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Constitutional Law

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak briefly in this debate. I, too, wish to send my heartfelt sympathies to Carwyn Jones on the loss of his mother. At the end of an extraordinary few weeks in the history of Wales, I also offer a tribute to the retiring First Minister, who has had an extraordinary 10 years. To stand down at the end of 10 years from the most important job in Wales and to be garlanded with such popularity—by 65 to 75 per cent. of the nation—is phenomenal. It does not happen very often. A member of my party who witnessed the tributes to this great giant of the nation was surprised to see that 10 minutes later he was queuing in the cafeteria for a cup of tea with Rhodri Morgan standing next to him. It does not happen that way in Westminster—it seems to be the Welsh way—but it might explain why Rhodri was so important. At the moment, we have rare, if not unique, unity in Wales on so many issues. We have had a year of a stable and strong coalition Government, who have not been quarrelling constantly. That has been beneficial to Wales. We have seen in the debate tonight this extraordinary unity. We all know that in the past there have been divisions between us. I served with great pride on Gwent county council with my right hon. Friends the Members for Torfaen (Mr. Murphy) and for Islwyn (Mr. Touhig), although we were not unanimous then. I would like to pay tribute to the Welsh language and what it has meant to my life. It has enriched it extraordinarily. I remember living with my family and having to be told that I lived in Wales. My mother explained to me that, although everyone to whom we spoke had Irish accents, we were in fact Welsh because we were born in Wales. We were just Welsh—not proper Welsh, like the people in north Wales, or real Welsh, like the people who speak with Welsh accents, but we were certainly Welsh. I had the great luck that few had at the time of having an inspiring Welsh teacher who taught me the glorious, majestic poetry of Robert Williams Parry and T. Gwynn Jones. I remember that to this day. All my life, the language has been a source of great pleasure, right up to today, when I drive up the motorway to the sounds of Heather Jones singing "Mae Hiraeth yn fy Nghalon". There are many other great facets to modern Welsh, a language that in 1962 we all feared would not last until the end of the century, after the famous speech by Saunders Lewis, "Tynged yr Iaith". He said that the language was in such a steep decline that it could not survive to the year 2000. Welsh is now flourishing in a way that none of us believed possible. I was involved in union work, but I came into politics because of the decision by the school teaching my eight-year-old daughter that the first Welsh song that she would ever learn would be the Welsh national anthem, but taught in English, which seems an affront too far. I got involved with the movement for Welsh-language schools in Gwent, which have survived and prospered magnificently. Every one of them has been a huge success. What a joy it is now to go into every school in my constituency, where, when I was young, people would have been uncertain whether they were in England or Wales. The county's motto was "Faithful to both", which meant faithful towards England and Wales. Now it means faithful to both north Wales and south Wales, which is an entirely different meaning altogether. It is a matter of some rejoicing for us as a nation that we have reached this point, where we have this treasure of the language, which has come to us down the centuries. It is a language that existed with sophisticated literature long before the English language existed, and it continues to prosper. Last week we had a saturnalia in Caerleon in my constituency—we go back a bit further than the Christian tradition—to celebrate the Roman Christmas. It is fascinating to recall that if one was attending a saturnalia in Caerleon 2,000 years ago, the children would have been speaking two languages: Welsh and Latin. Welsh is the language that survives on the lips of the children today—we do not hear a lot of people speaking Latin these days. That is a matter of great pride for us as a nation. This evening's debate is a historical turning point, in that we are going forward in harmony as a nation, united and at peace with ourselves, to build a much stronger Wales and see our own Parliament on the soil of our country—something that we have not had in any reasonable form for centuries—strong, stable and certain to have a great future as an independent Parliament.