IN the 1980s, it was Coal not Dole — today it’s Enough is Enough. The story of managed decline experienced by working-class communities in Wales hardly needs retelling.

Since Thatcherism wove this fabric of decline into our communities, the term regeneration has cast a very large shadow over Welsh life.

It has by now become part of everyday speech among policy-makers, local councillors, trade unions and social activists, filling pages in newspapers and mouths in conversations.

We’ve been playing the regeneration game for some time now — but, of course, this isn’t a game at all for the majority of working people caught up in its harsh vagaries.

The strategies the British and Welsh governments are pursuing presently are the same ones they have pursued for 40 years. What’s more: they’re not working.

All too often, they have resulted in beauty pageants and auctions for foreign direct investment, placing our wellbeing at the door of the footloose multinational corporations that control it.

Indeed, in March earlier this year, I criticised the Cardiff capital region’s disgraceful boast about relatively lower graduate pay in Cardiff compared to other UK counterparts to attract inward investors.

Regeneration is part of the dire euphemistic patter that resounds in social media soundbites and fills the pages of reports.

It sounds good, but more often than not disguises a strategy of creative destruction, shoehorning in deregulation, privatisation and the dismantling of workers’ rights wherever possible.

This is a reality playing out most recently in the laughably named Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill put forward by the Westminster government — a horrific lurch further toward deregulation as the Tories scheme to hand power to the highest bidder through their charter cities and enterprise zones.

In Wales, we’re seeing another iteration rear its head. In the Senedd, I recently drew attention to freeports.

Freeports are rarely mentioned in any of the Welsh government’s regional economic development publications, yet last month a freeport programme was launched with the British government.

One of the stated objectives of the programme is the following: “Promote regeneration and high-quality job creation.” Here we go again.

It should be an instant red flag that freeports were a flagship policy of former chancellor Rishi Sunak.

That the Welsh government are trying to follow the economic lead of the Tories in Westminster, especially given the current shambles they’ve gotten us into, should send alarm bells ringing.

This is before we’ve even looked at the evidence decrying the sleaze and seedy underbelly of freeports.

Freeports are places where the usual rules don’t apply and where the ability for ordinary people to exert influence is annulled. Geographically, freeports are placed within countries but legally outside them for customs purposes.

Companies using a freeport can claim a wide range of customs privileges and tax relief. They can be maritime ports, airports, or potentially any area where imports are handled.

It should be said that freeports aren’t new either. More than 80 operate across 21 of the EU member states according to a list provided by the directorate-general for taxation and customs union.

Moreover, there is a large body of research that shows they’re fertile territory for all kinds of illicit activity.

There is an intrinsic secrecy and shadiness to freeports. A report from the financial action task force has made this point — the innate lack of scrutiny in freeports can, and more than likely will, play host to money laundering and tax evasion.

Furthermore, because the goods in freeports are technically “in transit” (in most freeports there are no time limits), goods can enter a freeport, stay there indefinitely and trade an unlimited number of times without ever having been taxed.

Freeports also risk simply moving activity and jobs from one place to another, rather than creating new activity and new jobs — they encourage job relocation rather than creation.

Indeed, a 2019 report on freeports from Sussex University stated that the main effect of freeports was to divert businesses into the port from the surrounding area.

This would only serve to exacerbate the protracted attrition of jobs already being experienced in many of our post-industrial communities.

The only groups that are certain to benefit from freeports are tax-avoiding businesses (presuming they do in fact decide to relocate to the freeport) and the wealthy individuals they are bound up with.

And while they reap the rewards, the disadvantages will be felt by everyone else, either through the public cost of maintaining them, or through the lax workers’ rights within them.

Despite all this, the freeport programme in Wales is attracting interest. Plans to explore a “green” freeport have been launched in my region and elsewhere in Wales.

While the bid’s intentions in my region seem noble — I’m sure many of us would agree that developing renewable energy sources are a good thing — the means by which we achieve this need urgently to be examined.

Freeports do not align with the self-styled progressivism of the Welsh government, and problems in underdeveloped areas won’t be solved by them.

Many of our post-industrial areas are really being hit by the cost-of-living crisis, and rather than incentivising these “sleazeports,” we should be focusing on tried and tested models of community wealth-building and rebuilding a society of solidarity.

We must ensure that we are crisis-proofing our future. The Welsh government could be focusing on strategies for this, but instead they’re once again preoccupied with “regeneration.”

Well, I say it is high time we focused on proper, bottom-up regeneration: investment in ethical green energy projects, community wealth-building strategies that keep the wealth produced by our communities in our communities, local supply chains and making sure the economy is responsive to the needs of working people.

Freeports are not the answer and we should not get sucked in to the vacuous rhetoric of regeneration anymore. Real regeneration comes from the bottom-up, not the top-down.

Luke Fletcher is Plaid Cymru MS for South Wales West.