Election. Choice? What choice?

The political parties crouchtautly at the starting line as the tension rises. The gun is poised to go off on the least unexpected General Election since 1997. The three parliamentary parties are locked in terrible conflict, or is it stuck in a terribly difficult effort to distinguish themselves from each other, as they all seem to promise exactly the same things. Let’s look at some areas where, despite the froth and fury, there is mutual understanding.

First, we have the economy, which the media dutifully inform is the ‘real’ issue of the election. If it is then where’s the choice? We have the ‘deepest cuts since Thatcher’ (Darling), ‘painful and extensive cuts’ (Osborne) or ‘savage’ cuts (Clegg). Hmmm, quite a choice there then.

For all three parties it goes without saying that everyone else will be expected to pay the price rather than a financial sector that first stoked up unsustainable growth, then walked off with £ billions of public money and then tried to hold the countries of the UK to ransom. But who’s suggesting that the financial sector pay the costs of the recession?

Meanwhile, the figures for shares of national income over the past nine months show that of the increase of £27 billion, £24 billion is accounted for by a rise in profits and a mere £2 billion by a rise in wages. The financial sector carries on regardless with business as usual as employers take the opportunity to attack working conditions and hold down wages. Yet when people go on strike to defend their wages and conditions the three parties combine to demonize them for their irresponsibility.

Exactly which of the parliamentary parties are admitting that building an economy on easy credit housing and selling financial services is a pretty crap idea? Which are loudly condemning the steady slide in the proportion of wages and salaries in the national income (now down to 53% from a high of 65% in the 1970s)? Which are pointing out that shrinking the economy by 5% over the last year was actually quite a good thing in terms of staving off global warming and helping the environment. Oh, none of them.

The final area where choice will be at a premium over the coming month relates to public morality. Labour has been thoroughly corrupted by the Blairite infatuation with corporate values. From Blears to Hewitt, Byers to Hoon the party is rotten, riven by greed. Any decent person must be repelled by the lying and dishonest sleaze that taints Labour.

Appalled by this, are we seriously expected to transfer our affections to a party just as deeply entwined with business, a party quite happy to take money from non-resident tax-avoiders, a party infiltrated by the publicity relations industry and sharing its shallow values? And can anyone honestly argue the Lib Dems are better? Questions about dodgy expense claims and freebies hang over the heads of at least four of the five outgoing MPs.

Rest assured though. The political class is hardly likely to let the issue of its own corruption mar a jolly good election. Expect to see few reminders of these distasteful matters in April. No, it’s all about the economy.

Instead, as the parliamentary parties hone up their debating skills and practice the make-up in advance of the make-believe TV ‘debate’, they hope that grabbing extra publicity and reserving it all for themselves will make people forget there are alternatives out there. They may be over-optimistic. Support for ‘others’ in the polls is running at a consistent 12%. This is 4% higher than it was at the equivalent stage in 2005. And in the event ‘others’ did better then than the polls predicted. With even higher numbers of other candidates likely in May that’s just about guaranteed this time. We’re looking at around 15% of votes being cast for others.

For example, in Cornwall, the combined ‘others’ are predicted to outpoll Labour easily in all constituencies save Camborne-Redruth. There Labour may cling on to one in five of the voters as habits slowly die. Overall, a Lib Dem clean sweep is still favourite. The closest races are predicted to be South East Cornwall and Truro-Falmouth. However, I suspect that in the event Lib Dem support is being over-estimated and that these two constituencies are likely to fall to the Tories.

St Austell Bay: the global meet the gullible

Newspapers, part of the corporate world, are hardly the place to find radical scepticism. Yet scepticism towards corporate schemes and the establishment politicians who back them is precisely what we require, now more than ever, to prevent Cornwall becoming an exploiters’ playground. Believe what you read in the papers and you may start thinking that building yet another settlement, or actually six barely connected settlements, near St Austell and calling them an ‘eco-town’ will ‘shape a better and more sustainable future’ and ‘positively transform the economy and environment of mid-Cornwall’.

Putting aside the scientific impossibility of zero-carbon housing, are we seriously being asked to believe that the in-migrants who will make up at least 70% of these new settlements won’t own cars, will use the bus to go shopping in Truro or surfing in Newquay and will stay at home and be self-sufficient. In its most bizarre form the eco [sic] town becomes a dreamland where the inhabitants all ‘work from home, drive electric cars and use enhanced public transport’. Even those attending an RDA Infrastructure Advisory Group meeting in May 2009 found it difficult to swallow this nonsense and questioned how the new roads of the scheme could possibly be described as ‘sustainable’.

This absurdity is joined by another – that the top-down project to build six new villages will now involve the ‘community’. The usual displays appear for a day or two in St Austell from 10.30 to 6 and are then quickly whisked away for two evenings at Penwithick and Par. The small proportion of people able to attend are listened to politely but not given the option of rejecting this ludicrous scheme outright. And never ever asked their opinion about the prospects of their grandchildren living in a ‘sustainable’ Cornwall of 1.3 million plus.

Let’s have no illusions. The St Austell eco [sic] town is just that – a sick joke. It’s the Labour Government/corporate version of sustainability, as far removed from real social and environmental sustainability as the average MP isn't from greed and mendacity. The scheme to build 5,000 houses, create a similar number of jobs (all at home?), a ‘sustainable’ transport infrastructure’, leisure facilities and the inevitable ‘green space’ is all about providing a green fig-leaf for a discredited Government’s growth agenda. In addition it turns redundant land into profits for the French owned Imerys Minerals and provides development opportunities for Egyptian-Swiss owned Orascom Development.

The most farcical aspect of this whole sad scheme is its ‘luxury, waterside marina’. And not just any old marina, but ‘the best marina in the UK … something truly special here in this beautiful corner of the country’. Since when have marinas been ‘sustainable’? What’s the carbon cost of all those fibre-glass yachts? Do the yachting class generally have a low carbon footprint and tread lightly on the earth? Is it a productive use of resources to have marina properties lying empty for large parts of the year?



Marinas are not normally associated with environmentally sensitive projects but they are normally associated with Orascom’s projects. We have already seen how Samih Sawiris, CEO of Orascom, has some curious misconceptions about Cornwall. Nonetheless, his company is described in the press as having expertise in ‘long-term, sustainable town development and management’.

A few minutes research by our local press hacks might have shown them that this ‘expertise’ lies in a series of projects around the Red Sea and the Arabian peninsula. Apart from a couple of budget housing schemes, involving thousands of industrial units outside Cairo, Orascom’s method is basically to take undeveloped areas, which it describes as ‘pristine environments’ of ‘inherited purity and natural splendour’, and dump a resort on them.

Its brochure is studded with a vocabulary of ‘luxury’, ‘high end’, ‘exclusive’. Orascom transforms ‘virgin lands into eco-friendly living communities (though hardly as ‘eco-friendly’as the original virgin lands surely) for the ‘exclusivity and privacy’ of those ‘who are looking for an escape from the everyday bustle, looking for a private retreat to unwind’. This is the placeless, gated world of the globe-trotting super-rich, oblivious to the environmental destruction unfolding in their wake.

Orascom’s key development of El Gouna on the Red Sea is the prototype. Its population of 15,000 share their ‘private beach town’ with no less than 15 hotels, a landing strip, two marinas and golf courses. While Orascom signs up to a ‘green’ approach it’s difficult to see how plonking down golf courses in the middle of deserts makes any kind of environmental sense. And what about any local people? Orascom ‘blends in with local culture’. In Taba Heights in the Sinai Desert local Bedouins ‘were employed to work and live in the destination, where they are encouraged to present their culture to visitors’.

Orascom, gross profits in the first nine months of 2009 of around £77 million, reflects its chairman’s long-held interests in tourist resorts and marinas, which I guess is the reason the Government (or was it Imerys? or who?) thought them ideal for Cornwall. Certainly the Tory leadership of Cornwall Council welcomed their involvement for that reason.

At least Orascom, which moved its HQ from Cairo to Switzerland in 2008, is doing what comes naturally to profit-maximising corporations. What’s the excuse for the more local Tom Noddys whose role is to legitimate this ridiculous project, all semblance of critical thought having long ago fled their skulls. These simpletons come in three varieties.

First, there are local Labour candidates. Lee Jameson welcomed the ‘lasting community for thousands of people, many of whom are unable to afford a home in their own county at present’. But if they can’t afford a home in their own counties then how can they afford to move to Cornwall? Then there’s Jude Robinson who thinks the eco-town con-trick is all about helping ‘thousands of people in Cornwall who want a decent home’, providing ‘better jobs and homes for local people’. Facts never get much in the way of arrogant Labour pronouncements. The fact is that the local need housing requirement for the whole of St Austell and the clay country amounts to just 2,700 houses. So who are we building all those extra houses for?

Second, there are gullible local councillors. Planning supremo Councillor Hicks has grandly announced from the safety of Redruth that the eco-town and its marina ‘is wonderful news for all the residents of the clay area. It reinforces our commitment to put the interests of local people first’. What, not the interests of the Government, Imerys or Orascom then?

Moving on swiftly we find Tim Smit. The Eden Project guru is never slow to support some very dubiously sustainable companies and projects. In this case the boyishly excitable Smit enthuses ‘It’s very exciting … it’s a real rip working with a guy who has a vision and who wants to do it as much for the legacy as for the money. People just need to believe because this is the best thing that will ever happen to St Austell’.

Believe! Have faith! Have faith in the half-truths of the media and government spin. Have faith in those who sell our land. Have faith in those who profit from it. Have faith in those who arrogate to themselves the right to determine the destiny of Cornwall and the future of its people. If they tell us marinas and never-ending housing are the best thing ever to happen to St Austell then don’t laugh. Just believe.

Lib Dem sums don't add up

Here’s another pretty shameless election leaflet. The voters of Camborne-Redruth would seem particularly unlucky in receiving a high level of half-baked information through their letter boxes. A Lib Dem leaflet has three stories. One of these concerns curbing boy racers (who don’t or can’t vote). The headline story offers a £700 a year tax cut which will result from raising the income tax threshold. The final story promises £2.5 billion more investment in schools plus the abolition of university tuition fees.

At least we’re informed the tax giveaway will be paid for extra taxes on the very rich. The schools investment and the tuition fees? Who knows? Like Labour, Lib Dems seem to be in denial, saying one thing to voters while planning for another. On the main Lib Dem website Clegg promises ‘cuts, cuts that are savage and bold’. Yet, being a good Lib Dem, he’s going to be equally ‘fierce and savage’ about protecting services.

But there’s not a peep in Julia Goldsworthy’s leaflet about possible cuts. So let’s fill in the gap from the central party website. At least, unlike the Tories, the Lib Dems do seem to have one or two plans for cuts (though uncosted). They want to scrap Labour’s planned ID cards and biometric passports and cancel the next tranche of Eurofighter planes. They also promise there will be no ‘like for like replacement of Trident nuclear missiles’. This seems to leave some wriggle room but let’s assume it means no more Trident.

What will this save? The ID cards and passports maybe as much as £7bn. The Eurofighter might amount to another billion, although the problem here is that there are costs in penalties and legal fees for ending the contract and these could offset much of the savings. Trident, by the Government’s (probably under) estimate will cost up to £20bn to replace and then £1.5bn a year. Add all this up and over the next four years it equates to a total one-off saving of £34bn.

Sounds a lot. However, the ‘tough choices’ the Lib Dems promise to make will have to involve a lot more than this to wipe out the £70bn annual structural deficit they identify. That leaves an awful lot of slack to be taken up by their vaguer talk of pay rise caps for public sector workers, cuts in public sector pensions and ‘value for money’ public services. And, as I argued yesterday, all this will impact relatively more heavily on Cornwall.

Meanwhile, the leaflet also claims that Camborne-Redruth will be a ‘two horse race’, with Julia on 32%, an unnamed ‘Con’ on 30% and ‘can’t win this time’ equally anonymous Labour on 25%. This is referenced to the Politics Home website. Yet the same website gives a notional 2005 Lib Dem majority of 8% and not 2%. When we investigate the actual notional 2005 result calculated by the number-crunchers at Plymouth University we find their estimate is

Lib Dem 37%, Labour 29%, Con 26%, others 8%

In other words completely different from the figures printed in the Lib Dem leaflet. An honest mistake? Or brazen misinformation designed to confuse?

The budget and Cornwall: cider and silence

For the Western Morning news and BBC’s Spotlight the most important aspect of this week’s budget was its vicious attack on cider drinkers. This is proof that Labour ‘doesn’t care for the westcountry’. Adding to the stereotype of a bunch of hunt-following cruel sports fanatics, the media are now painting us as irate cider-drinkers. Which adds precisely nothing to any rational assessment of Labour’s economic policies and Cornwall.

Let’s turn to our MPs and prospective MPs to find out what they’re saying about the budget, presumably the most important political event this week given the centrality of the economy to the coming election. The answer is absolutely nothing. We can perhaps forgive Lib Dem leavers Colin Breed and Matthew Taylor. Breed is keeping his head well down after being exposed for ‘inadvertently’ failing to declare an interest following luxury freebie trips to Gibraltar and Taiwan. Meanwhile, Taylor is too busy looking forward to his new job announced a day after the budget as a director of South West Water. (Some idea of what he might expect as remuneration comes from Damian Green, Tory MP for Ashford, who currently pockets £2033 a month for 14 hours work as a director for South East Water).

Not a peep from the Tories in Cornwall about the budget either. The only comment I can find comes from Labour’s idiosyncratic Jude Robinson, ppc for Camborne-Redruth. Like other Labour candidates, Jude inhabits a dreamlike world where the Labour Party only ever does good things and Britain is the nearest thing to Utopia. She highlights, among other things, the increase in the state pension (up by £124 - or 2.2% a year - actually a real fall as inflation is now over 3%). Or there’s an extension to free school meals. And let’s not forget the massive 13p rise (2.2%) in the national minimum wage. Even Darling didn’t think it was worth mentioning that in his speech. Strangely though, she seems to have missed a £250 rise in winter fuel allowance. This is definitely good news for Cornish pensioners (usually) basking in mild winters.

But funny that Jude only mentions the give-away aspect of the budget. This in total amounts to just £1.5 billion from the windfall unanticipated savings of £13 billion. The rest goes to pay off the public debt. Jude was apparently asleep when the £11 billion in ‘efficiency cuts’ was mentioned, or when the vague threats of future cuts in public spending were swiftly passed over by the Chancellor. These make the £1.5 billion for pensioners, businesses and the poor pale into insignificance.

In fact what we are seeing is the unedifying spectacle of a political class who, for all their sound and fury, signify nothing, having long ago stopped communicating with their voters. Instead, they collude in a pre-election conspiracy of silence, locked in a grubby embrace as they refuse to divulge exactly what they’re going to cut. The Institute for Fiscal Studies concludes that there’s only a ‘modest difference’ between the plans of Labour and Tories. As Clegg postures about the need for ‘savage cuts’ we can assume the Lib Dems are part of that ruling consensus that says that the wage and salary earners of Britain have to pay the price for the bankers’ greed.

The current budget deficit is £167 billion. Labour want to reduce this to £89 billion by 2014 and the Tories to £81 billion. The cost of the various banking bail-outs and nationalizations came to exactly £167.5 billion. So the rest of us will have to pay to keep the bankers afloat through unspecified reductions in the quality of public services and/or increased taxes.

Actually, in the short-term this budget did not entail much pain. This year only those earning more than £100,000 a year will be worse off, despite misleading headlines in the Telegraph and Mail bemoaning squeezes on the ‘middle class’. Unless the ‘middle class’ is confined to the top 3% of earners this is not the case. Even next year, someone on the average Cornish wage will be no more than £36 worse off (a year!) That is, if they still have a job left. For the real pain comes in the loss of public sector jobs and cuts in public spending.

The current ‘efficiency cuts’ and the coming cuts in local government budgets in practice mean fewer public sector jobs, real wage reductions and attacks on working conditions. In Cornwall in 2008 29.8% of all jobs were in public administration, health and education. The equivalent figure for Great Britain is 27.0%. Therefore, we will pay a higher price than most for bailing out the bankers.

Cuts in public services impact more on poorer households and communities. As Cornwall has more than its fair share of deprived communities and relatively poor households its people will be expected to take a bigger hit from the cuts that are being lined up for after May (but not discussed). Voters should refuse to vote for any of the consensus parties unless their representatives start to inform us honestly and openly exactly where they intend the axe to fall.

George Eustice – addicted to disingenuity

Voters in Camborne-Redruth are beginning to experience the fallout from non-dom cash diverted from the British Treasury to ensuring a Tory government is returned on May 6th. Discarded leaflets from Tory hopeful George Eustice are becoming more common in the district that than roadside daffodils.

Only a week ago George displayed outraged pique at accusations he’s been less than totally open about his job as a political lobbyist with Portland Communications. So in the light of that I’m extremely saddened to see that in several hundred words and two separate leaflets George completely fails to mention his ‘real job in the private sector’.

Does George intend to carry on working for this company if he were elected? Oddly, this question doesn’t appear in a list of ‘Your questions to George Eustice’. Among the pages devoted to his family roots in the area dating back to the times dinosaurs roamed the earth, there’s one mention of his former UKIP membership. But no hint at all of his current lobbying job. Surely there isn’t more reason to hide the latter than the former?

Moreover, George repeats the extremely disingenuous claim that sitting Lib Dem MP Julia Goldsworthy claimed £159,000 in expenses ‘last year’. (In fact it was £162,000 in 2008-09 but for some reason George seems to still be using the 2007-08 figure). As regular readers of this blog will know I’m not particularly a fan of Julia either. But to repeat; in these ‘expenses’, which most voters might automatically assume are all for leather rocking chairs, plasma TV sets, ready meals from Harrods and the like, the biggest element is £91,000 in office costs.

Let’s put the record straight. Julia Goldsworthy’s ‘expenses’, defined in this broad way, ranked 173rd highest in the Commons in 2008/09. This is rather high but the travel expenses of Cornish MPs are bound to be more than those in the south east of England. But what do Conservative MPs cost us in contrast? George implies that they’re a lot cheaper; sound, honest men and women who would rather be run over by a rural bus if there were any than claim from the public purse. We have none in Cornwall to make a comparison so let’s take the closest two. In Torridge and West Devon Geoffrey Cox cost £165,000 and ranked 122nd while Gary Streeter in South West Devon cost £163,000 and ranked 158th. A huge difference there then!

Disingenuity, cavalier partiality with the facts, misrepresentation, smears and downright lying are core components of the election leaflet genre.* And often goes unnoticed. However, check out a new website where election leaflets are being uploaded in order to ‘try to keep [the parties] honest’. Unfortunately at present it has no examples from Cornish constituencies, but it looks like an excellent idea even if those who started it may be doomed to inevitable disappointment.

* If you spot any of this in the coming campaign why not email me with the details.

New Cornish party: old British politics

There are 377 political parties currently registered with the Electoral Commission. Some of these are local parties registering for local elections. Others are clearly defunct, having gone down with the loss of all hands. A good proportion of the remainder are ‘parties’ that are vehicles for the vision (or ego) of a single individual and seem to have a membership confined to single figures.

One of the latter variety has just popped up in Cornwall. The Cornish Democrats registered as a party last December with a set of interesting party descriptions - I especially enjoyed ‘Cornish Democrats: For Proper Jobs’. Nothing was then heard until recently. The party ‘leader’ and founder, a Jonathan Rogers of Carbis Bay, now announces his intention to stand in the St Ives constituency. Proving that this is no one-man band, the party boasts a press officer, a Jon Bergdahl. Could this be the same Jon Bergdahl who’s designed a Spinal Tap quiz I wonder?

The Cornish Democrats stand for ‘clean modern politics - built on traditional values’. The traditional values turn out to be more in evidence than the modernity. Mr Rogers is an unapologetic social conservative and a professed Christian, attacking the ‘metropolitan political elite’, ‘media-savvy politicians’ and the associated ‘moral drift’. The Lib Dems ‘no longer represent the views of their traditional nonconformist Westcountry electorate’ while the Tories are just New Labour and have jettisoned ‘traditional conservative values’.

In contrast, the Cornish Democrats want to restore values of decency, integrity and probity’ based on the ‘time honoured principles of British life, such as ‘a Christian worldview’, ‘English [some mistake surely?] liberty’, ‘ecclesiastical independence from Rome’ (of course) and ‘constitutional monarchy’. They want to withdraw from the European Union, a ‘contravention of HM the Queen’s coronation oath’ apparently. This socially conservative agenda would seem to compete with UKIP and the Tories, whose candidate in St Ives is another professed Christian.

But, while against abortion, legally assisted suicide, civil partnerships and Europe, the Cornish Democrats are not just another version of UKIP/Tories. For example they accept the existence of global warming and call for a ‘carbon neutral society’ and want to take South West Water back into public ownership. Their policy for reducing the public sector debt by 30% over three years is slightly less draconian than Labour’s 50% in four years or the Tories’ even faster rate, although they want to do this with no tax rises at all.

And of course, they’re a Cornish party. This centres on a belief that people in Cornwall can play a leading role, set an example and clean up politics. While rejecting a ‘separate’ Cornwall and disassociating themselves explicitly from such horrors as MK or the Cornish Democrat’s blog, these Cornish Democrats call for recognition of Cornwall’s unique identity and a special status (although it’s not clear what). They also want measures to support aspects of Cornish culture such as the revived language.

However, this right of centre Cornish party remains completely silent about the current Cornish crisis caused by hyperdevelopment pressures and exploitation. No mention of the plans for 69,000 houses over the next 16 years. Complete silence about Labour’s proposals for a population in Cornwall of 1.3 million by 2099. Furthermore, the Cornish Democrats seem to rely rather naively on changing individual values, failing to see where the values they deplore come from or what produces them. Perhaps this is because Cambridge-educated Jonathan Rogers, who also owns property in London, was for ten years director of a strategic management consultancy firm in London and thus has a rather intimate knowledge of that corrupt metropolitan elite he abhors. Currently, he combines being financial director for a publishing firm with a marketing directorship for a manufacturing firm.

Consistently, but slightly crazily, the Cornish Democrats also strongly support the ‘tried and tested’ unfair first past the post voting system. So they won’t be surprised when they get their 200 or 300 votes then.

But on the scale of sheer bonkers policies, the Cornish Democrats pale into utter insignificance compared to UKIP. The latter are now calling for a 25% cut in public spending but at the same time proposing a raft of extra spending amounting to £12.5 billion a year. According to my calculations this is double what they reckon they’ll save by pulling out of the EU. The extra spending includes money for 17 new nuclear power stations, no less than three high speed rail lines and a 40% increase in defence spending with 125,000 extra troops. These will presumably be needed to shoot those demonstrating against the up to 2 million job cuts UKIP plan for the public sector, jobs which have ‘no useful purpose whatsoever’.

Under the frightening prospect of a Lord Pearson run administration we face the restoration of oaths to the Monarch rather than the state and a transfer of land and property back to the royal family to give them a bit more to live on, dear of ‘em. The last night of the Proms will be celebrated (compulsorily?) as an evening of ‘good humoured British pride’ while the ‘UK theme melody’ (I have no idea what this is) will be restored to BBC Radio 4. Global warming is of course unproven and green taxes are firmly opposed while all subsidies for renewables are to be abolished.

UKIP identifies three ‘threats to Britishness’. The first is the ‘cultural/Marxist left’ who obviously run everything. Then there’s ‘pseudo-nationalism’. This means Scottish and Welsh nationalism and directly elected Scottish Parliaments and Welsh Assemblies are destined for the bin. Finally, there’s ‘Islamicisation’. In fact, so scared witless are they about the latter that they have a special policy on ‘face coverings’ (against). Compared to that lot the Cornish Democrats look harmless.

Learning the lessons of the past? Another dodgy PFI deal.

On March 17 Cornwall Council’s Cabinet agreed to go ahead and prepare a business plan for a PFI Affordable and Extra Care Housing Project. This will be submitted to central government who will then give the Council up to £151 million of PFI credit to pay for 284 houses and 210 ‘extra care apartments’ to be built over a four year period. As a sweetener land for 157 privately sold houses and flats and 90 shared ownership units will be thrown in.

Lanson councillor Alex Folkes reports this is equivalent to meeting 7% of Cornwall’s affordable housing needs a year. Currently the Council has a capital grant direct from the government for 2008-11 which is delivering around 700 houses annually, in other words a lot more. But in the current climate government investment is set to fall. And with local government budgets under even greater pressure as the next government ensures the homeless and others pay for bailing out the bankers, it’s no good looking there to make up the gap.

Enter the PFI (Private Finance Initiative) scheme. PFI schemes (or scams) were invented by the Tories before 1997 and then enthusiastically adopted by their New Labour soulmates afterwards. The idea is to unlock private sector money to pay for public assets like schools, hospitals, affordable housing – at least in principle.

In practice however, to say PFI is problematic is something of an understatement. In fact, it’s a major disgrace and standing indictment of Labour policies. In Cornwall, we’ve already seen the disastrous results of the PFI schools contract where appalling standards when servicing the newly built school buildings eventually resulted in the private sector consortium walking away from the contract. And then there’s the waste management deal with SITA which has lumbered us with an expensive legal inquiry. After failures like these one might have thought that the Council would be avoiding future PFI commitments like the plague. Not so. Council officers have been working away behind the scenes on another for affordable housing.

To a large extent, this is because there appears to be no alternative if we want more social housing. PFI looks more and more like an offer the Council can’t refuse. Not that the current leadership of Cornwall Council needs much persuading. Chief Executive Kevin Lavery was formerly CEO of SERCO Solutions, one of the major players in a PFI market that has grown to around £5 billion a year. Moreover, it’s highly unlikely that the average councillor can understand the complex mystifications that surround PFI deals.

The basic idea is straightforward enough. A PFI consortium is set up involving a bank, a construction company and a support services firm (in this case a social landlord). The first raises the money, the second does the build and the third services the contract, providing maintenance, tenancy control, care and security and the like. The consortium splits the equity three ways and gains an income from rent and service charges but mainly through payments from government over the (normally) 30 year period of the contract.

So what’s wrong with this? Several things. Fiarly fundamentally, it’s not actually providing ‘value for money’. The auditor-general of the National Audit Office, Jeremy Colman, has called the value for money calculations ‘pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo … so complicated that no-one, not even the experts really understands what is going on’. It’s more expensive because private borrowing on the capital markets is more expensive than government borrowing; because the private companies need to make a healthy or even unhealthy profit; and because the deliberate complexity generates fees for consultants, insurers, arrangers, advisors (in this case the international companies Price Waterhouse Coopers, Gleeds Worldwide and Ashurst solicitors) and any other number of greedy parasites. In the PFI Affordable Housing Project a quarter (£47,000) of the cost of building each unit will go on management and delivery costs.

Contrast the £101 million the Council has from the Housing and Communities Agency to build 2,000 affordable homes with the total income to the PFI contractors of £469 million over 30 years to build fewer than 500 units of social housing. This is nothing to do with value for money and all to do with two factors. First, it helps the Labour Government continue its gigantic accounting fiddle. PFI schemes don’t appear in the current accounts as the costs are spread over three decades. Second, it siphons huge profits into the private sector which gets a lucrative servicing contract and a predictable and virtually risk-free revenue stream. Yet at the same time higher costs lead to shoddier outcomes, as at Cusgarne Primary School for example.

The other major problem with PFI schemes is their inflexibility. We are now living with the consequences of the 30 year waste management deal the Lib Dem County Council struck with SITA, apparently unable to escape it because of the cost implications. This has wider repercussions. Swathes of public spending are hidden from public scrutiny and democratic accountability. Councillors at the Cabinet were not allowed to debate the principle of PFI. Why not? We are told that bidders for the contract had already been actively sought – ‘there is significant interest from major players intending to bid for the Project and it is considered by funders to be bankable’. But we’re not allowed to know who these anonymous companies are because of ‘commercial confidentiality’.

As a result meaningful consultation becomes even more of a joke, democratic freedom is restricted for 30 year chunks of time and power shifts from elected representatives to officers who are the only ones who pretend to understand what the hell’s going on.

From the laconic minutes of the Cabinet meeting it’s clear that few piercing questions were asked. Such as what’s to stop this particular PFI consortium walking away from the deal whenever it suits them? Or what’s to stop them ‘cashing out’ - selling the equity and making a huge profit after a few years? Or how much does the future need for affordable homes depend on our ever upwards population growth pressures?

For their failure to confront the iniquities of PFI, its inefficiencies and waste of public money and its dire effect on democratic control (and working conditions) our politicians stand culpable of gross neglect. Meanwhile, every time a PFI contract is signed, the space of democratic accountability shrinks. Little by little democracy withers, corrupted by the ongoing penetration of market values.

Second coming spotted in Falmouth

In the early twenty-first century an Eden project-Tate Gallery-gourmet coast tourist triangle appeared in Cornwall. For the project class and the marketing girls and boys of Quality Cornwall Ltd this is a golden triangle. For the Cornish, even those living within it, it may seem more like the Bermuda Triangle, as they sink further into invisibility.

Now the triangle is about to become a quadrilateral. Falmouth staked a claim to join the triangle back when the National Maritime Museum opened its doors. But this flattered to deceive and was soon almost drowning in deep financial waters. But we are now reliably informed by the English Guardian that Falmouth has its saviour, in the form of Rik Stein, owner of Padstow. Padstow is one of the centres of north coast gourmet stuffing, boasting no less than one Stein-owned establishment for every 400 of its grateful residents.

Guardian writer and novelist Emily Barr, who moved to Falmouth from rural France all of (almost) two years ago, is very excited. Falmouth, she claims, is very different from Padstow. ‘Unlike Padstow, it feels like a real place’, which seems a little unfair on Padstow. Falmouth, she gushingly goes on to inform us, is a place where ‘you can walk to the shops, wherever you live’. You could, but wouldn’t you be a trifle knackered after trudging all the way back home to those new estates up the hill near Bickland Water Road?

Maybe Emily is finding it difficult to escape the fictional genre. Falmouth has ‘few, if any, second homes’. Actually it had 261 second and holiday homes at the time of the 2001 Census, around half the number, although a far lower proportion, than Padstow. And of course, ‘much of the employment here is tourism-related’. That’s ‘much’ as in less than one in five. The proportion working in tourism-related jobs in Carrick is 10.5% (2008). The percentage working in hotels and restaurants in Falmouth in 2001 was 11.4%. But then, the broadsheets must never waste an opportunity to assert the hoary old myth that we all spend our time selling ice creams or mopping out chalets.

Building on this foundation of secure local knowledge, Barr informs us that ‘Stein is being greeted here as something of a messiah’. It’s not the mere 30 jobs he’s bringing with him. It’s the fact that he’ll entice ‘people to the town, from further afield, particularly over the summer’.

So the promised ‘regeneration’ being spearheaded by one ‘posh fish and chip shop’ involves more of the same old thing. Strangely, tourism-led policies have not saved Falmouth from the recession, empty shops, expensive housing, low wages and high number of bankruptcies that also feature in this shallow article. Stein is quoted as saying Falmouth is ‘the most dynamic town in Cornwall’. He has a point. But the dynamism is probably more down to the extra spend produced by a student population which has been swollen by 3,000 in the past six years then from tourism.

Five hundred people applied for the 30 jobs on offer at the new chippy, which as Stein says was ‘highly encouraging for us, though I suppose from the other side it isn’t’. The ‘other side’?? Just so. That’s the side the Guardian doesn’t tell us much about.

Tory electioneering ferment stuns voters

The election campaign this week spluttered into renewed idiocy. Sixth Form Debating Society chairman Michael Gove laid into Labour’s hyperactive speed freak Ed Balls for leading a ‘lurch to the left’. On closer inspection this sudden and unlikely Labour leftism turned out to amount to not adopting Tory policies. Such as privatising the Post Office, opening up NHS care to the private sector and ‘reforming’ schools. So they’d be more accurately described as a lurch from the right to the centre-right or the centre then. Not that this didn’t stop the media from hysterically describing it as a return to ‘old socialism’, red in tooth and claw.

As Tory electioneering cranks up, albeit little more than hypocritical name-calling (the unctuous Gove was on strike for several months as a reporter in Aberdeen around 1990), it’s time to catch up on what local Tory hopefuls are getting up to. On the whole still doing everything they can to avoid anything that might be mistaken for politics. Or at least political questions such as what public services they would like to scrap or what they intend to do about the destructive level of growth Cornwall is locked into.

What promises to be an ‘internet election’ exposes a few problems for the Conservatives when translating the rhetoric of modernisation into reality. For example, the Tories in St Ives promised that ‘as our PPC develops his campaigns throughout the constituency we will post details here’. The rest of the page glows blankly back at the curious, completely devoid of campaigns of any description. Surely this empty void cannot be typical.

It’s not. Over in neighbouring Camborne-Redruth George Eustice is stung by fiendish Lib Dem accusations that he has been less than transparent with local voters by not mentioning up to now that he works for lobbying firm Portland Communications. Their clients include Coca Cola, Vodaphone, Google, Tesco (as reported here many months ago). To give him credit, George has responded robustly on his blog, claiming that MPs should have experience of ‘real jobs’, although defining PR lobbying as a ‘real’ job is a mite confusing.

That out of the way, he’ll probably return to his more normal style, which seems to consist of reminding all and sundry how his family have roots in the district going back 10,000 years to the last Ice Age. Meanwhile, it appears George has personally run marathons/worked/had a meal/drank/completed pub quizzes with (delete inapplicable) everyone in the constituency.

However, unfortunately George’s work with Portland Communications seems to have affected his grasp of what now happens in Parliament. He accuses Julia Goldsworthy of taking £159,000 a year in ‘expenses’. Well, sort of. Actually £91,000 of this in 2008-09 was office staffing costs and another £20,000 travel and communications payments. The expenses element - the Personal Additional Accommodation Allowance – amounted to £22,000 in 2008-09. Fair enough; it’s still too high. But George then goes on to say that ‘the Lib Dem MP thinks it is OK to claim £400 a month from the taxpayer for extra food without even submitting receipts.’ If she does this is strange as no payments are now made for food and haven’t been since the Green Book (the guide to MPs’ expenses) was revised in July 2009. Only eight months behind the game then. Which I suppose is better than being a century behind like some of his party colleagues.

Moving on to Truro and Falmouth we meet the most impressive of the Tory bunch, Sarah Newton, who looks to be the front-runner here. Sarah has been busy standing around at the opening of Rowe’s pasty counter at Asda Penryn. And she came perilously close to a political commitment, or at least politics, when she implicitly welcomed her Shadow Health Minister’s welcome of the review of the transfer of cancer services from Treliske to Derriford. Of course, no commitment to reverse this transfer has been made.

She is also enthusiastic for the Tory party’s ‘Green Deal’ to help make houses more energy efficient. As housing accounts for a quarter of UK carbon emissions this seems a good idea. Except that the money - £6,500 per house (FoE reckon it should be nearer £20,000) - won’t go to the householder but to the private sector who then recoup it via higher energy bills. So, while trailed as ‘free’, it’s not. We pay for it. And more ominously, the private sector has been waxing lyrical about how this will ‘unlock a fantastic new market’. Meanwhile, the Tories link it to building more nuclear and coal fired power stations, which rather destroys the point.

Turning to PFI-challenged Caroline Righton in St Austell and Newquay, her webpage promises ‘weekly news bulletins’. But the ‘latest news’ is dated 16 September 2009. Caroline has either gone into hibernation or hiding, at least on the web. As each day passes it becomes clearer that the assiduous and hard-working Dick Cole is head and shoulders above his rivals in this seat. Such a pity that he lacks the £thousands that will flow from offshore tax-avoiders via Tory Central Office to the local Conservatives.

Sian Flynn’s website in North Cornwall is more up to date. Attacking the possibility (rather than the definite actuality) of a compulsory levy on dog owners, Sian fulminates about this latest vicious attack on ‘struggling families in North Cornwall’. As well as standing up for dog lovers Sian is a great believer in rural bus services, although Tory intentions in this respect are soggy rather than crisp. They’re relying on more competition. Some may remember it was the Tories back in the 1980s that first destroyed rural bus services through deregulation and … err … more competition.

Sian is also self-appointed spokeswoman for Cornwall’s beleaguered and ailing (is it ever anything else?) tourist industry. She enthuses about measures to combat marine crime. These will add to ‘Cornwall’s attractions as a tourist destination’, I guess by attracting more yacht and second home owners. Just the types North Cornwall needs and the Tories are banking on.

Finally, in the South East Sheryll Murray’s most recent contribution to her news page expresses ‘grave concern’ at the rise in unemployment in Cornwall. The only problem is that this refers to February’s rise. In March it fell. But Sheryll has yet to mention that inconvenient fact. She’s also delighted that car parking charges in South East Cornwall are being frozen at 20p for the first hour. All fascinating stuff. But I’m still left slightly puzzled about who’s going to pay for the promised Tory cuts, estimated to be an eye-watering 16-18% in real terms for the unprotected bits of government spending.

Puerile slogans 3: Change that works for you BUILDING A BETTER BRITAIN

To avoid unfair accusations of being unduly biased against the Tweedledum and Tweedledee parties let’s look for a moment at Tweedledim’s slogan. The Lib Dems have come up with by far the longest slogan. Not exactly tripping off the tongue and clearly far too intellectual for the media, this runs into two separate sentences, although stripped of full stops and uncomfortably combining a lower case and an upper case half.

As the Greens and then Labour went for ‘fairness’ and the Tories for ‘change’, the Lib Dems in a blinding flash of sheer inspiration have come up with … both. Obviously believing this brings together the best of both worlds, it serves instead to combine the banality of both to create something even more empty and meaninglessly loathsome than the originals.

In place of the Tories’ infantile blanket endorsement of ‘change’ (George Eustice is now claiming that the voters of Redruth have a ‘strong mood for change’. Dream on, George, they’re just being polite) the Lib Dems have ‘change that works for you’. But the problem lies in deciding who the ‘you’ is/are.

Let’s look at some practical Lib Dem ‘change’ when they controlled the old County Council. There’s the PFI schemes for schools and waste management for starters. But these haven’t exactly worked well for the council taxpayer. Instead, they’ve left us with large bills and locked into costly and inefficient contracts that we can’t get out of. On the other hand they work very well for the investment companies, banks and builders who make up the PFI consortia.

Then there’s the unitary authority. This has worked fine for council officers on the County Council who kept their jobs in the face of pending central government cuts at the expense of their colleagues in the Districts and even better for the new corporate directors bussed in on inflated salaries. But it hardly worked for properly responsive local government in Cornwall or for democracy in general. Or there’s Newquay airport. Pouring £millions into this worked for wealthy second home owners and the airlines and boosted the egos of certain Lib Dem Cabinet members. But it’s tricky to see how it’ll work to avert calamitous global warming. Although it’s ‘worked’ successfully to make the aim of the ‘green’ peninsula even more of an unattainable pipe dream.

While I’m on the environment what about Lib Dem support for a high level of house building and continuing population growth? Like the Tories, we’re still waiting to hear a credible alternative to the disastrous Labour plans for unsustainable growth. Selling off Cornwall to the developers works for the profiteers but does a population of 1.2/1.3 million by 2099 really work for Cornwall and its people?

So let’s make the Lib Dems’ slogan more relevant to Cornwall. ‘Change that works for those that profit from change. BUILDING A BIGGER CORNWALL’ is far more appropriate.

Is Heartlands tearing the heart out of Cornwall?

Another aspect of the cloying Lib/Lab/Con political consensus in Cornwall can be met with in Camborne-Redruth. Or more precisely in Pool, which we are told is the ‘heart’ of Camborne-Redruth, where the Heartlands project and its progenitors – CPR Regeneration – spearhead ambitious social engineering masquerading as ‘regeneration’.

Here, in what we are informed is ‘Cornwall’s most derelict urban area’ a £33 million investment is under way, two thirds Lottery funded and the rest supplied by the Homes and Communities Agency and Cornwall Council. This aims to transform an area currently including housing, former mining sites and giant out-of-town retail warehouses. In what may appear strange to a casual visitor from Mars, the brutalist angular steel architecture of the shopping wedges will be left untouched. No, the ‘regeneration’ involves mainly land not currently built on, apart from the remains of the Robinsons shaft surface works of South Crofty mine.

Our local politicians have been extremely keen to associate themselves with this ‘regeneration’. In 2007 Julia Goldsworthy welcomed the ‘inspiring new landscape’ which would replace ‘an eyesore you would rather avoid’ and recently the Lib Dems re-affirmed their support. George Eustice and the Tories will also not be heard raising a word of criticism against CPR Regeneration. This might be a little surprising since the latter unilaterally attempted to rename Camborne and Redruth as ‘CPR’, much to the irritation of many local people.

This utter loss of critical faculties when confronted by this project would have made Stalin proud. It’s the result of a relentless flow of ‘feel-good’ press releases from the Heartlands project team and CPR Regeneration, all dutifully churned out in the pages of the local press. This has shaped a discourse that echoes to words like ‘inspiring’, ‘inclusive’, ‘sustainable’, of a project which ‘celebrates and enriches understanding of the local culture, heritage and natural environment’. Who could possibly be against that? Say it often and loud enough and it’s difficult to resist the true believers.

Yet there’s one tiny problem. Well, actually there’s several and they’re not tiny. But the major contradiction in the Heartlands project is that in order to construct a ‘spectacular cultural playground’, a showcase for the ‘best of Cornish arts’ and a monument to Cornish mining heritage the scheme has to destroy aspects of that heritage.

The eleven hectares of land at issue will host the construction of a two hectare ‘green space’, an ‘urban park’ which will be at the centre of the project. Apologists for the scheme have made constant reference to the ‘derelict land’ the park will replace. Hold on a moment though. In reality this ‘derelict land’ is a) already an open space and b) green fields. So a ‘green space’ is being created to replace part of the existing green space!


Moreover, what the Heartlands project views as a ‘paddock … a large open green area … of low visual quality’ which ‘does little to contribute to the vision for Pool or to regeneration objectives’ others have viewed as a unique landscape. In 2002 a report by the then Cornwall Archaeology Unit concluded that this patch of ‘relict farmland’ was ‘the best, if not the only, recognisable historic mining landscape in this area not subject to major clearances, resurfacing, landscaping or redevelopment’. Now the plan is to obliterate this minescape heritage to make room for an urban park that respects local heritage. Some mistake there surely?

If one myth at the heart of the Heartlands project is that of ‘derelict land’ then another is that somehow this is a ‘community project’. The Heartlands website boasts how the project is ‘shaped by priorities identified by residents and partners’. Do these priorities include massive house building in the area over the next 15 years or so, central to the ‘regeneration objectives’. Indeed, some of the current green space is earmarked for blocks of housing – actually three of the eleven hectares.

True, there has been a series of ‘consultations’. But these have been carefully managed and the options on offer closely constrained to fit what CPR deems ‘possible’. And when we look at the companies involved in making money out of this project at the consultancy, design and planning stages we get a sense of where the main input is coming from.

For example, there’s Dronsfield Owens da Silva of London, Outside Studios design development of London and Stroud, Cazenove architects of London, Land Use Consultants – of London, Gardiner and Theobald, a global company based in … London, Buro Happold, an international company with main offices in Bath, LDA Design of London, Oxford, Peterborough and Exeter, Scott Wilson architects, a global company with HQ in London, Stride Treglown, which despite the name and offices in Truro, is registered in Bristol and has offices across the UK. The list goes on. The only companies I can discover based in or near Cornwall are Gamble Fearon Partners and the website designers Gendall Design of Falmouth.

Can the influence of these companies explain the curious presence of well known icons of Cornish culture such as a ‘piazza’ and a ‘village green’ in the plans? How exactly are they supposed to engender a ‘wider understanding and appreciation of Cornwall’s cultural heritage’?

What is really happening is that Cornwall’s heritage is being museumized and sanitized to add a frisson of domesticated ‘difference’ to an urban park familiar to suburban sensibilities. The area is being tarted up to make it safe for gentrification and in order to attract a better class of permanent resident from outside Cornwall and large numbers of temporary visitors from outside Pool (the carbon cost of which is what??)

Like many things in Cornwall there’s been little opportunity to debate all this. Indeed, an ominous authoritarian streak runs through the whole project, from the ‘strength through joy’ style, unremittingly cheerful website to the admonitions that this ‘playground’, once built, ‘couldn’t be more fun’. Enjoy! Or else. Or take the co-option of local school and college students into the projects. Wasn’t it the former peoples’ states of eastern Europe which relied on the massed ranks of indoctrinated well-drilled young people.

Behind the slightly menacing implication that if you’re not finding this ‘inspiring and visionary’ project the height of fun you must be a seriously misanthropic and grumpy old git lies a more threatening ‘there is no alternative’ bluster. As the 2007 Trevenson Road Implementation Plan that kick-started all this states ‘to bring about the social and economic changes aspired to in the Urban Framework Plan and Regional Spatial Strategy, Camborne Pool Redruth must embrace growth’. This is the stark reality of ‘regeneration’ Heartlands style when the glossy but empty verbiage about inclusion and sustainability slips. Is it any more than the same old ‘predict and provide’ reactive policies imposed on Cornwall by central agencies ever since the 1960s?

Puerile party slogans 2: Vote for change

While Labour is suddenly all of a tremor about rediscovering ‘fairness’ the Tories take the biscuit for coming up with the most outrageously unimaginative election slogan ever coined. We are urged to ‘vote for change’, which is both idiotic and says precisely nothing. It’s clearly influenced by the 2008 Obama slogan – ‘Change we can believe in’. This was also pretty daft but at least the qualifier made it less fatuous than a blanket ‘vote for change’.

What change? All change? If a real flu pandemic appears and kills off half the population do we welcome it for the inevitable ‘change’ it’ll bring in its wake? If a giant fireball crashes into Truro and instantaneously puts all those shoppers out of their misery and solves the growing congestion crisis at a stroke is this ‘change’ we should welcome? Or if the earth is invaded by swivel-eyed aliens from Planet Kkut who proceed to take power should we welcome this change with open arms?

Presumably even the swivel-eyed aliens who seem to populate large chunks of the Tory Party might baulk at these changes. So what ‘change’ do they want? If we listen intently for policies what do we hear? A lot of vague static but no clear message. Local Tory candidates leap from one community event to the next resolutely refusing to commit themselves to anything that resembles hard policies. Take Cornwall’s unsustainable growth. We know they’re against housing targets but what are they for? They won’t or can’t tell us what they think Cornwall’s ideal population capacity should be. And yet Tory councillors can be found quietly voting through one housing scheme after another.

Cameron and Osborne assure us they’ll move even further and faster to offer human sacrifices to the financial markets through swingeing spending cuts. But, like Labour, they won’t say from where. The only changes they seem really keen on amount to handing a lot of tax back to millionaires by cutting inheritance tax and repealing the meaningless hunting ban. Of course, ‘change’ could mean change back to something old rather than something new. Back to those days in the 19th century when Old Etonians and Oxbridge chaps ran the Tory party and the peasants knew their place.


The other meaning of ‘vote for change’ is that of vote for us because we’re not them. This ‘anything but them’ message has a bit more mileage given the present incumbents but it’s even more vacuous. It’s hardly saying much to base your appeal solely on ‘we’re not them so give us a chance’. It makes people think that the shiny Mr Cameron might have nothing at all to say after all but may be just another PR product. A bit like Tony Blair in fact. Which might explain the steady haemorrhage of Tory support in the polls over the past few weeks.

When confronted by a real reason for change, the Conservatives rapidly change the subject. Are they in favour of changing the voting system? Don’t make us laugh. First past the post is a system made in heaven. Do they favour an approach to the economy different from Labour’s cosying up to the rich, the City of London and the corporations? Will they end PFI scams? Certainly not. In that area the Tories look even less likely to change disastrous policies that have spectacularly failed. Are they intending to withdraw from Middle Eastern wars, thus saving £4.5 billion a year and reducing the need for cuts in childcare, libraries, schools and the rest? A silly thought. They want to spend even more on foreign wars.

So if you want changed (in the sense of new) government policies it would seem the last place to look is the Conservative Party. So, logically, is their slogan really calling on people to vote for the Greens, MK, UKIP or the BNP, anyone in fact with some different policies?

In any case, isn’t it odd that politicians (and especially the Tories) apparently assume that the punters want ‘change’. Whoever we vote for, we’re in for change whether we ask for it or not. For instance, shouldn’t the Tory slogan more properly read ‘Vote for Climate Change’ as none of the parliamentary parties have much of a clue and even less enthusiasm about what to do about global warming. Indeed, many Tories now appear to be climate change deniers.

Or should it read ‘Vote for capitalist change’. Every day capitalism engages in what some economists have termed ‘creative destruction’, chewing up jobs, communities and the environment in the pursuit of the next profitable venture. More properly termed ‘destructive destruction’, in reality this is the only kind of ‘change’ on offer from the Tories. Meanwhile, the coming election will continue to focus on which party leader looks best on TV or has the most believable wife. The real causes and impacts of ‘change’ will remain blissfully unexplored and off the agenda.

Puerile party slogans 1: A future fair for all

The London parties have been proudly wheeling out their one-liners in advance of the coming election. They’re apparently assuming that plastering banal slogans all over the place between now and May will convince Joe and Jill Public to stampede to the polls. First in the field among the centre-right parties was Labour with its ‘A future fair for all’.

Is Labour displaying a new-found post-crisis (whatever happened to ‘no more boom and bust’?) radicalism by adopting a curious and excitingly different word order? My first confused thought was that we’d all be entitled, indeed forced, to ride the Big Wheel regularly. Or perhaps there’ll be targets for the number of times we get behind the wheel of a dodgem car or league tables will be instituted to measure our access to fairs.

What they mean is a fair future for all. Fair future? So after 13 years of Labour aren’t we already basking in the sepia glow of ‘fairness’? Sadly, it appears not. The Hills report showed for example that inequality has peaked under Labour.

Where exactly was fairness last year in the tawdry revelations that Labour MPs were just as corrupted by commercialism as the Tories and discovered with their snouts just as deep in the trough. Perhaps fairness lay in the fact they all had an equal chance of ripping us off. What’s fair about some token Labour MPs now being prosecuted while others like Hazel Blears, though caught red handed trying to walk away with £thousands of unpaid capital gains tax, can walk free and even have the gall to stand for re-election? If I went and nicked a few thousand quids worth of gear from Comet but then turned up a few months later with my chequebook could I also avoid prosecution?

Does fairness extend to asylum seekers where Labour has tried to outflank the Tories and the BNP? Or what about the children of Falluja, suffering hideously from the effects of white phosphorus and other great western munitions technology? Has there been an outcry of ‘unfair’ from Labour about that? Was the Iraq war ‘fair’? Was the Israeli action in the Gaza strip ‘fair’?

And then there’s our ‘fair’ economy. Fairness seems to be defined as making the majority pay for the failures of the banking sector through declining public services and pay freezes. What’s ‘fair’ about a half-baked and economically illiterate Labour pledge to reduce the public debt by a half in four years? Especially as one embarrassing fact that the media can’t be bothered to mention is that levels of public debt aren’t actually that high by historic standards. Debt was higher from the late 1800s to the 1870s and again from the 1930s to the 1970s.

So why has the Labour Party fallen for the clarion cries from the Tories and their socially irresponsible mates who wish to avoid paying tax? Why has Labour rushed to jump through the hoops held by the financial markets? Shouldn’t ‘fairness’ involve making those who gained most from the boom years pay the most in the bust years? Shouldn’t it include arguing loudly for radical policies of global regulation of markets to ensure that ordinary folk don’t pay for the gamblers’ greed again? Doesn’t ‘fairness’ imply doing something about the bankers’ bonus culture instead of just talking about it?

Perhaps Labour should revise its slogan to read ‘A future bankers free for all’.

And if Labour are suddenly so keen on ‘fairness’ why have they done bugger all about a transparently unfair voting system? Is 13 years not enough time to get their heads around that one?

What’s fair about forcing us in Cornwall to accept a population rise of around 700,000 between now and 2099? And with no democratic debate either. Labour people seem to have difficulty in understanding or commenting on this one. Let’s make it nice and simple. It means that whereas now we have this number …

in 2099 we will have this number

Is this fair? Shouldn’t the slogan better be phrased in Cornwall as ‘A future full of all’?

And why do the Welsh or travelling tinkers get recognised under the race relations legislation as national minorities but we’re still ignored? After 13 years? And what’s ‘fair’ about deliberately denying the Cornish a census ethnicity tick box? Or ignoring the Cornish case for a regional assembly despite the fact that Cornwall was the only region that actually expressed a measure of public support for an assembly? What was ‘fair’ about emasculating and centralizing our local government in the name of cost savings?

Shouldn’t the slogan be therefore re-written as ‘A future fair for all but the Cornish’

I’d better stop before my blood pressure reaches dangerously high levels. Interesting however that Labour’s brilliant slogan appeared four days after that of the Green Party. The Greens’ slogan is ‘Fair is worth fighting for’. At least the Green Party correctly imply that in reality we shouldn’t expect to leave the building of a fair and decent society to the likes of the Labour Party. We have to be vigilant. We have to be critical. And we’ll have to struggle for it.

Hallenbeagle and the story the West Briton doesn’t tell us

This week we’ve been informed that the Plymouth Western Morning News will be henceforth partly edited from Bristol (will we notice the difference?) Meanwhile the local weeklies are now little more than stitched together press releases. Take the front page ‘story’ in last week’s Camborne, Redruth and Hayle edition of the West Briton under the tag ‘Julian Ridge’. This was optimistically headed ‘Jobs boom promised as £4m in Euro cash is pledged’. Yet of the 15 paragraphs all but three and a bit were plagiarised straight from a press release kindly provided by the Convergence Partnership for Cornwall, the gatekeepers for EU funding. Not even the order of the release was altered.

The story told us that the ‘Cornwall Business Park’ near Scorrier is being given £8m (actually £7.8), half of which is from the EU’s Regional Development Fund and the other half matched by developers Hallenbeagle Estates. This will pay for the roads and infrastructure for a 33 acre business park, split into two parts. One part will comprise 23 industrial plots. The other will be a ‘bio-park’, in other words contain a commercial waste transfer station.

But this lazy (or more likely overworked) journalism fails to reveal a number of things about this interesting scheme.

First, it doesn’t inform us that it is merely the latest in a whole series of attempts to build on this patch of land. Way back in the 1980s an ambitious but rather ludicrous scheme to build an airport and a hotel surfaced but quickly died a death. In 2001 the land was proposed as the site of a ‘massive food processing park’, creating 300 jobs. By this time it was inevitably a ‘sustainable development’, despite relying on major transport movements.

Nothing came of that either. But in 2007 it re-emerged as the Cornwall Business Park. This time supported by the RDA the park was aimed at small and medium businesses and the number of promised jobs had miraculously doubled to 600. However, as Cornwall’s unemployment rate fell below that of the UK and as the ‘knowledge economy’ became all the fashion, building more and more traditional industrial estates began to look a bit unnecessary and old hat.

Yet the park has now re-emerged revitalised and full of energy. This time the press release quantifies no actual number of jobs to be created. The ‘jobs boom’ in the headline appears to exist only in the fevered imagination of a West Briton sub-editor. But what the press release does tell us is that the renewed energy is coming from the proposed use of half the site for a ‘fully integrated sustainable [of course] solution to the problem of the disposal and management of Cornwall’s commercial waste’. Furthermore, it ‘can accommodate Cornwall Council’s requirement for the household waste transfer and recycling facility previously proposed for a site in the centre of Scorrier’. This is presumably the ill-considered plan withdrawn in March 2009. In other words, it moves the ‘waste transfer facility’ a few hundred metres to the east.

Second, Hallenbeagle Estates rather airily describes this as ‘previously developed land’ and talks of a derelict site, a place of ‘past metalliferous and associated activities’. This aptly describes some of the 33 acres as long as we realise that the previous ‘development’ tends to be more than 130 years ago. The majority is actually now grassed and re-vegetated, mining having stopped long ago. This is not your typical brownfield site; most of it is green fields.



Indeed, in 2001 there was considerable opposition to the food processing park on the grounds that it would be built on ‘extensive areas of lowland heath, a rare and threatened habitat, as well as densely vegetated hedgerows and mature oak and hawthorn trees … the area is also a haven for wildlife, including bats, badgers and hawks.’

Third, the pathetic West Briton report abjectly fails to put this into any sort of context. Despite the impression in the press release the area is well to the east of the Camborne-Redruth built-up area. An industrial site/waste incinerator here will extend that area a bit further eastwards. With the built up area of Truro extending westwards from Threemilestone, this is part of that inexorable process of eventually creating a continuous urban/industrial corridor along the A390/main railway line.

But why do we need more industrial land and more ‘waste transfer facilities’ in the first place? Because we’re stumbling ever onwards to the brave new world of 2099 when 1.2 or 1.3 million will be proud to be Cornish. It goes without saying that the West Briton is entirely silent on this particular aspect.

Finally, the major landlord of this site is Tregothnan Estates, or Lord Falmouth. It’s unclear exactly what the relationship is between Tregothnan Estates and Hallenbeagle Estates. Now, I’ve nothing against retaining our landed class as a decorative and ceremonial adjunct to modern life. As living heritage a few protected specimens pottering around their country estates could do a grand job, reminding us of our class-ridden past.

Mind you, continuing to allow people to make decisions in the upper house of our legislature based solely on who their fathers were might seem to be taking things a little too far. No other European country needs this quaint custom. Isn't it about time we had a proper reforming government that swept away such bizarre anachronisms?

But if it’s the democratic wish that a minority should still own the majority of our land then I can live with that. But what does irk a little is when the actions of the landed class result in the rest of us paying the price (in reduced amenities, degraded environmental resources, increased congestion and the like) of maintaining their privileged privacy. Strangely enough, the parish of St Michael Penkevil, home to Lord Falmouth, is a rare example of a Cornish parish where a lot fewer people live now than in 1960. While the Tregothnan estate avoids the consequences of mass population growth they're set to benefit from its continuance elsewhere.

Now what did that Tory chappie say? ‘We’re all in it together’? Fair’s fair then. So why don’t we build a proportion of those extra 69,000 houses in St Michael Penkevil, within easy commuting reach of Truro. Of course, we’d need to build a bridge over the river to Malpas and widen the road. But once that was done it would then ease the transport of the lorries to a ‘waste transfer and recycling facility’ that, because of the relatively low density of population, would have much less impact across the Fal than on the edge of Camborne-Redruth.

Penzance harbour – second time lucky

You may read this here first. (No, you won’t. I’ve just been beaten to it by A Lanson Boy who’s too damn quick on the blog). As I predicted in January, having failed to get its new Scillonian ferry terminal past its own Strategic Planning Committee at the first go Cornwall Council planners have done it the second time around. Arms have been twisted, pressure exerted, dire threats issued and – sighs of relief all round at County Hall and SWRDA HQ in Bristol, in the boardrooms of Halcrow and Birse Coastal and at the Duchy of Cornwall bunker - those pesky elected representatives have come into line.

The vote in the end was fairly comfortable with a two to one majority in favour of proceeding with the Harbour scheme. Fourteen councillors voted in favour and seven against. Interesting to see how the voting panned out. All eight Tories (Cllrs Ellis, Flashman, Hatton, Jenkin, Mann, Pugh, Rushworth and Stoneman) voted for. The Independents split four in favour (Goninan, May, Wallis and Wood) and one (Plummer) against. Two Lib Dems (Bull and George) voted for and the other five were opposed (Lewarne, Nolan, Pascoe, Pearce and Glenton Brown), while the sole MK councillor at the meeting (Cullimore) also voted against.

So what lessons does this hold for the health of our democracy? First, it reminds us that when a democratic decision comes up against powerful vested interests – in this case two global corporations and the Duchy of Cornwall – heaven and earth will be moved to get it overturned.

Second, the politics of fear yet again seem to have triumphed over constructive discussion and debate over the future. Whatever the rights or wrongs of the scheme, the ‘debate’ since the initial rejection has descended into the gutter. Both sides have been guilty of personal abuse and scaremongering although it does seem to an outsider that those belatedly in favour of the scheme haven’t bothered to rest their case too much on the facts.

Instead, they’ve taken their lead from Councillor Hicks and blustered away, portraying any refusal to agree this scheme as akin to the destruction of Penzance and all those unfortunate enough to live in it. According to this apocalyptic view rejection would have triggered the transformation of the town, once a happy contented place, into a festering, crumbling wasteland. As shops closed and businesses left in droves the townsfolk would soon be reduced to ragged and hungry despair. With the inevitable collapse of all means of subsistence within a ten mile radius of Mounts Bay they would have been forced to leave their homes with just a few pathetic belongings to wander the roads and lanes of Cornwall begging for a crust from places like Camborne and Redruth. With this awful prospect facing them no wonder they plumped for bringing the builders in.

It seems that any chance of calm, reasoned debate or, dare I mention the forbidden word, compromise, was ruled out by a combination of central government deadlines, Council (both this one and the last) dithering, and commercial interests who are set to make considerable money out of the scheme.

Those councillors bounced into overturning the decision, especially those who changed their minds under pressure, need to answer one or two still unanswered questions, such as

* why wasn’t more effort put into public consultation while vast sums of money were being spent working this scheme up?

* why was the appraisal of the alternative scheme carried out by Halcrow, one of the partners in the original scheme?

* what, if any, links does this scheme have with longer term plans for tarting up the sea front at Penzance and who is likely to benefit financially from those schemes?

Duchy profits from concreting Cornwall

Regular readers of this blog (if there are any) should be aware by now that levels of hypocrisy among centrist politicians and ‘opinion-formers’ in Cornwall are high, to say the least. But the outright award for the prince of hypocrisy must go not to a politician but to a real prince – Charles ‘Windsor’, Duke of Cornwall (61).

In 2008 in a speech to some rapt Scottish serfs the Duke said ‘we owe it to our children and grandchildren not to wreck [this small island] through short termism and fashionable obsessions’. Admirable sentiments. However, short term and fashionable obsessions do not appear to include the time-honoured and traditional ability to make a lot of dosh. In practice, the Duchy’s actions render the Duke’s words into meaningless and hollow platitudes.

In Newquay the Duchy is doggedly determined to play its full part in the wrecking of Cornwall by allowing up to 850 houses to be built on their land, supposedly a part of the Newquay Growth Area to the east of the town. Well, not allowing exactly. More promoting. Accused of making money out of concreting Cornwall the Duchy holds up its hands and pleads that it’s just providing land for houses that central and local government wants. It’s a case of ‘not me, guv’ when found red-handed at the controls of the JCB with the engine running.

As a money-making organisation the Duchy is never slow to sniff out an opportunity to make money. It cannily bought and sold £30 million worth of land and property in 2008-09, selling agricultural land at a time of high land prices and depressed house prices. Like some greedy Labour MPs, although unlike them ‘legally’, the Duchy of Cornwall pays no capital gains tax. Indeed, on its income of £16.3 million in 2008-09 from its 55,000 or so hectares worth £647 million, it paid just under 20% tax. Compare that with your own pay slip. The tax and NI paid on mine comes to over 25%. And unlike most property firms the Duchy’s income rose last year by 7% in the midst of a recession in the housing market.

In 2007 the Duchy gratefully jumped onto the bandwagon kindly provided by the Regional Spatial Strategy and published plans to build up to 850 houses at Newquay on green fields. No matter that in the same year the Government’s own Planning Inspectorate ruled that Restormel Council’s Newquay Growth Area was an example of an ‘unsound strategy’. No matter either that it turns out that 200 of the proposed houses at Quintrell Downs are actually wholly outside the Growth Area.

Such minor details won’t matter when it comes to giving away planning permission. Inevitably, Restormel gave the plans the green light in January 2009, despite protests from hundreds of local residents. Cllr Redman (Tory), in that blinkered approach usually more associated with the Labour Party, focused entirely on the ‘affordable housing’, conveniently blind to all the rest. However, Cllr Brown (Lib Dem) gave the game away. These houses would, he claimed, be ‘vital for a great many families coming to this town’. The local Lib Dem MP, Dan Rogerson, had also welcomed the concreting over of Cornish fields back in 2007 – ‘this is an excellent initiative which will bring real benefits to Newquay’.

The Duchy had claimed that a ‘significant proportion’ of the houses would be ‘classed as affordable’. Yet ‘significant’ transpires to mean that only 30% of the houses of the first phase will be affordable and even then house prices have all been set at the upper end of the range.

The Duchy’s rapacious drive for profits under a cloak of vacuous pontificating about championing ‘sustainable development’ is not confined to Cornwall. Up near Bath it plans to build an urban extension on its land at Newton St Loe, prompting the local curate to complain in no uncertain terms that ‘the Duchy is clearly enthusiastic about the possibility of a huge financial gain for themselves’. This plan involves up to 2,000 houses, destroying land currently farmed sustainably and includes part of a World Heritage Site. Can this be the same Duke who ‘cares deeply about rural communities’?

Meanwhile, back at Newquay, it’s revealed that the housing plans at Tregunnel Hill would involve wholesale destruction of the existing Cornish hedges. The Cornwall Wildlife Trust and other environmentalists protested vigorously against the original plans - from a Duke who had said that it was ‘wrong and immoral … not to consider ‘those other species who share the planet with us’. Stamping out wildlife habitats is plainly not as immoral as the failure to make shedloads of cash. The Wildlife Trust was bought off rather easily by promises of some compensation and the rebuilding of some of the hedges (so why knock them down in the first place?) It may not be a coincidence that one of the trustees of the Wildlife Trust is none other than the Duke of Cornwall!

The Duke and his Duchy are among those powerful individuals and organisations making money out of the hyper-‘development’ of Cornwall, enthusiastically doing their bit for unsustainability by stuffing more and more people into Cornwall – and in the process stuffing the Cornish people. An unholy alliance of Labour Government, Tory Council and Lib Dem councillors all work hard to divest themselves of any critical faculties they may have once possessed in a charitable effort to channel profits into the pockets of a feudal landlord. Focusing on the mote of less carbon costly housing, this same landlord is oddly extremely reticent about the huge beam of 69,000 more houses to be built in Cornwall by 2026. Neither do we recollect ever hearing him sound off at the prospect of 1.2/1.3 million people living in Cornwall by 2099.

And the Duchy’s greed doesn’t end at Newquay. Only this last week local councillors in Truro had a shock when they heard that Cornwall Council officers had been quietly working away behind the scenes with the Duchy to develop a park and ride facility to the east of Truro. The only slight problem with this is that it’s on previously undeveloped land at the junction of the A39 from Carland Cross and the A390 from St Austell. Apparently this rural setting is the ‘most appropriate site’, according to the planners.

But nothing comes for free. In return the Duchy wants to concrete over another useless swathe of Cornish countryside by building a supermarket and an undisclosed number of houses in these green fields. These will no doubt be highly sustainable of course and will inevitably be welcomed by various politicians as an ‘excellent initiative’.

If the Duke were genuinely concerned to promote a sustainable Cornwall and combat global warming then why doesn’t he use his considerably over-inflated influence to condemn the unsustainable ‘development’ of Cornwall? Silly question really. He won’t because he’s one of those who make large amounts of money from the suburbanisation of places where he himself is never ever going to live.

Let’s face it. The Duke, like all his predecessors, is part of our problem and not the solution. So which candidates for political office in our benighted democracy are going to call loudly for the modernization of Cornwall and demand the long overdue abolition of this feudal relic?

Election nears: mendacity rears

As we get within two months of the election expect the general level of disinformation and downright lying from the establishment parties to go through the roof as they desperately and futilely try to prove they’re not the same as each other. Take these two examples.

In Newquay and St Austell Steve Gilbert’s recent election leaflet (printed in Plymouth) attacked the Tories on Cornwall Council for playing a game of ‘smoke and mirrors’ with the St Dennis incinerator. He loudly called on the Tories to ‘make the facts public’. Well, let’s start with the following two facts, Steve.

First, MK’s Dick Cole moved an amendment at Cornwall Council’s Waste Development Advisory Panel of January 26 to ‘properly explore the option of termination’ of this disastrous and costly PFI contract with waste giant SITA. He was supported by just one Lib Dem councillor (Jackie Bull of Bugle in the clay country). Two of the three other Lib Dem councillors present at the meeting - councillors Donnithorne (St Agnes), George (Liskeard South) and Riches (Saltash St Stephens) - joined with the Tories to vote down this amendment.

Second, this inefficient 30 year contract which we now seem unable to get out of – strange that the private sector is able to walk away from these deals whenever it suits them – was ‘negotiated’ in 2006 by the previous Cornwall County Council. And that Council was then run by the Liberal Democrats, who have a proud record of supporting incinerators against the wishes of local people.

Turn to the west and we find Tory George Eustice in Camborne-Redruth claiming again in his leaflet (printed in Weymouth) that ‘Conservative led Cornwall Council’ has ‘blocked attempts to force the building of 11,000 houses’ in the district. Eustice, who has regularly and increasingly tediously claimed this target is ‘crackpot’ says the Tories will abolish such central housing targets.

Yet, despite several requests, neither Eustice, nor any other Tory candidate or councillor, is able or willing to suggest exactly how many houses they feel should be built in Camborne-Redruth. In fact, the ‘Conservative-led Cornwall Council’ has been planning for two scenarios. Either 11,100 or 9,400 houses. (And its other actions seem hardly designed to reduce these unsustainable targets.) We have yet to hear the evasive Mr Eustice condemn the 9,400 figure, which entails a growth rate well above the 2,000 to 3,000 required for local needs. It’s even above the 6,000 houses that Lib Dem Julia Goldsworthy is on record as supporting, a position roundly condemned by former UKIP member Eustice.

In truth, what happened at the Planning Policy Advisory Panel meeting of January 29 was that work on the two scenarios was ‘deferred’ until there was more clarity. The 11,100 house target remains a possibility. In the meantime, councillors from Camborne-Redruth were urged to meet and discuss a more appropriate build rate. And which Tory moved this resolution? Surprise, surprise – it wasn’t a Tory at all but MK’s Dick Cole. And the seconder? Independent councillor Mike Clayton.

A pattern seems to be emerging.

The imbecilic and the incoherent: Radio Yokel meets UKIP

So the BBC starts to cave in to the incessant demands from Rupert Murdoch and his Tory chums and reluctantly begins to hive off chunks of its empire. The Beeb is setting out on the road to becoming a residual ‘public service broadcaster’, dealing only with the bits that don’t make profits. In which case pressure to reduce the licence fee will become irresistible and a downward spiral will set in as quality programming becomes a nostalgic historical memory.

No worry. The market, in the shape of the oligopolist News Media corporation, will pick up the slack. In the name of ‘choice’ the broadcast media will be dumbed down even more rapidly into a bland pottage of trivia and sound bites designed to ensure the world remains safe for corporations and conservatism alike.

I have a suggestion for the beleaguered Beeb however. If it’s looking to save some money while not having any tangible effect on its audience, indeed possibly increasing the fund of human happiness, then why not scrap Radio Cornwall. Did we once naively believe that Radio Cornwall could potentially become a sounding board for a distinctive Cornish perspective on the world, a station that would provide that vibrant debate which our Cornish ‘democracy’ lacks? The truth is that Radio Cornwall long ago degenerated into Radio Yokel.

Take its reporting of UKIP’s ‘Cornwall Area launch’ last week (24th Feb) at the majestic venue of Tresillian Village Hall. This occurred at the odd time of 4pm, presumably early enough for the massed ranks of UKIP supporters to drive home before it got too dark with plenty of time to down a nice cup of cocoa before bedtime.

Radio Yokel’s report of this major political event came immediately after James Churchfield concluded a fawning interview with Martin Clunes of Doc Martin ‘fame’. The imperialist Clunes made the stunningly incisive remark that while he came to Cornwall to work ‘everyone else comes here on holiday’. Everyone? This idiotic statement was unsurprisingly left unchallenged by Churchfield, a man whose style would make Morpheus seem hyperactive. Distil the essence of this man into sedatives and the NHS could save millions. This was followed by some teeth-jarring woman - I didn’t catch the name as I was throwing up at the time – enthusing over Clune’s ‘lovely voice’.

Dragging their handful of seriously drugged listeners back from their sleep, these two witless pratterers thankfully gave way to a report from Tamsin Melville, hot from all the excitement at Tresillian. There, what the Western Morning News described as a ‘crowd’ was later revealed in the same newspaper report to amount to just 30 people. According to UKIP the event was ‘well attended’.

The star turn at the launch was their MEP Trevor Colman (70), a Cornishman originally from St Breward, but now one of Farage’s merry band scourging the arch-Satan and frighteningly evil Van Rompey in the Euro-Parliament. Colman spoke of the people ‘down here … losing freedom and the right to govern themselves’. Fair point, but sadly, there was no offer of a Cornish Assembly on the table. Regional government is, of course, in the Alice in Wonderland UKIP universe, a dastardly EU plot.

Mind you, in the UKIP world, everything is a dastardly EU plot. What Colman offered instead was a policy to deal with ‘uncontrolled immigration into this country’ and the ‘building of houses for these people’ in Cornwall. Now which country and which people would that be then? ‘These people’ is code for foreign immigrants, probably of a different skin colour from the average Ukipper.

The UKIP policy of a five year halt to immigration into ‘this country’ will in some mysterious way solve the problem of unsustainable immigration into Cornwall and the local housing crisis. Radio Yokel’s Tamsin did mildly interject at this point. Cornwall, she said, was ‘not a hotbed of immigration’. Well, that depends on your perspective, Tamsin. Unfazed, Colman asserted that the recipients of all the extra housing were from ‘out of county', strongly implying that they would be ‘these people’.

In the real world, the problems caused by unsustainable housing and population growth in Cornwall are clearly little to do with immigration into the UK. But UKIP seem unable to make this distinction. Harry Blakely (65), candidate for Truro and Falmouth and whistleblower of the imminent imposition of Sharia Law in Hayle, is quoted in the UKIP Cornwall News of February as saying that we are ‘overdeveloping our green fields to accommodate EU immigration policy’.

Apparently, it’s EU policy to dump thousands of white flighters from the south-east and midlands of England on Cornwall, thereby increasing the potential voting fodder for parties with simplistic racist messages. Why precisely the EU should do this remains unclear. The absence of any critical interrogation of UKIP’s underlying racist English nationalism by Radio Yokel (or the Western Morning News or the local Tory weeklies) is a standing disgrace for the honourable (?) profession of journalism.

Maybe there are UKIP members dismayed by the suburbanisation of Cornwall. Maybe they harbour a suspicion that this isn’t all to do with EU immigration policy but has some connection with the way strategic planning and the housing market operate in Britain. If such people exist my advice is leave UKIP asap and join a party genuinely committed to standing up against the destruction of Cornwall.

UKIP, a quarter of whose MEPs in the last Euro-Parliament either left or were convicted of benefit fraud, expenses fraud or false accounting seems pretty indistinguishable from the corrupt Westminster threesome. A party that thinks people in Wales and Cornwall spoke or speak ‘Gaelic’ is not exactly blessed with a great understanding of the Celtic peripheries. A party that continues to spell Camborne ‘Cambourne’ on its website would seem to be labouring under a few problems.

Fundamentally, it seems that UKIP, in addition to being full of paranoid obsessives, is unable to differentiate between immigration into the UK and immigration into Cornwall. Any claims that it is somehow protecting Cornwall rather than, like its former member George Eustice, jumping on a bandwagon, must be swallowed with a very large health warning.