When Wales voted against devolution in 1979, it was asked to vote again in 1997, but after voting for it then by however narrow a margin, no chance to reconsider has been allowed. Fair enough, you may say, if such a referendum should be no more than a once-in-a-generation event. Perhaps 24 years is not yet quite a generation, with the average age at which we have our first children rising, but it's not far off. What is the status quo ante? What would the position of Wales be if we did not have devolution; if this institution and the Government it begets were to be abolished, as my party desires, campaigns and advocates? Our opponents like to suggest that the alternative is some sort of viceroy who comes down from London or south-east England to govern Wales, and of course, John Redwood received great opprobrium for returning to Wokingham to sleep with his wife. But I don't believe that the Minister seeks to suggest that the current occupants of the Welsh Office are any less Welsh than he.

In 1979, Labour argued, at least at an official governmental level, that, since power was exercised by the Welsh Office, it needed to be made more democratically accountable. By four to one, the people of Wales said 'no', not, I submit, because they didn't believe in democratic accountability, but because they didn't support the whole gamut of administrative devolution that a minority faction within the Labour Party had inflicted on them.

Lockdown restrictions separate me from my office shelf of diaries, memoirs and biographies of leading Labour luminaries in Wales in the 1960s and 1970s, but my recollection is of how little those books say about splitting off parts of UK Government departments into a Welsh Office, or what the rationale for this was. The 1964 Labour manifesto merely stated in a plan for the regions that:

'In Wales, the creation of a Secretary of State, to which we are pledged, will facilitate the new unified administration that we need.'

Then leading figures such as Roy Jenkins and Jim Callaghan sat for Welsh constituencies, but they were UK figures and this was not their project. Policy divergence in most areas was limited, economic development was the Welsh Development Agency and then, Nicholas Edwards's non-Thatcherite approach perhaps an exception.

A reversion to that Welsh Office model, which we saw from 1965 until 1999, could draw our United Kingdom together again, with less difference for difference's sake, whilst saving the £65 million a year that we spend on this Senedd, for starters. What, though, would be wrong with reverting to the constitutional arrangements that we enjoyed before the Welsh Office and a Secretary of State for Wales? We could integrate all departments properly; we could empower local government, allowing Welsh councils greater freedoms than they now have; we could return Welsh education to at least the standard seen in England; we could once again rely on a single, integrated NHS, true to the model of Aneurin Bevan and deal with COVID together.

There is nothing about the Westminster model that prevents legislation specific to Wales, when appropriate, if necessary, promoting a greater role for the Welsh Grand Committee. That approach allowed Wales specific education Acts and the development of Welsh language policy; it led to the disestablishment of the Anglican Church in Wales finally implemented in 1920; and a differential approach to Sunday closing from 1881 to 1996. Instead, we have an unbalanced devolution process. Never a settlement, despite the Government of Wales Acts in 1998, 2006, 2014 and 2017; a process that only ever moves in one direction—towards independence. Despite those four Acts, the Welsh Government is always demanding more. Recently, it was the devolution of justice and a demand that limits on Welsh borrowing be removed, with less UK restraints on the Welsh Treasury than the EU provided for Greece. When, Minister, will your demands ever cease? Why must we be dragged in the wake of Scotland as if their history and outlook is ours? And if devolution is always a process and there can only ever be more of it, then, how can people ever become comfortable with it? If devolution is not stable and not sustainable, won't we, sooner or later, have to end it? Surely, we must ultimately abolish this place or sleepwalk to independence.