In October’s Caerffili by-election Labour lost the previously safe seat and its share of the vote collapsed from 46% to 11%. Should something similar happen in the 2026 Senedd election, Labour would be left with just a handful of MSs and be evicted from office in Wales. And if such an outcome were repeated at the next UK general election (due 2029), Labour would not have a single MP in Wales and barely any in England and Scotland either.

If Labour is deserted by Wales, their loyal fiefdom for over a century, then the Party is finished. Wales can be seen as the metaphorical canary in a coal-mine – and even someone as unintelligent as Kier Starmer can recognise existential danger when the bird drops dead. Since Caerffili, his true-blue chief of staff Morgan McSweeney must have instructed him to pay some attention to Wales for a change – which doesn’t come at all naturally to a British Nationalist bigot like Starmer, who drapes himself in union jacks at every opportunity, has the classic centralising autocrat’s bone-marrow distaste for the UK’s devolved nations, and seems to have the greatest difficulty even uttering the word “Wales”.

But needs must; so earlier this month Starmer honoured us with a rare flying visit. He swept into Cardiff like an imperial governor inspecting a subjugated colony and ensconsed himself in the safe haven of Ely & Caerau Children’s Centre in the heart of fellow rightwinger Russell Goodway’s rotten borough. There he conducted a tightly controlled press conference and a few interviews with some hand-picked lackeys, I mean journalists, before rushing back to London having lost Labour a few more votes.

With his trademark mix of deluded self-aggrandisement, cringeworthy vacuity, manifest insincerity and staggering cowardice, he steered clear of all topics of interest such as his multitude of broken or watered-down promises; his sickening attack on human rights; his appeasement of neo-fascism; his imitation of Farage’s dog-whistle racism; his abandonment of liberal democratic values; his ditching of policies protecting the natural world; his frightening imprisonment of those who campaign against the genocide in Palestine while flogging lethal weaponry to Israel; his uber-capitalist fixations on ‘growth’ and ‘deregulation’; and his pathetic subservience to Trump’s tyrannical onslaughts on civil liberties, on enlightenment, on independent nation states, on the EU, and on any opposition to his terminological inexactitudes, censorship and rapidly developing police state. Instead Starmer mostly droned on in that excruciating nasal estuary-English accent about his favourite subject: himself. He churned out the usual stuff about being an ordinary working-class bloke whose “dad” was a lowly toolmaker, when his father actually owned the toolmaking business, he was sent to a private grammar school and he came from an archetypal middle-class family in a suburban, pebble-dashed semi – but such detail wrecks his corny rags-to-riches narrative and makes his rise up the greasy pole to Prime Minister not half as impressive.

Like so many in contemporary politics, Starmer can’t seem to stop himself fibbing. For instance he stated that he goes to his barber “every few weeks”, an assertion which asks us to picture an improbable scenario of him applying the oil-slicks of hairspray and fussing for hours in front of a mirror each day in order to achieve that absurdly inappropriate, not-a-hair-out-of-place, side-sweep uplift and severe comb-over. And his grotesque caricature of Green Party policy (“they think it’s all right to sell drugs and there should be no restrictions. So somebody could sell drugs outside my children’s school. That’s nuts. They’re dangerous”) was precisely the sort of ‘loony left’ gutter press slander the Tory tabloids have been flinging at Labour for decades, embellished with that creepy-crawly, low-populist reference to “my children”. Yes, it was completely untrue: Green policy on drugs is the long-overdue decriminalisation of users not dealers, and then only for very small amounts.

In the carefully choreographed Press Conference, which had all the spontaneity and free expression of a Nuremburg Rally, Starmer topped all that when the subject of Wales was raised. Brave attempts by some Welsh journalists to ask serious and pressing questions were ignored, truncated by ridiculous time-constraints or, when a spluttering Starmer was cornered, simply cut off. There was no comment on the missing HS2 billions and Crown Estate millions stolen from Wales by his Westminster government, or Labour’s continuation and indeed expansion of the policy introduced by the Tories after Brexit of seizing what were devolved powers (see this article for more on these issues). When asked for a reaction to the revolt going on in the Welsh Labour Party whereby Senedd backbenchers have openly criticised the UK government for its latest power-grab from Wales via its ‘Pride of Place’ scheme which distributes town centre regeneration funds solely decided and allocated by Westminster, despite the fact that regeneration is an entirely devolved power, Starmer could concoct no coherent response or justification for this attack on devolution and closed down the issue by chucking in: “I’m a big believer in devolution.” It was just another of his bare-faced lies.

Pitiful First Minister Eluned Morgan was there, squirming with embarrassment and unconvincingly pretending all was well despite the fact that her own government in Cardiff has officially raised concerns with UK Labour about being illegally and contemptuously by-passed. The trouble is she is one more Labour rightwinger foisted on Wales after being hand-picked in London by Starmer, McSweeney & co (like her disgraced predecessor Gething) and her prime loyalty is to those principle-free bastards and most certainly not to Wales. You can see why she has backtracked on the promise she made before becoming FM to renounce her 2010 peerage (‘Baroness Morgan of Ely’): she has obviously realised her Senedd stint will end next year, so now she says she has simply “paused” her House of Lords membership – well, the £370 a day allowance will come in handy: she might then be able to afford Starmer’s barber!

Starmer’s main purpose in Cardiff was to inform the audience of the wonders he is going to bestow on Wales via his publicly-owned agency ‘Great British Energy – Nuclear’ (he is fond of sticking the ‘Great British’ tag on everything – patriotism being the last refuge of a scoundrel). Ynys Môn is going to be blessed with eight “small modular reactors” (SMR) at Wylfa, and apparently we should all be dancing in the streets to celebrate his foresight and benevolence.

In fact this is, of course, a load of Starmer bullshit. The SMRs are to be made by Rolls-Royce in Derby at the cost of untold billions – vast public spending that Starmer is unable to say from where it will be plucked (wild guess: the Welsh budget). SMR is an unproven, theoretical nuclear technology that doesn’t actually exist yet: Rolls-Royce has never built one SMR let alone eight, none of the required regulatory approvals have even been applied for, no SMR has ever undergone real-time operational trials, the on-site assembly of SMR modules has never been attempted, and even if all those hurdles were cleared tomorrow it would still take over 10 years for the SMRs to be built, installed and start generating power. Then there’s the unmentioned issue of radioactive nuclear waste; it has been calculated that SMRs would double the quantity of waste per kilowatt of energy generated compared to traditional nuclear plants. Where would all this new waste, which remains lethal for 100,000 years, be stored? Currently most of the UK’s nuclear waste is stored in steel canisters at Sellafield in Cumbria, which is nearly full to capacity.

Starmer and his nodding-donkey Morgan gurgled in unison about the exciting riches that would land on Ynys Môn. “Jobs for decades to come”, “incredible benefits”, “local skills”, “training opportunities”, “once in a generation boosts for jobs, supply chains and local infrastructure”, etc, etc were assured over and over again. Guess what? It was all an insulting pack of lies. For starters, SMRs’ modular method means no advance construction jobs will come to Ynys Môn, and secondly it’s a certainty that any construction at Wylfa itself will be done by the established workforces of Rolls-Royce’s main contractor and their sub-contractors in the English midlands, not a brickie from Llangefni. As for the handful of nuclear specialists required to run the SMRs once operational, they will obviously be taken from the already existing staff currently decommissioning the old Wylfa plant, bringing not a single new job to the island. The best Ynys Môn can expect is a few irrelevant, unskilled jobs as cleaners and in the canteen. Wow! What a game-changer!

Worst of all is the underlying motives behind this treatment of Wales as a guinea pig, as a blank canvas with no needs of its own, and as England’s much-abused possession. The fact is that Wales is already completely self-sufficient in energy. The latest stats, from 2023, show that Wales produces 23 Terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity per annum, through renewables, and only consumes 14 TWh. WE HAVE A MASSIVE ELECTRICITY SURPLUS. We do not need highly dangerous, enormously expensive and environment-wrecking nuclear SMRs, (nor for that matter do we need one more wind farm, solar farm or hydroelectric dam). The opposite is true: we could actually comfortably do without many of these hideous scars on our landscape. Starmer’s SMR scam is not needed for the 3 million people of Wales: if needed at all it is for the 60 million people of England. Here’s an idea Starmer: how about sticking your fucking SMRs where they belong in, say, Hyde Park?

Starmer’s plan for Ynys Môn is Cymruphobia in action. To serve England and transmit the nuclear power to where it is needed will desecrate Wales. Phalanxes of pylons will have to be erected to march across beautiful Ynys Môn and from there in all directions southwards and eastwards through the precious Welsh countryside, wreaking havoc on Welsh communities, culture, nature and biodiversity. And that’s just the start of it: Labour plans to designate all of northern Wales as an AI ‘growth zone’ that will pump out immense amounts of carbon while annihilating jobs, and the Irish Sea is being primed to be plastered with offshore wind turbines and the Celtic Sea with floating turbines – none of which are needed by Wales. As for Ynys Môn, with a UK military base at RAF Valley and the addition of a swarm of nuclear facilities it will become a prime target in this world of utterly brutal warmongers and terrorists. Gee thanks, Sir Kier, you are so thoughtful…

This is a Wales we might have presumed had been confined to history: a Wales only good for violent invasion, annexation, mutilation, ransacking and impoverishment; a Wales to be systematically extracted of its minerals, precious metals, fertile valleys, vibrant hills, pristine waters, abundant natural resources and its very history and people; a Wales that is just a handy hollowed-out non-entity for England’s convenience; a Wales despised and punished over and over again by pea-brained inadequates like Starmer, furious that we have the audacity to still exist.

The £2.5 billion that the UK government initially intends to invest in the SMRs should instead be used to insulate every house in Wales so that our bills can be reduced and our energy surplus can be sustained effortlessly into the distant future. Complete independence from the despicable British State is the only lasting solution that can bring our ruthless exploitation to an end. Meanwhile, the few decent people left in the ‘Welsh’ Labour Party, should now be working to topple the vile betrayer of Welsh interests Eluned Morgan and all her quisling cronies from office – before the Party talks itself into extinction.

There is one final point I must make. Ynys Môn Council, controlled by Plaid Cymru, is in favour of the SMRs. Ynys Môn’s Plaid Cymru MP Llinos Medi is in favour of the SMRs. And Ynys Môn’s Plaid Cymru MS, and Plaid Cymru’s leader, Rhun ap Iorwerth is in favour of the SMRs. Having met a cross-section of Plaid activists over the years this comes as no surprise; it merely confirms that the ‘Party of Wales’ can be as rightwing, ignorant, corrupted and rotten as all the others. Plaid is only a vehicle on the road to independence: if/when that is achieved it must be dismantled and split into its very different left/right/centrist components. Then the battle for the soul of Cymru can, at last, begin.