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Mr. Dominic Grieve (Beaconsfield): I am grateful for the opportunity to take part in the debate, and I shall try to be brief. I wish to cover three important points.
I was particularly interested, in reading the White Paper, to see that one of the great selling points will be the Assembly's ability to deal with secondary legislation. I have the privilege--albeit sometimes a slightly purgatorial privilege--of going upstairs every Tuesday afternoon to the Joint Select Committee on Statutory Instruments to scrutinise the gobbledegook that comes out of central Government. Statutory instruments and secondary legislation are the Achilles' heel of our democracy, allowing rafts of legislative provision, including criminal offences, to be introduced without anybody knowing what goes on and often with a hideous lack of clarity, some of which derives directly from the Euro-directives.
The Government now say that they will transfer scrutiny of that secondary legislation to the Welsh Assembly, which will have the ability to regulate it. Superficially, that may seem to have a few attractions, but when one sits back and thinks about it, one realises that the Assembly will have no role whatsoever. The vast majority of statutory instruments which it will have the pleasure of rubber-stamping will have to go through willy-nilly, because they come directly from central Government diktat and the majority are imposed through Europe.
What has not been explained--I find this fascinating--is how the content of such instruments will be co-ordinated centrally. We spend a great deal of time in our Committee meetings having explained to us by Speaker's Counsel, who is extremely experienced on the matter, the extraordinary failings and lack of co-ordination between Government Departments in achieving comparable legal provisions, which we must constantly refer back and regulate.
How will that be done if it is not done centrally in this House? It defies credibility that those with ultimate responsibility for good government should simply hive off
to an Assembly that has neither the ability nor the input from specialist staff for the scrutiny of secondary legislation, especially given that the occasions on which it will be able to intervene directly and change the legislation will be extremely limited.
On that score, the Secretary of State and the Government are selling the House and the country a pup. There will be no ability to scrutinise or influence secondary legislation. The reform that is, heaven only knows, badly needed, is in this House. Hon. Members of all parties need to sit down and look at this stuff and prevent it from coming out in such a hideous form. It needs to be referred back to this Chamber if there is to be any opportunity to influence it.
That is not a party political point. Half the statutory instruments that we have been examining over the past few weeks came from the last Government. We are beginning to examine those from this Government, but frankly it does not make a bean of difference--they are equally badly drafted.
I was fascinated to read in the White Paper that, in the resolution of disputes between the Assembly and this House and central Government.
What does shine through in the White Paper is the emphasis on the holistic approach. We heard that two or three times in the Secretary of State's speech. I hope that I came into politics intending to conduct myself with integrity and courtesy--that is important--but politics and its processes are not about an holistic approach. That is the decorative pap and mush that the Government have put out to justify serious constitutional changes that, ultimately, will affect accountability in government.
The basic principle behind the justification for the legislation is that it will make government more accountable; yet we are the sovereign legislative body, and accountability rests with us. The buck stops with us. We are the only people who, ultimately, can call the Secretary of State and the Government to account. The White Paper states, in black and white, that, when the legislation is enacted, the Secretary of State will not be accountable for the activities of the Assembly. A better recipe for bad government could not be found.
I do not want to follow the English nationalist road.I am British. My ancestors come from every corner of the United Kingdom and I see myself as British through and through. The complaint that has been made throughout the whole of the devolution process, and that we have heard again today, is that people want to parochialise their politics. They are no longer prepared to accept the concept that they have to lump majority views within the United Kingdom if they disagree with them. They claim the right
to parochialise their politics and, provided that within their own parish they have a majority view, to buck the view of everyone else.
There is absolutely no doubt that sovereignty ultimately lies with the people of this country, through the sovereign and her coronation oath.
Mr. Grieve:
Yes, it lies with the Queen through her coronation oath to her subjects. That is what the oath is all about. It is worth re-reading.
Mr. Allan Rogers (Rhondda):
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Vale of Clwyd (Mr. Ruane) on his maiden speech. I am sure that he will represent his constituency with great force.
Bearing in mind what has gone on over the past couple of months, there seems to be a Welsh national newspaper that is a broadsheet for the Welsh Office. Those of us who happen to have a different view about the Welsh Assembly from other colleagues in the Labour party might well be in favour of devolution. I am strongly in favour of it, but I am not in favour of the Labour party's proposals as encapsulated in the White Paper. A fundamental reason for not believing in them is that I do not want subsidiarity. At the same time, I do not want devolution to stop at an all-Wales level.
I happen to be a strong proponent and supporter of local government. It is an institution that we take for granted all the time. Selfless people spend their lives--many of them prejudicing their careers--to serve others at a local level. They undertake fairly awesome responsibilities. When I was involved in local government I participated more in the democratic process than I feel that I have ever done in England, where the Executive runs the state and where Parliament has little say.
Local government is the largest employer in Wales, and it spends more money than any other organisation in Wales. For the life of me, I cannot understand why, if they wanted to abolish quangos, the Government did not first restore to local government the powers of those quangos. It was the Tories who took the powers of local government and handed them to the quangos that they set up.
That is what happened over the past 18 years. The Tories could not govern Wales. Indeed, they could not govern England. They never won local elections. We know that they were hammered at that level. So what did they do? In London, in other parts of England and in Wales, they took powers from local authorities and gave them to unelected quangos, where they could put their placemen. That has been the pattern of politics in Wales.
We should not fall for the false nationalistic answer to the problems of democracy and accountability. Surely we should first undo what the Tories have done. It was the
Tory party that created bad government in Wales. That is why I, and some of my hon. Friends who hold a different view from others in the Labour party, resent the imputation that there is a move to get into bed with the Tories.
I happen to come from what many people in the valleys of south Wales refer to as the heartland of British socialism. The very thought of collaborating with the Tories would get me kicked out of the House by my constituents and by my family, right through to those who would rise from their graves at the very thought of it.
I and my hon. Friends the Members for Islwyn(Mr. Touhig), for Ogmore (Sir R. Powell), for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney (Mr. Rowlands) and for Cynon Valley (Ann Clwyd) are prepared to fight against the Tories all the time. We also fight against the nationalists because we think that they present a false road for the Welsh people to travel down.
Our patriotism and our love of Wales is not based on resentment of the English. We are not fighting for a Wales in Europe. We do not trust the French, the Germans and those from Luxembourg any more or any less than we trust the English. If we have to be part of a pattern of government, I would rather be within the pattern of government of a British state, of Great Britain, rather than following Plaid Cymru's policy of a Wales in Europe.I will not go down that road, because it does not serve my constituents. Let it be understood that we are all here to serve our constituents.
I see my colleagues in the Chamber, and I see no one who is an absolutely dogmatic politician. We must all realise that politics is often the art of the possible. Our surgeries are not full of people who fly to the stars on great political philosophies. They are full of people who are concerned about their rents and their welfare payments, because the ravages of the Tory Government decimated our communities and collapsed our industries. The Tories did that purely out of selfish spite against coal miners. We fight for those people every day.
I am not hung up on any particular structure of governance in Wales, but I want good government for my constituents, and quite frankly I am not convinced by this White Paper. My right hon. and hon. Friends have already made some of the points that I was going to make, but I want to raise one issue in particular. It has been suggested that, if we had had a Welsh Assembly, we would not have had the ravages of Thatcherism, and that somehow Toryism and Thatcherism would have stopped at the Severn bridge or at the border by the A5, near the constituency of that English nationalist, the hon. Member for North Shropshire (Mr. Paterson).
There is a railway bridge in Nelson that the Secretary of State and I know very well, from when we were both campaigning for a no vote in 1979. I have seen written on that bridge, "We voted Labour and we got Thatcher." That is true--we had Thatcher and she hammered our constituencies--but an Assembly will not save the people of my constituency from poverty, it will not cure the sick, and it will not put the unemployed back to work.
A previous Labour Government felt that the best way to regenerate the Welsh economy was to establish a Welsh Development Agency, for the reasons that my hon. Friend the Member for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney gave. It
was decided that we needed something outside the normal organs of government that could energetically pursue investment in Wales. By and large, the WDA has worked.
The issue of accountability has been raised. When the Welsh Development Agency did not work and performed badly, it was made accountable. Tribute was rightly paid to my right hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams) for his work on the Public Accounts Select Committee. I can go back a little further. When I was a member of the Public Accounts Select Committee, we considered the Parrot Corporation and its relationship with the WDA. I feel that such accountability will be missing under this proposal.
"The Attorney General and Solicitor General will continue to serve Wales and England. Any disputes about the Assembly's use of its powers will be referred to the Law Officers. This should allow disputes to be settled speedily, without recourse to the Courts."
The Law Officers are servants of the Government. If I were in dispute with the Government, I would not go to their lawyers to get my advice. I cannot understand the assumption that disputes will be settled easily through recourse to the Law Officers. Indeed, they have no provision or power to do any such thing, so I assume that some statutory power will be introduced to enable them to do so. To believe that one can go off to the other side's lawyer to get advice is to live in cloud cuckoo land. It is another part of the White Paper that is wholly redundant.
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