Want to keep up to date on Welsh politics? Sign up and get political news sent straight to your inbox Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Invalid Email

There's a discernible pattern that has emerged in recent years.

An announcement is made that a public or private sector organisation is planning a project that will create hundreds or thousands of jobs in Wales.

Everyone rejoices at the boost to the Welsh economy that the new project will bring.

Politicians from different parties and different levels of government claim a slice of the credit.

Then things go silent for a while before rumours start circulating that there are problems.

Eventually an announcement is made that the project can’t go ahead after all.

All manner of excuses are trotted out, and the politicians who originally claimed credit for their part in securing the scheme now assert that Wales has been betrayed yet again.

From the Swansea Bay tidal lagoon to the Circuit of Wales, and the M4 Relief Road to rail electrification, an argument can be made in isolation about the specific individual merits of each one.

But the repeated pulling of plugs from potentially transformative infrastructure projects planned for Wales is a pattern of events that's is increasingly difficult to believe are unconnected.

People in Wales can look at enormous outlays on initiatives like HS2 and Crossrail and wonder, legitimately, why it's acceptable to spend billions of pounds in bringing jobs and prosperity to parts of England, but not to us in Wales.

The likelihood that the Wylfa Newydd nuclear power station won’t now go ahead is the latest in this unedifying series. It can be taken as a further case study illustrating the degree to which Welsh communities can come to depend on an external saviour to provide much-needed local work.

Up to 9,000 workers would have been involved in building the new power station on Anglesey and 850 would have been needed to run it if the project went ahead.

So far as Anglesey and the neighbouring county of Gwynedd are concerned, the impact won’t be restricted to the loss of well-paid employment opportunities.

The local development plan covering both counties has been written with the assumption that Wylfa Newydd would go ahead. If the power station isn’t built, the area will have an excess stock of housing. This will lead to a slump in the property market, with all the problems that stem from that. In a very real sense, the area would have been better off if hopes had not been raised in the first place.

Of course, the decision on whether to proceed with the project will be taken not in Wales, or even in London, but in Japan, by the Hitachi Corporation. Nevertheless, Hitachi’s decision stems from the refusal of the UK Government to underwrite the project to the extent required by the Japanese company.

But the Government’s refusal to fund a nuclear project that could bring prosperity to north Wales doesn’t appear to stem from any ideological objection to nuclear power itself. In a way, that would have been more tolerable. The fact is that the UK Government has killed off two major renewable energy projects too – the Severn Barrage from Cardiff to Weston-super-Mare and the Swansea Bay Tidal Lagoon.

The first project was strongly backed by former Welsh Secretary Peter Hain, who resigned from the Shadow Cabinet in 2012 to campaign for it. The £25bn investment needed to build the barrage would have come entirely from private sources, and if it had gone ahead it would have generated 5% of the UK’s electricity needs.

But the scheme was scuppered when the UK Government was not prepared to accept the proposed “strike price” – the amount paid to companies for power generated from renewables, to help overcome high initial costs – even though the subsidy would have been lower than for nuclear and offshore wind.

Norway, which invested in hydroelectricity a few decades ago, now produces 98% of its domestic electricity from hydro. Consumer bills there are consequently 65% lower than in the UK after the initial period of subsidy.

Again, after an initial burst of optimism – and a supportive report from a former Conservative energy minister – the Swansea Tidal Lagoon project was killed off by the UK Government because of its cost. At the same time, it dashed hopes that the Swansea Bay lagoon would be the first of similar lagoons built around the coast of Wales.

The electrification of the Great Western railway line beyond Cardiff to Swansea is another project which raised so much hope, only to come to nothing after lengthy delays. Transport experts pointed out how any attempt to revive the scheme in the future would be very costly because of the need to plan it from scratch. The cost would have been less as part of the ongoing electrification of the line to Swansea.

And while some Valleys lines to the north of Cardiff are on schedule to be electrified as part of the Metro light rail network, the electrification of others in the region has been ruled out.

For several years the Circuit of Wales project – which entailed building a motorsport racetrack on moorland above Ebbw Vale – kept alive the promise of 6,000 jobs in one of the most impoverished parts of the country. Eventually it went the way of the other schemes when serious doubts were raised by consultants about the claims made on its behalf and the Welsh Government refused to provide the financial guarantees requested.

Hopes are now fading among supporters of the M4 relief road near Newport that it will get the go-ahead from a new First Minister who hasn’t given the project the kind of unequivocal backing as his predecessor.

Is Wales unlucky – or has there been a concerted effort to deprive us of investment worth billions of pounds? Even if there are good reasons for rejecting some of the projects mentioned, it seems unfortunate that every single one has been deemed unworthy of support.

There are grounds for believing that Wales is regarded as an undeserving western appendage to the country where true power resides and where infrastructure projects that rise in cost exponentially are part of the natural order of things.

If Wales is ever to have a chance of catching up with the best-performing parts of the UK, we need some big projects that will actually work and deliver what they promise.

Meanwhile, we all have a right to feel disenchanted with those in both the public and private sectors who have let our nation down.