Party’s mission to ‘rebalance’ Wales
PLAID Cymru leader Leanne Wood has said her party is on a mission to “rebalance” an unequal Wales where people who live outside Cardiff feel neglected.
She used her party conference speech in Newport to accuse Labour of a lack of ambition for Wales and call for investment beyond the Welsh capital.
In her speech, she described her hopes that the next time a company on the scale of the Admiral insurance group comes to Wales it will be headquartered in “Aberdare, Treherbert or Maerdy”.
And Ms Wood turned her guns on the Welsh Government for basing the new Welsh Revenue Authority in Treforest and not Wrexham or Porthmadog.
She claimed the Welsh Government is “recreating the problem of an overheating centre at the expense of everywhere else”.
She is concerned by poor broadband quality in parts of the country and flagged up enduring problems with transport infrastructure.
Ms Wood said she hears people describe the same sense of “feeling neglected” in former coalfield areas as she does in “Newtown, Wrexham, Porthmadog, Bangor”.
She said: “Anywhere away from the capital city feels neglected, pretty much.
“At Westminster under the Tories wealth is being redistributed the wrong way and the same is happening in Wales.
“Through making Wales more equal, Plaid Cymru wants to unite the country because it’s inequality which divides people and divides regions.”
Her speech comes just weeks before Theresa May is due to trigger the two-year formal Brexit process. Ms Wood refuses to give up the fight for the country to remain in the single market.
She said: “We’ll not accept any deal that’s bad for Wales and we’ll continue to fight against ‘hard’ Brexit that doesn’t prioritise our membership of the single market. Jobs and the economy remain our priority throughout this process.”
The Prime Minister has ruled out continued membership of the single market but Ms Wood said: “I’m not prepared to give up hope on that because so much depends on that... We have to try to make sure that those jobs are safeguarded and protected and membership of the single market is part of that.”
The prospect of the Brexit process starting in earnest has not prompted her to seek a formal coalition with Labour.
She said: “Well, I ‘m content that the Budget deal that we just agreed with the Welsh Government has enabled us to deliver on a number of our key priorities and for a number of people in various communities through Wales whilst at the same time has enabled us to hold the Government to account.
“And I don’t have faith in the Tories or Ukip to properly scrutinise the actions of the Welsh Government, and so Plaid Cymru being able to do that whilst at the same time influencing Government policy and its spending priorities is something that works well for us.”
She is wary about the consequences of the new Wales Act, saying: “That wasn’t just a disappointment but actually I’ve got very serious concerns that it could lead to a Westminster power-grab and we’ll be standing up and challenging that at every turn.”
She said: “We were ready for it when the rumours came about last summer and again last autumn and again just before Christmas... [We] are ever-ready for any election that they might want to throw at us.”