Government of Wales Bill

Risible arguments are precisely what we heard earlier. What nonsense has been put around. I have great regard for the right hon. Member for Torfaen (Mr. Murphy) but when he was pressed about the evidence, even he could only say that he had had the odd conversation here and there. Nobody has produced a shred of evidence to prove the case. Let us look at the international situation. Dr. Wyn Jones and Dr. Scully said:"““The proposed change is internationally anomalous””." Their report goes on:"““After extensive consultations with the expert academic community, we have only been able to discover one place where the change proposed in Wales has been implemented. This was in Ukraine, prior to the 2002 parliamentary elections . . . The only other instance we have been able to find where this has even been seriously proposed is very recently for New Brunswick in Canada. Therefore, the suggested change does, frankly, make Wales look odd.””" I would certainly say that that is true. The Electoral Commission was cited earlier by the hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs. Gillan), and it has looked dispassionately and independently at the situation. What it had to say about international comparisons is interesting:"““There are around 30 countries that have mixed or additional member electoral systems.””" But no other country bans dual candidacy on the lines of the proposal in the White Paper. We feel that going down that road requires more compelling reasons without those other examples. If we are to operate outside international democratic norms, we have to have particular reasons for doing so. The Secretary of State’s response, of course, was to rubbish that and pretend that academics highly respected in Welsh and international politics had somehow got it wrong. If he says later that the matter has been considered in New Zealand and Canada, he will be right, but it has been turned down in both, which hardly helps his argument. The Secretary of State also offered a gratuitous insult to the Electoral Commission in saying that it played a valuable role but could get things wrong and had got this wrong. If we are all, collectively, getting it wrong, why does not the Secretary of State give us some proof instead of conjecture and stories about thousands of people who are beside themselves all night because of the unfairness of the system?