Jo Stevens is an ignorant, fanatical British unionist – in other words, a typical member of Kier Starmer’s cabinet. Starmer picked her for the job of Welsh Secretary precisely because she is an insecure imperialist just like him, fundamentally committed to centralising power in Westminster, to undermining and reversing devolution, to resuscitating the thoroughly discredited myths of British exceptionalism and to thwarting any moves that might help bring about the advancement and actualisation of Wales.

Appointing an out-and-out Cymruphobe as Secretary of State for Wales, a post that exists specifically to protect, nurture and enhance Welsh identity, is like putting Jack the Ripper in charge of a nunnery. The appointment summed up all that is wrong about Starmer, comfortably the worst leader in the Labour Party’s history. What Wales needed after 14 years of Welsh Secretaries imposed by a sequence of terrible Tory leaders in London was somebody with, at the very least, some sort of affinity and sympathy for Wales, even perhaps a hint of affection for this serially abused, ransacked, exploited and trashed little country. But no, Starmer decided it was appropriate to appoint a dogmatic anti-Wales bigot.

A telling example of her virulent hostility to the very existence of Welshness came last month. One of her constituents in Cardiff East emailed her to ask why her leaflets, social media and website never used the Welsh language, which along with English is an official language of Wales. Bilingualism is the norm among Senedd Members, while all MPs in Westminster have access to a free translation service should they want their material to be in both English and Welsh – meaning Stevens wouldn’t even need to spend a penny out of her £160,000 a year salary. Stevens replied that she only used English in her roles as an MP and as Secretary of State for Wales because “almost every elector speaks English” – a contemptuous, autocratic, arrogant attitude that would have been viewed as laughably narrow-minded jingoism a century ago and which, taken to its logical conclusion, amounts to a de facto justification for the eradication of Welsh, not to mention most of the planet’s other minority languages. And this, remember, is coming from the person responsible to the 20% of Wales for whom Welsh is their first language plus the 20% who are Welsh learners plus the 30% of pupils who are taught in Welsh, and who is charged with the duty of supporting the policy of the Welsh government to reach a million Welsh speakers by 2050.

Stevens underlined her shockingly disrespectful and destructive attitude when she followed up her initial response with “There is no statutory requirement for MPs to provide bilingual communications in English and Welsh” – a pathetic piece of specious sophistry considering she is not just any old MP, but an MP for a constituency in WALES (a constituency, by the way, with 15,000 Welsh speakers), and an MP who also sits around the cabinet table as SECRETARY OF STATE FOR WALES (a country, by the way, with 600,000 Welsh speakers). If she’s finding that task too onerous and not her cup of tea, she should resign or else be sacked.

Stevens is the first Welsh Secretary since devolution in 1999 to attempt to undermine the settled cross-party consensus that support for the Welsh language is a good thing, and the only Labour Welsh Secretary, apart from the treacherous hypocrite and sex offender George Thomas (1909-1997), to adopt an openly negative attitude to the language. It was revealing that the sole support in the Senedd for Stevens’ profoundly offensive, obsolete poison came from the reliably reactionary fossil Andrew R T Davies, a blustering Last Days of The Raj buffoon who always looks like he’s about to burst a blood-vessel and is taking ages deserting the sinking Tory ship and defecting to Reform UK. So this is what the UK Labour Party has come to: ganging up with far-right bullies. What next? I wouldn’t be at all surprised if one day, should it be necessary to cling to power, Starmer went into a coalition with his natural allies Reform UK. Jo Stevens could then be put in charge of what appears to be her heart’s desire: the abolition of Wales…