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Government of Wales Bill

I will give way to the hon. Gentleman in a minute but I want to respond to the more interesting of the points that he made earlier on, which also ties in with something that the right hon. Member for Torfaen said. The hon. Gentleman said that losers should not be winners. What a dramatic change for the Labour party: losers should not be winners. Where does it say that manifesto commitments secured by only a third of the popular vote mean that a party has the justification, in any democratic sense, to force through such provisions? Labour Members know as well as I do that two thirds of the British population voted for parties that were not Labour, yet when they are talking about democracy that fact seems to go out of the window. Today, it is convenient for Members sanctimoniously to masquerade as keepers of the democratic process, but we should never forget the complete contradiction in the Government’s justifying their proposed changes on the basis that there is some kind of democratic deficit in Wales, while forcing through these and many other provisions when they very well know that most of the electorate voted against their manifesto.