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Welsh Affairs

Trying to deal with the source of supply is utterly futile. The Columbian authorities have been trying for 30 years, and we are seeing the Columbianisation of Afghanistan. The British taxpayer has spent £250 million in Afghanistan and the lives of many of our soldiers have been lost in trying to stop the drugs supply at source. The result is that the production of drugs in Afghanistan last year went up by 60 per cent. and the price of heroin on the streets of Britain is the lowest that it has ever been. It is a complete myth that the supply of drugs can be stopped at source. This is an international problem, but we have our problems in Wales as well. However, I am optimistic about our situation. When I walked as a 17-year-old from Grangetown across the docks in Cardiff to Guest, Keen and Nettleford's nail factory where I worked at that time, the landscape was bleak, with cranes and railway lines, and now the place is transformed. We have a wonderful site—the new bayscape with the Senedd, a jewel of a building. A group of people from New York came to see me recently and their teacher told me to ask them their favourite television programme, and it was ““Torchwood””, which has images of Cardiff bay. That is part of what has been going on for the first time for centuries. We have heard some bleak and jaundiced views about devolution, but for the first time for centuries young people, creative, talented and entrepreneurial people, from Wales do not have to come to London to earn their fortune. In fact, the flow is coming the other way, just as the flow of power is coming the other way. That is inevitable, and it will continue. If they say English votes for English Members, so it will happen. The process of devolution will continue, and it cannot be resisted. People may stand in the stream and say no, but the flow will go on from now. We will see the results of that in the nation's growing self-confidence and the growing popularity of devolution. John Shortridge recently gave some figures showing that it was accepted in Wales by a hair's breadth, but now the opposition has declined. There are people who have been anti-devolution, who I can recall in 1979 being against the campaign and who will never have anything good to say about devolution, but we can look with optimism at what is happening in our country. There are two places that I would like to be tomorrow to see what Dewi Sant would have recognised when he said, ““Bydd llawen, cadw'r ffydd””—be happy, keep the faith—although he might have been surprised just how many faiths there are in Wales now. The first of those two places, where Welsh life will be in its purest and best form, is the village school in Arfon in Gwynedd. The young children there speak Welsh with great fluency and understanding; language has come down the centuries continuously. It is a miracle that the ancient Welsh language still survives and is still there in such schools. The second place is another school, in Pillgwenlly, Newport. The children there are of every possible hue and from every part of the world. They will be saying their prayers and conducting their St. David's day ceremonies. During prayers, half the class will join their hands together in the Christian way, and the other half according to the Muslim tradition, but they will be saying the same prayers and singing the same songs in both beautiful languages of Wales.