Congratulations to the Government on the improvements to what was an ugly draft Bill. We have before us a Bill that will be a genuine step forward in devolution.
I was taken by the speech made by my hon. Friend the Member for Ynys Môn (Albert Owen), who talked about Welsh people seeing themselves not as victims but as visionaries. Absolutely right—we can go forward on a confident note, but not by having referendums. The whole system of our democracy is in peril at the moment, partly because of the debasement of political discourse, which is the worst it has been for a couple of centuries. The worst example was in the referendum on the alternative vote. Here was an opportunity for an advance in the quality of our democracy, but it was not argued in that way. As I came in every morning at Vauxhall Cross, anti-AV campaigners were telling people that those who voted for AV were the sort of people who believed in seeing babies die in hospitals and our brave soldiers die in Afghanistan. That seemed a rather extraordinary argument, but it was the one put forward by those opposed to AV. It was based on the idea that AV would cost money—a tiny amount of money, really, because democracy is expensive—and that the first thing the Government would do would be to cut the protection of our soldiers in Afghanistan and the money provided to baby units in hospitals. It was an outrageous lie, but that is currently the quality of parliamentary debate.