THE RUINATION - actual and proposed - of the Welsh countryside by wind-turbines and outrageously-sized pylons is being promoted by successive UK governments’ refusal to decouple the price of expensive and volatile gas from cheaper renewables.

Electricity bills have for years been artificially inflated because of an illogical, and increasingly indefensible, wholesale market convention that allows gas - the most expensive fuel - to set the price for all electricity-generation.

It’s an arrangement that mightily benefits the burgeoning wind sector and hugely disadvantages vast numbers of people in Wales struggling - and sometimes unable - to pay energy bills.

Wind companies correctly surmise that governments, desperate not to jeopardise their self-imposed zero-emissions policies, will be extremely reluctant to risk stemming the current flood of onshore wind applications by scrapping gas-link pricing to the detriment of wind’s colossal profits.

For at least three years, starting with assurances of energy market reform by Kwasi Kwarteng, chancellor under the amateurs-plus Truss administration, Westminster governments have signalled their awareness of a glaring pricing anomaly and have murmured their intention to scrap it. But they haven’t.

Under energy security and net zero secretary Ed Miliband, the murmurs of pricing justice seem set to be mere whispers, following warnings from wind and solar power outfits that decoupling could discourage them from investing in the sector.

Such messages have put the wind up successive UK governments, with turbines companies interpreting long-term Westminster reluctance to offend wind and solar companies as a green light to ramp up windfarm planning bids, accompanied, they assume, by an attendant succession of open-ended cheques stretching into the foreseeable future.

Wales gets a particularly bad deal over electricity prices, worsened by the fact that so many homes and businesses are off-grid for cheaper gas. Here, both the per-unit price and daily standing charge for electricity are higher in the old Manweb (north and mid Wales and Merseyside) area than anywhere else in Britain. Both are due to rise further during the three months October to December under a revised Ofgem energy price-cap.

All-electric households in Wales are stung not only by the highest per-unit price but by their inability, despite any attempts to minimise consumption, to cut bills beyond a certain point because of the universally applied, and patently unfair, standing charge.

In the Manweb area, where some of the poorest people in Britain live, this daily charge will rise next month from 67.65p to 69.95p, to nearly £60 a quarter. So, shiver as you will, they’ll come knocking for your 60 quid, or £240 a year; plus 27.72p a unit. Both elements are the priciest anywhere in Britain. Rural Wales MPs, let alone the Welsh government, should be shouting from the rooftops about this unfairness. They aren’t.

Compare those figures with 61p daily standing charge and 27.06p a unit in northern Scotland (comparable in so many ways to the Manweb region); and 44.62p standing charge and 26.48p a unit in southern England, where some of the richest people in Britain live. The standing charge in the south is the lowest anywhere in Britain.

The premium prices for electricity offloaded onto Wales also betray lies routinely peddled by the wind lobby that turbines on your neighbouring hillside provide not only locally-generated energy consumed locally, but ensure lower electricity prices. Both claims are untrue.

A tiny number of MPs try to spur Miliband to scrap the regime sanctioning the artificial overpricing of renewables.

For example, West Dorset Liberal Democrat Edward Morello stressed in the Commons recently the basic point that decoupling electricity prices from the gas market was essential if consumers were to enjoy lower-cost energy.

New solar, he pointed out, is 11per cent cheaper than the lowest-cost fossil fuel, and onshore wind 39 per cent cheaper, yet the marginal pricing system that ties electricity costs to the market price of gas “has resulted in British consumers enduring the fourth-highest global energy prices during a cost of living crisis.”

The government’s response was far more revealing than it probably guessed.

Energy under-secretary Michael Shanks agreed that decoupling from “volatile and expensive” gas prices was critical. But then - music to the wind industry’s ears - added: “…And the journey we are on to develop clean power by 2030 will do that.

“Our objective is to deliver a clean power system where gas only provides the back-up, rather than setting the price, as it currently does. Too often - 80 per cent of the time - we rely on gas to set the price. We are trying to remove that, and to build a clean power system for the future.”

Note “journey”, “by 2030”, “objective”, “trying to remove”. Translated, that means business as usual, and prices exploitation of Wales, for at least the next five years. That is, if Wales allows them to get away with it.

IT’S transparently obvious that Hywel Dda health board can’t be trusted to safeguard and guarantee the future of Bronglais Hospital’s indispensable and first-rate stroke unit.

Despite fierce public and press anger and weighty petitioning, the board shows no sign that it is prepared to deviate from its patently dangerous ‘treat-and-transfer’ model. Nothing short of government edict will change that. We’d be well advised to accept the fact.

To the extent that some of us might once have thought that sound, humane, well thought-out counter-argument should and would triumph, we must stop deluding ourselves.

The board’s fixed demeanour is that of a monolith doggedly and immovably set on imposing its will.

It is not an administration genuinely open to persuasion. It would like us to think it is. It isn’t. Publicly, the board presents itself as benign and engaged. Its public relations output is full of empathy, understanding and goodwill. It’s all a front.

In reality, the board remains fundamentally cemented into a mad plan guaranteed to harm patients, one that should never have gained traction in the first place given Bronglais’s supreme importance as a vital health hub for a vast area of Wales.

There is now only one answer. The health minister, Jeremy Miles, must, effectively, overrule the board and act decisively to safeguard the interests of people across Ceredigion, Powys and Meirionnydd. There must be no more messing around with the best interests of patients. Their well-being, not the managerial preferences of the health board, must come first.

Without equivocation, Jeremy Miles must order not only the retention of Bronglais’s highly successful stroke unit, but any developments useful for its enhancement.

If he doesn’t do this, Labour will deserve not a single vote from these regions in next year’s election.