Well, of course, I thank Nick Ramsay—the idea of the Secretary of State for Wales as Marley's ghost, shaking his chains in the background of my meeting with the Chief Secretary to the Treasury is an entertaining one. Given his record on other matters, myself, I am inclined to be grateful for the fact that he wasn't in the room, given what might have happened had he been there.

Let me turn, Dirprwy Lywydd, to the motion itself. The Government amendment differs from the motion, I think, simply in means rather than ends. There was very little in what Simon Thomas had to say in opening this debate that I would have dissented from at all. I think it is simply that, on this side, we do not believe that it makes best sense for this institution to be drawn into passing motions of no confidence in individuals who are not elected to the National Assembly nor answerable to it.

Moreover, Dirprwy Lywydd, in the minds of the public, a motion of no confidence in a political setting has a particular purpose: if it is carried, the individual must resign. And we know that this would not be the case in this instance; it would be a gesture, the leader of Plaid Cymru told us. And my heart sank, because I really did not believe that we had set up the National Assembly for Wales to be an outpost of gesture politics.

The Government amendment does two things: it identifies the office where responsibility lies—and I do not dissent from anything that has been said by Plaid Cymru Members about the responsibility that lies with that office holder—and then it goes on to place the failures of that office in the wider context of the unsustainable state of inter-governmental machinery here in the United Kingdom.

This is more than the failure of an individual, Dirprwy Lywydd; it is the failure of a Government. Of course it is right that the National Assembly should register its verdict on the scale of anger and disappointment felt at the decision and pin the responsibility where it lies. But we have to go beyond that; we have to think about how this could be put right for the future. That's what's the Government amendment does, and I hope Members will support it this afternoon.