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Welsh Affairs

It is a delight to follow the hon. Member for Newport, West (Paul Flynn), whom I congratulate on having the Ryder cup in Newport; I pass the city's wonderful golf course on the way to my mother in Cardiff. He may not be aware that St. Albans is the home of the Ryder cup—indeed, the beautiful golf course there is known as the Ryder Cup golf course. We have transported something over the border, and I am pleased about that. One might ask why the MP for St. Albans is talking in the Welsh affairs debate. It is a delight to be here; not only was I born and brought up in Wales and educated at Swansea university, but there is a vibrant and thriving Welsh society in St. Albans. It was delightful to address the St. Albans St. David's day dinner last year—briefly but not very well in Welsh, I might add. My hon. Friend the Member for The Wrekin (Mark Pritchard) drew attention to the fact that there are not many leeks in the Chamber. I am sure that many of us have fond memories of eisteddfods, during which there used to be macho leek-chewing events—frequently resulting in dragon's breath. We all chewed our leeks and wore our daffodils with pride. Like other hon. Members, I am wearing a fake daffodil today; I thank Marie Curie Cancer Care, which issued us with these little silk daffodils. The organisation does wonderful work in my constituency, where it founded a hospice, and in other constituencies. I pay tribute to it. Unfortunately, I am old enough to have grown up in Wales during a huge transition period. Meibion Glyndwr came into being as a result of concerns in Wales, expressed at the time, about how much Englishness there was in the Principality. The civil disobedience that I watched as a child in the 1960s—the daubing of the road signs in 1967, for example—was of major concern to my parents. Many people in England wondered what people in Wales were playing at. There was a serious issue at the time about Welsh speaking. Although my school was good at encouraging the Welsh language, and taught Welsh, that was not the case at many schools. The 1961 census showed that Welsh was on a huge decline. That has been reversed in a very short time and that is wonderful. Not many other languages could have achieved the renaissance that Welsh has enjoyed so quickly. Unfortunately, however, some of the questionable practices of Meibion Glyndwr and others resulted in cottage burning and the daubing of road signs in a wonderful shade of green. The old joke doing the rounds at the time was, ““Come home to a real fire—buy a cottage in Wales!”” None of that did Wales's image any good at all and it made us a lot of enemies as well as friends. The Cardiff and Swansea of my youth have been wonderfully transformed. The hon. Member for Newport, West referred to Grangetown; many of us were aware of the more industrialised parts of Cardiff. Crumbling, deprived areas such as Splott and even infamous Tiger Bay are now part of a vibrant reconstruction that draws many visitors into Cardiff and makes a visit to the Principality a wonderful experience. There has been a huge injection of money, energy and even glamour into the city. ““Torchwood”” has been mentioned; my son was delighted to hear his grandmother point out houses in ““Doctor Who”” that she had been standing near when the film cameras came along. We all appreciate the assets of Wales, although we may not realise that we are seeing them in programmes such as ““Doctor Who””. The rippling out of prosperity and the enticement of money and business investment have been to the good of Cardiff and Wales as a whole. My hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs. Gillan) mentioned the hope and optimism now expressed in Wales, and she was right to do so. Any deprived area—I have them in St. Albans—that is made to think well of itself and encouraged to think big and look to the future can profit from that hope and optimism. There has been some debate, which I would not engage in, about whether more power or less power should be given to Wales. However, I am concerned—speaking as a Welsh-born MP but representing an English constituency—that we do not hear enough in the Chamber about the good bits of Wales. The appointment of regional Ministers, which some would say has been a great asset to Wales and the other regions, has also left us with a gaping hole. I was expecting—I stand to be corrected if I am wrong—that there was going to be a Select Committee for the regions that would give hon. Members the chance to question regional Ministers about what was going on in those regions, and indeed in Wales. That is a broken promise and a breach of trust on the part of the Government. This House should be able to hold the regional Ministers to account. The large amounts of funding that have profited Wales, and other areas, so well are fantastic, but we need to be able to talk to the regional Ministers and ask them exactly what is going on. My constituents' taxes are going towards that funding process, and they would like to be able to find out what the regional Ministers have been up to and assess their roles and value.