PLAID CYMRU leader Leanne Wood’s rejection of a Labour Party “fully signed up to the austerity brigade” will reverberate across all the nations that make up Britain.

Labour is easily spooked into supporting ugly right-wing proposals such as the the arbitrary welfare cap or the child benefit freeze touted by its walking disaster of a shadow chancellor Ed Balls, who was outshone by a passing spider on BBC News yesterday.

The shadow of Thatcherite posh-boy Nigel Farage prompts ill-thought-through gimmicks such as promises to control immigration quite impossible to keep while remaining in the European Union.

The party cringes before billionaire media tycoons whose papers spew out guff about Ed Miliband being unelectable and howl with fury at any baby-step the Labour leader makes towards confronting the robber barons who have taken over our energy supplies and transport services.

Hyper-sensitive to any criticism from the right, the party remains strangely deaf to the roar of anger against austerity from millions of its natural supporters.

Poll after poll shows overwhelming support for nationalisation of the utilities and the railways, not the half-baked compromises offered by Labour’s front bench. Labour doesn’t listen.

As pointed out by CND general secretary Kate Hudson in yesterday’s Morning Star, it doesn’t listen either to the majority who are appalled by the prospect of blowing tens of billions of pounds on a new set of nuclear weapons when the money is urgently needed for investment in our public services.

And so it is unlikely Labour will listen to Wood. Party officials will point out that the Party of Wales shows no real indication of being on the verge of an electoral breakthrough.

And unlike Scotland, where a referendum on separation from the rest of the United Kingdom seemed too close to call at times, support for an independent Wales rests at 3 per cent — its lowest level ever.

But Labour should be wary of complacency on this issue. Many who have no time for Welsh nationalism will nonetheless have been nodding along to Wood’s list of Labour failures delivered to the Plaid conference.

“Where have they been?” she asked. Wood was talking about Labour’s pledge to stand up for Wales, but the question could have been asked by many others.

Hard-pressed NHS staff forced to take strike action against endless pay freezes, disabled people vilified and bullied by a Tory-Lib Dem coalition intent on picking their pockets, millions queuing outside foodbanks because they can no longer afford to feed their families would all be justified in hurling that question at Miliband. Where have you been?

The smug assumption of the Blair years — that working-class voters had nowhere else to go — was not even true in the 2000s, when the party said goodbye to millions of voters who saw nothing in the patronising, privatising and warmongering coterie in Number 10 worthy of their support.

It is even less true now. From the loss of former Labour heartlands that voted Yes to Scottish independence to the party’s slither of a victory over Ukip in the Heywood and Middleton by-election, the writing is on the wall.

Labour has to start fighting for working people, or it will lose them.