Tomorrow's Wales (Cardiff): The report in the Western Mail on Friday on Sir Emyr Jones Parry’s call for politicians to give concrete examples of laws they would like to see passed in order to better explain why the Assembly needs primary law-making powers raises some interesting question about what the Convention’s role is and how the case is best made for giving the Assembly primary legislative powers.
Firstly, politicians obviously have a responsibility to put the case for further powers to the people, and would by necessity have to do so during any referendum campaign. But it is also one of the core purposes of the All Wales Convention, as set out in its terms of reference, to explain to people how moving to primary legislative powers would affect the future governence of Wales. It is rather worrying if the members of the Convention see this as a role for others to fulfil while the Convention sits back and simply assesses the effect of such arguments on public opinion.
Secondly, while examples of what kind of new laws could be passed can indeed be useful in ‘ensuring that the debate takes place on as concrete a basis as possible’ it can also be an unhelpful distraction from the real debate, which is about the contitutional principle of the
Assembly being able to make its own laws. People could be opposed to a specific idea for legislation while still being fully supportive of the principle of the National Assembly having the power to make that law. To confuse the principle with the practice distracts attention
from the real issue and could lead to confusion.
In the evidence which we submitted to the Convention last week, we highlighted five principles of good governence which the current settlement fails miserably to fulfil, but where a move to Part 4 would go some way to doing so. It is principled questions on how and from where Wales should be governed that will be the subject of a referendum, not any specific legislative proposals, and it is these issues that the Convention should concentrate on explaining to the public.
