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Government of Wales Bill

I am most grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that intervention, because it takes us to the heart of the Conservative position. What he has ignored throughout all his comments so far in the debate is that the National Assembly for Wales is a democratically elected institution. The point of devolution was to introduce a more democratic element to the process of dealing with the huge number of distinct regulations that the Secretary of State for Wales dealt with in the past. The central weakness of the Conservative position is that it does not recognise that the Assembly has any democratic validity at all.