FROM WASHINGTON:

Welsh Labour is surging.  A Cardiff University poll put them at 44% (+9) in its last sounding, and expects the Conservatives to lose a seat.

This is extraordinary, because the same Welshmen backing up Labour voted almost unanimously for Brexit, against the wishes, programs, and pleading of their party.  Now they will vote for a Labour Party that is, in some ways, more radical than Corbyn’s national Labour Party.  First Minister Carwyn Jones has been demanding that Wales remain in the Single Market for almost exactly a year now, a position that Corbyn refuses to endorse or even properly address.  Jones’ Brexit White Paper was co-written with his left-wing former opponents in Plaid Cyrmu, and this week Jones took up another of Plaid’s longstanding demands, the abolition of the Barnett formula.  (The Barnett formula allotts money to Britain’s devolved governments.)

Plaid isn’t happy about this bit of poaching by Labour.  They reminded the BBC that Corbyn had specifically supported the Barnett formula.  Well, maybe that’s just the point.

It’s a strange time for Mr. Jones, undoubtedly, the Europhile first minister of the Brexitest tribe in Britain, now tacking left in SNP and Plaid’s direction, now tacking right in the general criticism of Corbyn, refusing to mention him in his May election statement and claiming that “only Welsh Labour will stand up for Wales.”

(Carwyn Jones, AM for Brigend.  As friendly as he looks but shockingly tall.  From Wikicommons.)

And, when the EU funds and CAP payments finally dry up, he’ll be the First Minister over a nation with no jobs, no mines, over half of its farmers making net negative income, and no constitutional means of staying in the Single Market.

If Jones wins on the 8th — and it looks like he will — it will be his grim coronation as the Fisher King of Wales.

It’s not for lack of effort, to Jones’ credit.  One 1 March of this year, Saint David’s Day, I met the First Minister at a reception hosted by the Congressional Friends of Wales Caucus on Capitol Hill.  He smiled and he joked and his staff showed videos of sleek new infrastructure in Wales, but the mood was grim.

“The first thing I want to emphasize,” he told the room, “is that Wales is open for business.”

But you saw a different story in his eyes, when he looked down at his Diet Coke and away from the Congressman pumping his hand.  When I asked him there was any cause at all to be optimistic following Donald Trump’s election — military spending was due to rise, and American defense contractors like GE Aircraft and General Dynamics are major outside employers of skilled Welsh workers — he shook his head sadly and said,

“No.”

Just no, full stop.  There was no cause for optimism.  Pressed on it, he said that Trump had run on a promise protectionist economics.  The “special relationship” between Trump, whose trade policies sound like Steve Bannon’s attempt at Mussolinian autarky, and May, the Queen of Hard Brexit, would never revive Wales.

(The special relationship.  A thousand words, et cetera.)

Open for business:  the First Minister had come looking for trade partners with the full knowledge that he had nothing the United States wanted, including, frankly, another foreign exporter.  One product Jones was pushing on his March trip was Welsh lamb, the major agricultural product of Wales — 93% of which, according to journalist and farmer John Wilkes, has been exported to the EU up until now.

It would be a hard sell.  For one thing, the US Department of Agriculture Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (USDA / APHIS) still enforces its 1990s ban on British meat products, a ban intended to keep mad cow disease out of the United States.  The ban is outdated, and USDA has held some tentative talks with the British government on ending it.  But it’s still on the books, and however anti-regulation Trump might be, British lamb is hardly one of his priorities.  Or, for that matter, Theresa May’s.

But worse luck for the Welsh, Americans have little stomach for lamb and none at all for mutton.  (Which is a desperate shame, because if mutton were available in Washington at least one journalist would buy it by the metric tonne and live on nothing else.)  The lamb that Americans do eat comes vastly from Australia and New Zealand, which pays little in tariffs.  And the supply is frighteningly big — only 9.3% of Australian lamb exports, for example, go to the US, and that 9.3% comes out to 13,753.68 metric tons of meat.  So if Americans did start eating more lamb, it would come from the Pacific.  Not from Wales.

Mr. Wilkes, at least, was not pessimistic.  Millenials are eating more lamb than their parents, thanks to their cosmopolitan taste, and UK lamb might prove attractive to upscale, organic-meat consumers.

We wish them godspeed.  But if there’s a miracle recovery in Wales, Labour government or none, it won’t be due to more kebabs in New York.  Only reentry into the Single Market can breathe life into Wales.  And if Corbyn won’t say as much, Jones at least will.

Good luck, First Minister.