Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:39 pm on 26 February 2020.
Diolch, Llywydd. I'm a little bit surprised, actually, by the opening contribution to this debate because, of course, the motion on the order paper talks about the failure of Welsh devolution and yet, you went on to speak very much more widely about devolution across the United Kingdom and the various challenges that that might face if a federal system, effectively, were to be introduced.
Our amendment, of course, is designed to actually get the real steer of the fundamental problem that we've experienced in Wales since the advent of devolution, and that is that we've had a National Assembly that has been dominated by one political party, and that political party has been the Labour Party and it's been in Government in one way or another since 1999. It’s a misconception to associate the failures of that Government with devolution and therefore to draw the wrong conclusion, I believe, that, because of the failures of that Government, devolution doesn't work. We believe that devolution has a great deal of potential to transform this nation into the powerhouse that we believe that it can be. We also believe that the way to do that, of course, is to vote Welsh Conservative in the next Welsh Parliament elections in order that we've got a Conservative majority Government.
I think it is a little bit rich of Plaid Cymru to be critical in its motion of successive Labour-led Governments when it did form part of one of those Governments for a period of four years. And, you know, I know that they like to have or seem to have collective amnesia about those four years, and we'd like to forget them too, frankly—[Interruption.] Yes, I'll happily take an intervention.