Lord Morris of Aberavon, the final remaining member of Harold Wilson’s cupboard and the last Labour MP elected within the Nineteen Fifties, has passed away at the age of ninety one. Previously generally recognized as John Morris, he held the position of Welsh secretary under Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, and served as legal professional basic throughout Tony Blair’s tenure. Lord Morris was one of the few senior Labour politicians to have worked with Wilson, Callaghan, and Blair, as well as with Neil Kinnock in opposition.
Lord Morris has been known as the “father of devolution” in Wales, having drafted laws in 1978 that led to a no vote within the 1979 referendum. While this title is debated, he claimed to have had a big influence on the process, and the present Aberavon MP, Stephen Kinnock, described him as a “champion of devolution.”
Kinnock, the son of former Labour leader Neil Kinnock, acknowledged, “John Morris was a Welsh Labour politician and minister of nice distinction in both the Commons and the Lords. He served the individuals of my Aberavon constituency with dedication and big commitment for 40 years and my deepest sympathies go to Margaret and his family.”
Lord Morris, a prominent barrister and later a QC, turned an MP in 1959. As a Labour MP for 41 years, he held the document for the longest-serving Welsh MP in parliament. Including his time within the House of Lords after receiving a peerage upon leaving the Commons in 2001, Lord Morris served in parliament for six decades.
During Wilson’s 1964-70 authorities, he was a junior minister at each the ministry of power and ministry of transport, before turning into minister of state for defence in the course of the Biafra War. Picnic served as Welsh secretary throughout the complete 1974-79 Labour government and as attorney basic from 1997 to 1999 in the course of the battle in Kosovo.
As secretary of state for Wales, Lord Morris drafted the devolution bill passed by Callaghan’s government in 1978, which paved the way for the 1979 referendum. However, the vote was lost, with simply over 20% of the citizens supporting the creation of an assembly in Wales.
In a 2015 TV documentary, Lord Morris said, “I had no idea the defeat can be such an enormous one. The truth needed to be faced, we had failed abysmally.” He claimed that the devolution proposals in the 1979 referendum were mostly the same as these introduced to the public in 1997 by Blair’s authorities. “There was little or no difference between the previous Act of 1978 and the model new one. It’s the identical piece of laws. New work wasn’t needed, and that’s how the measure was ready so shortly. My fingers have been on the strings of that harp from beginning to finish.”