Government of Wales Bill

As my hon. Friend reminds me, it is the Minister’s Bill, so we do have some clue about what he will say. None the less, I fully accept that he may stand up and say, ““The Opposition are right. I’ll think again. I’ll accept these amendments.”” If he does, he will not only be a hero to the Opposition, but he will be carried through the streets of Wales by the tens of thousands of people who will have read Hansard and realised how wrong they were to clog up the post of the hon. Member for Meirionnydd Nant Conwy (Mr. Llwyd). However, I think that I can guess to some extent what the Minister will say. His intention is noble; he wants to right what he believes is a wrong, and he is probably genuinely convinced that his position is not party political, but is in the interests of Wales. I ask him to recognise that what he really seems to be doing is legislating for the present circumstances in which Labour finds itself, not for the long-term interests of Welsh politics as a whole. Indeed, if the Government were more persuaded of the case in principle they would be acting on a legislative basis in Scotland, and it is obvious that they have no intention of doing that. We have had a useful debate so far, and I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say, but I counsel him to realise that not all of us are trying to score points off the Government—[Interruption]—as I am sure other hon. Members would agree. Some of us are looking at the long-term constitutional interests of the Welsh democratic settlement. The danger of using short-term thinking to generate legislation is that it has long-term unintended consequences. Far from solving the problems that the Minister says he is trying to solve, he may be about to introduce something that not only creates a democratic injustice for the candidates but that could be challenged in human rights legislation, as the hon. Members for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) and for Meirionnydd Nant Conwy (Mr. Llwyd) rightly said. I look forward to the Minister’s reply, and I am sure that he will provide us with a reflective perspective on the issue. Notwithstanding that, I hope that the Government will think again.