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Theresa May will make a speech in Stoke today, attempting to shore up support for her Brexit deal, and warn that parliament is more likely to stop Brexit than allow the UK to leave the EU without a deal.

In the version of the speech released to the media by No.10 (see update below), she made reference to the vote to create the National Assembly for Wales in 1997.

"On the rare occasions when Parliament puts a question to the British people directly, we have always understood that their response carries a profound significance," the briefed version of the speech said.

"When the people of Wales voted by a margin of 0.3%, on a turnout of just over 50%, to endorse the creation of the Welsh Assembly, that result was accepted by both sides and the popular legitimacy of that institution has never seriously been questioned.

"Parliament understood this fact when it voted overwhelmingly to trigger Article 50. And both major parties did so too when they stood on election manifestos in 2017 that pledged to honour the result of the referendum."

This isn't exactly true.

The worst lie: "On the rare occasions when Parliament puts a question to the British people directly, we have always understood that their response carries a profound significance."

Since the Prime Minister was so determined to use the story of the Assembly's creation to prove her case on Brexit, it might be worth providing her with a simple history lesson, as she seems to have misremembered the facts.

The referendum that voted in favour of establishing the Assembly took place on September 18, 1997. On December 9 that year, the Government of Wales Bill went before the Commons, bring its creation into law.

The Conservative Party voted en masse against it. Including prominent Brexiteers like John Redwood and Liam Fox, as well as a backbencher by the name of Theresa May.

Or to put that another way. Theresa May actively chose to use the Assembly referendum to support her position on Brexit, even though her own actions in that specific case were the exact opposite.

Another fairly big lie: "When the people of Wales voted by a margin of 0.3%, on a turnout of just over 50%, to endorse the creation of the Welsh Assembly, that result was accepted by both sides and the popular legitimacy of that institution has never seriously been questioned."

Taking aside the fact that Mrs May and her colleagues were seriously questioning the popular legitimacy of the institution before it had even been created, the Conservatives were continuing to call the existence of the Assembly into question long into the decade following the vote.

The Conservative manifesto for the 2005 general election - by which time the Assembly had been operating for six years - carried a single reference to the National Assembly for Wales.

It was this: "In Wales we will work with the Assembly and give the Welsh people a referendum on whether to keep the Assembly in its current form, increase its powers or abolish it."

Yes, abolish it. Six years after it was introduced, the public would be given a vote on getting rid of devolution again. Presumably the Prime Minister doesn't regard her own party's manifesto pledge as a serious question about the legitimacy of the institution.

And for those not yet in full appreciation of the level of irony here, that's a second referendum being proposed. Presumably not anti-democratic on this occasion though?

A complete lie: The whole thing

Even taking all of the above aside, the aftermath of the narrow vote to create the Assembly is the direct opposite of the aftermath of the narrow vote to leave the EU.

Richard Wyn Jones, director of Cardiff University's Wales Governance Centre, made this point very eloquently on his excellent Twitter account this morning.

"Setting aside Theresa May's misremembering/rank hypocrisy [delete according to taste] concerning her own and her own party's position, the lesson of Wales 1997 is actually about 'loser's consent'.

"Welsh devolutionists (led by Ron Davies) fully realised that there was a real legitimacy question resulting from the very narrow referendum result. They worried about it, thought about and got people like myself to brief them about it in pretty lurid terms.

"And to the extent that these things are possible, they deliberately set about trying to generate 'loser's consent' for the result.

"By involving opponents of devolution in discussions about the internal processes that would be adopted in the new National Assembly

"By being unusually cross-party in their approach during the parliamentary passage of what became the 1998 Government of Wales Act (kudos here to the Wales Office team of Ron Davies, Peter Hain and Win Griffiths)

"In other words, they realised that the referendum result was only a fragile mandate on which to build a new constitutional dispensation for Wales. That mandate had to be shored up. Undergirded. Supported.

"And the only way to do that was to be cross-party and to do what they could to reach out to and address the concerns of their opponents.

"It helped, of course, that this approach 'went with the grain' of that particular ministerial team. There were also willing interlocutors

"But the fundamental point was that they realised that the narrowness of the referendum result meant that they simply had to make every effort to build consent among those who had been opposed as well as those who just hadn't bothered to participate in the vote."

The result, Richard concludes, is that devolution has become more, not less, popular in Wales as a result of the consensual actions that directly followed the narrowness of the referendum result.

He concludes: "At risk of labouring this, is seems to me that the contrast between post 1997 Wales and post 2016 UK could hardly be starker. But not in the way Theresa May wants to claim.

"May's government has made practically no effort to secure the consent of those who voted Remain. A narrow referendum mandate was regarded as giving carte blanche.

"Remoaners; Saboteurs: Remainers were simply meant to suck it up whilst the fantasies of the Brexiteers were indulged."

So there you have it. One small, voluntary reference to the history of the Welsh Assembly by the Prime Minister. Three whopping lies.

UPDATE: The Prime Minister's delivery of the speech in Stoke eventually differed slightly from the version that was originally released to the media by No.10. Instead of saying "When the people of Wales voted by a margin of 0.3%, on a turnout of just over 50%, to endorse the creation of the Welsh Assembly, that result was accepted by both sides and the popular legitimacy of that institution has never seriously been questioned", she actually said: "When the people of Wales voted by a margin of 0.3%, on a turnout of just over 50%, to endorse the creation of the Welsh Assembly, that result was accepted by Parliament". That, of course, is true. But it doesn't change the fact that Theresa May directly voted against the implementation of the result of a referendum, or that her party campaigned for a second referendum on a matter that had already been put to the country. She just chose not to say as much.