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Delyth Jewell, who is the deputy leader of Plaid Cymru, is one of four regional Senedd Members serving the South Wales East region.

In recent weeks, stories about big businesses disregarding the interests of ordinary people have dominated the headlines. 

With Tata’s decision to cut thousands of jobs in Port Talbot, we saw the cynical actions of a company that’d decided to throw their workers onto the scrapheap. 

As I’ve argued in the Senedd, Tata’s decision wasn’t about net zero: it was about politics and money. 

Shame on them for their cruel disregard for our communities, and shame on Rishi Sunak for refusing to talk to Wales’ First Minister about the calamity facing the steelworkers. 

The negligence shown towards this workforce has been profound, and it’ll have dire consequences for businesses across Wales, unless the company is persuaded to reconsider. 

We cannot achieve net zero without steel, and if we lose the ability to create virgin steel, we’ll be forced to import a dirtier product from other parts of the world, where workers are exploited. We cannot allow that to happen, and indeed there is an obligation on both the Welsh and UK governments to work together to find a way out of this crisis. 

Another story of David and Goliath proportions has been that of Mr Bates vs the Post Office, and the shameful way in which innocent subpostmasters were fined and even jailed for crimes they’d never committed: all because a Goliathan company (in this case, Fujitsu) apparently chose to protect their Horizon IT software, instead of the welfare of their workforce. 

Worryingly, that same parent-company Fujitsu (the ones who owned the faulty software) has a number of IT contracts with Transport for Wales. I’ve been raising concerns about this in the Senedd, and have questioned whether it’s morally right for a company that played such a crucial role in destroying people’s lives should be receiving more public money. At the very least, there should be an urgent review of those contracts, and a decision taken not to re-award them without open tender.

The final example of this trend I’d highlight was the recent decision by Ofgem to allow energy companies to continue forcibly installing pre-payment meters into some people’s homes. 

Pre-payment meters, when forcibly installed, can allow companies to cut off people’s energy supply if they can’t afford to top up the meter. 

It’s essentially throwing struggling households to the wolves, and is proof, in my book, that we have a regulator that’s failed. 

In allowing this wicked practice to continue, the regulator (Ofgem) has shown that it works for the benefit of big companies, and not consumers. In this regard, and similarly to what we’ve seen with Tata and Fujitsu, it’s the little man (or woman) who suffers. 

It’s a trend we’re seeing far too often, and exposes the failings of the ultra-free market ideology which has taken over so much in our society. Surely I can’t be alone in thinking that all of these services should be run for the benefit of people, not big profits?