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Government of Wales Bill

I wish to add my voice to the chorus of condemnation of the Secretary of State. There is no doubt that what is proposed is a shabby and dishonourable measure that ought to be criticised by Members on both sides of the House. The Government suggest in their White Paper that the current arrangement, whereby, as the hon. Member for Caerphilly (Mr. David) puts its, losers can become winners,"““devalues the integrity of the electoral system in the eyes of the public and acts as a disincentive to vote in constituency elections””." I suggest that it is not that aspect of the matter that acts as a disincentive but the Byzantine complexity of the system put in place by the Labour party. The system is complex and difficult to understand. Nevertheless, that is the system that the Government put in place in 1998. It was always perfectly foreseeable, and an inherent part of the system, that there would be constituencies in which more than one candidate would be returned to the Assembly, whether though first-past-the-post or the regional list system. If the Government did not realise that from the outset, they were pretty short-sighted. My constituency, Clwyd, West, is constantly cited. Four of the five candidates were elected to the Assembly, one under first-past-the-post and the others through the regional list. Again, that was always foreseeable. It was an extreme example and an extreme conclusion. The hon. Member for Caerphilly laughs about that, but the Government put that system in place. It is a bit rich, a few years on, for the Government to start moaning about it and suggesting that they never foresaw it. It is rather facile to suggest that this is resulting in some kind of disengagement on the part of the electorate, especially given that none of the witnesses who appeared before the Welsh Affairs Committee supported that view, and the Committee’s conclusion had to be based on"““informal feedback from the public””." It is nonsense. There was a huge weight of evidence against the Secretary of State’s proposal, but he is ignoring it completely. The Secretary of State has also suggested that there is some form of systematic abuse of the system.