Cornwall’s local elections 2025

Which political party seeking our vote in tomorrow’s local elections is the most ‘Cornish’? Putting policies aside, most of which are merely variants of ‘build more’, which has the greatest proportion of Cornish candidates? One, admittedly very crude, method for assessing this is to compare the surnames of candidates against the 850 or so surnames in the second edition of my The Surnames of Cornwall.

Here are the results ….

	proportion of candidates with Cornish surnames
MK	50%
Independents	40%
Liberal Democrats	39%
Conservatives	35%
Reform UK	30%
Labour	24%
Greens	9%

Somewhat suprisingly, this exercise bears out what we would probably have expected. (You can compare these figures with 2009 and 2021 here. Although note that the number of surnames in the second edition of my book is over a fifth higher.)

With half of their candidates having surnames that include those featuring in the book, MK tops the list. Independents and Lib Dems are not that far behind however. This indicates the historic, though fading place of Independents in Cornish local politics and the former strength of Gladstonian Liberalism in the region. Not that the Liberals ever had things all their own way. In fact, in parliamentary politics Liberal triumphs in 1886, 1906, 1929 and (to some extent) in 1997 proved impermanent and were followed sooner or later by wipe-outs as the Conservatives took their turn to monopolise Cornish representation. Indeed, like it or not,the Conservative Party has equally deep, though less analysed or understood, roots in Cornwall.

The proportion of Tory candidates this time with ‘Cornish’ surnames does not therefore lag too far behind Indies and Lib Dems, while outnumbering their competitors for the far right vote. Reform UK in turn has a clearly higher proportion of ‘Cornish’ candidates by this measure than does the Labour Party. The latter has always found Cornwall to be difficult territory. The party was entirely obliterated in the first election to the Cornwall Unitary Authority in 2009 and will be lucky to hold on to its handful of seats this time around too.

Finally, the Greens bring up the rear, with just nine per cent of their 33 candidates enjoying surnames that appear in my The Surnames of Cornwall. Curiously, given that the Green Party is putting up record numbers of candidates almost everywhere else left with elections after Labour and the Tories combined to cancel several, the Greens in Cornwall seem to have done a runner. This time they’re contesting just 33 wards out of 87, a steep fall from the 70 they fought at the last election in 2021.

The unknown factor this time will be where homeless progressive voters go. Some may vote MK or TUSC where those parties are present but that accounts for only a minority of wards. Others may do the research and decide to cast ballots for acceptable Independents. However, they’re surely unlikely to vote for Labour given its sharp rightwards shift, neo-liberal policies, attacks on the income of the elderly and disabled, vacillating policy on the extinction crisis and apparent desire to put money into the pockets of property developers. Will they abstain, not bother or spoil their votes? Or might they vote for the Lib Dems who are opportunistically contesting every ward in a rather desperate attempt to regain their former glories?

And will our shambolic and unfit for purpose electoral system then mean that all this volatility merely allows the Trump-admiring Reform UK to sweep up a hatful of wards on somewhere around 25 per cent of the vote, or maybe nine per cent of the registered electorate?

Cornwall and devolution 3: England’s first colony

We have seen that the government’s neo-liberal ‘devolution’ holds out zero prospects for a democratically elected Cornish Assembly. We have also seen that the blueprints for such an assembly, however neatly crafted, suffer from a lack of attention to the means through which it can be achieved.

In the meantime, while the Cornish Democracy Unit (CDU)’s report of 2024 optimistically claims that the ‘direction of travel’ is towards a Cornish Assembly, the more visible direction of travel seems set on a course towards ever-more gentrification, suburbanisation and consequent marginalisation of the Cornish in Cornwall, a Surrey-by-the-sea reserved as a convenient leisure periphery for the middle classes of south-east England.

The CDU report, in making its case for a Cornish Assembly, rests much of it on the recognition of the Cornish as a national minority in 2014 under the Council of Europe’s Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (FCPNM). The report suggests that the issues that arise from that, although these are left largely unexplored, will be addressed through an assembly. But inevitably, there’s an ethnic aspect to this. This is something that both Cornwall Council’s leaders and the political class in both Truro and London have studiously preferred to ignore for the past ten years.

Gentrification proceeding apace

A focus on the FCPNM and national minority rights implies that Cornwall is a nation and that this national status should be respected. However, there are a couple of caveats. First, it’s not the territory of Cornwall that is a nation, but the Cornish people. The easiest assumption, that all residents of Cornwall are automatically Cornish, may make sense in terms of political demands for an assembly but might run into difficulties on a cultural level.

Second, there are alternative definitions of Cornwall, as the report points out (p.5). One of the things that distinguishes Cornwall from other places is that it can be imagined in a number of different ways, sometimes even simultaneously. For some it’s a nation but for others it’s a county, or occasionally a region, with the CDU report opting for a ‘constitutional duchy’. This definitional kaleidoscope is all very well but it tends to undermine campaigns for devolution based on a national status. For instance, many decision-makers in Cornwall, whether Cornish or not, share the assumption of central government that Cornwall is a county, which doesn’t bode well for making a vigorous case for an assembly.

If the Cornish people, however defined, comprise a nation, then another description is more than appropriate. If its people comprise a nation, then the territory of Cornwall would seem to be best described as a colony. It’s notable how academic observers on Cornwall so often resort to the concept of colonialism to explain our status (see pp.76-77 of From a Cornish Study for example). Usually confined to cultural colonialism or used as a general metaphor there seems no good reason not to extend this to the political and economic spheres.

Cornwall certainly fits the classic definition of a colony – a people who have lost their independence and been incorporated and controlled by another state, a land subjected to settlement and occupation by that controlling agent, a people economically exploited by external forces. Cornwall’s independence was gradually curtailed in the ninth and tenth centuries (see my Cornwall’s First Golden Age), after which there was a long, drawn-out transitional period during which the stubborn persistence of its Celtic language into the eighteenth century provided a bulwark against full anglicisation.

Meanwhile, Cornwall’s resources were plundered by institutions such as the Duchy of Cornwall, joined in the twentieth century by the tourist industry and housing speculators. Nonetheless, the presence of a strong sense of territorial identity, the flickering embers of the Cornish language – in placenames and surnames – plus the existence of a large overseas diaspora continued to remind the Cornish of an alternative history and what might have been.

This history would suggest that a postcolonial perspective offers a better way of grasping Cornwall’s current predicament. Postcolonial theory might help us deconstruct the cultural knowledges of both coloniser and colonised. Dismissal of demands for the right to live and work in our own land as merely an unwarranted sense of entitlement could be challenged and disempowered. Moreover, those ingrained and internally colonised aspects of the indigenous mindset might be identified and countered.

A postcolonial perspective could also help us get beyond simple preconceptions of exceptionalism or insignificance and focus on the discourse between coloniser and colonised as an ongoing negotiation. It could clarify thinking about the means to achieve a popular and democratic Cornish Assembly, avoid a sterile and inward-looking victimhood, restore some pride and counter the daft conspiracist fantasies of the far right. Finally, it could provide a more consistent and confident argument to complement, bolster and extend the prospectus outlined in the CDU prescription for an assembly. While the local political class, trapped by the mystifications of a county mentality and tragically confused about the difference between local government and an assembly, roll over and beg at the first sign of devonwall, a postcolonial stance would provide the confrontational resolve that is sorely needed.

Cornwall and devolution 2: From ends to means

It’s crystal clear that the government’s top-down devolution is of no relevance to the struggle for Cornish democratic devolution. It offers no path to a Cornish Assembly. The only possibility it reluctantly admits is extended local government for an individual local authority like Cornwall in ‘exceptional circumstances’ (p.28). No doubt, the response to that will be to beg the government to be so kind as to regard Cornwall as a special case. Good luck with that one.

The Cornish Democracy Unit’s (CDU) report of 2024 rests its case mostly on arguments of identity and history. However, these are hardly designed to cut the mustard in the cold corridors of Whitehall. Appeals to remember the existence of a Stannary Parliament of landowners in 1752 or respect a revived medieval language spoken by less than 0.1 per cent of the population or, more bizarrely, the argument that ‘Cornwall has … its own kings’ (p.17) are likely to be met with blank incomprehension or arrogant derision.

Meanwhile, the CDU report panders to the government’s own growth discourse. It claims for Cornwall a ‘strong entrepreneurial tradition and can-do attitude’ (p.17) and asserts that devolution will address inequalities and increase GVA per capita. Maybe it will but unfortunately this is not supported by empirical research. It’s therefore open to the equally subjective and unsubstantiated counter-argument that the government’s devolution agenda will also perform these miracles. If growth and economic parity is what you want, they’ll say, then climb aboard our mayor-led devolution express and enjoy the ride. Arguments based on the government’s own narrow discourse resemble the ‘anticipatory compliance’ of centrist and centre-left parties when they adopt policies of neoliberalism favoured by the far right.

The CDU report rather optimistically claims that the ‘only barrier’ to a Cornish Assembly is ‘institutional resistance’ (p.8). This repeats the tendency of similar calls for devolution in the past. These have focussed on overcoming what might be called the supply-side of devolution – the deliberate dismissal and neglect of Cornwall from the central state and its local apologists and the structural problems blocking meaningful devolution, such as hostility or indifference from the media.

Finely designed end products are all very well but there surely needs to be more in-depth thinking about the means though which those ends are attained, thinking that takes into account the changing social context in Cornwall. If the Welsh example is to serve as a possible template, let alone Scotland, we need to consider the demand side. Where is the broad-based activist movement rooted in civil society that takes every opportunity to demand devolution and lobbies enthusiastically for it?

The CDU report claims that ‘most of Cornwall is likely to greet a more substantial devolution deal positively’ (p.13), while there is a ‘cross-party and broad-based civic demand’ for a democratically elected assembly (p.17). Really? Little evidence is presented to back this up. The 50,000 signatures collected back in 2002 were an impressive statement of support for a Cornish Assembly. But what’s happened since then? Would a similar petition succeed in 2025 and who would organise it? Where is the well-supported political party or parties demanding an assembly as the centrepiece of their policy offer? The electoral performance of MK, when compared with the electoral breakthroughs of the SNP in Scotland and Plaid Cymru in Wales in the 1960s and periodically thereafter, can only be described as dismal. Moreover, where is the radical flank? Where is the Cornish Independence Party? Where are the more militant organisations prepared to take direct action when campaigning for an assembly? Their absence tends to raise some uncomfortable comparative questions.

The Scottish and Welsh devolved institutions were only established after referenda which provided them with democratic legitimacy. Tellingly, the CDU report makes no mention of a similar referendum for Cornwall. Instead, the blueprint is one of a gradual devolution of powers from central government through orders in council or parliamentary legislation. The danger of that approach is surely obvious. Opponents in Cornwall and elsewhere will no doubt denounce it as ’separation by stealth’, an anti-democratic and costly imposition on a hardworking populace. This approach resembles the plays made by climate denialists and vested interests who attack poorly thought through net-zero initiatives that impact poorer sections of the community while studiously avoiding tackling the catastrophic lifestyles of the better-off.

Net inwards migration has been on the rise and is likely to increase. Can the new residents be persuaded to vote for a Cornish Assembly?

Furthermore, it ignores the rather large elephant in the room. In the Scottish independence referendum of 2014 those Scottish residents born in the other parts of the UK voted 70-30 against independence, very different from the 50-50 split among the Scottish-born. In Cornwall, the proportion of non-Cornish born is much higher and likely to increase further given the Labour government’s plans to massively increase the number of open-market houses, the overwhelming majority sold to incomers. The new residents are unlikely to have much knowledge of or sympathy with any historical case for Cornish devolution/autonomy/independence based on the national rights of the Cornish. Indeed, why should they support such a move when they’re unlikely to identify themselves as Cornish?

In that respect moreover, there’s been a reluctance by assembly campaigners to face up to the issue of how support can be generated among that considerable proportion of the population who are not Cornish by birth, upbringing or family connections and do not claim a Cornish identity. How do we persuade the retirees, career transients, guest-house investors and seekers after the ‘Cornwall life-style’ to buy into the idea that they should support an assembly if the case rests mainly on the FCPNM?  Relying on education would seem far too slow given the scale and turnover of demographic change. Meanwhile, assimilation and acculturation ceased to operate as long ago as the 1980s (Ron Perry et al., Counterurbanisation, 1984).

Any referendum on a devolved assembly in Cornwall would have to guarantee at least 70 per cent of the Cornish-born vote to have a shot at success. Is this likely? Is this why a referendum is not now a part of the demand for a Cornish Assembly? Are those campaigning for a Cornish assembly unwittingly joining the growing clamour to do away with democracy?

Cornwall and devolution 1: delivering devonwall

In September last year, the Cornish Democracy Unit (CDU) at the Institute of Cornish Studies produced a blueprint for devolution to Cornwall (Devolution for Cornwall: One of Britain’s Oldest Nations: From localism to devolved assembly, 2024). This was the latest (although perhaps the most detailed) of a series of such templates for greater political autonomy proposed since MK first demanded self-government for Cornwall in the 1950s. The greater part of a century has passed and while the demands have come and gone no substantive progress has been made towards a democratic settlement for Cornwall.

The model proposed by the CDU is based on the Welsh precedent. It envisages the creation of a Minister for Cornwall, a Cornwall Office and a parliamentary Cornwall Committee. Top-down executive ‘Orders in Council’ could then be used to devolve powers, preparing the ground for a democratically elected Cornish Assembly of 60 members. The report rejected the mayoral model of devolution and made it very clear that a radical reset is required, not an ‘ad hoc extension of local government’ (p.14).

It’s fair to say that the Labour Government’s White Paper on English devolution (Power and Partnership: Foundations for growth, 2024) that appeared a week or so before Christmas did not offer much seasonal joy for the authors of the CDU report. For starters, Cornwall was only mentioned once and then along with three English counties as an example of a single local authority devolution agreement. Otherwise, it was entirely ignored, something devolution campaigners in Cornwall have long become depressingly used to. Clearly, like its predecessor, the Labour Government is treating Cornwall as a bog-standard English county.

The government claims that their devolution White Paper proposes a ‘completely new way of governing’ (p.7). In fact, it does nothing of the kind. It’s still essentially about governing from the top down, while getting the local state to do some of that governing on their behalf, allowing some limited possibility of tweaking that governing while doing so. The White Paper’s title is ‘Power and Partnership’ but this is only power to carry out the government’s bidding, that bidding being clearly signposted by the extension to the title – ‘Foundations for growth’.

The current top-down devolution map

The word ‘growth’ appears 202 times in just 118 pages. In contrast, there’s not a single mention of the word ‘democracy’ in those same 118 pages. In fact, we read that the proposals will result in ‘fewer politicians’ (pp.13, 16, 17, 100), bracketed in the White Paper with ‘a more efficient state’ (p.13). This is classic neo-liberalism, offering a very limited devolution coupled with further de-democratisation of the political infrastructure. While mayors will be directly elected the ‘partnerships’ will not. Furthermore, from Cornwall this looks like re-centralisation, not de-centralisation.

Three ominous signs for Cornwall lurk in the government’s plans.

First, neo-liberal devolution will be achieved through a ‘universal’ coverage by ‘Strategic Authorities in England’ (p.35). Those with mayors will be rewarded with the deepest level of devolution. Ultimately, the government’s ambition is for Mayoral Strategic Authorities across the board.

Second, the ‘default assumption’ (p.31) is a population of 1.5 million or more. Cornwall’s population might well be rapidly heading towards that figure but at present is still under 600,000. Authorities should be based on ‘sensible geographies’ (p.112), which in the government’s limited vision means focused primarily on labour markets and economics.

Finally, the government will bring the big stick into play if there are local authorities that cannot agree among themselves on creating strategic authorities. Strategic authorities will be imposed on these naughty reluctant places (p.35).

The clear logic of this is that, like it or not, Cornwall Council may well be forced into a shotgun marriage with Devon’s local authorities to form a mayoral strategic authority to meet these criteria. (Fortunately, at the moment Devon’s local authorities are squabbling among themselves and not offering a united front to force Cornwall into a devonwall structure. Long may that last.)

Top-down devolution on this government’s model offers nothing to those wanting Cornish-based political institutions and more political autonomy. Instead, all it offers is the less than alluring prospect of the re-imposition of an unaccountable devonwall quango-state. It’s an arid restatement of outdated centralised assumptions mired in a short-sighted fossil-fuelled growth fetish. As a path to a democratic Cornish Assembly it’s supremely irrelevant. It took just over a month after the White Paper had appeared before Cornwall Council’s declared refusal ever to contemplate a devonwall deal began to crumble. On January 21^st this year a move to reverse council policy and consider ‘cross-border combined authority deals’ was only defeated by 36 votes to 29. Which brings us to the unasked question in the CDU report. What happens when the government predictably ignores the feeble opposition from Cornwall and imposes a centralised devonwall structure on us, assisted by its friends at Cornwall Council?

Tourism in Cornwall – an update. We were right.

Back in 2021 we estimated the contribution of tourism to the Cornish economy as being around 13.5% in 2019, a figure far lower than the 20-33% being freely bandied around by the tourism lobby and uncritically reported in local and more general media.

It now turns out that we may have been too conservative in our estimate and exaggerated the role of tourism somewhat. Lightcast Data, which claims to deliver ‘clarity’ to ‘regional leaders’, calculates that tourism accounted for just 11.8% of the total Cornish economy in 2021. This is revealed in a report on ‘sustainable’ tourism produced by … Cornwall Council.

If they want to get their facts right in future perhaps corporate journalists might report the research on this site rather than rush to re-print the latest preposterous and groundless claims from a tourism lobby that has effectively captured Cornish politicians and media outlets.

Clean and green? The carbon costs of Cornwall’s housing programme

You can download a copy of this report here or read it below.

In 2021 I submitted a Freedom of Information request to Cornwall Council asking what the total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions would amount to at their Langarth project. Cornwall’s planners admitted that they didn’t know and referred me to their consultants – Arcadis Design and Consultancy of Exeter. This was mildly surprising as, more than two years earlier, to great publicity, the Council had declared a climate emergency and set the ambitious target of reaching net zero by 2030. Yet here we were with the planners apparently not having a clue about the climate implications of their flagship project.

Arcadis referred me in turn to the environmental statement they had produced in support of Cornwall Council’s planning application for Langarth. A masterpiece of its kind, Arcadis’ environmental statement came in at over 800 heavily technical pages. It’s very unlikely that any councillor actually read it and questionable whether they could understand it if they did. Which was possibly the rationale for what must qualify as a classic example of a pointless (although presumably very lucrative) task by Arcadis.

Nonetheless, Arcadis had done the sums (or at least some sums) on the greenhouse gas that would be emitted during the construction and operation of the Langarth suburb. They discovered that the planned 3,550 houses, set to engulf 245 hectares (605 acres) and 55 fields to the west of Truro would have ‘no significant’ effects on climate change. Anyone who bothered to read this would also have been mightily relieved to find that the effects on the ecology and biodiversity of the area would be ‘not significant’. Meanwhile the long-term consequences of dumping a suburb on the landscape and its visual impact was also ‘not significant’. A few farms were to be displaced while the countryside due to be chewed up is relatively high grade agricultural land. Yet, even more incredibly, the consultants could also conclude that the impact of the building on those farming enterprises would be ‘not significant’, as they would have plenty of ‘time … to relocate or diversify’ (Arcadis, Langarth Garden Village Environmental Statement, non-technical summary, Nov. 2020, p.12). Cornwall Council’s plans for its new suburb ‘garden village’ were duly given the go-ahead from …. Cornwall Council.

In order to reassure any sensitive folk concerned that the Langarth suburb would slightly contradict the Council’s net zero target, Arcadis came up with some ingenious but disingenuous logic. Because its construction would only contribute from 0.003% to 0.012% of the carbon budget for the United Kingdom, it was no problem at all. A moment’s reflection reveals the consequences of this idiotic argument. If we adopt such ludicrous criteria, only the most massive development will ever be deemed to have a ‘significant’ effect. Patently designed to guarantee the continuation of business as usual, this nonsense ignores the aggregate effects of a number of similar projects. In passing, we can note the same fatuous argument is used by developers when claiming that their own building project will lead to gains in biodiversity. This is even as study after study reveals alarming declines in insect numbers along with a steady growth in the number of species consigned to the endangered  list. Individual impacts may well be relatively small; collectively, they are disastrously huge.

Nevertheless, the Arcadis environmental statement on Langarth does provide some interesting data on the greenhouse gas emissions expected over the course of the construction and operation of the 3,550 houses and other infrastructure at Langarth. This includes the embedded carbon in materials used in construction, transport to and from the site, extra traffic and the energy use of the houses. Here it is ….

800,000 tons of GHGs or 800 kilotons (Kt)

Now, that figure is fairly meaningless in the absence of context. In 2020, the most recent year with available data, the total GHG emissions in Cornwall were 3,407 Kt. (This was up to 10 per cent lower than expected because of covid and a sharp, though temporary, fall in emissions from transport.) We can therefore expect the Langarth project to add the equivalent of just over two and a half months of current GHG emissions, or almost an entire year of emissions from all the cars on Cornwall’s roads. While hardly insignificant in absolute terms, this is indeed a relatively small proportion of Cornwall’s total GHG emissions – although remember that the Council’s aim is net zero by 2030, by which time it will be a very large proportion.

Furthermore, we can use the data Arcadis supplied for Langarth to estimate the effects of the overall plans for additional housing in Cornwall. Cornwall Council appears reluctant to assess, let alone publicise, the carbon costs of its housing plans, despite promising to put the climate emergency at the centre of policy-making, which should support ‘carbon-reduction’ (Climate Emergency Development Plan, 2021, p.9). Let’s give them a helping hand.  

We now know that the Langarth suburb will add 800 Kt to Cornwall’s GHG output. That’s just over 0.22 Kt for each house being built. However, Langarth is merely one small part of Cornwall Council’s overall housing plan for Cornwall. The Local Plan calls for 52,500 houses to be built over 20 years. Cornwall Council’s Five Year Housing Land Supply Statement of 2021 tells us that completions for the first 11 years of the Plan were exceeding this and running at the rate of 53,300 houses every 20 years. Moreover, the Council is on record as desiring an ‘ambitious accelerated delivery of at least 3,000 homes a year’, or the equivalent of 60,000 every 20 years. (New Frontiers, Housing and Planning, 2018, p.9). Indeed, the so-called devolution deal (in actual fact a growth deal) is promising to ‘unlock the barriers’ to ‘wider housing growth’ (UK Govt and Cornwall Council, 2022, p.73).

If we take the 0.22 Kt of GHG emitted for each house built at Langarth and multiply it by the 53,300 to 60,000 houses per 20 years that County Hall is so keen on we can obtain a rough estimate for the overall GHG costs of those housebuilding plans.

Houses	GHG emissions (Kt)
53,300	12,011
60,000	13,521

As the bar chart above shows, the total GHG emissions for Cornwall in 2020 were 3,400 Kt, with transport accounting for up to 900 Kt of this. The housebuilding programme will therefore equate to three and a half to four years’ worth of the current total emissions for Cornwall. Or 12 to 13 years of emissions of all the cars currently driving around Cornwall’s roads. If we take the average of the two estimates of GHG from housebuilding and divide it by 20 we obtain the annual carbon cost of Cornwall Council’s housing growth plan. The bar chart below adds this.

If anything, this is a conservative estimate as other ‘developments’ are unlikely to be as environmentally friendly as the Council’s iconic Langarth scheme. Moreover, it does not include the additional emissions from the consumption and travel of the extra population attracted to Cornwall by its high rate of speculative housebuilding – in fact the highest rate in the UK in relation to its resident population. Let’s remind ourselves, over the last decade 29.5 per cent of the houses built in Cornwall have been supposedly ‘affordable’. The vast majority however are sold on the open market and are speculative developments marketed aggressively to upcountry buyers. Twenty years-worth of these speculative housing projects alone equates to two and a half to three years of current carbon emissions every two decades, or eight to nine years of Cornwall’s current road transport emissions.

Cornwall Council clearly has a problem even though its leaders seem blissfully unaware of it. It has rightly although belatedly realised that humanity’s decision to transfer billions of tons of carbon and other GHGs from the lithosphere to the atmosphere was not its brightest idea. But, like the UK Government, it seems to believe that recognising this is sufficient. If it were genuinely serious about reaching net zero by 2030, Cornwall Council would be loudly calling for a moratorium on speculative housebuilding, action to regulate and restrain estate agents, punitive taxation or other restrictions on second home buyers and the devolution of planning powers to limit housing to meet genuine local need. But it’s clearly not serious.

On the one hand it remains committed, at least on paper, to net zero by 2030, which a glance at the calendar reveals is just seven years away. But it lacks any effective pathways to achieve it. Meanwhile, its housing targets are helping to burn a large hole in its net zero policy as, on the other hand, it also wants business as usual to continue. More than that it wants to ramp it up, ‘accelerate’ growth, unblock those mysterious ‘barriers’ and speed up Cornwall’s transformation into a home county by the sea. It’s almost as if one hand wasn’t at all aware of what the other was doing. Do councillors not realise that their policy aims are utterly incompatible, about as sensible as using petrol to douse a fire?

Look at what they do, not what they say: Cornwall Council and the climate emergency

Cornwall Council planning for more fossil fuelled growth

Yesterday Rishi Sunak delivered an obvious snub to Boris Johnson’s aim of forging a global deal on the climate crisis at the forthcoming COP26 meeting.  He did this by halving the tax on domestic flights while only increasing the duty on long-haul flights of over 5,550 miles by a paltry 4.3%, probably less than next year’s rate of inflation. Whether deliberate or not, this further undermined any tatters of moral credibility left clinging precariously to the UK Government.

However, this news was no doubt met with wild celebrations in certain quarters of Cornwall Council. By an amazing coincidence the Council yesterday responded to a Freedom of Information request I had made asking for an update on the number of flights taken by officers on council business. The original piece from 2019 can be found here, while the updated figures are as follows.

Year	Domestic flights	Overseas flights
2017-18	655	6
2018-19	1056	22
2019-20	633	23
2020-21	23	1

The key thing to remember is that Cornwall Council declared a ‘climate emergency’ in January 2019. Nonetheless, every single working day in the financial year from March 2019 to March 2020 saw an average of 2.4 council officers still hopping onto a plane to somewhere else in the UK. Meanwhile, the number of overseas flights actually increased in that year. Even in 2020-21, when it was difficult to fly anywhere, council officers managed some domestic flights.

This raises three questions.

First, why did councillors allow their frequent flyers to make their declaration of a climate emergency look foolish? Why didn’t they act to stop all internal flights where a rail journey was an alternative? As very few of those domestic flights were presumably to Belfast, that would be the vast majority. What is it about the word ‘emergency’ that Cornwall’s councillors and officers don’t grasp?

Second, how can the Council call on residents to reduce our carbon footprint when it allows its officers to act with such mind-boggling hypocrisy?

Third, why does it take an FOI request to obtain this information?

Fact: an air trip from Newquay to Heathrow creates per capita seven times the carbon emissions of a train journey and that doesn’t include the CO2 costs of getting to and from the airport.

The financial impact of tourism in Cornwall: an assessment

There appears to be some confusion in the press about the role of tourism in the Cornish economy. Estimates of its financial contribution fluctuate alarmingly and are often contradictory. For instance …

“Tourism is worth between £1.7bn and £2bn a year to Cornwall, around 20% of the county’s annual GDP, Mr Conchie [CEO of Cornwall Chamber of Commerce] said, while an estimated 53,000 people are employed by the industry.” (Sky News, August 2018)

“Tourism is 25%-28% of gross value added of Cornwall, and the visitor economy could be as much as £2.4 billion over the year.” (Kim Conchie, Penarth Times, March 2020)  

“Tourism is worth nearly £2 billion to the local economy – 23% of GDP” (Daily Mirror, March 2021)

“a lot of people don’t appreciate just how important tourism is. It is 33% of our GDP“. (Cornwall Live, August 2021)  

“Tourism … is about a third of our GDP” (Kim Conchie, Daily Express, September 2021)

Occasionally, the confusion seems to be caused by an elementary failure to understand the difference between spending on the one hand and Gross Value Added (GVA) or Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on the other. As the absolute figure for GVA/GDP is lower than the spending figure, calculating the proportion of GVA by dividing GVA by spending will inflate its importance.

So what is the actual picture, taking care to compare like with like?

In order to calculate the proportion of GVA in Cornwall that is contributed by tourism we need to know the total GVA and the GVA contributed by the tourist sector. Unfortunately, while the regional data for the total GVA is available on an annual basis (Office for National Statistics [ONS], Regional gross value added (balanced) by industry: all International Territorial Level (ITL) regions, Table 2b, 2018 prices), the ONS does not provide a separate tourism sector. However, it has estimated the proportions of its existing sectors that can be attributed to tourist activities (ONS, UK Tourism Satellite Account: 2017. Tables). For example, it estimates that 76% of the ‘accommodation services for visitors’ can be accounted for by tourism, 37% of ‘cultural activities’ and so on. While these ratios are clearly open to question, we can use them as a basis for calculating the overall importance of tourism.

If we do this for Cornwall’s GVA we find that the direct contribution of tourism in 2013 was 8.1%, rising to 9.0% in 2019.

However, the impact of tourism does not end there. In addition to the direct impact of any economic sector there are indirect and induced effects. Indirect effects include the purchase of goods and services from other sectors, for instance when a hotel buys bed linen from a local company. Induced effects include the spending of those earning their living in that sector. This might include things like buying their groceries from the local supermarket.

To allow for this we require a multiplier that includes these indirect and induced effects. Such multipliers for sectors are available on an annual basis from the Scottish Government (The Scottish Government, Supply, Use and Input-Output Tables: 1998-2017, Type II, output, income, employment and GVA multipliers Scotland 1998-2017). In 2017 the multiplier was 1.5 (ONS, Annual Business Survey 2017 NUTS3 and LAU1, aGVA data for Tourism in England). If we then apply this to the tourism estimates for Cornwall, it will increase the role of tourism in Cornwall to 12.2% in 2013, rising to 13.5% in 2019.

This result – a total impact of 13.5% in 2019 – is not that far away from the conclusions reached by the occasional ONS research on the impact of tourism at a regional level. Their estimate for 2013 (ONS, 2016, The regional value of tourism in the UK: 2013) gives a direct tourism component of 9.9%, rising to 15.3% once the direct and induced effects are factored in. Clearly there is some variation here but, given these various estimates, we can safely conclude that the total financial contribution of tourism to the Cornish economy is somewhere between 12% and 16%. This is a lot lower than the figures bandied about by those with a vested interest in tourism.

Note for journalists – next time you hear someone pluck a figure out of the air ask them for the details of their source and refer them to the research here.

Moreover, this assessment of the contribution of tourism to Cornish GVA does not take into consideration either the social costs (of second homes, congestion, pressure on services), environmental impact (a study of Cumbria – A Carbon Baseline for Cumbria, 2020, p.22 – concluded that tourist activities account for almost half its total greenhouse gas production. It would no doubt be similar for Cornwall) or the longer-term disastrous cultural effects on the Cornish people.

Cornwall’s June 2021 Covid wave: cover-up or curious coincidence?

Cornwall is sometimes portrayed as a land of mystery. One mystery that is now fast disappearing from memory is the strange case of the third Covid wave that suddenly appeared towards the beginning of June. The story of this needs to be put on record before it slips, conveniently for some, into the realms of the unexplained.

A third wave breaks

Cornwall had been relatively fortunate in the first wave of the Covid virus. Despite dire warnings of the effects of hordes of tourists, the summer of 2020 passed off safely. However, the luck didn’t hold and in the second wave Cornish communities, like others, saw a substantial rise in case numbers, hospitalisations and deaths as a result of a too-eager relaxation of restrictions and Christmas shopping. And then things calmed down after January 2021 and by the spring numbers were low again, although not quite as low as in the previous summer.

Then, in the week ending June 5^th, unnoticed by most people, the number of Covid cases began to creep up from the levels of May. Cases were reported from the Falmouth district among others. Around the same time the Newquay area began to see cases and by the 8th June the virus had re-appeared in St Ives and in Falmouth itself rather than in the surrounding district.

The three hotspots were clearly visible by June 12th

Case numbers then rose exponentially. In the week following June 6^th there was a record eight-fold increase and Cornwall’s third wave was well and truly under way. But this wave was very different from the first and second. In those, cases of Covid had risen steadily and relatively uniformly across Cornwall, although some towns obviously suffered higher numbers than did others. In this third wave, the cases were at first very highly concentrated in and around just three towns. Falmouth, Newquay and St Ives and their surrounding districts accounted for over two thirds of the recorded cases in the first week of the third wave despite containing only a seventh of Cornwall’s population. This concentration later declined as the delta variant spread out from these three towns. A month later, only echoes of the initial concentration on St Ives, Falmouth and Newquay could still be seen on the map. While these districts still account for a quarter of Cornish cases, that proportion is steadily dwindling.

And even more visible by June 16th

The geography of the third wave

Observers could not help noticing the uncanny correlation between the re-appearance of the virus, driven by the more transmissible delta variant, and those areas of Cornwall that had seen the bulk of the activity preparing for the G7 summit of June 11^th-13^th. The G7 participants themselves were clearly not the cause as numbers were already rising when the summit began. However, up to 6,000 police and assorted security personnel plus at least another 3,000 support staff (some estimates are as high as 14,000) had been active for up to two months previously. They were clearly not immune from the virus; cases were reported from a cruise ship housing police while a hotel at St Ives hosting media and security also experienced an outbreak.

These support staff had been drafted in from all over England, including from places in the north where the delta variant had already become well-established. Some of them had been around for a considerable time, although exactly how many or for how long was withheld for ‘security’ reasons. Nonetheless, the West Briton of June 24^th reported a police officer who had been in the Carbis Bay area off and on for eight weeks although presumably not all those involved would have been around for that long. On May 12^th, a whole month before the summit, a police task force was reported as visiting and warning an activist in St Ives, while footpaths were being closed and movement monitored in the Carbis Bay area at least two weeks before the summit itself.

Questions began to be asked. Given the clear geography of the outbreak, appearing almost simultaneously at three districts several miles apart, but restricted to districts that had borne the brunt of the disruption caused by the G7 summit, it was hardly rocket science to conclude that the G7 must have contributed in some way to Cornwall’s third wave. The chair of the Police Federation had warned back at the end of March that the preparations for the G7 summit had the potential to become a ‘super-spreader’. Some journalists concluded that that was indeed what had happened.

G7? What G7?

But no, not according to Cornwall Council, the NHS or the Government. The response of the authorities was blunt, despite the transparent geographical correlation of Covid and G7. Not only was the G7 summit not the cause; the official line was that not one resident had been infected as a result of it. The week from the June 14^th saw blanket denials from public health officials, councillors and the Government and a categorical assertion that the G7 had played no part at all in the sudden and unusual outbreak in Cornwall. However, it was interesting that the Council and its friends rather disingenuously failed to distinguish between the summit weekend itself and the weeks of preparation beforehand.

The distinct correlation of G7 and the initial outbreaks was left unaddressed, but it was significant that no-one in authority reached the logical conclusion – the undeniable correlation between Covid and G7 venues must therefore have just been a remarkable coincidence. The news website Cornwall Reports reported a Cornwall Council press conference on 22^nd June where public health officials claimed they relied on a different government database that was ‘more reliable’ than the official UK Government dashboard. The spokespeople failed to elaborate on this mysterious second database or how two government datasets could possibly show completely different geographies.

Moreover, suspicions were heightened by the vehement response of the authorities to those asking questions about the covid correlation. Rather than respond to those questions directly and engage with the geography of the outbreak the Council sought to distract from the actual data by attempting to demonise those asking whether there might have been some link to the G7 summit. Those concerned about the third wave and its impact on local businesses were roundly accused of being ‘conspiracy theorists’. Councillor Virr claimed that questions about the causes of the spike were a ‘distraction’ from the task of getting on top of it. The BBC’s Radio 4 disgracefully dismissed claims of a possible G7 link as ‘mischievous’, without bothering to investigate the evidence or ask the Council’s public health spokeswoman Ruth Goldstein any probing questions, or hardly any questions at all.

Probably the daftest accusation came from Conservative MP for Truro and Falmouth Cherilyn Mackrory, who said those suggesting a possible connection with the G7 were ‘scaremongering’. It’s difficult to see what people were supposed to be scared of, as the G7 summit was by this time history, unless Ms Mackrory has not yet told us about another similar jamboree they’re planning to foist upon us.

The factors suggested by the authorities to account for the third wave were much more likely to create scaremongering as they scapegoated groups that were around in large numbers. G7s happen only occasionally; residents, holidaymakers and students, the three groups blamed by the Council for the outbreak, are with us rather more permanently. For critics such as ex-MP Andrew George the ‘ferocity of the denials’ showed a ‘lack of an open mind’. In fact, the hysterical attacks on those concerned as ‘scaremongering conspiracy theorists’ who were merely being ‘mischievous’ was a smokescreen to divert attention from the Council’s refusal to address the questions that were being raised or release data to prove its case. The manner of the peremptory rejection of any link to G7 strongly suggests the Council was not exactly 100% confident of its own case.

Identifying the scapegoats

What did that official explanation amount to? First, let’s clarify exactly what it is that needs to be explained. It’s not the general rise of Covid infections, which was already on the way up across large parts of England as preventative measures were gradually relaxed and pubs, restaurants and other venues opened up again. This, coinciding with the lax border controls which had allowed the more transmissible delta variant to get a hold, had already guaranteed a general rise in infections. All that could easily be predicted. What needed explaining was the very rapid and simultaneous rise in three Cornish coastal towns. What did these places have in common that other places did not? If it wasn’t G7 preparations, then what was it? That is the question that Cornwall Council and its public health officials have for some reason refused to address directly.

Over the two weeks after the third wave broke, the Council’s alternative explanation gradually emerged. At first the goalposts tended to shift wildly as different factors were thrown into the mix. However, after a few days, this was dressed up as a multi-factor explanation, involving a unique combination of factors. We’ll return to that later but for now let’s look at each of the Council’s possible causes in ascending order of credibility.

The first was the general relaxation of regulations that allowed hospitality venues to re-open. As stated above this was clearly a factor in the general rise in case numbers but does not begin to explain the very focused spike on Falmouth, Newquay and St Ives. It’s an enabling factor but not a causal one. Are we seriously supposed to believe that residents and visitors to these three places and these three places alone were the only ones to abandon caution and restraint?

Second, and most bizarre, was a suggestion that ‘people from Cornwall going upcountry to see family and friends’ had caused the spike. In May the highest rates of the delta variant were found in south Asian communities in the north of England. The last available data does not indicate the presence of a large, or even a small, south Asian community in Falmouth, St Ives or Newquay. In the absence of such a link are we really expected to believe that residents of St Ives, Falmouth and Newquay had particularly infectious ‘family and friends’ upcountry when compared with Penzance, Truro or St Austell, places that saw no equivalent spike? Moreover, blaming its own voters might seem a rather foolhardy strategy for an elected body to adopt.

Third, the Council and its health experts blamed ‘visitors coming to Cornwall’. St Ives, Falmouth and Newquay are, it is true, major destinations for tourists, who took advantage of the half-term holidays in late May, after the G7 preparations had been underway for some weeks it should be noted. But Penzance and Mount’s Bay generally, Perranporth, St Austell Bay, Padstow and the Camel estuary, Fowey, Looe, Bude are also popular tourist destinations, let alone places like Torbay up the line. Yet none of those places saw any equivalent spike occur in early June. In most there was very little rise at all after the half-term holidays. So did those places have no visitors? Were they empty over half-term week while only Falmouth, St Ives and Newquay were rammed full of visitors? On comparative grounds this explanation is also patently nonsense.

Finally, we arrive at the most credible explanation offered in the Council’s takeaway list. Students and the young more generally provided a neat scapegoat.

Bloody students

Cornwall’s public health spokesperson Ruth Goldstein has made much of the initial outbreak centred on the universities’ campus at Tremough. It is true that elsewhere towns with large proportions of students have experienced the highest rise of Covid case-rates, places such as a Durham and Leeds or Bristol and Brighton.

Yet if we examine those places in detail in the first half of June, we do not find the pattern seen in mid and west Cornwall. Here, we have three concentrations of cases several miles distant from each other, separated by areas where the case rates were far lower. This pattern, of islands of Covid cases, was particular to west Cornwall and cannot be found in the other districts where high rates were associated with a large student presence. In those other places, the high rates were focused mainly on the student areas and then spread out beyond them.

The Council will no doubt fall back on their assertion that it was the unique pattern of students plus holidaymakers that produced a unique spike. But how unique is this combination? What about Brighton or Exeter or Bournemouth, or Bristol come to that, where Weston-Super-Mare is not that far away? Why did we see no similar pattern in any of those places in the first two weeks of June?

There remain questions about the role of students that the Council seems unwilling to address.

First, how did the students at Falmouth spread the virus so quickly, within a day or two, to St Ives and Newquay?

Second, why did they did not have the same effect in nearer towns such as Truro, Redruth or Helston?

A comparative method of analysis suggests that the almost simultaneous and dramatic outbreak, limited at first almost entirely to three towns several miles distant from each other cannot be easily explained by residents’ behaviour, or holidaymakers, while the role of students is not fully explained.

The simpler explanation

A simpler, less puzzling alternative remains. The other factor these particular three places had in common was the presence, for up to eight weeks, of a large number of persons associated with the G7 preparations. The correlation of G7 and the Covid spike is unmistakeable and remains the most obvious explanation in the absence of a credible alternative offered by the Council or its apologists that can explain the pattern of Cornwall’s third wave.

On June 27^th the double-jabbed TV journalist Andrew Marr disclosed that he had been suffering from ‘a nasty bout of Covid’, caught while he was in Cornwall reporting on the G7. The presence of Marr and thousands of others must have had some sort of link with the Covid surge. Presumably, the Council and its experts would argue that he was a holidaymaker who was given Covid by a student working in the hospitality sector and furthermore passed it on to no-one else. The Council’s desperate denials also began to look increasingly threadbare when Professor Tim Spector, of King’s College, London, one of the UK’s leading Covid scientists, concluded that ‘the G7 “cannot be ignored” as a factor driving Cornwall’s huge spike in infection’. 

It would have been useful if the Council and its public health officials had engaged more sensibly with the comparable case data rather than resort to blanket denials, wild accusations of ‘conspiracy’ and ‘scaremongering’ and mysterious and secret data sources. Ruth Goldstein claimed that public health officers ‘understand what is happening and understand all of our cases’. Yet, in the same report in the West Briton of June 24^th she admitted that the surge ‘took people by surprise’. So which is it? Did they know it was going to happen or were they surprised when it did?

extract from councillor’s email reply

In a reply to an email to my Cornwall Councillor last month, a reply in which my questions were predictably all ignored, my councillor mentioned some modelling that had been done in advance of the G7 summit. According to her, ‘this spike was predicted as far back as March when Public Health did some modelling of what the outcome of restrictions being lifted and half term would be’. Even Cornwall’s Conservative Councillors ought to be a little more critical of that claim. (At least one broke ranks and admitted that the spike “could be linked perhaps to the G7 preparation circus that has been here for several weeks”.) If Council officials knew in advance from this stunningly accurate modelling that there was going to be a specific spike in the towns of Falmouth, St Ives and Newquay then why did they not warn the residents of those places to exercise caution? If, as is more likely, the modelling merely predicted a general spike in June then why was this kept secret from the population in general?

This is presumably the same modelling process that the Council told Cornwall Reports in September 2020 would not be made public as it would ‘lead to panic’. I am awaiting a response to a Freedom of Information request asking for more details of what modelling was done with specific reference to the G7 preparations. But is it right in principle that taxpayers’ money is being used by the Council and the Government to produce secret reports that taxpayers are then not permitted to read?

Moreover, the Council is left with other collateral questions. If holidaymakers were really a major cause of the June spike, as it claims, what is the Council doing to deter the expected flood of tourists over the coming couple of months and protect its residents? Or is it only concerned to protect the reputation of those who organised and initiated the G7 summit?

Now that the Government has decided to give us back our freedom to catch this virus and to give it to others, the case data in Cornwall are being rapidly overtaken again by rising numbers in England and Wales. Our political and health establishment will be breathing a sigh of relief as this distracts attention from questions about the geography and timing of Cornwall’s June Covid spike, their response to that spike and their competence in dealing with it. Questions that they have steadfastly and arrogantly refused to address.

Down from London: dreaming and dreading

The poem below was sent to me by one of my readers.

Camberley

Darling! We MUST move to the south Cornish coast!
My smart phone’s just pinged up one cool must-do post
To say people like us are all moving there
And with superfast broadband and super fresh air
There’s nothing to stop us! We both work from home
So – no more London office! We’re free now to roam!
The house prices there are SO much less than here
Let’s go for it, pronto! Let’s not wait a year
Or the really nice houses will no doubt be sold
And I DO want to move before we get too old!

Camborne

Radio Cornwall – bringing bad news today.
Even more emmets a-coming our way.
Doubt if we’ll see them in Camborne or Pool,
More like on the coast. That’s the general rule.
Feel sorry for Helford and all they nice places
Just look at their car parks! There won’t be no spaces
For ornery Cornish like you and like me
To stop, have a walk and a lovely cream tea.
The buggers have all got these great SUVs
Which take up the road – they all do as they please.

Camberley

Look darling! These websites are a godsend right now
This one’s got a house – a mere six-hundred thou!
We CAN sell this place – and that mews flat we own,
Buy a cheap cottage in Cornwall – a home!!
AND the true cost of living down there in the sticks
Will be much less! No darling, we don’t have to mix
With the locals. There must be a golf club or inn
Which caters for people like us. Let’s begin
To start looking in earnest. Let’s live by the sea
And buy a nice yacht we could call...Camberley!

Camborne

My boy wants to build yachts – down Falmouth or Penryn
But – hell – see the state that his chances are in
Of finding a place he can heat, eat and live
Without spending a fortune – which we a’nt got to give.
All Falmouth be rented to students and such.
The Council do say they is building a clutch
Of ‘houses for locals’. You coulda fooled me.
More like housing for emmets and so NOT for we.