Welsh Affairs

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 5:47 pm on 29 February 1996.

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Photo of Mr Rhodri Morgan Mr Rhodri Morgan , Cardiff West 5:47, 29 February 1996

It would not be worth while ever going back over the Severn bridge to Wales if we were to choose a Secretary of State for Wales who was not a Member of Parliament in Wales. I can give the hon. Gentleman absolute assurance on that. Although there might be many other things on which he may ask to be assured, we would be spoilt for choice on that front. There is no problem. The problem lies with the Conservatives because, much to our chagrin, they kept ignoring the right hon. Member for Conwy. They thought, for some strange reason, that he was not proper Cabinet material and instead they have chosen four successive Secretaries of State from English constituencies.

Of course the Government would not treat Scotland in the same way. None the less, they go on about second-class treatment for Wales. We have heard much about it in the debate. The Secretary of State has again written to the Leader of the Opposition asking, "Why are you giving second-class status to your Welsh Assembly?" Should the right hon. Gentleman not be looking for the beam in his own eye, considering that he is the fourth successive English-based Member of Parliament who has become Secretary of State for Wales?

Many commentators have said that even if the Conservative Government were down to only one Scottish Member, however appalling his quality, they would never dare choose an English Member as Secretary of State for Scotland. They are willing to try it on in Wales because it has been a long time since they ever had any expectation of political approval from the Welsh electorate. Indeed, they have not won a majority in Wales since the secret ballot was introduced 130 years ago. Perhaps they are right to give up trying it on with the Welsh.

I should have said earlier that my hon. Friend the Member for Caerphilly (Mr. Davies) apologises for not being able to speak in the debate. He is with my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition, who is on his way down to Wales for 24 hours and will be going to the scene of the Sea Empress tragedy tomorrow. When my right hon. Friend is spending a day in Wales, my hon. Friend must be with him.

We have been very interested in the Secretary of State's letter to my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition because it is remarkably different from the Conservative party press release issued no more than eight months ago by the previous Secretary of State. Both letters carry the same banner of "Conservative Party News" and both purport to be careful, objective costings of Labour's assembly proposals.

In June, just before the right hon. Member for Wokingham took himself off in another direction—to the Back Benches—he said that Labour's assembly proposals were "very modest forecasts". He is a fellow of All Souls, like the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, so he obviously knows what he is talking about. He said that Labour's proposals for an assembly would cost £123 million.

However modest that forecast was, the Government must have been very successful in the fight against inflation in the past eight months because the present Secretary of State says: Labour's Assembly would cost £52 million". The Secretary of State's assistants have been doing some serious work in Conservative party headquarters. If, eight months ago, the assembly was going to cost £123 million but, one day ago, £52 million, one wonders how seriously the Government expect be taken. How can two successive eminences, who are both Ministers and who both have the ability to call on assistance—not civil service assistance of course, although it is probably taxpayer-funded one way or another and done by the political advisers, and so on—estimate costs of a Welsh Assembly that vary in eight months by more than 60 per cent?

Nevertheless, the Secretary of State wants to be taken seriously. Indeed, he made that part of his speech. He said that he wanted answers to the questions that he has asked the Leader of the Opposition. The first thing that the right hon. Gentleman should have done is to say why he thinks that the previous Secretary of State's estimate was so wildly wrong. Then he should have said, "Okay, the previous Secretary of State was an absolute idiot. I am very sorry about that. I am going to have another go. Then we might get taken a quarter seriously."

The right hon. Gentleman should also have referred to the BBC estimate, which came out fairly recently. That does not come from a party political source—although I know that there are figures on the Conservative side who think that the BBC is a political party, or an adjunct to one. The BBC estimate was £25 million.

Then the Secretary of State should have asked the Prime Minister, "In all those interesting meetings you had with the Northern Ireland Members on Monday night when you were trying to get them into the Division Lobby with you, what was the estimate for the cost of the Downing street declaration Northern Ireland Assembly, by which you proposed to introduce a measure of democratic devolution in Northern Ireland, however the peace process eventually turns out in that Province?"

If one believes in provincial autonomy for Northern Ireland, presumably once accepts that it will cost money. Presumably, there will be big rows and differences of view about what sort of electoral system there should be. Although the Secretary of State seems to think that it is only in Wales that there is any possibility of a variation in views between political parties about the system for electing the parties involved in provincial devolution and autonomy, the same applies to Northern Ireland.

We are interested in knowing whether the Secretary of State has come across any estimates of the costs there. Will he answer that question, because we would like to know what costs are being worked on? I do not know whether the right hon. Gentleman will be able to answer, because before he asked us about costs, he should first have gone to the Library to find out how much Stormont cost in its last year of operation, 1972. He should then have asked the Library to uprate that figure by the increase in the retail prices index since then. What were Stormont's running costs in 1972, uprated to the 1996 equivalent? The Secretary of State would have found that the figure would be about £2.5 million.

From there, the right hon. Gentleman could work out how our assembly proposals would relate to the Stormont figures. Stormont is the only devolved assembly that the United Kingdom has ever had, so those figures are all that we have to go on. Obviously, there must be huge differences, but those figures should be the starting point, and we must try to relate our figures to them.

The hon. Member for Cirencester and Tewkesbury (Mr. Clifton-Brown), who represents yet another constituency east of the Severn bridge, asked, "What about the West Lothian question?" That was effectively answered by the Leader of the Opposition in his speech over the road in the Queen Elizabeth II conference centre a couple of weeks ago. Before answering the West Lothian question, the priority is to ask, "What about the Duke of Lothian question?"

Why is it considered logical for the Government to commit themselves to retaining the hereditary principle, which means that people who are not elected by anybody can vote in the House of Lords on Welsh business, Scottish business and English business? If this is all a big issue, that has to be sorted out first—and that is what Labour proposes to do. There is a package of constitutional reform, of which the Welsh proposals are only a part, and the Secretary of State must respond to it if he expects to be taken seriously.

The Opposition are open about the fact that we have different proposals for Scotland and for Wales. The right hon. Member for Wokingham, when he was Secretary of State, said that ours was a third-class proposal, but the present Secretary of State has uprated it to a second-class proposal. He probably does not understand the fact that the United Kingdom has an asymmetric pattern—a flexible and asymmetric constitution. That is what we are building on.

The Secretary of State certainly should not attempt to frighten the horses by saying that investment will not come to Wales if we have a Welsh Assembly. I do not know what that tells the people of Northern Ireland about what they will face if they have an elected autonomous provincial assembly there, as the Government propose. Will that frighten investment away from Northern Ireland, or is it only in Wales that that would happen if there were a measure of local democratic autonomy?

We keep being told that everyone in Wales will start squabbling, and that tribal conflicts will break out between north and south. "The assembly will be based in Cardiff," we hear. "Isn't that a terrible thing?" The idea of a Cardiff-based assembly is used as a sort of insult; I do not know what that says about the Under-Secretary, the hon. Member for Cardiff, North (Mr. Jones), and his influence on his ministerial colleagues.

We have heard such statements before, although the Secretary of State will not have heard them. He is not old enough to remember Africa before Macmillan's "winds of change" speech, although he might have read about it. The language that he uses about Wales is exactly the sort of language that was spoken by white colonialists trying to discourage Nigeria, the Gold Coast or wherever from introducing any measure of freedom from the British colonialists. The right hon. Gentleman must realise that to us in Wales, such language spoken by him sounds deeply colonial.

There is a lesson there that applies to the Sea Empress disaster too, and we must learn it when we consider the environment. We welcome much of what the Secretary of State said about setting up extra response units in the Welsh Office, but we must tell him about the burning resentment that has been caused throughout south Wales, above all in Pembrokeshire, by the way in which the Sea Empress tragedy unfolded over several days, and changed from a minor incident to a major tragedy.

I know that the Secretary of State has been down to Milford Haven, and I am sure that anybody who goes there will detect the almost palpable sense of burning resentment about the fact that local expertise was ignored while "sea vultures" from the salvage companies, and perhaps jobsworths from the headquarters of the Secretary of State for Transport, made a muck-up of the whole thing by ignoring local expertise.

Until the result of the inquiry is known, we shall not know the truth for sure. I re-emphasise the strong support from those on the Labour Front Bench, not only from shadow Welsh Office Ministers but from everyone else too, for making the inquiry initiated by the Secretary of State for Transport a fully independent one, like the inquiry into the Braer disaster. Otherwise we shall never know whether further improvements are needed in our ways of trying to reconcile conservation of the environment with saving a ship and its oil cargo.

In Milford Haven, our methods do not seem to have worked. The chilling words of the pilot on board the Sea Empress—not the original pilot, but the one who went on board over the weekend—are recorded on tape. They were in all the newspapers, so I am not giving away any secret that should be revealed only to the inquiry. The pilot said something like, "I can see my way to take her clear out to sea now," and the harbourmaster called him back to tell him, "Yes, I agree with you, but I am in a room full of men telling me no."

Those are chilling words, and we want to know who those men in the room were. Most of them were probably acting with the authority of the Secretary of State for Transport. From that moment, things went horribly wrong. The Government cannot hide behind the salvage experts. The conversation between the pilot and the harbourmaster is public knowledge. The Government's handling of the whole affair has not covered them in glory.

The presence in Pembrokeshire of the Minister for Aviation and Shipping, Viscount Goschen, was not much help to the Government. His unofficial family motto, which he told journalists about when he was first appointed— Mr. Goschen has no notion of the ocean"— has now come back to haunt him. Following the heroism of the man from the Chinese take-away, the people of Pembrokeshire now have a lot more faith in the Chinese waiter than in the chinless wonder.

That weekend, people in Wales felt that we had joined the third world. We were being treated as a colony. The authorities were going completely wrong, without listening to local experts, who were treated as people who knew nothing about Milford Haven and its workings. That was one of the major reasons why the affair became such a huge disaster, with environmental and economic consequences that may continue for decades.

Such treatment is common in many areas of Welsh life. This afternoon my local paper, the South Wales Echo