Jingoism devoid of real content

ANYONE who expected a big announcement from Theresa May would have been disappointed.

Her failure to even name-check the Swansea Tidal Lagoons project is possibly ominous.

Ministers – especially prime ministers – love to tell audiences good news, and confirming at a party conference that a major local infrastructure project had Government backing would have been the perfect occasion to do so. Instead Mrs May’s speech was essentially pitched at her party faithful rather than Wales as a whole.

If you listened to her without knowing about the turmoil in her own Cabinet, you could be forgiven for concluding that Brexit represents the greatest economic opportunity Wales has ever had. Two years ago, of course, she was arguing the opposite, as was Secretary of State for Wales Alun Cairns, another born-again Brexiteer.

The major message from Mrs May, though, was a jingoistic one. She is a British nationalist through and through and sees anyone who isn’t entirely signed up to the Union as an enemy and an outsider.

But while pressing home the point that we have so much to thank the British state for, she acknowledges that the biggest internal discrepancy between rich and poor regions in the entire EU is in the UK itself.

She says she wants to reduce this gap, but her speech contained no detail of how that would be achieved.

She claims the post-Brexit UK Shared Prosperity Fund will be superior to EU structural funds, but no details of how it will work in practice have been disclosed. There are fears that it will be a top-down fund, bypassing the Welsh Government.

So much is up in the air that it’s impossible even to be sure that Mrs May will be back for next year’s Welsh Conservative Spring Conference.