Lib Dems rise from the grave

Lib Dem bloggers and tweeters are all of a twitter in Cornwall since Thursday’s by-election victory at St Austell Bay. John Oxenham, the successful Lib Dem candidate, overturned a 361 Tory majority to win this seat by 15 votes, increasing his party’s proportion from 33.5% in June to 48.2% in the process. The fact that this should be one of the Tories’ safest wards in Cornwall merely added to the Lib Dems’ excitement and the Tories’ gloom.

Across the length and breadth of Lib Dem Britain their activists have been quick to follow Matthew Taylor’s lead and claim St Austell Bay was a result of ‘how quickly the tide is turning against the Conservatives in Cornwall now people can see the reality of their approach at County Hall’. Sure enough, the Tory leadership at Truro have hardly wasted their time in turning Leader Alec Robertson’s pledge of ‘openness and transparency’ into a hollow joke.

Just six months in and his rash promise is looking increasingly ludicrous as the Tories manage to shoot themselves in the foot. Repeatedly. They’ve ignored the council scrutiny process and pushed through changes in severance pay for council staff; they’ve been accused of secrecy in handling matters as diverse as childcare services, closure of village schools in north Cornwall and running Newquay airport; their Green Paper on Cornwall’s economy has been subject to widespread ridicule. Word has it that cracks are already opening up between the Tories and their Independent coalition partners.

Meanwhile the Lib Dems are frantically wielding their crowbars in an attempt to widen those cracks further. With reported ‘growing disillusion’ with the Tory-led Council comes the ineptitude of the Tory ppc in St Austell and Newquay – self-help guru and media empty-head Caroline Righton. Lib Dems in mid-Cornwall must think that Christmas has come early this year.

Caroline, the Tory candidate who hadn’t a clue what PFI meant, managed to score an embarrassing own goal by sending an email which quoted a tweet by hyperactive Lib Dem rival Steve Gilbert. This had in turn apparently described her as a ‘d**kh**d’. The only slight problem was that Gilbert hadn’t actually used the offending word (too naughty for the Western Morning News to publish). ‘Dickhead’ had been added to Gilbert’s tweet by an over-enthusiastic Tory activist.

Cue indignant and shocked letters from St Austell and Newquay Lib Dems to Righton, Cameron and anyone from whom an ounce of publicity could be squeezed. One thing the Lib Dems can certainly do well is outraged innocence. It reminds me of the unfortunate Anna Pascoe, the council hopeful in Camborne who described MK’s Stuart Cullimore as a ‘greasy-haired twat’ in an election leaflet earlier in the year. Although come to think of it, wasn’t Pascoe a Lib Dem?!

Lib Dems have curiously selective and short-lived memories. Matthew Taylor writes that since 1974 ‘people can see that the Lib Dems are local people committed to putting Cornwall first, a fact they clearly value’. Although oddly not enough to re-elect them back in June. Their St Austell campaign manager Hamish McCallum echoes this wishful thinking; the voters ‘have turned to the Lib Dems as the only party that will consistently stand up for a fair deal for Cornwall and will deliver action not just words’. The absolute shambles bequeathed by David Whalley and his merry band at County Hall and the irreparable damage done to Cornish democracy by the ill-fated unitary authority has completely faded from the memory bank. In its place returns the comforting and nostalgic glow produced by that never-never land where Lib Dems always provide a ‘fair deal’ for Cornwall.

It is likely that, even though the electorate also has an unfortunately short memory span, Tory cock-ups at County Hall are not the main reason for the Lib Dem victory in St Austell Bay. Another reason was that their candidate was a well-known local man and that the Tory was party hack Bob Davidson. Davidson had been Restormel District Councillor for St Austell Bethel from 2007 to 2009 but is better known as the (non-Cornish)man behind the Tories’ parliamentary campaign in Cornwall. Having already missed out in St Austell Bethel by just 18 votes in June Davidson’s candidature had the whiff of desperation about it and seemed to be taking the local electorate for granted.

So what does this result augur for next year’s General Election? First, it should be seen in the context of local elections elsewhere. Last week the Lib Dems similarly gained two other seats from the Tories at High Peak (Derbyshire) and Stratford on Avon. But they also lost a seat to Labour on Merseyside and did spectacularly badly the week before in Doncaster (3.3% of the votes) and Falkirk (2.8%). All this suggests that the Tory vote is hardly as strong as the polls suggest and that everything is still to play for. But it also implies that voting patterns are diverging enormously from one part of the UK to another. In such circumstances predicting the outcome of the election becomes a hazardous exercise.

While the Lib Dems are congratulating themselves – at least they might now have a realistic chance of holding on to a majority of the Cornish constituencies – the Labour party looks doomed. Their bounce in the polls looks very much like a dead-cat bounce, and is not replicated in actual local elections outside Scotland and some urban areas. The Labour votes in High Peak and Stratford – 4.3% and 5.9% - were as awful as in St Austell Bay, where their candidate scored a measly 4.6%. The 66 Labour votes were 32 fewer than back in June, when they won 7.0% in St Austell Bay.

Furthermore, in August Labour candidates came fourth and last behind MK and the two unionist parties in all three town council by-elections in their former strongholds of Camborne and Falmouth. Which suggests that Labour in Cornwall is on its last legs. Isn’t it about time remaining progressives in Labour looked to more relevant and realistic homes in MK or the Green Party? Although this assumes that there still are any progressive activists left in the Labour Party.

Climacrites: the climate change quacks

Is our ‘opinion-forming’ class responsible enough to deal with the looming crisis of catastrophic climate change? It would appear not. One thing they seem to find very difficult to understand is that unless they set an example by making some necessary adjustments to their own lifestyles then it’s hardly likely that Joe or Jane Soap in the street are going to give up their annual holiday in Spain.

We’ve already seen how the former Liberal Democrat leadership at Cornwall County Council just didn’t get it, shovelling public money into a carbon black hole at Newquay airport. Similarly, others who hector us on the need for climate change have been discovered to have an unfortunate Clarkson-like fondness for speeding up and down the A30. But the rot goes further and climate hypocrites (or climacrites) are not hard to find.

Kevin Lavery is Chief Executive of Cornwall Council and has been saying some interesting things about devolution to Cornwall and the need for a Cornish Assembly. Perhaps he’s going native already. But it’s less certain whether he’s now so committed to Cornwall that he actually lives here.

Kevin, along with other ‘corporate directors’ at County Hall was given a very generous removal package and separation allowances on top of his £200,000 annual salary when he began work in November last year. In January 2009 he pledged to move his family ‘lock, stock and barrel’ to Cornwall (Local Government Chronicle, 22 Jan).

But in April he was reported to be still living in York and commuting on a weekly basis, expenses paid by us. It’s unclear whether he has yet made the move. Cornwall Council won’t comment and his LinkedIn entry still says York, UK. Although, come to that, it also says he’s CEO at Cornwall County Council. He still appears in the list of company directors at creditgate.com with an address in York.

Wherever he’s living, for a period of six to twelve months Kevin has been barrelling up and down the motorways in his three litre Mercedes CLS320. This has a fuel consumption of 25 mpg and carbon emissions of 215 g/km. It’s ranked 60 on a scale of greenest (0) to most polluting (100) cars at whatgreencar.

But this can’t be the same Kevin Lavery who is quoted as saying ‘we also need to set an example in taking a lead in developing new technologies and developing a low carbon economy.’ Like most of the business-as-usual political class Kevin seems to put his faith in utopianism and unnamed technologies which will miraculously save the world. I have a message for him. They won’t.

And when setting (bad) examples we might look at the Tory Shadow Cabinet. Cameron likes to paint his party as somehow ‘green’ but this claim can only be credible to those who are completely colour-blind. Take his choice as Shadow Minister for the environment, Gregory Barker, MP for Bexhill.

Barker has made four expenses paid overseas trips in the past year. Last November he was hotfooting it to Brazil on a return business flight and economy internal flights for six days to see how the rainforests were faring. In March he was at a conference on climate and energy security in Washington DC, with hotels, hospitality and flights all paid for by GLOBE, the global legislators organisation backed by big business.

In September he was popping over to New Zealand to speak at an environmental conference of the New Zealand National Party. The National Party’s policy on climate change in 2005 was to ‘ensure New Zealand jobs and growth are not sacrificed on the basis of equivocal science’. The party, now in government, promised to make a constructive contribution, ‘but not at the expense of jobs and growth’. So no contribution then.

They are also committed to doubling New Zealand’s economic growth rate, giving welfare only to those ‘in genuine need’ and cutting taxes for the better off. Sounds familiar. Barker must have felt really at home. To cap this he spent three days in October in Copenhagen, again financed by GLOBE.

This man’s carbon footprint is enormous and probably equivalent to a score of African villages. Profligate gallivanting around the world comes naturally to the global ruling class – unprepared to take climate change seriously but very prepared to stoke it up as fast as they can.

Their own greed, like capitalism itself, is limitless. Barker is a non-executive director of the Vardy group (involved in property investment and motor retailing among other activities). He earned £9,978 in just two months this year (August and September)for 28 hours work advising Pegasus Capital Advisors – a green(ish) private equity firm in New York. At £356 an hour this was tough work. All this on top of shareholdings in a raft of companies, including property investment in Britain and children’s entertainment centres in Ukraine. Not to mention his parliamentary salary and the full amount of expenses claims.

Just the person then to lead the Tory fight to save the planet on behalf of the millions of poor who are destined to take the brunt of what we’ve got coming over the next century.

St Dennis incinerator – Council U-turn looms

When it comes to the exotic topic of waste management policy Cornwall Council is truly stuck between the proverbial rock and the equally unyielding hard place. Voters expect nothing less from the Tory/Independent ruling coalition than a robust defence of the planning refusal for the proposed St Dennis Energy from Waste plant when this goes to a public inquiry in March next year.

Yet the Council’s recent statement on its waste policy contains wriggle room, with mention at the end of a smaller Energy from Waste plant. For the Council faces a bill of £30 million for ‘facilities’ already provided by the waste contractor SITA UK if they terminate their Integrated Waste Management Contract. This is something the St Dennis Anti-Incinerator Group and local councillors in the clay country are pressing them to do.

The problems associated with mass incinerators are well known. There are health issues, equity issues (they are almost always dumped on some deprived community) and, most damning of all, environmental issues. Energy from waste should be renamed Carbon from Waste plants. The CO2 produced from incinerators is much higher per unit of electricity generated than from gas fired or even coal fired power stations,

So why did seven new incinerators open in the UK in 2008 with another 22 in the pipeline? One reason is the waste management policy context. The EU is ratcheting up its landfill directive. By next year if landfill isn’t drastically reduced from 1998 levels then local authorities will be fined. The intention was to encourage recycling. Yet, because local authorities in the UK dragged their heels in getting their recycling act together in the face of this directive, which was agreed fully ten years ago, they now need a quick fix. They weren’t exactly helped by the fact that the Labour Government sat on its hands and dismally failed to show any leadership on this issue.

At this point, step in the waste management companies. There are two other factors behind the politicians’ apparent keenness for incinerators – raw corporate power and our friend, PFI financing. Threats of fines, weakness in the face of corporate lobbying and the lure of PFI finance help to explain why the Lib Dems jumped at a PFI contract with SITA UK in 2006. Early Lib Dem enthusiasm for an incinerator was also consistent with other Lib Dem policies apparently designed to increase carbon emissions irresponsibly, such as bankrolling the expansion of Newquay airport or failing to oppose unsustainable population growth in Cornwall.

But the power of multinational corporations to make and break agendas and the weakness of any democratic countervailing power is the wider problem. SITA UK did not enter a 30 year, £427 million contract with Cornwall County Council in 2006 out of the goodness of their hearts. They did it to make profits. SITA is wholly owned by Suez Environnement, a French company and the world’s largest waste services business, with a turnover of 12 billion euros. SITA UK’s turnover is £750 million, their operating profit in 2006 £32 million and they control 12% of the British waste market.

Let’s venture beyond the glossy PR claims that they provide a ‘sustainable and integrated management solution’. SITA appear to act like any typical corporation - offering their binmen in Bristol in May of this year an effective 2.25% pay cut while they sat on a 16% profit margin. Or refusing to work in Calderdale with an existing recycling kerbside collection, which was effectively squeezed out despite the support of local councillors. The reason? It ‘has to work financially for us’ said SITA.

SITA leapt at the chance of a print-your-own-money PFI contract with Cornwall County Council in 2006. Indeed, it claimed that the lessons of the PFI scheme, brokered with the Royal Bank of Scotland and AXA, the Paris based insurance giant (both RBS and AXA it is revealed today are among the corporations with the poorest record for increasing their carbon footprint), allowed PFI to become more ‘bankable’.

In their bank that is, rather than the taxpayer’s. Because the PFI scheme bundles all the different bits of waste management into one package. From the SITA viewpoint, as former CEO Pers-Anders Hjort is reported to have said in 2008, by ‘bundling all the services into one package you remove many of those risks (from the LA) to the private sector’. This is of course transparent rubbish, a topic about which they are experts.

In fact, it does the reverse. It removes the risk from the private sector but provides an unwieldy and inflexible 30 year monster of a contract for the local authority. The good bits – recycling - come with the bad bits - the incinerator. As the Green Party’s Derek Wall points out in an excellent article in Red Pepper, there is a fundamental paradox at the heart of this ‘market solution’. As incinerators need a constant throughput of waste to operate efficiently, we are locked into providing them with, in the St Dennis case, 240,000 tons of waste annually for the next 30 years. So where’s the incentive to produce less waste?

SITA are so keen on PFI schemes, which shovel disgustingly large amounts of public money into shareholders’ pockets, that they went to court in September to try to stop the Greater Manchester Waste Disposal Authority from concluding a deal with one of their rivals.

SITA has influence. The former Labour Chief Whip, Hilary Armstrong, was paid £30,000 to chair an ‘advisory committee’ of SITA UK. Meanwhile, SITA paid for a ‘study trip’ for her to Sweden in July 2008, including flights and overnight stay. At the Labour Party conference of 2008 SITA’s logo appeared on freebie T-shirts.

But hold on. SITA has not only burrowed deep into an ideologically spineless and decrepit Labour Party. In the same year the name badge at the Tory Conference featured the SITA logo. This coincided with Caroline Righton, Tory candidate for St Austell and Newquay, coming out against the St Dennis incinerator. Come on, Caroline – your party or your principles? Can you tell the difference?

Agendas are shaped behind closed doors. This is enabled by the disastrous reliance on PFI. Cornwall Council’s Cabinet Waste Development Advisory Panel has a predilection for secrecy, regularly excluding press and public from their meetings. Thus discussion of the Integrated Waste Management Contract (i.e. the PFI scandal) will be taken in confidence at their next meeting on November 30th. This is because of ‘commercial confidentiality’, a convenient cloak behind which this issue is whisked away from democratic scrutiny.

So what are the alternatives? Cornwall Council must stick to their guns and terminate this contract. Waste management has to be broken up into smaller, more manageable bits. And the council need to move beyond recycling towards a zero waste policy. They can’t claim ignorance about this. In fact, they had a presentation on it from the leader of Flint County Council at their meeting of 21st September.

Is this Council capable of leading the struggle to make Cornwall into a properly green peninsula? Can it transcend the empty windbaggery that at present accompanies official pronouncements on sustainability and going green? It’ll be a tough battle. For a start they’ll have to confront the weakness of a central government that refuses to stand up to corporate interests – witness the abject failure to deal with the supermarkets on plastic bags and compare that with what happens in France. If this means vigorous leadership then provide it. They might be surprised – the people of Cornwall could be right behind them.

Progressive coalition: correction

The excellent Cornish Democrat has proposed an electoral alliance to bring together MK, the Greens, Plaid, English regionalists (?) and others in Cornwall and across England and Wales. This would be along the lines of Europe Ecologie in France, which groups regionalists and greens and did very well at the Euro elections there earlier this year.

In making this suggestion, the Cornish Democrat says s/he is ‘following the Cornish Zetetics call for a coalition of Mebyon Kernow, the Cornish Greens and any other progressive democrats from the Duchy in time for the next general election’. But this is not actually what I proposed. My suggestion was much more modest – a Reclaim Cornish Democracy campaign. The idea was to build a united platform to expose the democratic deficit in Cornwall, in order to inform the election debate.

Would electoral coalitions on the Europe Ecologie model work for most UK elections? I would be sceptical for two reasons. First, our electoral system militates against them. The European elections in France were conducted on a large constituency party list system (as were ours) and for these a coalition might well make sense. Next year’s regional elections in Brittany will also be fought on a PR list system, where a minimum vote has to be obtained to secure representation. In these circumstances it makes even more sense for a small party like the Breton Union Democratique Bretonne to ally with others, as they are doing with the Greens and independents. But similar coalitions wouldn’t necessarily work in archaic first past the post elections. Indeed, when Plaid and the Greens combined in parts of Wales in 1992 it didn’t produce any higher votes than when they stood separately.

Second, British political culture is so dumb-downed by the media and the parliamentary parties that elections are now seen as merely a more boring version of ‘I’m a Celebrity, get me out of here’. Is there enough political sophistication to cope with such subtleties as electoral alliances? All the more reason perhaps to begin with extra-electoral alliances in order to combine to expose the political establishment’s complicity in whittling away democracy in Cornwall and England. Voters have to be weaned off their faith in the three centre-right parties that dominate what passes for politics in these benighted islands. The question is how best to go about it.

Cornwall Councillors, the workers and the shirkers

No doubt the end of the financial year next Spring will be accompanied by the usual cuckoo calls from local newspaper editors as they gnash their teeth about councillors’ expenses, in the process further demeaning a political process corrupted by corporate manipulation and parliamentary greed. But our shrunken number of local councillors, unlike MPs, do not get paid a wage.

All councillors get a members allowance of £12,000. In addition there are special allowances for those with particular responsibilities. For example, the Leader of the Council receives an extra £22,000 and chairs of important committees £7,000. Add to this travel and subsistence expenses on production of receipts. We therefore have a two-tier local democracy. While Leader and Cabinet members may receive a living wage the bulk of councillors do not. For some, being a councillor is a full-time job; for others it isn’t. And it couldn’t be as they need other sources of income.

Here’s a suggestion. Why don’t we actually pay a basic salary to those people we elect to do a job for us. We might just get a better calibre of councillor. Being a councillor ought to be a full-time job, if only to maximise the time they have to monitor what the (full-time) officers are up to and respond to the latest idiocies from central government. This is even more necessary now that the democratic element of local government has been reduced so drastically. Peg this salary to the local average full-time wage. In return the over-generous car allowance of 50p a mile should be scrapped for a more modest public transport rate in order to encourage greener travel.

Journalists, presumably earning a lot more than councillors, are less interested these days in what councillors actually do. But who is grafting away, working day and night for their voters? Six months into the unitary authority seems a good time to ask which councillors are the most assiduous.

Attendance at meetings is one (though only one) measure, and has the advantage of being easily quantifiable. But whereas some councillors have been expected to attend as many as 24 meetings in the past six months others have escaped with as few as four.

The key meetings at Cornwall Council are the full Council meetings to which all members are expected to turn up – there have been four since June – and the monthly open Cabinet meetings. Only portfolio holders are expected to be present at Cabinet meetings but they are arguably the most important strategic meetings where the direction of the council can be scrutinised and questioned. Any councillor can attend and can speak at these, although only Cabinet members vote. So who has attended the highest proportion of these Cabinet and Council meetings?

(The following results need to be accompanied by a health warning. Reasons for absence are not given. Councillors could be ill. It’s also possible to be a regular attender at meetings but say very little of any substance. On the other hand someone might not attend every meeting but be a busy bee behind the scenes.)

But, with these caveats in mind, who are the most visible meeting-attenders? Of the three main groups (excluding Cabinet members) Independents are slightly more likely to show up at strategic meetings while Tory councillors are less likely. Indeed, 16 Tory councillors (37%) have not attended a single one of the six Cabinet meetings. In contrast, both Independent and Tory councillors are more likely to turn up at their allotted committee meetings than Lib Dems, while Independent councillors are twice as likely as attend other meetings (out of interest) than either of the two party groups.

Individually, among the ten-member Cabinet, five still have a 100% attendance record at Cabinet and Council. The conscientious five are

Graeme Hicks (Ind, Redruth South)
Mark Kazcmarek (Ind, St Day)
Alec Robertson (Con and Council Leader, Helston North)
Carolyn Rule (Con, Mullion)
Armand Toms (Con, Looe East)

Two non-Cabinet members have also attended all ten Cabinet and full Council meetings. They are Conservative John Dyer (Chacewater) and Independent Fred Greenslade of St Dennis. Councillor Greenslade has also, along with Lib Dem Leader Doris Ansari, turned up at 13 other extra meetings on top of his committee responsibilities – a total of 32 meetings. He must be in the running for the Council’s Stakhanovite trophy of 2009 although the highest total number of meetings in this period (40) has been endured by Pam Lyne (Ind, St Keverne).

Five other non-Cabinet councillors have managed nine of the ten strategic meetings. They are

Dick Cole (MK, St Enoder)
Mike Eathorne-Gibbins (Con, Ladock)
Edwina Hannaford (LD, Looe West)
Ann Kerridge (LD, Bodmin West)
Joan Symons (Con, St Ives South)

Of these, MK’s Dick Cole has also chalked up 11 extra meetings and a total of 35.

Turning to the less assiduous attenders we find 15 who have only been seen at three of the ten meetings. Here they are.

Stuart Cullimore (MK, Camborne South)
Paula Dolphin (LD, Flexbury and Poughill)
Olive Eggleston (Con, St Germans)
Jim Flashman (Con, Kelly Bray)
Brian Gisbourne (Con, St Endellion)
Roger Harding (Con, Newlyn and Mousehole)
Neil Hatton (Con, Constantine)
Ruth Lewarne (LD, Penzance East)
Andrew Long (MK, Callington)
John Lugg (Ind, St Teath)
Sue Nicholas (Con, Marazion)
Phil Parsons (Con, Altarnun)
Mike Pearn (Con, Torpoint West)
Liz Penhaligon (Con, Lelant)
Gavin Shakerley (Con, Lostwithiel)

Two councillors, both Liberal Democrats, have only been present at two of these meetings. They are Jackie Bull (Bugle) and Mario Fonk (Gulval and Heamoor)

And finally Independent Neil Plummer of Stithians has managed to turn up at just one of the ten Cabinet and full Council meetings in the first six months of the new Council. However, the total of five meetings attended by Councillor Plummer beats the four of Bryan Preston (LD, Saltash Burraton).

Cornwall Council – a property-owning democracy

Earlier this year our local councillors were unceremoniously culled in the cause of moving to an ever more centralised and authoritarian local government system. So who is left now to represent us? The Cornwall Council website contains a wealth of information on what’s left of the democratic process. This includes a members’ register of interests.

Only three Lib Dem councillors have yet to complete this. But unfortunately, the register is an ambiguous document and the guidelines leave a considerable grey area for councillors to take advantage of. For example, the notes on shareholding interests in companies ‘active in Cornwall’ is extremely vague and councillors only have to declare those companies in which they have a ‘substantial interest’ of £25,000 or so. Not many councillors have followed the example of MK’s Stuart Cullimore, who lists his holdings in full detail even to the point of including an ISA. Get rid of it, Stuart – the interest’s rubbish.

Only a minority (59) of the current 122 councillors (there is one vacancy) appear to be employed or self-employed. And those include stated occupations such as Bert Biscoe’s ‘poet’, which presumably doesn’t bring him a vast income. Nearly 30% of all jobs in Cornwall are actually in public administration, education and health. However, these are virtually unrepresented sectors at Cornwall Council, as anyone who was working for Cornwall Council (including all teachers) was effectively barred from standing in the elections in June unless they gave up their jobs in advance.

As a result the retired and small business sectors are heavily over-represented. Also over-represented are property-owners. Amongst the Tories, at least 39% own more than one house and 18% own or rent land. ‘At least’ because this does not include any second homes owned outside Cornwall. The proportion of property owners falls to just over 20% among Lib Dems and Independents, with 13% of Independents and 8% of Lib Dems having access to land.

Yet all three groups include councillors who own holiday lets. Given its predilection for property-holding it will be surprising therefore if we find this council lobbying hard for tough action on second homes or their taxation.

Labour bottles it (again)

The annual medieval ritual of the Queen’s Speech marks one more milestone in the decay of an unrepentant Labour Government. It may have provided enough to excite one or two Guardian journalists eager to spot the seeds of social democracy sprouting in the barren ideological desert of British Labourism. But in reality all it did was reinforce the impression that Labour is incapable of responding to the failures of the market orthodoxy to which it sold its soul in the 1990s or of mounting any challenge to business pressure.

A few policy gimmicks count for little alongside a so-called bankers’ ‘clampdown’ that is nothing of the kind. Refusing to take real action against these spongers, this is designed to create media soundbites rather than to attack the scandal of bankers’ bonuses – even in banks that the taxpayer now owns!

More telling is not what was in this sad litany of desperate promises – none of which stand up in the face of the obvious riposte of why the hell haven’t you done this already in the past 12 years – plus the usual farrago of Blairite legal ‘entitlements’ and targets.

The deathbed feebleness of this collection of incompetent ciphers lies in what the Queen didn’t read out, not what she did. Put the feeble single proposal concerning climate change aside – there’s still little evidence that Labour grasps the importance of this, despite windy rhetoric about Copenhagen. Think back to the expenses scandal of last spring.

The revelation that the British political class is merely a bunch of seedy and shifty spivs engaging in a feeding frenzy at the public expense triggered widespread demands for political reform. One or two Labour politicians hesitantly toyed with supporting PR. But Brown bottled it. Again.

At the Labour party conference he committed Labour to a referendum, not on PR but on the alternative vote. But this pathetic proposal didn’t require a major constitutional change or a referendum. If Labour had possessed anything remotely resembling guts they could have pushed this through very quickly as it needs no long, drawn out boundary revisions.

Even AV on the Australian model would have some effect. Take the Cornish unitary elections – the only meaningful local vote we’re now permitted to have in Cornwall. On very cautious assumptions (that a third of voters do not express second preferences, that a third of those preferences do not go to the logically expected party destination) 15 of Cornwall’s 123 council seats would have changed hands. The hypothetical results would have been ….

Independents gained nine
Conservatives gained one, lost eleven
Lib Dems gained two or three, lost four
Liberal gained one
Greens gained one
MK perhaps gained one

This would have resulted in a Council where Independents were the biggest group, not the Tories, the result being

Independents 41
Conservatives 40
Lib Dems 36 or 37
MK 3 or 4
Liberal 1
Green 1

Maybe the fact that there still would not have been a single Labour councillor explains the Labour Party’s lack of interest in meaningful constitutional reform.

The Cornish Assembly. Next push? Or last gasp?

In 1922, when forced to backtrack on economic policy, Lenin wrote that revolutionaries sometimes had to give up one path and start again on another. He used the metaphor of climbing a mountain. If one route was barred, you had to start again from the bottom.

The Cornish have put it more succinctly. When asked for directions, the classic response is ‘I wouldn’t start from here, pard’.

The Cornish Constitutional Convention appears determined not to follow either advice. Its latest document – The Cornish Assembly: the next push –proclaims that ‘the new Cornwall Council unitary authority is a step along the way to secure effective, efficient, responsive and forward-looking governance for Cornwall, a peripheral, distinctive and different British region.’

However, this manifesto fails to make a case for this assertion.

The document is full of resonant phrases calling us to action in order to ‘empower difference’ and realise ‘the energy of a potentially creative community’. But this co-exists with a stifling surfeit of bureau-speak. Pages are peppered with ‘change agendas’, ‘partnerships’ and ‘delivery-driven local government’. ‘Drivers’, ‘best value’ and ‘brand values’ litter the paragraphs. An editor was sorely needed to sift through this garbage.

The Cornish Constitutional Convention is clearly well embedded, to use its own jargon, in local government. Moreover, The Next Push shares all the problems of that august body of men and women. At times it provides an uplifting vision of what might be and a stirring clarion-call to action, though what precise action isn’t really spelt out. But time and again, the message is buried in an avalanche of soulless neo-liberal sound-bites. Apparently, an Assembly will be ‘tax-efficient’ as well as ‘sustainable’. ‘Being Cornish’ will underpin our ‘future economic prosperity’. Successful regions are ‘efficient and business like’ with distinctive ‘economic and environmental identities’ (note the order).

By uncritically swallowing the assumptions of a tired and outdated neo-liberal agenda the Cornish Constitutional Convention risks straitjacketing its own campaign. What if restoring local democracy actually costs more money (and it probably will)? What if future growth and environmental sustainability are incompatible (and they probably are)?

The document, written in an idiosyncratically strange style, avoids these probabilities and rambles merrily along, numbing its visionary rhetoric (all potential and innovation unleashed by an Assembly) with local government officer-speak. For good measure throw into this mixture the usual contradictory and asinine statements of the local business lobby. For example how exactly will ‘the new Newquay airport’ … ‘further stimulate sustainable growth’? That could come straight out of a Cornwall Council strategic planning document.

Its fundamental weakness is a lack of a clear or inspiring strategy for the way forward. For the Cornish Constitutional Convention ‘partnerships’ seem to be the key, bringing groups in Cornwall together to convey a single message. This is fine as a tactic, but wishing away the real conflicts of interest in Cornwall does not make them magically disappear in practice.

Having got our ‘robust partnership’ the strategy then seems to be to cosy up to the powers that be. Apparently, these benevolent yet mysterious gentlemen (and women) merely need things properly explained to them and change automatically follows. So where are all those ‘people rhetorically burdened with illiberal concepts’ that we find mentioned on the very next page. Aren’t they rather well represented in government? But to the Cornish Constitutional Convention their motives are merely ‘difficult to fathom’. Their perceptions of Cornwall are ‘confused and detached’. By this time the reader of The Next Push is also mightily confused and detached.

This windy rhetoric and round-about contemporary history is hardly designed to get people all geared up to support the campaign for a Cornish Assembly. Its audience seems to be elsewhere, in other corridors of power. Perhaps in that make-believe never-never land where there is ‘consensus … around the concept of a Cornish Assembly’. We are assured this is found across ‘the main political parties in Cornwall, senior officials and holders of public office and within a significant swathe of the general Cornish public’. With the exception of the last group, this is a prime example of the all too prevalent pure wishful thinking school of Cornishness.

With Cornwall Council unable even to come up with clear democratic principles for its Community Networks, which it has taken six months to launch, it would seem a little premature to put too great a faith in this body. That particular mountain track has surely led to a cul-de-sac. It’s time to start the climb again in order to restore the energy of the early Assembly campaign.

Ultimately, an Assembly will only be achieved through popular support and democratic pressure; it will not come from relying on the same English patrician class that has presided over the destruction of local democracy in Cornwall. Although in this document even this is miraculously transformed into ‘a track record of being able to manage change well’. Excuse me while I reach for the sick bag.

Cornish language signs trigger independence!

Some of our English neighbours have not found it easy in the past to come to terms with Cornish difference. Even the smallest expression of self-assertion on the part of Cornish people could be greeted with a torrent of intolerant, arrogant and frankly racist abuse. Having lost the bulk of the Irish almost a century ago, and unable to stop the Scots and Welsh gaining a measure of self-government, some of the post-imperial English seem to have learnt nothing and forgotten everything and take it out on the Cornish. For them Cornish self-respect strikes a particularly raw nerve and becomes mere audacious insolence.

Reports this week of the decision by Cornwall Council’s Cabinet to roll out the existing Kerrier and Carrick practice on Cornish language signage across Cornwall provided an interesting litmus test for gauging the maturity of English reactions. The story was picked up from the Western Morning News by the Telegraph and the Mail. Either unwilling to actually cross the Tamar or a bit geographically confused the Telegraph sought out the opinion of a Plymouth city councillor. This wise man of Plymouth (a ‘quarter Cornish’ we were told) thought road signs would become ‘even more complicated’.

Not only would his reading ability be seriously taxed but the language policy would have unfortunate consequences. ‘What next? Passports on the Torpoint ferry … or border guards at Saltash?’, he plaintively asked. For such people small symbolic acts such as putting revised medieval Cornish versions onto street signs (at no extra cost it needs constantly repeating) are merely the beginning of the slippery slope. Revived Cornish one moment, separation the next. There is no grey area; no possibility of cultural difference can be allowed. From this viewpoint it’s all or nothing.

Both the Telegraph and the Mail, though relatively restrained in attacking the Cornish language signage policy, framed their stories within a slightly disconcerted and irritated tone. ‘Bilingual street signs’ were being introduced ‘although just 300 people speak Cornish’. For the Mail, there was a ‘furious row’ at Cornwall Council when it was ‘revealed just 300 people speak the language fluently’ as if this was some sort of state secret before.

Reporters on both papers seem to have difficulty understanding what’s going on. The papers described Cornish place names as being ‘translated’, the implication being from English to Cornish. Yet the four examples helpfully supplied by the Telegraph were all already hybrid names – Cornish and English. So the English words for street, park, hill and the like are translated but the Cornish elements merely re-spelt in the twee medieval script favoured by our revivalists.

Uneasiness at the implications of this small step might be expected from the London press. More depressing was the reaction from some local Tories, which seems to be the origin of the ‘furious row’. Conservative Councillor Morwenna Williams of Troon and Beacon categorically stated ‘This will not be welcomed in my part of the county. Some people in Cornwall will find this ridiculous and unnecessary’. It was the ‘wrong message’. And why was it the wrong message? Because ‘Cornwall is part of England’. Moves to more autonomy, the inevitable next step we’re pleased to hear, would actually be ‘a retrograde step’. For management accountant Councillor Williams, the tribune of Troon, the more logical move would presumably be to translate all the existing placenames into English. In fact why not start with her own house – Bos an Pryskel – revived Cornish for Thicket Cottage, an appropriate name in the circumstances.

Councillor Williams was echoed by her Conservative colleague Fiona Ferguson, who represents Truro Trehaverne. Cllr Ferguson doesn’t actually live in Truro but at Restronguet and has another property on the Roseland at Portscatho. She thought the council should ‘ask the public’. Councillors Williams and Ferguson are experts on the will of the people. Cllr Williams was elected by just 10.2% of the voters of Troon and Beacon while Cllr Ferguson garnered a massive 13.2% of the popular vote and scraped in by a slim six votes.

Sadly, a resurgent Cornish Toryism seems to be the haunt of the same small-minded servile sycophants as were found in it back in the 1980s. Twenty years on and nothing much has changed for our home-grown Cornish unionists. Any tiny expression of Cornish rights will send them scurrying to cling desperately to Auntie England’s apron strings, terrified of letting go, wallowing in their cultural cringe and embarrassing the case for Cornish autonomy. It would be most interesting to hear what their big sisters and brothers among the Tory Parliamentary candidates think of all this.

Sustainable communities – the view from Cornwall Council

Even the Government agrees with the scientists on climate change. If we want to avoid a temperature increase of more than two degrees centigrade by the end of the century and avert a potentially disastrous tipping point where unstoppable global warming sets in we must cut carbon emissions by at least 80% by 2050. And the sooner the better.

So we might expect a growing sense of urgency from policy makers, from Copenhagen down. Think again. On our own patch, the Cornwall Sustainable Communities Strategy sets out the long term vision for Cornwall. By 2028, it twitters, Cornwall will be ‘a special place of harmony and beauty: a prosperous happy place that values its communities, environment and economy equally and enables One and All to achieve the highest possible quality of life’.

Who writes this banal twaddle? They go on to define sustainable communities as ‘places where people want to live and work, now and in the future. They meet the diverse needs of existing and future residents, are sensitive to the environment, and contribute to a high quality of life. They are safe and inclusive, well planned, built and run, and offer equality of opportunity and good services for all.’

According to this definition any rapidly growing community is ‘sustainable’. The bureaucrats who wrote this meaningless and anodyne hippie trash need to be given some gainful employment. Meanwhile, the Cornwall Strategic Partnership, the mix of Cornwall Council and private sector quangoites who produced this ‘strategy’, should tender their resignations in shame for agreeing such smug, complacent, inane and pointless drivel designed patently to legitimate business as usual.

Needless to say, the Cornwall Sustainable Community Strategy fails to mention any policies for combating climate change or achieving real sustainability amongst its aims. Sustainable development is itself an oxymoron. But the authors of this and the Cornwall Strategic Partnership are clearly just morons.

Newquay airport - plus ça change

Andrew Mitchell, the Liberal Democrat councillor who oversaw Cornwall County Council’s involvement with buying and running Newquay airport was memorably, if unsympathetically, once described on Cornwall24 as a ‘corporate wheeler dealer’, an ‘open spaces urbaniser’ who got ‘greater vicarious pleasure’ from ‘big money, profit and rubbing up against the rich and famous’ than from ‘proper careful stewardship of the land, sea and air’.

Fortunately, the voters of St Ives had the good sense to kick Mitchell out at the unitary elections back in June. Yet the white elephant he bred remains. Newquay airport is the black hole of the accountancy world. Up to the budget of 2008/09 £45 million had been poured into it in capital spending from Cornwall County Council. Cornwall Council’s medium term financial strategy estimates its total cost at around £56 million. However, that isn’t the end of the story. It’s received £10 million from the SWRDA since 1999 and grants variously estimated at another £10-20 million from the EU. According to the Labour Party (hardly the most reliable source, I’ll admit) £72.5 million of public money has now been spent on encouraging people to fly to and from Cornwall.

Figures are not exactly easy to come by but this venture is set to go on costing Cornwall Council up to £5 million subsidy a year, or around a third of the annual £15 million hole in the Council’s budget (Western Morning News, 22 Oct 2009). And for what? The nebulous and ever-more hysterically repeated mantra that it’s ‘crucial to the prosperity of Cornwall’ (West Briton, 5 Nov 2009), or that ‘it strengthens our connectivity to markets and opportunities’ (Carleen Kelemen, Convergence guru), are becoming rather threadbare and extremely sad in the absence of supporting evidence.

The business destinations and inbound international passengers that would have the greatest economic impact are relatively rarely spotted from the Newquay viewing platform. Instead, half of the travellers are tourism related, British binge flyers who choose to damage the environment gratuitously when they could arrive here by train in about the same time including that spent in traffic jams getting to and from airports.

It’s good to see, moreover, that Mitchell has a worthy successor in Carolyn Rule, former Independent Councillor for Mullion who revealed her true Tory colours at the unitary elections. Carolyn is now Economy and Regeneration portfolio holder at Cornwall Council. In July she was spotted at Newquay helping in the onerous task of opening an executive lounge to attract those missing business customers. I suppose someone has to do it, but she was accompanied by her Tory mates Alec Robertson (‘there are plans to create a world-class airport’) and Jim Currie plus Independent Mr Angry from downtown Redruth, Graeme Hicks. Carolyn was ‘keen to see the airport go from strength to strength’.

A month later she had the answer for those green moaners at Groundswell Cornwall who have opposed this wonderful and heartwarming scheme. Its growth is being delivered ‘responsibly’. The airport, she asserted with a flourish, will be ‘carbon neutral’ by 2015. This gobsmacking announcement worthy of the best of postmodernist double-speak refers to the morally dubious practice of ‘carbon offsetting’. Does Ms Rule actually understand how this works? It exports the carbon costs from rich to poor countries to assuage our guilty consciences and allow us to continue swanning around the globe without a care in the world. Carbon offsetting schemes at best are mystification, a strategy to delay the real behaviour change that is urgently required, a pathetically impotent option for dealing with the problem. At worst, they deliberately and cynically avoid the action necessary to avoid global catastrophe.

In October, we found Ms Rule, in classic Mitchellesque fashion, wining and dining at the European Regions Airline Association annual awards dinner in Interlaken, Switzerland. She was there to collect an Airport Recognition Achievement Award for Newquay for 2009/10. This trophy was so heavy it took two people to carry it home – Ms Rule and the Airport Operations Director. Whatever was the carbon cost of this little jamboree then? Although no doubt it was ‘offset’. So that’s alright then.

The Lib Dems began this; the Tories and Independents seem bent on continuing it. The disastrous environmental effects of the airport expansion are well set out by Groundswell. And that’s not to mention the insidious long-term effects of the up-market tourism it services. Who has the guts to pull the plug on this lunacy?

‘The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which’ (George Orwell, Animal Farm)

The democratic deficit

David Cameron is half right. And half wrong. Society isn’t ‘broken’. Societies don’t ‘break’; they just change. But our democracy is broken. The problem for Cameron and the Tories is that they must shoulder a fair degree of responsibility for the breaking.

Tory MPs have hardly been shrinking violets when it comes to outrageous claims on the public purse. Tory MPs weren’t observed clamouring for a Freedom of Information Act that eventually allowed the truth about MPs expenses to leak out, despite the Labour Government’s attempts to keep a lid on things. Tory MPs have not been at the fore in demanding that the ‘system’ that was established in the Thatcher years be reformed. And Tories haven’t been queuing up to demand that the money grabbed by millionaire MPs to pay off their mortgages be repaid.

And they are of course not alone. Lib Dems weren’t heard loudly condemning the expenses system before the system condemned them. And Labour ex-Ministers seem to think that a belated apology for embezzling public funds is enough. No sackcloth and ashes for this lot. Having accepted their guilt by making token and reluctant repayments they then urge us to ‘move on’. Sorry – not good enough. If they possessed a shred of honour those who made financial gains for themselves or their families from manipulating housing allowances should have immediately resigned. What other employer would allow their employees to carry on collecting their salaries even after admitting they’d been fiddling their expenses?

Not only do these embezzlers hang on for dear life, claiming their misdeeds were merely unfortunate ‘errors’. But people like Blears, Hoon, Purnell and McNulty then have the unspeakable gall to intend to stand for election again. One can only trust that the electors of Salford, Ashfield, Stalybridge and Harrow East repay their overweening arrogance by giving them a good kicking next May.

The rot goes much deeper. A corrupt political class destroys popular confidence in political discussion as a forum for deciding what sort of society we want. Cynical manipulation of a small number of key voters in an electoral system long past its sell-by date spawns a deep distrust of all political discussion and is a fertile breeding ground for far right parties such as UKIP and the BNP.

If anything, the democratic deficit and the failure of democratic politics is felt even more profoundly here in Cornwall. When were the Cornish people ever offered a referendum on the social transformation of their land over the last half-century? Why were the 80% plus of voters who last year opposed the abolition of meaningful local government in Cornwall entirely ignored?

Democracy is surreptitiously erased as people recoil from the excesses of a political class which they conveniently mistake for politics itself. Meanwhile, grey men in suits congregate behind closed doors to slice our public services. Planners quietly ‘negotiate’ with property investors eager to buy bits of Cornwall, make their quick buck and bugger off again. Grant gate-keepers allow themselves to be captured by a business agenda where profit is the only god. External agencies and outside institutions ensure they get their clammy hands on goodies intended to aid Cornish communities. A whole industry of useless consultants waxes fat on the proceeds. A selectorate play musical chairs amongst the quangos well out of the bright light of publicity.

The unionist parties offer no way out, more concerned on protecting their own perks. Isn’t this the time for MK to urge the Greens and any other progressives they can find and re-launch a Reclaim Cornish Democracy campaign in good time for the General Election in six months time?

What’s CPR Regeneration ever done for us?

The Government and the RDA have two main visions for Cornwall. First, it must be attractive to property developers and second it must continue to be a major destination for migrants from the suburbs. But they have a problem. Left only to the market everyone would head for the coast. But the coastal zone has to protected from excessive over-development in order to keep it safe for the moneyed classes and not undermine the tourist touts.

So more migrants have to be steered towards the inland towns. And in order to do that those towns have to be made more attractive to profiteers and in-migrants alike. While property investors are queuing up to destroy our coastal communities they’re more reluctant to head for places such as Camborne-Redruth. Therefore the Government set up an Urban Regeneration Company - CPR Regeneration - in 2002 to ‘regenerate’ Camborne-Redruth. The idea was to use public money to provide the infrastructure and coax in the private investors.

This aim was stated quite bluntly in the early days of CPR Regeneration by the regeneration manager appointed in 2002. John Dobson, who had cut his teeth on converting derelict industrial sites in Yorkshire into ‘private sector development opportunities’, said that Camborne-Redruth ‘should be attractive to developers and investors’. The only problem was that ‘it has a perception problem. We’ve got to try to change the perception.’

There was no mention at that time of the later goal of ‘creating a sustainable community’. This addition is a fig-leaf designed to hide the more fundamental goal of creating profitable opportunities for private companies while socially engineering an inconvenient existing community.

The first way to change perceptions was to change the name. The historically separate communities of Camborne, Redruth and Pool/Illogan were to be jettisoned, to be replaced by an anodyne CPR, striving to give the impression to the investors and property wide boys that here was one single post-historical settlement ripe for exploitation rather than three boringly distinct ones.

CPR Regeneration then grabbed the planning functions of the democratically elected Kerrier District Council, whose elected members eagerly and supinely colluded in the process, and produced the Local Action Plan. This began the process of foisting a huge population increase onto Camborne and Redruth as the Government and its agencies looked to surgically transform the local population. Six thousand new homes were proposed. CPR Regeneration sagely stated that ‘it is important to acknowledge that without this scale of population and employment growth it will not be possible to achieve social and economic aspirations for CPR’. What? None at all? We can only conclude that this contained the not unusual shoddy proof reading that marks CPR Regeneration material and there’s a word missing.

Not that CPR Regeneration would worry overmuch by its poor grammar. This vacuous assertion, unsupported by the slightest shred of evidence, lurks unchallenged at the heart of their project. It justifies their ambitions to introduce a new suburban population and by doing so change those unfortunate perceptions of the area as too Cornish or too working class.

The sophistry of their claim was soon apparent as CPR’s scientific conclusion that 6,000 new houses was the magic number required to ‘regenerate’ the area suddenly shot up overnight to 11,000 new houses in 2008 when central government decided that the people of Camborne and Redruth were sufficiently docile to accept even more. This shoddy approach to evidence of course perfectly mirrors the Labour Government’s cavalier treatment of the same. In their hands ‘evidence-based policy’ has become a hollow joke, a bit like a morally driven foreign policy. Instead, the reality is myth-based policy in the service of profiteering.

CPR Regeneration are skilled at producing such rhetorical garbage and megalomaniacal self-publicity. For instance their 2008-09 Annual Report for their ‘key partners’ - The Homes and Communities Agency (HCA, formerly English Partnerships), the SW Regional Development Agency and Cornwall Council – claims credit for a fall in unemployment, an increase in the proportion of people working and a drop in income support claimants in the period from 2006 to 2008. This truly amazing impact sits oddly with the admission in the same document that the number of jobs created by CPR Regeneration to 31st March 2009 was a pathetic 130, just 3.5% of those they aim to create by 2013.

Or take the ‘affordable homes’ they’re so keen to trumpet. In most of the housing plans in the district affordable homes make up merely 25% of the total, much less than in other planning areas.

The various claptrap arguments and non-sequiturs put forward by CPR Regeneration are well documented on the CoSERG website. However CoSERG hasn’t said much about who is behind this outfit. The Board of CPR Regeneration has eleven members, including the Chief Executive, Nigel Tipple, another who hails from a background of developing public private partnerships in Yorkshire. The chair, David Brewer, has been there from the start; the rest rotate, none having served for more than three years.

The majority of the Board own or have recently owned their own businesses, although only one actually makes (or made) anything. The businessmen include Brewer, a laundry machine distributor. Cambridge graduate Steve Cowburn runs Flying Start Childcare Services based in Redruth but has a background working for IBM and Coopers and Lybrand. Ian Doble is Managing Director of Doble Quality Foods at St Agnes.

Steven Hindley is in another league, owning 60% of the Midas property services group after a management buy-out in 1998. This construction firm has an annual turnover of £200 million and began its life in Exeter in the 1970s though it was described this year as ‘Bristol-based’. However, it has worked on several lucrative projects in Cornwall, notably at the Tremough university campus and St Columb Business Park and seems to be well in with the RDA. Presumably it could tender for the works planned at Pool. But isn’t there a conflict of interest here?

Another business person is Sarah Trethowan, who runs a regulatory affairs consultancy, basically ensuring pharmaceutical companies get their drug licences. Sarah has cooperated closely with the infamous Cornwall Pure Business in their attempts to encourage more people to move to Cornwall. In an interesting insight into the way these people are selected, her name was put forward for Board membership by Unlocking Cornish Potential, the project for employing graduates run by Plymouth University. Finally, we have Raoul Humphreys, Deputy CE of Cornwall College and managing director of a commercial recruitment services company.

The others are Trevor Ives, a chartered surveyor and head of investment at the Homes and Communities Agency. On the Board of the HCA who do we find but none other than Candy Atherton, the very unlamented ex-Labour MP for Falmouth-Camborne. Candy was an enthusiastic supporter of the plan to socially engineer Camborne and Redruth. It’s heartwarming to see she’s managed to cling on to the gravy train despite being unceremoniously rejected by her electorate, on whom she’s obviously now wreaking her revenge.

Then there’s Theo Leijser, former programme director for Save the Children and with experience of sustainable development in Scotland. A perfect CV to be a new Tory candidate. The question of why Theo now wants to be associated with unsustainable development in Cornwall remains begged. Chris McMellon is a chartered company secretary and in-house legal secretary specializing in corporate governance and legal risk management. Falmouth-resident Chris has been made the profound observation that he wants to help ‘west Cornwall develop and meet the aspirations of all those who increasingly choose to live and work here’. So he’s perfectly suited for the CPR Project.

And finally we have Carolyn Rule, Tory Cornwall Council cabinet member for the Economy and previously Independent Kerrier District Councillor. From fifteen miles distance in Mullion, Carolyn has an uncanny ability to know exactly what the people in Camborne and Redruth want. For example she pronounced how pleased the people of Redruth were with their town centre improvements at a time when complaints about the same were at a record high.

Carolyn is typical of the CPR Regeneration Board, keen to take decisions on behalf of the people of Camborne-Redruth but more unwilling to actually live there herself. Of the 11 Board members I have yet to identify one who I can definitely state lives in the area. Others live in Truro, Penzance, St Agnes, somewhere near Plymouth, and incredibly, Teignmouth!

The directors’ remuneration of CPR in 2008-09 came to the tune of £138,361, most of which presumably went to pay Tipple’s salary. The other 22 employees weren’t doing too badly either. In that year their average salary was £38,439, more than twice the going rate for Camborne-Redruth. So is this the main mechanism through which local salary levels are supposed to grow?