Exclusive: Lys Ker-Now’s amazing Day of Self-Congratulation

Lys Ker-Now’s puppet press has widely reported dear respected comrade and Permanent Secretary to the Supreme Leader, fatherly general Kev Lav-Ery’s progress report to the ominously titled Corporate Resources Overview and Scrutiny Committee before Christmas.

This includes the Permanent Secretary’s astonishing attack on Lys Ker-Now’s previous regime. This had been riddled with conflict, he informed the assembled masses.

It was like World War Three

However, more details of the regime’s stupendous self-congratulation day of 13^th December have now leaked out.

Kev Lav-Ery extolled the ‘improvement journey’ the regime had adopted.

The ‘Fix, Prepare, Transform, Excel’ agenda was still relevant

Employees are reliably reported to silently mouth this mantra on setting out on their daily tasks.

Moreover, in what some outside observers have described as a fit of remarkable complacency, he went on to claim that

Failing services [inherited from the despised ancien regime] had been fixed, basic services were improving and Cornwall Council was one of the fastest improving authorities

in the universe

Crowds eagerly assemble in Truro to hear about progress on the improvement journey

Responding to fears of a behind the scenes power struggle in this rogue state, Kev Lav-Ery promised that the Supreme Leader, Rob Er-Son

was always prepared to attend open and frank interviews with the local press

However, those responsible for the totalitarian regime’s Propaganda Unit were admonished that

It was important to ensure that stories were correct and to celebrate successes

As the Permanent Secretary finished his report various supernatural occurrences were reported from across the land.

Weeping owls were said to have escaped from the Owl Sanctuary and deliberately flown into vehicles on the state-sponsored A30. Mysterious flashes of light were spotted in the skies above Newquay Airport, thought to herald the arrival of a plane sometime in 2012 and the glorious take-off into everlasting prosperity of the Local Enterprise Zone. And clouds in the shape of a pasty were seen hovering over the site of the proposed People’s Stadium at Threemilestone.

Meanwhile, Supreme Commander and High Toryness Rob Er-Son was quoted as describing the regime as

completely eccentric

This was later corrected to

Cornwall-centric

The seventh day of Christmas: 7% second homes

On the seventh day of Christmas my council gave to me

Seven % second homes

Six useless MPs

Five eco-villages

Four supermarkets

Three point four million pounds for an airport

Two Truropark and rides

And a stadium entirely for free

..................................................................................

* One in fourteen houses in Cornwall is a second home. Another one in fourteen is a holiday home.

The council have called on the Government to scrap the 10% council tax discount for second homes.

In 2012 will it make a clear demand that council tax on second homes is doubled? This would raise up to £16 million a year (thus removing the need to cut libraries, bus services, facilities for the disabled etc.) or alternatively drastically reduce the number of second homes.

Or maybe we’ll see councillors make the call for a tourist tax so that temporary visitors can pay their fair share towards the cost of local facilities.

The sixth day of Christmas: 6 useless MPs

On the sixth day of Christmas my council gave to me

Six useless MPs*
Five eco-villages
Four supermarkets
Three point four million pounds for an airport
Two Truro park and rides

And a stadium entirely for free

...............................................................................
* Cornwall’s MPs pledged themselves to fight the Coalition Government’s obliteration of Cornish distinctiveness and the reinforcement of our status as an insignificant English county by resolutely opposing a cross-border Devonwall constituency.

Steve Gilbert and Sheryll Murray rally for Cornwall

All six MPs ended up voting for the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act which introduced this.

Cornwall is now regarded as less worthy of special treatment than the Isle of Wight.

Clegg: still confused about fairness

While we’re on examples of shameless hypocrisy let’s not forget that curious ritual of British corporate politics – the new year message. Last year the Tory Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg produced a masterpiece of half-baked mendacity. This concentrated on a few small insignificant examples of Lib Dem ‘influence’ while conveniently omitting to mention such minor things as conniving with the Tory plan to cut the living standards of the 95% rather than tax the obscene wealth of the 5%.

This year he seems to have learnt nothing and forgotten everything. Not a word about single-handedly destroying the chances of obtaining a fairer voting system for another generation. Or whittling away our democratic rights by reducing our opportunities to vote. Or conspiring with Cameron to use the UK’s membership of the EU merely for boosting the financial sector and reducing everybody else’s wages.

No, instead Clegg repeats the sad Lib Dem deception that

thanks to the Liberal Democrats, the Coalition has been helping people get through these difficult times with measures to make life fairer and easier.

 That’s ‘fair’ as in the 2010 budget

 or again in 2011

In Clegg’s dreamworld the Government is

rebalancing [the economy] away from the City of London

In the actual nightmare world we live in this translates into

Clegg doesn’t care to mention the following

Perhaps because he’s one of that top 10%.

And in Cleggspeak the Government’s welfare reforms aren't an attack on the powerless

While the Inland Revenue doesn’t let the powerful off with a handshake.

The Lib Dems promised at the last election to close tax loopholes worth £12 billion (the actual level of corporate and super-rich tax avoidance is estimated variously as between £25 billion and £100 billion). In March this year Osborne finally offered to recover £1 billion, described by Tax Research UK as a ‘token gesture’.

Are there any Liberal Democrats left in Cornwall with a social conscience or an ounce of compassion for their fellow subjects? How can they continue to support a party led by those who spout such flimsy falsehoods?

P.S. Meanwhile, in his message, Ed Miliband says

Tough times expose your values, because they force you to choose.

As in choose not to support the public sector workers striking to retain half-decent pensions presumably.

The fifth day of Christmas: 5 eco-villages

On the fifth day of Christmas my council gave to me

Five eco-villages*
Four supermarkets
Three point four million pounds for an airport
Two Truro park and rides

And a stadium entirely for free

.............................................................................
* Cornwall Council is an enthusiastic supporter of the plan for Swiss-Egyptian company Orascom to make a shed-load of money from building five eco-villages (and an eco-marina) in the clay country.

These come with liberal lashings of greenwash and the enthusiastic backing of the Eden Project. This is a tourist theme park next to Cornwall’s largest car park - a frighteningly huge emitter of hot air which is recklessly topping up levels of greenhouse gases.

Not to be outdone, the Duchy of Cornwall, fresh from getting permission to plonk 170 houses on the last unbuilt-on piece of land in Newquay (originally kicked out by the planners but you can’t keep a good developer down) are poised to present its plans for another eco-community in mid-Cornwall.

Now you see them: soon you won't. The green fields about to be sacrificed in order to support the Duke of Cornwall's lifestyle

We can look forward to plans for more thousands of houses for more thousands of in-migrants and all to be built on Newquay’s green belt. This will no doubt be met with grateful and deferential delight in the streets of Newquay, as residents rejoice at such a display of tender loving care for their environment from the Duke of Shameless Hypocrisy.

The fourth day of Christmas: 4 supermarkets

On the fourth day of Christmas my council gave to me

Four supermarkets*
Three point four million pounds for an airport
Two Truro park and rides

And a stadium entirely for free

.................................................................................

Over the past year permission has been given for not one, not two, not even three, but FOUR new superstores in Cornwall – at Wadebridge(Sainsburys), Hayle (also Sainsburys), Penzance (ah, that one happens to be a Sainsburys) and Falmouth (errr, looks like another Sainsburys). How thoughtful of the council to provide some colour contrast in the highways and byways of Cornwall, adding orange Sainsburys plastic bags to the ubiquitous blue and white Tesco offerings that litter our 'green' Cornwall.

Oooh, yes, please

Superstores are estimated to reduce the turnover for shops in nearby town centres by between 10 and 15%. But supermarkets also cough up large amounts of conscience money for town centre managers to manage the decline.

More on the current state of Cornwall’s store wars coming on this very blog in the new year.

Tourism: the serpent continues to slither

In an all too brief flash of lucidity immediately following the award of EU Objective One funding to Cornwall a decade backalong, some of Cornwall’s ruling clique belatedly recognised that tourism compromised their grand plans to boost the Cornish economy. They wanted to diversify. While not exactly spelt out, the corollary of this was plain. The role of tourism - even though only around 10% - had to be reined back.

Since the 1890s anyone who has cared to think about such matters has recognised that tourism is a blight. For instance, it condemns Cornwall to a low-wage economy, soon to be exacerbated by Tory/Lib Dem plans for local wage bargaining. If this happens Cornwall – with the lowest wages and a greater than average proportion of employees in the public sector and weak unions – will be amongst the worst hit areas in the UK. (Whatever would we do without those three doughty Lib Dem defenders defending our corner in the government I wonder).

No, that's not the Amazon, dear

But tourism brings with it much, much worse effects than poverty wages and seasonal unemployment. It reinforces external representations of Cornwall as just a place to holiday in, not somewhere to be taken at all seriously. In the longer run it encourages past holidaymakers to become present residents.

Tourism has locked us into a dire demographic regime of excessive and unsustainable population growth. This is fundamentally reshaping Cornwall’s culture while it thoughtlessly tears up our familiar landscapes in what appears to be a cruel and heartless joke.

In short, tourism is an insidious serpent slithering into the Cornish body politic. Or, if you prefer another metaphor, a leech fastened onto our institutions, sucking the life blood from them, corrupting and distorting policies and encouraging colossal and extremely wasteful policy follies.

We’ve seen how tourist interests captured the Olympic torch relay route decision. Questions have also to be asked about the new Local Enterprise Partnership, already used merely as a front for propping up Cornwall Council’s environmentally disastrous promotion of Newquay Airport.

The tourist lobby seems to be over-represented on the LEP board. Given its share of the economy, it should have one of the eleven board members. Instead two are directly involved with tourism and another couple have close links. Several of the rest clearly share traditional tourism-generated myths about Cornwall.

Gaynor Coley is the Managing Director of the Eden Project tourist theme park, while Simon Tregoning runs Classic Cottages, marketing 700 holiday cottages. He also chairs the Partnership Board to VisitCornwall (the pro-tourism propaganda unit) and various shadowy lobbying groups such as the Cornwall Commercial Tourism Federation and the Cornwall Association of Holiday House Agencies.

Ominously, Simon calls for the

Cornwall brand

to be

really exploited

which is enough to cause a quivering in the pit of the stomach.

Then we have Alec Robertson, leader of Cornwall Council, which funds VisitCornwall, and with a background in the ‘hospitality’ trade. Not to mention Robin Teverson, previously adviser to the group with a substantial interest in The Beach, the massive Crinnis beach second home development.

The third day of Christmas: £3.4m

On the third day of Christmas my council took from me

Three point four million pounds for an airport*
Two Truro park and rides

And a stadium entirely for free

...............................................................................

* at Newquay. Every year. Over £100 million of public money has now been spent on the feeding frenzy required to keep this product of Liberal Democrat hubris in the air.

Thus subsidising second home owners and adding to Cornwall’s carbon emissions by up to twelve-fold by 2030.

At the same time in an indication of their warped sense of priorities Cornwall Council’s transport gauleiter Graeme Hicks is trying to cut up to £2.2 million from the bus subsidies.

Poor people travel by bus. The rich prefer planes to buses and trains.

The second day of Christmas: 2 park and rides

On the second day of Christmas my council gave to me

Two Truro park and rides*

And a stadium entirely for free

..................................................................................

*plus

• a medieval village

• and a Waitrose

• not to mention a Cornish food hall

• and all on a very pleasant greenfield site owned by the Duchy of Cornwall.

Brownfield site?

Unfortunately, most councillors seem to have swallowed the nonsensical claims about the park and ride hook, line and sinker. A woeful lack of critical faculties sees most of them parroting the planners' assertion that the park and ride will reduce congestion.

Expect more of this

If it does it'll be an excellent example of Cornish difference. For academic research on park and rides elsewhere shows that they consistently increase general levels of traffic. That’s increase, not decrease. So any temporary reduction in congestion on the road into Truro will be more than made up for the growth in traffic to the park and ride. (And most park and rides aren't sited right next to a supermarket!)

The first day of Christmas: a stadium

On the first day of Christmas my council gave to me

A stadium entirely for free*

..............................................................................

* On 17^th November Cornwall Council approved outline plans for a Sports Stadium at Threemilestone. This is to be sited alongside the busiest road in Cornwall and miles from the nearest railhead.

This illogical and just slightly unsustainable location has been backed by a petition signed by more than 16,035 people. They include prominent Cornish nationalists and cultural activists such as Dick Cole, Graham Hart, Conan Jenkin, Loveday Jenkin, Rod Lyon and PhilRendle who all seem to think that the stadium is being provided courtesy of Father Christmas and has no connection at all with anything else.

Sadly, they’re living in Tir Comolen an Gog; everything comes with a cost but they don't seem to be aware of the cost of this stadium. We now know the Cornish version of the old saying

For a nation to be free, 'tis sufficient that she wills it

must run something like

For a nation to be free, 'tis sufficient to mortgage our future for a possible stadium

Lys Kern-Ow. More rumours of regime change

Following the heavily denied hearsay earlier this week concerning the Great Leader Rob Er-Son’s imminent demise, more thinly veiled indications of continuing turmoil at the top of this closed and secretive western tyranny are seeping out. Despotic Permanent Secretary Kev Lav-Ery is reliably reported this week by the state’s puppet press to have removed former right hand man Tom Flan-Gan from his £135,000 a year post as Corporate Director of Environment, Planning and the economy.

In a cryptic remark that Kernologists are desperately poring over, Lav-Ery thanked Flan-Gan for all his work on

The disgraced Flan-Gan

reputational issues of managing Newquay airport

This is widely believed to refer to the Great State Flying Project. The spiralling costs of this mammoth regime status symbol are fatally undermining the entire economy of this impoverished far-western country.

It has already led to the adoption of extreme austerity measures which threaten famine in some remoter coastal communities. Many villagers are reported to have fled, leaving their run-down properties to a class of regime apparatchniks from the cities locally termed ‘second home owners’.

All the news that isn't fit to print. Convergence Office economises on truth

Just before Christmas used to be a perfect time to bury bad news. But now it seems it's easier just to quietly ignore inconvenient facts. Take the revelation that Cornwall’s economy, as measured by gross value added (GVA) per head, fell by 2.9% in 2009, which was the worst performance in the UK. 

Indeed, something curious is happening as large injections of EU money don't appear to be having the effect so confidently predicted by their gatekeepers, even on their own terms. True, from 1999 to 2004 Cornwall’s economy grew faster than that of the UK. GVA per capita rose from 59.3% of the UK’s to 64.9%. But this was before Objective One spending really kicked in. 

Just as that spending - on such things as the Tremough Campus, the Peninsula Medical School at Treliske or the Eden Project ­ - should have begun to affect things … they didn’t! OK, GVA continued to ‘converge’ with that of the UK from 2004 to 2009, but only by a miserable 0.7%. At that rate it’ll take until at least 2061 before we get up to the UK average. And by then coastal areas are likely to be under several metres of water.

And last week the Office for National Statistics (ONS) informed us that even this modest ‘progress’ was in reverse gear. It appears the Cornish economy was hit more seriously by the bankers’ crisis than anywhere else. But the Convergence Partnership Office, which spends our money churning out at least half a dozen press releases a week, remains curiously silent about this relative stagnation.

On the 14^th December, the same day as the sub-regional GVA figures were being announced by the ONS, the Convergence Office instead pumped out a feel-good press release about the £16 million government grant towards another road between Camborne and Redruth. Cornwall Council’s hapless Transport fuehrer Graeme Hicks was quoted welcoming the prospect of 7,500 more houses in the area as ‘good news’.

Needless to say, that press release was then dutifully reprinted virtually word for word in this week's  West Briton. Shamefully though, the paper didn’t think it necessary to inform us this was actually a press release from the Convergence Office and therefore might be providing just a very slightly rosy picture. Let alone seek to provide some 'balance' - such an old-fashioned concept in these post-modernist times.

Back in 2007 Carleen Kelemen, Director of the Convergence Office, was quoted in one of her own press releases as saying, with very curious syntax,

I am confident that in the future of the Cornish economy continues to grow

Carleen Kelemen not telling us the Cornish economy languished in 2009

Nigel Jump, chief economist for the RDA said at the same time

We believe Cornwall made further … progress in the last two years.

It didn’t. So what do these Nostradamuses of the regeneration-hype business now make of these latest dismal figures?

Olympic Torch Relay Route: Tracking down the local experts

The Olympic Torch Relay Route has been designed, so we are assured, to bring the torch to 95% of a breathlessly expectant population. Strange then that in Cornwall it takes utmost care to avoid our largest urban conglomeration completely, steering well to the south of Camborne-Redruth. George Eustice, Tory MP for that benighted and blighted area and down to earth farmer or wily PR operator depending on the phases of the moon, was not at all pleased.

Personally, I’d have thought this was the occasion for wild rejoicing on the part of the inhabitants of Camborne-Redruth, saved the awful embarrassment of being herded out to gawp at a flaming torch. But no. For George it was a ‘cock-up’. He asked

what on earth were the organisers thinking

Well, what were they thinking? The London 2012 Organising Committee claimed in the local press (10th November) that the route was decided

using local expertise

Looks like a Freedom of Information request is on the cards to find out who these local experts were then. Except that as a private company the Committee conveniently doesn’t have to answer FOI requests.

But visit their website and we discover that the route was decided after a series of workshops involving

local authorities …plus representatives from tourism, heritage, sustainability, culture, education and sport

The workshops were organised on the basis of the ‘regions and nations’ of the UK. So, as the Cornish nation has to be ignored on the orders of Nick Clegg, did ‘local expertise’ reside at a regional level?

It appears not, as we find out there are County [sic] Working Groups and a ‘Team Cornwall’ that is bent on ‘engaging the county [sic] in the world’s greatest sporting and cultural festival’. Let's ignore the tiny issue of when the Olympics became a cultural festival. We're told Team Cornwall is a ‘multi-skilled’ partnership involving:

• Cornwall Sports Partnership (which includes agencies of Cornwall Council)

• School Sports Partnerships (with a heavy involvement of the education authority which is of course Cornwall Council)

• Cornwall Museums

• Visit Cornwall (funded by Cornwall Council)

• Cornwall Council Leisure (part of Cornwall Council)

• Cornwall Council Economic Development (also part of Cornwall Council)

This body is therefore heavily connected with Cornwall Council, which directly runs three of the six partners and indirectly has a major say in two of the others. Sure enough, the County [sic] Working Group is chaired by Adam Paynter, Lib Dem Cornwall Councillor for Lanson North. And it’s serviced by Cornwall Council, which provides its secretary. However, despite being funded by public money, it provides no publicly accessible minutes of its proceedings.

In the absence of transparency or evidence to the contrary, we can only assume that the ‘local expertise’ involved in advising on the choice of route lay not a million miles from Truro. Which is presumably why Council Leader Alec Robertson was distinctly unsympathetic towards the whinges from Camborne-Redruth’s MP. He said

While we appreciate that some communities may be disappointed that LOCOG has not chosen their particular town or village as part of the official route, this does not mean they won’t be able to join in the party, as the aim is for those areas to host the Olympic Torch Relay on behalf of their surrounding communities.

To find the identity of those who ignored Camborne-Redruth, once Cornwall’s ‘central’ district but now it seems just towns and villages surrounding Helston and Breage, George Eustice might profitably look no further than Truro. For the ‘local experts’ turn out to be Cornwall Council, heavily involved in advising and supporting a route designed solely to boost Cornwall’s ailing tourist industry.

The great brownfield land myth

Back in October at a Cornwall Council meeting Jim Currie, Cabinet portfolio holder for corporate resources, got very shirty with Ruth Lewarne. Cllr Lewarne had implied that planning officers might have been tempted to propose approval for the Dutch ING Group’s plans for Hayle’s South Quay, involving a Sainsburys supermarket, cinema, shops, 30 houses and various other goodies, because Cornwall Council have 7% of its pension fund invested with ING.

Perish the thought. Ridiculous idea fulminated the irascible Currie. It was

far fetched and an insult to the professionalism and integrity of Cornwall Council’s planning officers

In Currie-land planning officers are of course always precise, accurate, objective and scientific in their appraisals. Take the Duchy Business Park at Tuckingmill, between Camborne and Redruth, for example.

On 20^th October a proposal for 87 houses and then a second for 296 houses from the Duchy Business Park were agreed by the Council’s Strategic Planning Committee, with no-one voting against and just one abstention, following officers’ advice. In the planning officer’s report the second site was described as

a mix of Greenfield and Brownfield land

But in the reasons for approval given in the minutes of the planning meeting this had casually transmuted into

the site was considered to be a predominantly Brownfield site

This is what it actually looks like.

Planning officers are no doubt extremely professional and stuffed with integrity. But they seem to be colour-blind.

Cornwall mourns loss of Great Leader

A distraught nation learnt this morning that our Dear Leader, Rob Er-Son, was unexpectedly stepping down. A tearful Radio Yokel presenter made the shock announcement at 7.09 a.m. ‘It is our people’s biggest ever sadness’, he sobbed, barely able to utter a coherent sentence.

Suffering in Stratton

The official Cornwall Council News Agency was reported to be urging the people to rally behind Rob Er-Son’s ‘Great Successor’, the shadowy figure of Kev Lav-Ery. For many months Kev Lav-Ery has been suspected of being the man pulling the strings. His supreme power is believed to flow from his role in the mysterious organisation SER-CO, suspected of exercising a major influence in the secretive and cloistered world of intrigue that is known as Lys Ker Now.

People in the streets of Truro broke down and wept uncontrollably as reports of the Great Inspiration’s demise filtered through. Christmas shoppers stood grief-stricken and paralysed, unable to take in the news. Meanwhile, it was reliably reported that Council staff were whooping weeping hysterically at the traumatic turn of events.

Grief in Goldsithney

Expert observers of the Truro regime report increasing cynicism internally as it proves incapable of meeting basic economic needs or safeguarding the Cornish environment. Harrowing accounts have been trickling out of this closely controlled society about large numbers of dissidents consigned to the prison camps of Cam Borne and Red Ruth where they are forced to purchase all their consumer goods at charity shops. Even worse, unconfirmed stories persist about some of the regime’s opponents being banished to the ghastly wastes of New Quay or St Aust-Hell for political re-education.

The authorities in neighbouring Wales, Brittany and Devon are reported to be on a heightened state of alert in case of instability in the western approaches.

Correction

Cornwall Council newsroom is categorically denying this story. A spokesperson states

These rumours are a scurrilous attempt to sow discord in our land of happiness, siblinghood and unity. Our Beloved Leader has absolutely no intention of stepping down. Ever. On the contrary he is looking forward to working 18 hour days over the next fortnight safeguarding all the loyal children of our nation of the setting sun as they relax over the Christmas period, ready to return to work – if they still have any - refreshed and with eager hearts in order to meet the Great Leader’s five year Mounting Austerity Plan.

What is to be done? Tackling the Cornish crisis.

The Conference finally draws to its close. As I relax with a complimentary post-Porthemmet conference massage from a dusky dusty bal maiden – aah, nothing beats the gentle touch of the spalling hammer – the answer to our long-suffering crisis seems obvious.

Dottie Penluny, Porthemmet's head masseuse

For a fundamental contradiction lurks at the heart of Cornwall Council’s growth plans. And if anyone is in any doubt about what those plans really are take a geek at their recent publication ‘Can-do Cornwall’. This appallingly written document, replete with meaningless management-waffle and jaw-dropping jargon, happily converts Cornwall Council from a democratically elected body answerable to the people to a private company answerable to no-one, proudly calling it Cornwall plc. (Strangely, you can find this nowhere on the Council's website. But try here.)

It also loftily claims that

We are designing an ambitious 10-year housing programme to deliver 30,000 well-designed and energy efficient new homes

But wait. In the ten years from 2001 to 2010 22,800 houses were completed in Cornwall. Over the same ten years the population grew by 39,900, or 8.1%. Even at that rate of growth the current population of around 540,000 will be around 1,100,000 by 2100. Doubling the population means the amount of built-up land will triple.

This is the unsustainable building spiral we’re locked into, erasing the Cornishness of Cornwall to accommodate the insatiable demand of people in the south east of England to come and live here and the insatiable desire of developers, construction companies, landlords, consultants and others to make money.

Yet even this mad rate is apparently insufficient for Cornwall Council. For they want not another 22,800 houses in the next decade but 30,000!!! In the process increasing the rate of growth from 8.1% to 11.8%. At that rate we’ll hit a million before 2070 and the numbers in Cornwall by 2100 will be 1,460,000, a truly insane plan.

But the denizens of County Hall are deaf and blind to such implications. The clarion call rings out through the corridors - speed up the suburbanisation of Cornwall. More people, more supermarkets, more cars, more everything. For ever and ever. Without end. (Only make sure the signage is in Cornish.)

Weary conference delegates wait for ferry

This becomes the mad mantra of the swivelled-eye mandarin political clique at the core of our mini-stalinist state. It’s echoed by their corporate allies and a more traditional ruling elite in Cornwall who long ago leaped at the chance to sell our birthright for their profits.

Yet in this gadarene rush to sterilise our land and make it safe for colonisation lies the basic contradiction. It becomes ever more difficult to persuade the consumer-subjects who live here that tearing up cherished and much-loved local environments is somehow in their interests. Vast housing developments that scar once green fields can contain as many ‘public open spaces’ as can profitably be included but cannot escape the inescapable fact. Cornwall is being well and truly trashed. Sacrificed for suburbs. Cleansed for cars and commuters.

Popular disquiet simmers and grows, as we are beginning to see from Penzance to Bodmin and beyond. The seeds of a broader movement will sooner or later blossom into righteous anger at what is happening to our land and our heritage. A popular movement that links the disparate groups inevitably waits in the wings, pregnant with possibilities, only needing a spark for ignition.

Will 2012 see the genesis of that movement to challenge the interests that are quietly selling off Cornwall? The always excellent George Monbiot cites the radical theologian Walter Wink. Wink says that to challenge a dominant system we must first name the powers, then unmask those powers, before engaging with the powers.

This and other blogs can go some way to naming and unmasking the powers destroying our land. But a single-issue cross-Cornwall group focused on the long-term implications of the crisis of unsustainable hyper-development is required to engage with them on their own political ground. Use the democratic machinery still left to us to throw a giant spanner into the works of the soulless Moloch and his disciples. And we can start by asking whose Cornwall this is. Theirs or ours?

What’s Cornwall Council for?

I feel I owe the dwindling band of loyal readers of this blog, exquisitely described by one fan as ‘libellous, inaccurate bollocks’ and ‘paranoid tosh’, an explanation for recent inactivity. The truth is that I’ve been on retreat, attending the biannual International Cornish Studies Conference at Porthemmet.

Porthemmet Conference Centre

Huge and enthusiastic crowd for the keynote paper on ‘Gone missing: did a voiceless alveolar lateral fricative exist in medieval Cornish?’ Fascinating. I escape the assembled obsessive-compulsives for a brief moment. Shall I be tempted by the contribution from VisitCornwall entitled ‘The fifth horseman of the apocalypse: why a tourist tax in Cornwall would mean the end of civilisation as we know it’? No, I’ll give it a miss and get some fresh air.

While taking a stroll along the strand, my mind idly turns to the questions that are never asked, either in the rarefied atmospheric mists of intellectual irrelevance that shroud Porthemmet, or in the everyday world of churnalism where exploited wordsmiths toil ceaselessly day and night to keep us completely confused and distracted.

Professor Tresoddit about to lecture on 'Foreshore or foreskin? Duchy discourses of the 1850s'

Questions such as

What is Cornwall Council for?

Local government has always had two functions. On the one hand it’s an agent of the central state; on the other it represents localities to the centre. When the latter threatens to get out of hand, the state has, if it can get away with it, never hesitated to abolish local government. Such as in the 1980s when the GLC and Metropolitan Counties were axed. But this merely continued a fine old British tradition. For example, in the early 1800s democratic open parish vestries were replaced by ‘select’ vestries, chosen only by the richer ratepayers.

In this light the abolition of a whole tier of Cornish local government in 2009 and its replacement by a unitary Cornwall Council was nothing new. The more local a council is the more susceptible it is to popular influence and the popular will. So much easier to distance government from the people by getting rid of the most potentially responsive level of local government and ensuring a popular mandate is only needed once every four years rather than two.

Easier that is for central government, left to deal with only one institution rather than seven. Easier as well for bureaucratic cadres at County Hall who could enhance their power. And easier too for the local political clique, Tory, Independent and Lib Dem, who like to think they run things and luxuriate in the glow of their own pompous self-importance.

For these groups emasculating local government and halving the number of elections in Cornwall at a stroke was completely logical. A more remote and centralized Cornwall Council with weakened popular oversight plays very nicely indeed into their hands, tidying up lines of decision-making and deepening the democratic deficit.

Others also benefit. One council enables more effective lobbying from well-funded and organised business interests. Land speculators and house-builders, keenly aware of the profits to be made from selling a Cornish lifestyle, cluster around the new authority like bees to nectar (or should that be like flies to shit).

The housebuilding lobby adopts a two-pronged strategy. The large construction companies have successfully lobbied the Tory/Lib Dem Government to give the green light to any and every large ‘development’. At the same time they press local government in Cornwall to build as many houses as possible, bribing them with sports stadia, new schools, roads, supermarkets, public open spaces or whatever.

Captured by the profiteers, Cornwall Council attaches itself ever more blatantly to a mindless ‘growth’ agenda. Abandoning any pretence of even-handedly trying to control the tiger of speculative hyper-development it jumps on its back and becomes a leading player in the great sale of Cornwall. It now acts more as a conduit for funnelling public funds to SERCO, SITA, other global corporations, and a host of up-country consultants, than as a representative of local communities.

Its role is to drive through ‘development’ at any cost, manipulating opinion and controlling public discourse in the process. Space for democratic debate shrinks. Internally too, the Cabinet system centralizes control. Councillors are effectively neutered. Those few councillors unhappy at being a mere cipher and with the initiative or ability to question things are efficiently co-opted, contained or marginalised.

A tiny mandarin class and a political elite – it’s difficult to know which is in the driving seat – sits in the centre of the spider’s web. All potential predators are safely muzzled, the fourth estate feeble and ineffective, voters and councillors alike kept at a safe distance. A Stalinist climate of fear and suspicion descends. The result is a one-party state that lacks even the redeeming feature of a party. Politics is diminished. Alienation is rife, the people disillusioned and disheartened.

Politics in Cornwall were changed fundamentally by the coup of the mandarin elite back in 2008/09. We have still to wake up to its implications. As I sleeplessly wander the plush corridors of the Porthemmet Conference Centre I shall ponder the next obvious question. 

What is to be done?

Conference delegates relax at the bar

Heartlands road to boost population growth

Despite regularly peddling the tiresome lie that ‘we have no money’ the Government yesterday found £41 million for the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games and today we’re told it’s going to find £170 million to build more roads. One of these, costing £27 million, will be between Redruth and Camborne. You’d think the existing two would suffice but the mind boggles at the demand to drive to and fro between these places.

Local Tory MP George Eustice crows that the new road will

unlock the potential of derelict land and create thousands of new jobs.

What George didn’t like to mention is that it will ‘release’ land (not by any means all ‘derelict’ either) for building another 7,500 houses.

But isn’t this the same George Eustice who used to think that the 11,000 or so houses originally planned for Camborne-Redruth by the Labour Government (a whopping 168% increase on the 4,000 or so built in the last two decades) was ‘bonkers’?

In its Core Strategy, Cornwall’s Tory/Independent Council is proposing somewhere between 4,600 (still a 12% increase in the build rate) and 12,100 houses for Camborne-Redruth. The land ‘released’ by the road will go a long way to providing this figure.

The road has always been part of the Council’s plan to dump as many houses as possible in Camborne-Redruth. They intend to take advantage of this relatively deprived area by cruelly dangling the vague promise of ‘thousands’ of jobs and never-ending prosperity in front of its bemused inhabitants.

Heartlands: just what we need - lots more houses

What this in fact shows is that the Heartlands ‘so-called’ regeneration scheme is basically all about tarting up the area in advance of new settlements, thus keeping the prices of new houses up. Heartlands is just a phase in a larger place-shaping project designed to legitimate a massive shift of population into the district. Like the stadium at Threemilestone its function is to fool the people while ratcheting up unsustainable population growth and making lots of money for developers and others.

Another huge demo against the cuts in Cornwall

Let’s continue last week’s theme and warm ourselves on the sparks of anger that are threatening to ignite a righteous blaze of indignation. A fire soon to be fanned into a veritable conflagration that will consume the corporate cronies and their political stooges in the furnace of the people’s retribution …

Sorry, getting carried away. Must check what they’re putting into that organic muesli these days.

Yet if you were in Penzance on Saturday morning you might have seen an even bigger demonstration than last week’s rally in Truro and a growing determination to confront the cuts. An estimated 2,000+ turned out to express their anger at the steady mothballing of West Cornwall Hospital as services are progressively transferred to Treliske.

They were addressed by local MP Andrew George who said

restore these services

Which would be fine except that when I last checked Boy George was still a member of the Liberal Democrats. That’s the Liberal Democrats who are part of the coalition government. The government that is making the cuts in the NHS’s budget, the same people that are encouraging the centralisation of services.

And the government that’s driving through its widely despised privatisation ‘reforms’ to open up the NHS even further to the global healthcare corporations. You know, the same one that’s decided that the poorer you are the more you pay for the bankers’ crisis.

As Andrew George claims to oppose all this (not to mention the Devonwall constituency, the new developers’ charter that will rig the planning system even further in favour of the profiteers, cuts in local bus services and most other things that his party signs up to) perhaps he would care to do the honourable thing and resign from the Liberal Democrats. Come on, Andrew, give us a lead.

Press fury at strike success

The state pension in Britain is among the lowest in Europe – only better than Estonia, Latvia and Cyprus. But I wonder where Britain ranks for the quality of its press. Take the papers’ reporting of yesterday’s anger over the Tory/Lib Dem attack on pensions for example.

According to the Sun the strike was ‘a flop’ and just an excuse to go shopping (no doubt spending all those exorbitant wages).

The Mail took the same line as it reported that

Militant union leaders failed in their campaign to bring Britain to its knees yesterday.

Both papers uncritically gave pride of place to Cameron’s airy dismissal of the strike as a ‘damp sqib’.

The Scottish Daily Express must take the prize for diving furthest into the gutter.

Attacks on public sector workers were more muted in the Telegraph but its headline still read

Funny how we're regularly told by these same papers that the public sector is a parasitical drain on our resources and then they worry that two million public sector workers will bring everything to a standstill. So which is it? Essential or unecessary? Make your minds up chaps.

Amazingly, we have to turn to the Western Morning News for something approaching fair reporting. It headlined the story as

STRONG SUPPORT FOR STRIKE IN THE WEST

and accurately reported yesterday's ‘massive rally’ in Truro. A pity though that you can’t read their story as for some strange reason it doesn’t appear in their online version.

Congratulations due to the Morning News then. But has it undergone an ideology transplant since I last looked? Then it was just a thinly disguised newsletter for the Countryside Alliance/Ukip.