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Mr. Flynn: Will my right hon. Friend give way?
Mr. Williams: I would prefer not to, because time is limited. I do not want to give way, because I want to let my hon. Friends make their own speeches.
Mr. Flynn: Will my right hon. Friend give way on the point about loyalty?
Mr. Williams: I am sorry--I will give way to my hon. Friend.
Mr. Flynn: There was an occasion in Parliament when my right hon. Friend was unjustly sacked from his position as shadow Secretary of State for Wales. One of his colleagues, in an act of personal loyalty, wrote a suicidal note in his favour, and was then himself sacked. Does not my right hon. Friend think that, when we have a courageous Secretary of State who is fighting a brave battle for us all in Wales, his loyalty should go to him?
Mr. Williams: There is a difference. When my hon. Friend did what he did--I have always respected him and appreciated his loyalty--I went to the Leader of the Opposition and asked for and secured his reinstatement.
The difference is that my hon. Friend showed loyalty with integrity. The Under-Secretary of State was asking for blind loyalty.
If the debate is to progress sensibly, we must strip away irrelevancies and myths. I tabled a parliamentary question as a result of a statement made by the Under-Secretary of State that thousands of jobs would be lost in Wales if the people of Wales did not vote yes. When challenged in the House by my hon. Friend the Member for Blaenau Gwent (Mr. Smith), he said that that was not what he had said. He claimed that he had said that thousands of jobs would be threatened in Wales. My hon. Friend, however, had the press release issued by the Welsh Office, as did my right hon. Friend the Member for Llanelli (Mr. Davies).
I asked what studies the Department had undertaken on the effect on jobs and investment in Wales of the creation of a Welsh Assembly. The Secretary of State replied:
Since the previous referendum, two major factors have influenced public opinion. The first is the 18 years of Tory devastation, and the second is the proliferation of quangos. I take first the greatest myth, which was well-exposed by my hon. Friend the Member for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney (Mr. Rowlands) in an article at the weekend--that somehow, if Wales had had an Assembly in the 1980s, it could have escaped the impact of Thatcherism. If I for one moment thought that that was true, I would not be in a position of dissent. I would be out there campaigning vigorously in favour of the Assembly.
However, when they think about the matter, most of my hon. Friends must realise that the myth is based on incorrect economic and constitutional assumptions. In the White Paper, the Secretary of State makes it clear that macro-economic policy will remain in the hands of central Government. The first Howe Budget would still have destroyed the jobs of Wales, as it destroyed the jobs of England. Even if, by some miracle, Wales had initially escaped the first impact, as the factories closed down in England, the factories in Wales and the steelworks in Wales that supplied them would have closed down as well.
Furthermore, there would have been no escape from the other policies that are associated in Wales with Thatcherism. The Prime Minister has made it clear that, even after this devolution--as would have been the case after the previous devolution if it had taken place--Parliament will be sovereign. Even with nursery vouchers and the poll tax, if a Government in Westminster were determined to impose such policies on Wales, they would be imposed on Wales. That will be the case in future, whether we have the Assembly or not. I am sure that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State will accept that that is so.
Mr. Ron Davies:
This is an important point, which is why I want to take issue with my right hon. Friend on it. I accept his analysis of the economic case. Clearly, the devastation inflicted on this country during the 1980s would have happened whether we had an Assembly or not. I fully endorse that point.
On the latter point about the constitutional question, however, the poll tax as it was constructed was implemented in Wales by means of three separate pages of secondary legislation. My right hon. Friend is correct in his assertion that Parliament is sovereign and that that will continue to be the case. Any Government, if they wanted to implement a poll tax, could implement it. No Government, however, could implement a poll tax in the way in which it was implemented in the 1980s.
If we had had an Assembly in the 1980s and the Government had tried to implement the poll tax in the way they did, there would have been an impact. Either the initial primary legislation would have had to impose a poll tax on Wales or the Government would have had to recognise a different political system in Wales and to decide that it would not proceed.
I entirely accept my right hon. Friend's argument that this House is sovereign. Parliament is sovereign and can always do what it wishes to do. It is my hope, however, that our political systems are not fossilised and that they are capable of growing, maturing and responding to different circumstances. When we have an Assembly, that evolution of our political practices will hasten.
Mr. Williams:
I thank my right hon. Friend for conceding my point. If the Government of the day chose to incorporate a poll tax in primary legislation, it would be enacted. I thank him for that clarification.
This matter concerns not only legislation, but the implementation of power and of policy. The Treasury can always ring-fence the money the Budget gives. There is an enormous difference between handing the whole loaf over, handing it over in a couple of pieces, or handing it over in thin slices. That option is always available to the Treasury, as our councils have, unfortunately, found out. The Treasury, even with an Assembly, would still have the capacity to constrict and almost to eliminate any discretion by the Assembly. The Assembly would have been forced to become a council, as it were--an agent of Government policy.
If there had been an Assembly during the Thatcher times or subsequently, the interface with the Cabinet, as the White Paper of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State makes clear, would still be the Secretary of State. Thus, the Secretary of State would still have been a Tory, and an English Member of Parliament representing an English constituency--and may well be so again. So an Assembly in no way addresses that problem.
Although Parliament is sovereign, as most of us here believe--I know that the hon. Member for Caernarfon (Mr. Wigley) believes this, for perfectly understandable reasons, and will, I think, endorse my point--there can be no escape from another surge of policy such as that enacted by Mrs. Thatcher. I must be careful--I am going on for too long.
Another feature is the quango state. On his white charger, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has stood, challenging the quango state. Many hon. Members will accept that it is not vanity to say that, over the past seven years, I have probably done as much as anybody in the House to expose the shortcomings of quangos. Indeed, if I may say to my right hon. Friend, my position is less ambivalent than his. After the first hearing on the Welsh Development Agency, he came to see me in my room to see whether it was essential to have a second hearing--
not for any dishonourable reason, but because he felt that the WDA was so important to Wales that we had to try to protect it from damage.
Mr. Williams:
Quite right, says my hon. Friend. Quite wrong! As I told my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State at the time--I am not in any way impugning him; he did not dispute this--what was imperative was that the WDA stables had to be seen to have been swept clean, and a second Public Accounts Committee hearing was needed to do that.
As has been suggested already, we were promised a crusade and a bonfire, but all we have had are a couple of burned-out coals. The Residuary Body for Wales was looking after the already completed changeover of local authorities without the White Paper. That is as dead on the ground as anything can get. The death sentence of the Cardiff Bay development corporation was already enshrined even before my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State included it in his White Paper.
My right hon. Friend has quoted the Development Board for Rural Wales and the Land Authority for Wales as quangos that are being abolished. That is a nicety of language. They are being abolished by being force-fed into the WDA. I am not interested in arguing whether it is right or wrong that they should go there, but they still exist. My right hon. Friend says that it is all about power. Well, their powers still exist--it is just that fewer people will exercise more power.
It is the same for hospital trusts. Every year,£3.5 billion is spent by health service bodies in Wales. We are told--again, one has to read the wording carefully--that there will be fewer trusts. That does not mean that there will be any less command at the heights of the NHS in Wales: it just means that there will be a few more mergers. There will be no change in the power or in who exercises it.
My right hon. Friend really gave the game away in an interview in The Western Mail, when he said that it was essential that the important quangos were dealt in advance of the Assembly being set up. He was also reported as saying:
"None, but my Department is keeping these issues under review."--[Official Report, 19 June 1997; Vol. 296, c. 272.]
Why can we not just stick to the facts? Why do we have to fabricate evidence when none exists in support of a case? If a case stands, it stands on its own; we do not need to make statements that have no foundation in reality.
"many of the quangos which will survive were small, had a small budget, had little or no economic impact, and were advisory bodies retained by every Government."
Of course they are. He goes on to say that the Government want
"to leave decisions to the Assembly on how it would deal with other quangos."
It does not seem the greatest act of confidence to say that, when it comes to the big ones, they have to deal with them themselves. In fact, one is bound to ask: why bother? Why not do it all ourselves? If my right hon. Friend has the power to deal with the big ones, he has the power to deal with the small ones--just as he can give power to the councils. He does not have to wait for an Assembly to give powers to the councils.
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