I thought that the leader of the opposition, with forensic skill, took apart the threadbare arguments of the Government against the publication of these reports. It certainly was startling to read the leaked letter that I received just minutes before First Minister's questions yesterday, threatening the Llywydd with legal action. Yet, then I heard, just a few minutes after I read that page, the First Minister saying that he accepted that there was no power to prevent this place having the debate that he was seeking to stop by means of legal action.

I don't know how that legal action would have been executed if he had succeeded in persuading a judge of the rightness of his cause, who would have appeared here, like a High Court tipstaff, to arrest the Llywydd or any others who tried to exercise our democratic rights to give our opinions on how the Government was conducting itself on any matter whatsoever. I thought it was an extraordinary reprise of the kind of attitude that we last saw in the House of Commons in the 1640s, when an overweening monarch eventually ended up losing his head because he was unwilling to accept the right of the people to discuss for themselves the rights that they had inherited from their predecessor generations. 

I think it's perfectly obvious from the report of James Hamilton that these matters can be redacted in such a way as to protect the identity of individuals, although their identities are not really a secret anyway, because we all know who we're talking about in this proceeding and who the prime suspects are. But the difficulty is often to prove this for lack of evidence, because, in the culture of omertà, nobody is prepared to speak out and tell the truth. 

I don't see why we can't have in this Assembly something like the system of reading documents and having discussions on Privy Council terms, where we trust each other to do the decent thing, and, in response to Lee Waters's intervention earlier on to say that Governments at Westminster routinely keep secret these matters, shouldn't we aim, actually, to be rather better than those at Westminster? Shouldn't Wales seek to lead rather than follow in these circumstances? Not that I expect that any leak inquiry will ever get to the truth; it would be highly unlikely if it did—although I was in the House of Commons at the time that the Westland leak inquiry took place and a highly dramatic series of events then unfolded—but what you can do with the publication of such documents, of course, is to evaluate how thorough the inquiries have been, and all sorts of pieces of information that might then be elicited could be put together in a jigsaw, especially when there might be a series of investigations, such as there is in this particular instance, on the basis of which, at the culmination of these processes, we can draw some rather more informed conclusions.

The last point that I wanted to make is on the gravamen of this letter from the Government to the Llywydd, which seeks to put the First Minister in an extraordinarily privileged position. The legal argument, as I understand it, on section 37 of the Government of Wales Act is that decisions or actions that the Government take collectively, which any Minister could take under the powers devolved in this Act, are available to this Assembly to be made the subject of inquiry, but that where the First Minister has the power alone to make such decisions or take such actions we have no power to investigate him. This seems to be a most extraordinary elevation of the First Minister into a kind of absolute monarch, which we certainly would never have anticipated when this Bill was in gestation in 2005, 2006, and I think it's a complete misreading of the relevant section to put the First Minister in that privileged position. I think what it simply does is to distinguish between the powers of Ministers. The junior Ministers, including Cabinet Ministers, are not necessarily collectively responsible for his decisions in the legal sense, but he is responsible, because he's in charge of the whole Government, for all the decisions that any Minister might make. Otherwise, he would be excluded uniquely from the Assembly's scrutiny, and I think it vitally important, therefore, that the Assembly votes this afternoon in favour of this motion just to show our defiance of the Government and to show our rejection of that toxic principle.