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A LACK of ambition and self-belief has always been Wales’s achilles heel as a nation.

And now it has consumed Wales’s main nationalist party, with the announcement that Plaid are to enter into an ‘agreement’ with Welsh Labour.

Former Plaid Leader Leanne Wood declared gleefully today that Wales was ‘pushing leftwards’ as a result of the deal.

Signalling once again that the party now sees itself as a socialist party above all else.

Seemingly oblivious to the irony that in showing such lack of belief in its own credentials as a nationalist party, it only serves to cement an unionist party’s control over Wales.

The agreement has still to be passed by Plaid members at a virtual conference this weekend, but that already appears to be written into the script.

The agreement will include a commitment to introduce Senedd Reform, Replacement of Council Tax, a new National Care Service, and a limit on second homes.

It could be argued that such an agreement between Labour and Plaid may provide some stability to Y Senedd, and act as some form of protection for the institution should Westminster seek to claw back any powers from Wales.

And some nationalists will argue that it is following in an honourable tradition of ‘influencing’ Labour to become more nation-building in its outlook.

But it’s a depressingly supplicant frame of mind when Wales’s main nationalist party – in existence for almost a century – can only imagine this kind of junior relationship for itself in governance.

And that it’s all but given up of any hope of winning power by its own merits.

It’s all a far cry from Adam Price’s “cast iron guarantee” to the Welsh people at the election in May, that Plaid in government would introduce an Independence referendum in its first term.

Gwlad leader Gwyn Wigley Evans said such an alliance with the unionist Labour Party stank of too much mixing and matiness in Cardiff Bay.

‘This socialist alliance will just put another foot on top of the suffering Welsh population, whilst those involved get high on the oxygen of power’ he said.

He said that Labour had already mismanaged Wales for close on 25 years since the start of Devolution, bleeding the public dry with various White Elephants and rewarding its favourites in the third sector.

‘And now we see Plaid patting them on the back and saying, “let’s have more of the same, lads”.’

Mr Evans added it was painfully clear to all that Wales needed wholesale change rather than patching up a broken system.

‘Wales needs new parties such as Gwlad, who don’t have the baggage of the past and who say it as it is.’

‘A party committed to Independence, with sensible amd pragmatic policies to bring Wales to the standard of other small independent nations’

With Labour and Plaid joining ranks to extend the Covid passport in Wales last week, it was almost inevitable that this was a prelude to some formal nuptials between the two parties.

Labour HQ in London – who still run the whole Labour movemement in essence – must scarcely be able to believe their luck.

Dependent on Wales as their last remaining outpost in the UK, they have now seen the main nationalist opposition to their continuing hegemony effectively neutered as a real political threat.

That Welsh achilles heel will now need to be cured by someone else.