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Those who continue to oppose devolution like to claim that the Westminster parliament is far more effective at scrutinising legislation than the National Assembly for Wales.

Whilst the ‘big guns’ blast on the banks of the Thames, on the shores of Cardiff Bay it’s Billy Connolly’s ‘wee pretendy parliament’.

Naturally enough, Welsh parliamentarians at Westminster are particularly partial to this particular saw.

Now the Assembly has its problems. But, really, it takes a particular kind of chutzpah to argue the case that Westminster is somehow a more effective legislature than the National Assembly for Wales when we recall the complete pig’s ear that the former has made of the legislation that underpins the latter.

It’s hard to think of a better example of the failings of the self-styled ‘mother of parliaments’ than Westminster’s Welsh devolution legislation .

In the last eighteen years, it’s made three attempts to legislate a workable constitution for devolved Wales.

The Government of Wales Act 1998 was succeeded by its 2006 namesake and then supplemented by the 2014 Wales Act.

But given that the 2006 Act contained two different schemes of devolution, it’s perhaps more accurate to suggest that Westminster has had four goes at it. Each of these efforts has been fundamentally flawed. And on each occasion the flaws have not only been predictable; they have been predicted.

Yet this has not deterred Westminster from ploughing ahead regardless, with Ministers blithely proclaiming that the latest dispensation is destined to settle the question of devolution ‘for a generation’.

So far at least, the parliamentary journey of the Wales Bill has done little to redeem Westminster’s reputation.

Despite the complexity of the plans, and the fact there is no precedent for the particular model of reserved powers devolution they are meant to be implementing, Theresa May’s government appears intent on ramming the legislation through parliament.

(Image: AP Photo/Olivier Matthys)

Although the Bill was only published in early June, the intention is apparently to secure royal assent by Christmas, with only a very limited amount of parliamentary time set aside for debate. Which would be a pretty outrageous way of proceeding were it not for the fact that the official opposition has made such ineffectual use of the time that has been allotted.

The efforts of Welsh Labour MPs during the Commons debates can only be described as pathetic. Unwilling to engage with the deep structural flaws of the Bill (for reasons to which we will return), they concentrated their intentions instead on relative minor, peripheral issues.

Predictably, they also availed themselves of the opportunity to return to the alleged constitutional outrage of the government’s plans to reduce the number of Welsh MPs; an issue that clearly exercises some far more than the prospects of yet another inadequate Welsh devolution dispensation.

To be fair, it appears as if the House of Lords is determined to make a better fist of things. Its second reading debate earlier this month was certainly a far more substantial affair than the thin gruel served up the Commons.

Yet it currently seems unlikely than the government will offer up more than minor concessions.

The lack of interest, let alone serious engagement, from our elected representatives has given the green light to yet another ‘devolution settlement’ that will settle nothing, but will – if implemented – quickly unravel under the weight of its own inadequacies.

The Wales Bill suffers from two fatal flaws: it’s a piece of legislation that has been both poorly conceived and badly drafted.

They combine to fatal effect to outline a system of devolution that would not only be as cumbersome as its predecessors, but in some important ways would be even more restrictive and frustrating.

The Bill is based on what the UK government has rather grandiosely titled the ‘St David’s Day Agreement’.

This was the end result of a lowest common denominator process in which each of the political parties was allowed to wield a veto on the individual recommendations of the Silk Commission; doing so without any need to explain (privately let alone publicly) their behaviour.

The Conservatives and Labour’s Owen Smith combined to veto every single substantive recommendation made by Silk for further devolution in the field of justice, this apparently in order to protect the integrity of the unitary England and Wales legal system.

Given that law and justice overlap with pretty much everything that the Welsh Government and National Assembly do, adding them to the list of reservations was bound to create a hopelessly unwieldy system.

A list of reservations far that is far longer than those found in Scotland and Northern Ireland, two territories with their own legal jurisdictions.

It is striking to note that Welsh Labour MPs (though emphatically not First Minister Carwyn Jones) continue to support Owen Smith’s standpoint on justice and jurisdiction.

On this the UK government and the majority of Welsh Labour MPs stand as one. Hence in part the unwillingness of the opposition to engage with the structural flaws of the Wales Bill.

(Image: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

It’s doubtful that it was ever possible to produce a sensible, stable devolution dispensation on such weak foundations as those provided by the St David’s Day Agreement. But without doubt, its deficiencies have been further magnified by the grudging, negative attitudes on display across Whitehall during the drafting process. Attitudes that a weak, marginalised Wales Office has been quite unable to challenge.

In drawing up the list of those issues that will be reserved to London, Whitehall departments have seized the opportunity to reserve every power they might conceivably ever ‘need’ in relation to Wales.

Matters have been listed because Whitehall civil servants seem to believe that Welsh politicians can’t be trusted to deal with them responsibly.

Others have seemingly been added to the list because Whitehall regrets letting go of them when powers were devolved to Scotland.

Whitehall has even availed itself of the opportunity to reverse the losses that it suffered at the hands of Welsh Government in the Supreme Court. Not only has the attitude been negative and grudging; it’s been patronising and vindictive too.

Reservation has been piled upon reservation to create a final schedule that is sprawling and lacking in any logic. But even that wasn’t enough for Whitehall. Just in case it had forgotten anything, it’s also reserved everything that ‘relates to’ the list of reservations, thus further extending its reach.

And as if all this wasn’t enough, it has insisted upon a system of ‘ministerial consents’ of such mind numbing complexity as to cause bafflement even amongst seasoned constitutional experts. Its effect, though, is clear enough. It will require Welsh Ministers to go cap in hand to Whitehall in order to act even in areas that might otherwise be regarded as devolved.

Elystan Morgan had it exactly right in his powerful contribution to the debate in the House of Lords: the attitude that Whitehall has displayed in drafting the Wales Bill can only be described as colonial.

So what’s next? Is it our fate to be governed on the basis of this nonsense?

It would seem that Theresa May’s government has the votes to force the Wales Bill onto the statue book. But there is one further hurdle. The National Assembly for Wales will have to give its consent before the new legislation can be implemented.

Until now, it has been assumed that National Assembly consent would hinge on a positive outcome in the negotiations currently taking place between the Welsh Government and the UK Treasury on Wales’s ‘fiscal framework’ – encompassing the Barnett formula, tax devolution and borrowing powers.

But with the UK Government apparently determined to refuse any significant changes to the legislation despite the sensible and constructive suggestions being made by the Welsh Government, the Assembly’s Constitutional and Legislative Affairs Committee, and the Assembly’s Presiding Officer, it appears increasingly possible that the National Assembly will use its ‘nuclear option’ and reject the new devolution settlement whatever the outcome of the fiscal negotiations.

Given the obvious problems with the Bill it would be no less than Whitehall and Westminster deserve.

Should the National Assembly ultimately decide to withhold consent then it will be a direct result of the failure of the legislative process in London.

Having failed so many times before, there really is no excuse for another botched attempt at legislating a workable system of devolution for Wales.

Professor Richard Wyn Jones is the director of the Wales Governance Centre at Cardiff University