainly I saw no difficulties. I am not competent to comment on his French, but he was a native-born French speaker.
I am proud that when--on my first occasion as Secretary of State for Wales--I visited Gwynedd county council, in Easter 1974, the same type of system prevailed. I was questioned and addressed in both languages. Many questions went on for the good part of two hours, and I sought as best as I could to answer in whatever language the question was asked in. Certainly, as regards the language, there was no complaint--although there might have been complaints about the contents of the answers. It is not an insuperable difficulty, and I think that the wise words of the right hon. Member for Honiton--that we should consider the position as we go along--should be borne in mind.
"Part of the reason for taking evidence away from Westminster is to hear people in their working environment or in a setting that is directly relevant to the inquiry".
Therefore, I was a little surprised to read that the only time the Welsh Affairs Select Committee had taken evidence in Welsh was as far back as 1981, although it has taken formal evidence in Wales on 18 occasions since then.
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