Infamy!

Just as Ivan Pavlov was able to predict with complete accuracy that the ringing of a bell would cause his dogs to slaver, so the student of Welsh politics can foretell unerringly that the publication of a report by the Welsh Affairs select committee of the House of Commons will cause the Presiding Officer of the Welsh Assembly, the Rt Hon Lord Elis-Thomas, to erupt in paroxysms of high indignation.

Last week, the committee published its report on the proposed legislative competence order (LCO) on housing. LCOs (or “Elcos” as they are sometimes, inelegantly, known) are the infelicitous invention of the former Secretary of State for Wales, Peter Hain. They are a device by which primary legislative powers are salami-sliced down to the Assembly on a case-by-case basis. Constitutionally speaking, they are the work of the devil.

The Welsh Assembly Government decided last year to seek powers to enable it to suspend temporarily the right for social housing tenants to buy their homes. It needed the power, it said, in order to ease housing pressure in parts of Wales. So it started the process of applying for an LCO.

In accordance with the practice that has developed, Paul Murphy, the current Secretary of State, referred the application to the select committee for scrutiny. The committee duly considered the application and delivered a report recommending the grant of the LCO; however, concerned that the LCO as drafted would theoretically have permitted WAG to abolish the right to buy completely, it also recommended that the power to suspend should not extend to outright abolition.

Anyone unacquainted with the intricacies of Welsh politics might have thought this no big deal; after all, WAG itself had made it clear that it did not intend to repeal the right to buy. So, the layman might assume, everything is hunky-dory.

However, so far as Lord Elis-Thomas is concerned, it is a matter of the gravest constitutional moment. The select committee has behaved in the most outrageous fashion. And he has written to Paul Murphy telling him as much.

He also appeared on the BBC Politics Show this lunchtime, grave of countenance and heavy of tone. The report, he said, was a “product of anti-devolution sentiment among Welsh MPs”. A Westminster conspiracy, you see, aimed at cheating the Assembly of its legislative entitlement. No matter that the LCO that has been recommended by the committee will enable WAG to do precisely what it says it wants to do; no matter, either, that the committee is composed of members of all four Welsh parties, including Plaid Cymru, or that its report was unanimous. No, it is a conspiracy and we are all in it together.

An image of a betogaed Kenneth Williams in Carry on Cleo springs irresistibly to mind: “Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all got it in for me!”

It is, of course, all nonsense. The committee has scrutinised the draft LCO and come up with its report; the Assembly will consider it and decide whether it wants to amend it; the Secretary of State will then decide whether to lay it before Parliament.

But for Dafydd Elis-Thomas it is a golden opportunity to sound off once more against the evil denizens of Westminster and rail against their attempt to deny the Assembly a power that WAG doesn’t need anyway.

It’s all getting so terribly predictable. Dafydd El now apparently sees himself as the Lord High Protector of the Welsh Constitution, whose role is to speak out on such weighty matters, to say nothing of whether we should have another Prince of Wales (which also now appears to fall within his purview).

It really is so very silly. Can’t he just be happy chairing the twice-weekly plenary sessions of the Welsh Assembly, which is his primary function, after all? Oh, and perhaps also meeting the odd Israeli ambassador? Or refusing to, as the case may be?