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Mr. Swayne: Can the hon. Gentleman comment on the inevitability of an element among those who support the assembly and who will be members of it setting out to maximise disputes between the assembly and Westminster, precisely because they want the assembly to become a parliament for an independent Wales? Will he reflect on the fact that the arrangements, if they are to survive, will have to work when there is a lack of good will, as well as when there is an abundance of it?
Mr. Morgan: I certainly do not deny that there will be periods of stress in the relationship between any devolved parliament and the supreme central Parliament. Looking ahead over the next quarter century, I would never deny the likelihood of a few punch-ups and hot arguments between Westminster and a devolved parliament, but what does the hon. Gentleman think happens in other countries with devolved parliaments? What does he think happens in Germany in respect of decisions about what the lander governments should and should not be allowed to do?
What is at issue is whether that is an argument against democratic devolution. In the debate so far, Opposition Members have tried to stir up the idea that democratic devolution will be unworkable because of the likelihood of such disputes, but a crisis such as the hon. Gentleman describes is far more likely to occur if we do not have democratic devolution.
Now that we have had the referendum, it is not right that the House should be detained overlong by anything that is predicated on our putting into operation anything other than a form of Welsh devolution, with its first sitting in mid-1999. The sooner the official Opposition--although the Conservatives are hardly the official Opposition in Wales--get used to the idea that there is going to be a Welsh Assembly, the better.
The Conservatives are starting to think about methods of selecting candidates and how to participate in the assembly. Once they have secured reasonable representation, proportionate to their usual level of support in Wales--let us hope they have a good year and exceed the 20 per cent. mark--they will find themselves taking part in a democratic assembly. They might occasionally find themselves enjoying it, rather than enduring it through gritted teeth, as seems to be their feeling today.
Mr. Huw Edwards (Monmouth):
We do not hope that.
Mr. Morgan:
Sorry--in making my predictions about the level of support that the Conservatives will achieve, I am speaking as an ex-academic political scientist and psephologist.
Britain is unusual in having no written constitution; when doing things such as this, we edge our way forward from administrative devolution to democratic devolution. Democratic devolution came to Northern Ireland--indeed, that is the only previous example, although it does not provide a model that one can quote with any commendation, as it was withdrawn after 50 years in 1972 because of the unusual religious circumstances and community divisions in Northern Ireland.
People have said that we must remember the yes-no divide within Wales. We can all see that the referendum result was close, but we can also see that it showed a sort of historic line down the middle of Wales--an east-west divide stretching roughly from Great Ormes Head at Llandudno down to Nash Point or Port Talbot. West of that line, the vote was mostly yes; east of the line, the vote was mostly no, but the significant point is that there were large numbers of no voters in the yes areas and large numbers of yes voters in the no areas.
One has to express surprise at the level of the yes vote in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Monmouth (Mr. Edwards). All credit is due to him for the fact--staggering to those involved in the yes campaign--that 10,000 people voted yes within the Monmouthshire local authority area. That showed that there was still a large yes vote even in what is often referred to as the most anglicised area of Wales, or even as an area which has never really accepted that it is part of Wales--Monmouthshire having been declared part of Wales only during the 1960s. The divide was not a sharp one--the majorities fell east and west of the line I described, but there was more of a spectrum, with the percentage of yes voters gradually increasing the further westward one looked. There is no great danger of Wales being divided; none the less, the Welsh Assembly must make every effort to act as a bridge between yes-voting and no-voting areas.
In the absence of true democratic institutions in the past in Wales, and given our geography--the reverse of Scotland's, where the mountains are on the outside and the people live in the middle, whereas in Wales the mountains are in the middle and the population live around the outside--centrifugal forces are strong in Wales. The Welsh Assembly will, for the first time, provide a focus--a collecting point--for Welsh public opinion in one coherent whole. Therefore, for the first time, the Welsh people will be able to express themselves democratically, rather than being divided by the forces of geography--the position of the mountains and the distribution of the population on the plains and in the river valleys of the Severn and the Wye.
Our geography also helps to explain the difference between the level of support for devolution in Scotland and in Wales. Given that 80 per cent. of the Scottish population lives in the central area, the centripetal forces are extremely strong, so it was easy for the yes campaign there to secure a high proportion of the vote, whereas it was difficult for us in Wales.
Our difficulty was increased by the fact that the word "Welsh" carries two meanings, whereas the word "Scottish" does not. When we talk about a Scottish Parliament, everyone is clear about what we mean; but when they hear the words "Welsh Assembly", many people--especially in constituencies such as that of my hon. Friend the Member for Monmouth--think that that means a Welsh-speaking assembly. The word "Welsh" has a meaning in the sense of language as well as in the sense of nationality and that gives rise to a somewhat bifocal view of Welsh identity. In the more anglicised areas, people are immediately suspicious of the word "Welsh", in case it means the Welsh language being rammed down their throats--an expression which is quite common in parts of Cardiff and Newport and is heard even more often further east, in the Wye valley and in north-east Wales.
I am therefore pleased to see that the wording of the Bill has been changed from "Welsh Assembly" to "National Assembly for Wales", which gets around that bifocal view of the word "Welsh". Non-Welsh speakers suspect that something is about to be imposed on them if they agree to something Welsh, because they think the word refers to the language, not the nationality. I am pleased that, in making adaptations as we have progressed from the White Paper to the referendum campaign and on to the Bill itself, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has taken such concerns on board.
Since the publication of the Bill and, more recently, the consultation paper, there has been controversy about where the assembly should be located. Cardiff councillors and Members representing Cardiff are not the most popular people among supporters of the assembly. People are suggesting that the population of Cardiff is less than whole-hearted, or is complacent, about Cardiff being the capital of Wales. Swansea people seem to be keen as mustard, but the people in Cardiff do not seem to care too much whether the assembly is located there or not. A peculiar situation has arisen and I am hoping that it may be resolved at the conclusion of tonight's meeting, or perhaps at another emergency group meeting on Wednesday. It is a pity that it has come to this.
The consultation paper has unleashed commercial and political forces. Now that the deal between the Labour group of Cardiff county council and my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has broken down--not irrevocably, we hope--and my right hon. Friend has issued the consultation paper on the Welsh Assembly's location, forces have been unleashed. Those forces could be described as the PFI and the PFO. The private finance initiative involves property developers who want the Welsh Assembly as part of their property development because they think that it will boost its value. PFO stands for parochialism fever outbreak. The combination of PFI and PFO is unhealthy and can get out of hand.
There are property developers in Cardiff who see enormous value in having the Welsh Assembly in an urban regeneration area. At least three, if not four, schemes in Cardiff bay are being unveiled and pushed. It was put to me very simply: the developers look at the White Paper, or the Bill, and say that the assembly's running costs will be halfway between £15 million and £20 million--let us call it £17 million.
If the assembly is located in the middle of an urban regeneration PFI comprehensive redevelopment scheme, the property developers will say that that figure, multiplied by 10, will give the spending power emanating from the assembly--£170 million. They say that that £170 million guaranteed spend from the assembly in its first 10 years will fill the restaurants, taxis, hotels and houses. They therefore promise to invest £170 million in the surrounding property if they are allowed to build the assembly. Some of them are implying that they will even build the Welsh Assembly for half price or less for the honour of having it in the centre of their PFI comprehensive redevelopment scheme.
All those factors show that it will be a difficult race for my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State to ride. He will have to hold on to the reins carefully because those forces have been unleashed. None of that would have happened if the negotiations over Cardiff city hall had not broken down--that is a tragedy.
Cardiff city hall was built to ambitious standards in 1903. It was built as part of the campaign to have Cardiff declared not the capital city of Wales, but its first city. Cardiff was not a city at the time and part of the campaign was for it to be declared a city--much later, it was to become a capital city. It was because it wanted to be a city that it thought that it should have a city hall to match its ambitions, which is why it has an enormous clock tower, known in Wales as the equivalent of Big Ben. In many ways, it is the Welsh Big Ben, but Big Ben has more of a claim to be called Welsh than does Cardiff's clock tower.
I am told that Big Ben is named after Sir Benjamin Hall, a Gwent ironmaster, who stood 6 ft 4 in, weighed about 20 stone and was known as Big Ben. He was the Commissioner of Works of the Palace of Westminster. I am told that the clock tower of Cardiff city hall is a straight steal from the clock tower of Caracas cathedral, so Big Ben is actually Welsh, and Cardiff city's clock tower is Venezuelan. However, all that does not matter as, in the hearts and minds of the people of Wales, the clock tower shape with which we are all familiar--and with which we will be even more familiar after next year's European summit--is our equivalent of Big Ben.
It would be odd to invest so much in raising the image of Cardiff's city hall by having the European summit there in the middle of June next year, only to find that the Welsh Assembly is not to be located there. We can imagine some strange conversations between the Prime Minister, Chancellor Kohl, President Chirac and Prime Minister Jospin. They would say, "This is a lovely building, but tell us, Prime Minister, why aren't you putting the Welsh Assembly here? Have you got better buildings than this to put the Welsh Assembly in?" The Prime Minister would say, "Well, we had better offers, but perhaps not better buildings."
It will be a shame if Cardiff city hall becomes one of the best-known buildings in the western world, but is not used for the assembly. For the three or four days that it is in the limelight during the European summit next June, its shape will become familiar. If it does not become the home of the Welsh Assembly after all the investment in raising its recognition factor throughout the world, the assembly will be the weaker. The guildhall in Swansea is a superb building of its era, but it is nothing like Cardiff city hall. Through its good fortune in hosting the Euro-summit next year, Cardiff city hall will achieve a special world recognition factor, something which Wales lacks.
If anyone wants proof of Wales's low recognition factor, he has only to turn to the sports pages of The Observer yesterday. It contained a wonderful example of how Wales is perceived as less important than Scotland and Ireland. Yesterday, I leafed through the sports pages in a desperate attempt to find anything that did not relate to England drawing with New Zealand on Saturday. Eventually, I found something about the sale of fishing rights, which is a huge issue at the moment. The article said that one could buy fishing rights on stretches of the Tay and the Tweed for, say, £3,000 per yard or whatever, but one did not have to cross the border in order to buy excellent trout and salmon fishing rights, as one could buy a lovely stretch on the Conwy.
That is a classic example of the perception that one does not have to cross the border to go to Wales, but one does in order to reach Scotland. When the Welsh Assembly is set up, I think that that problem will largely disappear. It will give us a probably never-to-be-repeated opportunity to increase Wales's international recognition factor close to that already achieved by Scotland and Ireland.
The same will be true of the status of whichever city is chosen for the location of the Welsh Assembly. The question is not whether it will be Cardiff or Swansea, but whether any city in Wales can achieve the status--or something close to the status--that Edinburgh and Dublin already enjoy. I do not know that any city in Wales will ever reach the status of Edinburgh and Dublin, but we know that that is the competition. It would be nice to think that the location of the Welsh Assembly, whichever city my right hon. Friend eventually chooses, has a fighting chance over the next few decades to achieve the international recognition and status that cities such as Edinburgh and Dublin--with which one naturally tends to compare Cardiff, Swansea and Llandrindod Wells--already have. I do not believe that it is possible to achieve that for any city other than Cardiff.
Cardiff has a good opportunity and a good start because of the European summit and the rugby cup final that will be held in June 1999, but those are only temporary boosts--one is for three days, the other for three weeks; we hope that the Assembly will last for 300 years. I do not think that that opportunity arises anywhere else but in Cardiff, which is why I make a plea, as I did at this morning's press conference in Cardiff along with my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, North (Ms Morgan), for Cardiff to be chosen. My plea also goes out to the Labour group on Cardiff county council and to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State when he finally comes to make his decision.
I have heard the remarks about new technology and the fact that one should not be a luddite and should remember what can be achieved with microwave links around Wales and video conferences. I do not deny that, although such technology will probably always pass over my head as I am not of the techno whiz-kid generation. However, there are dangers in saying that it does not matter where the assembly is located, as one can use video conferences, e-mails, websites and the latest gizmos from the computer world. That may be fine for the under-30s. I accept that most democracies are terribly old-fashioned because they insist on conducting their business face to face in Chambers such as ours. Perhaps we are worse in some ways, or more conservative, than most, because we do not even have electronic voting, whereas most legislatures do.
However, we are in danger of missing the point. The fundamental point of a parliamentary assembly or democratic body is that it is the place where people go to petition for redress of grievances. It must have the ability to legislate--it does not matter how modest the legislative powers in the Bill are. It must also have the ability to debate.
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