Whatever happened to the Green Cornwall policy?

The Tories and their Lib Dem chums are doing their best to make Cornwall Council’s preposterous pretensions to a Green Cornwall policy an even more ludicrous charade than it is.

Last year Cornwall Council was predicting Cornwall would be leading a solar power revolution whille planning a solar energy farm next to Newquay airport. (Although the latter may have been driven more by their increasingly desperate need to find something to keep that deeply ungreen project alive.)

Now we hear that the Government is to slash its subsidy for solar power by a half. This is believed to be the same bunch that promised to be

the greenest government ever.

Cornwall and tourism: the myth exploded

Tourism thrives on myth and mystery. How to find credible data on the role of tourism is a mystery. Instead, we have a myth of its importance, cunningly propagated by tourist bodies themselves. What happens is that lobbyists such as Visit Britain pay some consultant to come up with a back of the fag packet prediction based on wishful thinking and guess work. This is then churned out to a gullible public by an uncritical local media.

But rather than the usual hype designed to assure us how tourism is so vital to our very existence we now have a more reliable calculation by the Office of National Statistics. They’ve measured the importance of tourism expenditure in regional economies. So how important is tourism to Cornwall? By the amount of attention it receives it must be at least 50% surely. After all, everyone tells us that there’s nothing else going on in Cornwall but tourism and without the tourist pound we’d all starve.

Surprise, surprise. The ONS discover that tourism contributes a mere 11% of spending in Cornwall. So the next time some know-it-all tells you that we are dependent on tourism in Cornwall, remind them that the catering trade amounts to just over a tenth of the Cornish economy.

Not that this stopped the Western Morning News and Foxhunters Friend headlining this news as

The old ones are the best ones, I suppose.

Cornwall Council avoids difficult decisions.

Last year, the Leader of Cornwall Council, Tory Alec Robertson, was relishing government cuts of 30% in four years. With utter sangfroid and mind-boggling complacency, he said

we face some difficult decisions

A year on and we can see this was a regrettable slip. What Robertson actually meant was

we will have to avoid making difficult decisions

The Tories and Independents on the Council seem to have learnt nothing from their hapless predecessors. For example, did they, as a matter of urgency, renegotiate the catastrophic waste contract with SITA – the result, it must be remembered, of Lib Dem incompetence and Labour’s enthusiasm for PFI schemes scams?

Well as a matter of fact, no. Instead they made a massive U-turn with Robertson compounding that by secretly lobbying Coalition Minister Pickles against his own Council’s policy. As a result they’re facing a bill of up to £6 million every six months. According to their own calculations this is the equivalent of

providing 400,000 hours of care for vulnerable people living at home, funding all the Council’s community leisure facilities, keeping the streets of Cornwall clean for twelve months or repairing potholes and treating roads during the coming winter months. It would also be the equivalent of increasing council tax by 5%.

But of course, they’re blaming the people of St Dennis for this rather than their own dithering.

In any case, other facile equations can be made. For instance every year the Council makes the

difficult decision

to go on spending at least £3.5 million on keeping Newquay airport open – despite plummeting passenger numbers.

That's the equivalent of

providing 250,000 hours of care for vulnerable people living at home, funding the majority of the Council’s community leisure facilities, keeping the streets of Cornwall clean for seven months or repairing potholes and treating roads during the coming winter months. It would also be the equivalent of increasing council tax by 3.5%.

Or it would keep the half of Cornwall’s public toilets that the Council have decided to close open for another three years. The decision to close those toilets was presumably

a difficult decision

Go to our neighbours in France and you’ll find that every tiny village seems to have its public toilet. How can they afford it and we can’t? And how come we refuse to learn from their example?

Our council is stuffed with unimaginative philistines whose only morality involves a £ sign. They can apparently make the difficult decision to close toilets, or slash the bus services, or trash the budgets of libraries, museums and other guardians of our cultural heritage. But they’re incapable of making the not so difficult decision to stop funding Newquay airport, which in effect subsidises the better off and second home owners. They say the reason is that

we would have to pay back millions of pounds worth of funding to Europe

So because of this millions more pounds are merrily thrown into the black hole of Newquay airport even though it’s all wasted.

This really is the logic of the madhouse. It was surely not beyond the wit of the Council to take the difficult decision to approach the EU a year ago when it was obvious they and we might just as well be building bonfires of pound notes (and euros). They could have admitted then that continued EU funding for the airport was a complete waste of taxpayers money and tried to negotiate a moratorium on the return of existing grant payments.

They could have argued that they’d suddenly seen the light and adopted a Green Cornwall policy. Instead of using public money to gratuitously increase carbon emissions they could have taken the high moral ground and offered to help the EU’s increasingly slim chances of hitting its carbon emission targets by scrapping this particular subsidy for the wealthy.

But no. Closing Newquay airport, like Plan B for Cornwall’s waste, are clearly

difficult decisions

the Council prefers to ignore.

Mervyn King’s cruel inflation joke

When inflation hit 5.2% this month Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, said it was at its peak and blithely promised us that it would

fall sharply early next year

Is this the same Mervyn King who last November predicted that inflation would

peak at 3.5% in the first part of 2011 before falling back below 2% in 2012

And it can’t possibly be the person masquerading as Mervyn King who confidently assured everyone in January 2010 that the relatively high inflation rate (then 2.9%) was

temporary and within a year would be back to 2%

These ‘predictions’ seem to be little more than wild guesses. And not very good ones. My cat could do better.

King

Cat

Mervyn King earns between £375,000 and £400,000 a year and is set to take home a pension of around £200,000 a year when he leaves the Bank of England in 2013. 

My cat earns nothing.

Who watches the watchers? Cornwall Council flouts law

Radio Yokel blogger Graham Smith asks an excellent question. Why did Cornwall Council, acting like a cowboy developer, jump the gun at St Dennis and start building an access road to the planned incinerator several weeks before an appeal to the High Court gave its ruling?

This was after already spending £1 million helping its corporate friends in SITA to appeal. And then the Court overturned the government’s decision to give planning permission to the incinerator. So will the Council restore this land to its former state? Is it going to plant some trees to replace those that were cut down, despite having tree preservation orders I hear, in the rush to build?

Furthermore, as it is illegal to carry out works in the absence of formal approval will Cornwall Council be prosecuted? But as Graham Smith points out, they’re the prosecuting authority!

There’s a bigger issue here. The imposition against local wishes of a unitary authority results in Cornwall Council – an active ‘partner’ with various upcountry developers, landlords and supermarkets in its ‘growth’ projects across Cornwall – making planning applications. To itself!

Surely this can’t be right. At worst it’s deeply corrupt. For example, in the old days of two-tier local government at least decisions on such projects as the ‘eastern district centre’ at Truro would have been taken by the District Council with some semblance of neutrality and objectivity.

Let's face it. Cornwall Council is out of control. It rampages across the land, unrepentantly and stubbornly throwing good money after bad, refusing to recognise in this case its disastrous PFI contract needed serious redrafting or tearing up. It’s made a complete hash of the incinerator fiasco. But there’s a bigger issue here. It’s now developer, judge and jury all rolled into one. And somehow we find ourselves lumbered with what is effectively a one-party ‘hyper-growth state’.

Cornish terrify Guardian

The English Guardian has been undergoing one of its periodic bouts of agonising over the future of the cherished Union. With Scotland gearing up for an independence referendum and more powers slowly percolating across Offa’s Dyke to Wales it looks like the writing is finally on the wall for the British Jacobin state.

The choice for the English is obvious. Either embrace a properly federal UK and grant the maximum autonomy and equality to the non-English nations of these islands. Or ungraciously and stubbornly resist devolution into the last ditch and beyond.

Adopt the latter and they’ll wake up to find themselves living in a bitter, spiteful and vitriolic Little England led by the likes of Nigel Farage and with a majority population of rabid racists and xenophobic Europhobes living on the fading glories of their past. A population addicted to its daily fix of bile from the Daily Mail.

Unfortunately at the moment it looks as if they’re blindly stumbling into choosing the latter. Nothing better indicates this than the fear and confusion of the English metropolitan classes when they are confronted with the fact that there is a fifth nation in the British Isles – the Cornish.

The Guardian came up with a survey of national identities in Britain. Go to the Guardian and express your national identity. Except that if you’re Cornish you’re not allowed to. The other nations of Britain have the right. We don’t.

Instead, we are consigned by the erudite liberals of the Guardian to the category of ‘others’. How inclusive of them! As a result its map of identities has a large swathe of ‘others’ inhabiting the far south west tip of Britain. This embarrassing blot on their pretty map was memorably described by the Guardian on Wednesday as ‘Cornwall: a strong turnout for the ‘others’’.

More than a strong turnout surely. In fact 78% of respondents in Cornwall described themselves as ‘other’ and only 20% as British or English. Across the UK 58% described themselves as British or English and just 8% opted for ‘other’. In Orkney and Shetland the Guardian wrote ‘Could those ‘others’ view themselves more as Nordic than Scots’? In fact, in Orkney & Shetland only 10% described themselves as ‘others’. In Cornwall it was 78%.

The only other mention the Cornish got in the hard copy Guardian was in a discussion of ‘English devolution’. Where we were described as ‘truculent’. According to my Thesaurus truculent means ill-disposed, evil-minded, spiteful, surly, treacherous, untamed, barbarous, malevolent among other glowing attributes.

What sins could we possibly have committed in the past to be singled out for this treatment? Or is it just the sin of being the smallest nation in terms of numbers and easy meat for the English playground bully as it lashes out in furiously and ignorantly?

As English self-loathing and confusion mounts and as the Scots and Welsh escape their wrath we’ll have to expect a lot more of this nonsense. Such is the penalty of being England’s first and last colony.

Postscript: The Guardian did deign to mention the Cornish in its online guise - see here.

Cornwall Councillors performance: the 2009-11 league tables

Metrics are the new black of the managerial-political class. We’re offered league tables on such things as school performance, hospital operations, university research and the poor unfortunates who work in those institutions are forced to waste a lot of their time playing the metrics game. So it’s only fair that backbench councillors’ performances (Cabinet members are excluded) also come under the spotlight.

And here they are for Cornwall Council for the last two years. I won’t repeat the methodology – for that see here and here. But I will repeat that this comes with a hefty health warning. A councillor could attend every meeting possible but then spout asinine rubbish while there. On the other hand a councillor might rarely bless the council chamber with their presence but be busy behind the scenes.

For example they could be checking how many meetings council officers have been having with developers. Or they might be totting up the waste of taxpayers’ money spent on subsidising the great white elephant of Newquay airport while the axe is taken to Cornwall’s social care, libraries and heritage. Or they may be exhausted after tirelessly exposing the contradictions behind the council’s Green Cornwall policy and challenging the high population growth being forced on it by a small cabal of senior officers and the Cabinet.

Or not.

So who were the twelve most assiduous meeting attenders in 2010-11? The highest scorers were

Pam Lyne (Ind, St Keverne) 27.7
Fred Greenslade (Ind, St Dennis) 27.6
Andrew Long (MK, Callington) 27.5
Andrew Wallis (Ind, Porthleven) 24.0
Alex Folkes (LD, Lanson Central) 23.7
Doris Ansari (LD, Truro Tregolls) 21.7
John Keeling (Ind, Breage) 20.9
Mick Martin (Con, Lanivet) 20.5
Fiona Ferguson (Con, Truro Trehaverne) 20.3
Mike Eathorne-Gibbins (Con, Ladock) 20.1
Dick Cole (MK, St Enoder) 20.0
John Coombe (Ind, Hayle South) 19.9

Those scoring least were

Jenny Stewart (Con, St Austell Gover) 4.5
John Oxenham (LD, St Austell Bay) 5.1
Bryan Preston (LD, Saltash Burraton) 5.6
Michael Callan (Ind, Perranporth) 5.8
Robin Teverson (LD, St Mewan) 6.4
Irene Bailey (Ind, Ludgvan) 6.6
Mike Pearn (Con, Torpoint West) 6.7
Olive Eggleston (Con, St Germans) 6.9
Sasha Gillard-Loft (LD, Lanson South) 7.5
Liz Penhaligon (Con, Lelant & Carbis Bay) 7.5
Colin Riches (LD, Saltash St Stephens) 7.6
Sue Nicholas (Con, Marazion) 7.7
Neil Plummer (MK, Stithians) 7.7
George Trubody (Con, Rame) 7.7

And how does this compare with the previous year? The 2009-10 league tables were as follows.

Highest scores

Fred Greenslade (Ind, St Dennis) 29.7
Andrew Wallis (Ind, Porthleven) 27.5
Pam Lyne (Ind, St Keverne) 26.7
Doris Ansari (LD, Truro Tregolls) 22.9
John Keeling (Ind, Breage) 22.5
Mike Eathorne-Gibbins (Con, Ladock) 22.3
Dick Cole (MK, St Enoder) 22.0
Bob Egerton (Ind, Probus) 20.9
Alex Folkes (LD, Lanson Central) 20.3
Derris Watson (LD, St Cleer) 19.6
Judith Haycock (Ind, Helston Central) 18.8
John Wood (Ind, Roche) 18.6


Lowest scorers in 2009-10 were

Neil Plummer (MK, Stithians) 6.9
Sue Nicholas (Con, Marazion) 7.0
Mike Pearn (Con, Torpoint West) 7.1
Neil Hatton (Con, Constantine) 7.4
Liz Penhaligon (Con, Lelant & Carbis Bay) 7.5
Jay Schofield (LD, Liskeard Central) 7.5
Nathan Bale (LD, Bude North) 7.6
John Lugg (Ind, St Teath) 7.6
Paula Dolphin (LD, Flexbury) 7.8
Joyce Duffin (LD, Mt Hawke & Portreath) 7.9
Olive Eggleston (Con, St Germans) 8.1
Geoff Brown (LD, Newquay Central) 8.3
Keith Goodenough (Con, Camelford) 8.3

Remember that this merely measures councillors’ attendance at meetings. It’s a quantitative measure. For an excellent and carefully considered qualitative account of a recent meeting see here.

Coming soon: Cornwall Councillor League tables 2009-11

Something broken down at the County [sic] Hall bunker again? Or just routine maintenance? Attempting to access their byzantine website this morning the computer winks at me with uncanny prescience

waiting for democracy.cornwall.gov.uk

And waiting. Still waiting.

According to the Labour Government in 2006, elected councillors were our ‘democratic champions’, articulating and representing their electors’ wishes. No matter that each of these has to ‘champion’ more than 4,300 people. Or that the number of councillors in Cornwall has fallen by an astonishing 86% since 1972 (from 854 then to just 123 now).

We live in a colony with shrinking democratic rights. I know I should just get used to it like everyone else. Just concentrate instead on enjoying all those lovely new supermarkets springing up like verdant oases of consumerism in our quaint and under-used land. I should join the armies of zombies blessing the surrounding lanes and hedges by adding a colourful veneer of discarded packaging strewn carelessly from their speeding charabancs.

But I digress (again).

Back in April 2010 I devised a quantitative measure of councillor activity. Now that two full years of meetings at the dysfunctional Cornwall Council are laid out for all to see it’s time to repeat that exercise and check on the performance of our ‘democratic champions’.

For the record, here’s the methodology.

But unfortunately, I can’t yet provide the results as I’m still waiting for some data from the Council’s website, which may even emerge improved and reorganised. Thousands can only pray that’s the case. But the league tables are on their way. Very soon.

Cornwall Council IT staff grapple with County Hall website

BBC Radio Cornwall amazingly survives cuts

The BBC are planning to cut £670 a year from their planned budget by 2016 (around 15%). Which means even more sport disappears into Sky TV. Although the conservative propaganda disguised as moral agonising provided by Radio 4 is escaping unscathed. And thank Christ that live coverage of the proms will continue. Good to know that the ghost of Lord Reith still stalks the corridors, even if those corridors are being displaced northwards to Salford (sanctuary of parliamentary expenses criminals).

But haven’t they missed a trick here? Why not use this as a perfect opportunity to get rid of BBC local radio entirely? First in the line could surely be Cornwall’s own Radio Yokel, home of all the drive-time drivel you don’t want to hear. Instead, local radio is only being cut by a measly 4.2%. The strident voice of the colonialist will continue to ring out across our land, bringing fear and loathing to communities up and down the country.

Radio Cornwall boss announces cuts at Truro

Peninsula Community Health – what point?

On the 1^st October responsibility for Cornwall’s 13 ‘community’ hospitals plus one on Scilly, its minor injury units and its ‘community’ nursing was surreptitiously and with little fanfare handed over from the NHS to Peninsula Community Health (PCH). PCH is a Community Interest Company (CIC).

CICs were dreamed up in 2005 under – yes, you guessed it, the Glorious People’s Labour Party – as vehicles for social enterprises interested in bidding to deliver health and social care. They are run just like private companies – with boards of directors (including paid executive directors) and owned by shareholders.

The difference is that they’re not for profit but also not hidebound by various rules and regulations as are charities. Although described as ‘not for profit’ in fact legally CICs can pay interest on shares of up to 5% above the Bank of England base rate as long as it’s no more than 35% of their ‘profits’. Which is a little odd for companies that are supposed to make no profit.

The executives directing PCH all seem to have a background in nursing or local government. There are also currently three non-executive directors – these include Nick Buckland OBE, an organic farmer and active board member in the Plymouth area and Paul Masters, assistant Chief Executive of Cornwall Council.

The third is Dr John Lander, former banker and presumably not a medical doctor who also chairs Coastline Housing. This will involve an interesting balancing act as Coastline supports a massive housebuilding programme in Cornwall. So on the one hand a high number of new ‘communities’ and on the other cutting back on hospital provision. A neat trick if you can pull it off.

Read their website and it all looks hunky dory. The PCH is not for profit and committed to adult community health services. But wasn’t the NHS also not for profit and presumably committed to adult community health services? Which raises the question – why bother? Why not just deliver this within the NHS?

One reason is the Government’s ‘reform’ agenda which even at times of austerity it can find £2bn to push forward. This separates the delivery of health services from commissioning healthcare. Which in turn is driven by the Tory/Labour/Lib Dem consensus agenda of gradually increasing the market coordination of healthcare in the UK.

And there are other less publicised implications of CICs.

• First, they are conveniently unaccountable. Unlike the NHS they are not subject to Freedom of Information requests and their board meetings take place in secret. So when the government wants a hospital chopped it becomes so much more difficult to fight it. Already, the draft business plan for the switch to the PCH was deemed too ‘commercially confidential’ by Cornwall’s Primary Care Trust for us plebs to read.

• Second, CICs like any private company could go bust. If a shop or a manufacturing firm goes bust it’s bad news for its employees but it’s usually possible for the rest of us to find an alternative. What happens if a healthcare company collapses?

• Third, CICs are widely suspected of being a bridge to fully privatising services. In Surrey one of the first CICs – Central Surry Healthcare – was set up in 2006. When its contract ended it had to compete with private sector firms, and promptly lost £90m worth of business to Assura Medical, owned by the Virgin Group.

It’s unclear what length of contract PCH has with the NHS in Cornwall but suspicions that CICs are merely the path to back-door privatisation have triggered vigorous protests in England. In Essex, Shropshire, the West Midlands, Bedfordshire and now Gloucestershire local communities have campaigned against this transfer of health services. And won.

Here in Cornwall, partly because of our weak trade unions and partly because of our mini-Stalinist state, generally uncritical media and supine population, the transfer just happens with not a peep of protest.

Labour. Left, right or just dumb?

Much fatuous fulminating in the tabloid press this past week about ‘Red Ed’ and his band of blood-thirsty revolutionaries in the Labour(ing to make an impression) Party. But who possibly believes the myth of ‘Red Ed’ apart from the self-deniers of the financial sector and their paid hacks in the Tory press? Of course there’s always those Labour tribalists who cling desperately to tattered shreds of their faith. But any belief that Labour could once again be a party of the masses is touching but wishful thinking.

How confused do you need to be to continue to be a true believer after reading Red Ed’s speech to the Labour Conference? Wasn’t it enough that he shamefully joined the Tories and Lib Dems in pandering to tabloid hysteria by attacking those on disability benefit? How deaf or blind are they? Didn’t they notice Miliband and his spin doctors rushing around various TV and radio studies in the 24 hours after the speech?

And with what purpose? To frantically sooth the jangling nerves of the subjects of their Ruritania in case they thought they were ‘left-wing’. Perish the thought. These days the Labour Party hierarchy seems to regard being ‘left-wing’ as akin to being a bubonic plague carrier. Only worse. Quite the opposite in fact. They were concerned to win over ‘conservative voters’, oozing sympathy for the ‘squeezed middle’.

Logically, to depend on conservative votes it would be best to adopt conservative policies. So there we have it. Plain as a pikestaff. Blairism lives on in the hulk of a former workers’ party now merely serving as a hollowed-out shell for corporate politics and careerists.

Read Miliband’s speech. He’s only ‘red’ in the fevered imagination of the press barons. And as for being anti-business. In fact, the word ‘business’ appeared in his speech 20 times and ‘pro-business’ seven. ‘Tax the rich’ didn’t appear at all. Neither did any nonsense such as ‘redistribution’.

There was one mention, in 5,869 words of airy emptiness, of climate change.

I believe our environment and climate change is a crucial issue for our future

Although how this squares with

We need the most competitive tax and regulatory environment we can for British business

was left unexplained.

If the politics were kindergarten-simple, then so was the speech. No-one seems to have commented about its structure. A series of sound-bites where short sentences predominated, it was a fine example of the dumbing-down of British politics. More than a quarter of the sentences were of five words or less. He even managed five one word sentences (Ambition, Outsiders, Labour, Why? and Betrayed) and 12 two-word sentences. The mean sentence length was 10.4 words, suitable for the reading age of a six or seven year old.

Which tells us something about those who found anything remotely radical in last week’s depressing events in Liverpool.