You might have thought that unquenchable anger and grief over the flooding of Cwm Tryweryn 58 years ago would have subsequently made Wales determined at least to tap into the profits of non-Welsh businesses exploiting the country’s natural resources.

But it hasn’t.

Water, then and now, is gushing out of the country with minuscule financial gain for Wales, while, increasingly, billions in profits generated by the country’s 40-plus windfarms are being salted away by their multinational owners.

The pain caused by the 1965 flooding of the Tryweryn valley, including the village of Capel Celyn, to create a reservoir to supply Liverpool will probably never go away.

How astonishing therefore that, more than half a century later, the country continues to tolerate injustice over water despite the fact that, with climate disruption accelerating at the speed of a flash-flood, it becomes an increasingly valuable resource.

In the case of water, there is now a real and present danger that Wales is on the brink of again being shafted, that, aided and abetted by sleepy politicians, the country will offer little resistance to now active proposals to export, by pipe or canals, vast quantities of water to drought-prone parts of England, including the Thames Water region.

The body advising the UK government on infrastructure challenges, the National Infrastructure Commission (NIC), has already announced that talks have begun aimed at diverting millions of litres a day to needy parts of England. Current selling price of such exports? A reported derisory 3p per 1,000 litres.

Bear in mind that any new outflow arrangement would be in addition to the 243 billion litres a year currently transferred from Wales to England. It’s therefore a vast disappointment that the plan now being hatched by Severn Trent and Thames Water has so far stimulated little, if anything, beyond rather meek demands for Wales to get a better price for this sought-after export, and for security of supply for the home market to not be compromised.

In March, Adam Price, then Plaid Cymru leader, demanded that the Welsh government “should announce its intention to block the project until the benefits to Wales from an economic and environmental perspective can be conclusively shown.” Unsurprisingly, the Drakeford government did no such thing, and Price signally failed to push his point.

Price also said: “At the very least we should receive a fair price for the export of our water, with the profits being used to invest in our communities, not to line the pockets of private companies that aren’t even based in this country.” It was a fair bar-room summary of the problem, and a reminder of the redundancy of rhetoric detached from resolution.

Clearly, the pressing need must be for an uncompromising political strategy that identifies water as a high-value, nationally-owned resource which water companies will no longer be free to sell across the border for virtually nothing and will from now on be a major contributor to Welsh public finances.