mudhook

The independent group who have been looking at the possibility of a single form of spelling for revived or reconstructed Cornish reported back on 14 October 2007. Read their report here.

They have read the situation well and made two very sensible suggestions.

Firstly, they have not selected one of the current varieties of Cornish as the new standard, as some Cornish speakers hoped they would, but have instead suggested, in their own words, “a compromise somewhere in between KK and KS, building on KD, but with an input from KS.”

Let me try to explain the meaning of this alphabetical soup which I first described in this post.

KS is a coalition of KU/UC, KUA/UCR, and KN/RLC, to use Cornish and English abbreviations, though as far as I can see the three versions also remain. KK has been going for twenty years or so. KD is a new entry, a stand-alone coalition as it were. That’s all as clear as mud, I expect. Three of the forms have some version of the concept ‘unity’ in their name. The compromise means a seventh version of Cornish as far as I can see; in an alphanumerical spirit let me call it K7, at present a hypothetical version. Let me recap: the seven are KD, KK, KN, KS, KU, KUA, plus K7. Do remember that about three hundred people speak any version of manifold Cornish fluently.

The compromise leaves out no variety, they’re all in there. It is clear from the group’s report that they felt - wisely, I think - that to leave out any one variety or to plump for any one would risk a continuation of the present chaotic divisions.

Secondly, they have not spelled out the details of what such a compromise would be. They have suggested that they appoint someone to take a definitive and mandatory decision about what the compromise means in practice for the language. He or she would be advised by a small group representing the various varieties of current Cornish. I think this means choosing the actual spellings. Scope for reasoned debate or rows. And after that is settled there will be questions like how to form new words.

Whether the sensible and practical compromise statement means anything beyond an exhortation to cooperate and offers a feasible project will ultimately be seen in the response it gets from the language users. It is now for the taxpayer-financed Cornish Language Partnership (and the organisations representing the versions of Cornish, and individuals users) to decide whether to accept the group’s proposals. They have little choice; the proposals of a compromise and a practical way of progressing are the only ones from the independent group and to reject them would mean going back to the unproductive civil war that has been fought by the small handful of speakers of Cornish for the past twenty years. The holy grail of an actual reconstructed single written form of Cornish is not yet; but the choice between futile antagonisms and cooperation is stark.

Of course none of this means anything to the vast majority of people in Cornwall. They speak modern English and savour a nod to old Cornish, especially in geographic and personal names, but that’s all. They are no more inclined to learn the modern reconstruction of Cornish than they are to learn Old English.

People in Scotland are getting for free a range of public services that people in England are charged for. In England prescription charges are presently £6.85 an item and only off-peak buses are free for people over sixty. In Scotland there are free eye check ups, free dental check ups, and the arrangements for free bus travel for the elderly are more generous. Tuition fees are paid by students at university in England but Scottish students at university in Scotland do not pay them (though there is in Scotland a one-off flatrate graduate fee of about £2300 payable on graduation). In Scotland there are generally shorter NHS waiting list times and smaller school classes; some drugs are available on the NHS that are not available in England; the arrangements for personal and nursing care are more generous.

The Scottish government has just started a six month pilot of free school meals in some areas for pupils aged five to eight and hopes to extend it all over Scotland. It has also announced that prescription charges will be abolished for everyone within the lifetime of the present Scottish parliament and aims to abolish the university graduate fee.

I don’t live in Scotland and it is up to people there and their government to decide what happens in Scotland.

However, these improvements are possible because the Barnett formula gives a much higher percapita amount of UK identifiable government spending on public services in Scotland than in England. The formula, leading to the higher spending in Scotland and the free or more generous services, is increasingly seen as unfair to England. For 2005/06 the percapita public spending in England (including Cornwall) was £6762 and in Scotland £8265 (and in Northern Ireland £9088, and Wales £7666). This formula is unfair and untenable. It should be scrapped and a new arrangement made for spending UK taxes in the four constituent countries.

For Labour, with a majority of the Scotland seats in the UK parliament and dependent on Scotland for its UK majority, this is an issue they will not tackle; nor will they tackle the related issue of MPs for Scotland constituencies voting for England-only issues in the House of Commons. The Conservatives sometimes rumble about Barnett unfairness but seem undecided whether to commit to tackle it. It is noticeable that the Liberal Democrat MPs for Cornwall complain about what they see as unfair public spending in Cornwall, point to the UK government, but do not mention the Barnett formula.

Slowly people in England are realising the unfairness of the present formula and the present House of Commons voting arrangements and eventually parties will not be able to ignore them.

The Times on 11 October 2007 quoted figures from the Centre for Economic Business Research that showed state spending by the constituent UK countries as a proportion of economic activity was lowest in England and significantly higher in the other three countries.

An earlier post on the Barnett formula is here.

The results of the assessments for 2006/07 of the NHS trusts have been published by the Healthcare Commission and the three in Cornwall have mixed and unglowing scores. See here for the full results and here for a previous post.

* The primary care trust for Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly scores fair in both Quality of services and Use of resources

* The Royal Cornwall Hospitals trust unhappily scores weak for Quality of services and weak for use of resources

* The mental health trust Cornwall Partnership scores weak for Quality of services and fair for Use of Resources.

Overall these are scarcely impressive and patients in Cornwall served by these trusts should look for better next year. The Health Commission has described the RCH trust 2006/07 results as “the poorest record of any of the country’s 394 trusts.”

There is a discussion of what the standards mean here.

However, some good news has come out today. The Healthcare Commission has also announced that it is looking into concerns at the Royal Cornwall Hospitals trust. The trust has reviewed and confirmed its assessment of core values and has met only thirteen out of the forty four for 2006/07. A new chief executive is in place but large debts remain. The commission and RCH trust are working together to pull the hospital service around, the commission examining whether the trust is doing what is necessary to sort out the acknowledged problems.

The NHS in Cornwall is not glowing. It must improve. The primary health trust is newly formed from a previous three and RCH trust has new leadership and now help from the involvement of the Health Commission - and much is rightly expected of them. If next year the scores remain unimpressive, people in Cornwall might begin to ask whether the NHS has a longterm future.

PS 23 October 2007

The Audit Commission has just published its annual review of the financial performance of the NHS for 2006/07. It is more grim news about the RCH trust.

The RCH trust is among twenty seven that have failed every financial test in the review and has reported a deficit of £36.464 million for 2006/07 (Table 3, page 7).

At Appendix 2 of the review are the detailed scores for the three Cornwall trusts (some people in east Cornwall use NHS services provided by trusts in Devon). The primary care trust and Partnership trust score an overall 2 (meet minimum requirements). RCH trust scores an overall 1 (below minimum requirements) and scores 1 for all five aspects of the assessment.

PS 1 November 2007

The RCHT received a loan (public dividend capital) of £56.4 million for 2006/07 from the government. Thirteen NHS trusts received such loans. (Hansard 29 October 2007, column 1039W)

Months ago I wrote about Kareem Amer, a blogger of Egypt who was jailed for four years. I explained then why he was jailed:

Why? Officially, for insulting Islam and the president of Egypt. What exactly did he do? He has a blog and on it he criticised the president of Egypt and what he sees as the sectarianism and sexism of the state-financed Azhar University, and criticised the attack by some Muslims on a Christian church in Alexandria. He has criticised violence and dictatorship.

He is still in jail.

We should not let this go. We should not weary of this. The Egyptian regime is hoping we tire and forget. Send an email to the Egyptian ambassador in London protesting against Kareem’s continuing imprisonment. The email address is etembuk@hotmail.com. The address for letters is Embassy of the Arab Republic of Egypt, 26 South Street, London, W1k 1DW.

Everyone who writes a blog or reads one should stand up for Kareem and free speech.

There is a website Free Kareem. It has a section with addresses and sample letters here.

Here are two articles, by Libby Purves and Andrew O’Hagan, which ooze civilised sense about the nature of religious and philosophic tolerance and the importance of live-and-let-live and not imposing your beliefs upon others. I wholly agree with their sentiments.

The news from Christians has been dispiriting of late. The Anglican church has, as far as I can see, gone along with those who think homosexual acts are evil and damned in their Bible and that homosexual committed partnerships cannot be recognised in their churches and homosexuals cannot be Anglican mahoffs. Francisco Chimoio, Catholic archbishop in Mozambique, has said condoms from two unnamed countries of Europe are deliberately infected with HIV, unbelievable views which leave me speechless. And here’s an item from Nicaragua on the effects of a Catholic prohibition on abortion.

Mehr Licht, said the dying Goethe. I think liberals should also take to heart his other words, Ohne hast aber ohne Rast.

There are various measures of the number of people in Cornwall who describe themselves as Cornish. The best at present is probably the county council’s PLASC annual census in schools in January each year (see this post for 5 January 2007).

This collects figures for the ethnicity for about 72 000 pupils in Cornwall. The figures for pupils described as Cornish in January 2007, with January 2006 in brackets, are:

29.8 [26] percent of pupils in primary schools

24 [20] percent in secondary schools

45.8 [38] percent in other schools (special schools and nursery schools).

Overall 27.3 [23.7] percent of pupils were described as Cornish.

The Cornish figures in all the categories are higher in 2007 than a year previously though still a minority. The secondary increase probably reflects primary pupils moving up at eleven and continuing with their established ethnic description. Are the proportion figures for the entry classes higher than the later classes in primary and other schools? If so, the general increase in primary and special numbers will reflect that; and any increased proportion in entry classes may in turn reflect an increased awareness of the possibility and right to describe oneself as Cornish. I do not know why the proportion in other schools is so much greater than in primary and secondary schools or whether the figures are consistent over all the schools in Cornwall.

It will be interesting to see all the figures for the succeeding years.

Ethnic descriptions in Britain are entirely self-descriptions. In most cases in the PLASC in any schools in England the descriptions are presumably given by the parents rather than chosen by the child.

English ethnicity is not yet an option on the PLASC form; the standard alternative to Cornish is British.

What the school figures mean is difficult to say. Are they representative of Cornwall as a whole? Probably not though they may point to the future. They measure parental description of children and young people and do not, for example, necessarily reflect the ethnic self-descriptions of the elderly, many of whom have come to Cornwall from elsewhere and may well retain their previous ethnic descriptions. The Quality of Life survey of Cornwall county council in 2004 showed in Table 5 that overall 48.4 percent of the self-selected respondents in Cornwall described themselves as English and 35.1 percent as Cornish with differing results in different districts of Cornwall. There were about 4000 responses to the ethnic question and the survey generally had a disproportionate number of responses from the elderly rather than the young.

The 2011 census will give firmer information - though see the last sentence of this post - as it will include (for the first time in a census) an English tick box in the ethnic section; but at present there is no intention to include a Cornish tick box which I think, given the other boxes available, is unhelpful and wrong.

The school figures hardly reflect a political standpoint as the election results for nationalists plainly show. A Morgan Stanley survey in 2004 apparently showed about two fifths of people in Derbyshire identifying firstly with their county rather than with the country so I do not think one can say in themselves the Cornwall figures suggest support for views about Cornwall as separate from England. I suspect that while some people in Cornwall are clear about their identity/identities and their opinions about what Cornwall is, many have complex views about both which cannot be done justice in a choose-one-answer multichoice question.

I understand the point of ethnic monitoring so that we can use the data to try to ensure our public services are genuinely accessible to all parts of the population and so that we can try to provide relevant services. I understand the need to see oneself in particular ways, to enjoy various identities, including group ones. So I am not hostile to collecting and using ethnic data and giving people the chance to identify themselves. However, I have questions. How wise is it to seek out differences among people rather than concentrating on what we have in common? Can stressing ethnic, religious, and other cultural distinctions with no balancing commonalities engender antagonisms? How do we take care that these differences among people do not create unhealthy division and hostility? I suppose in the end I believe it doesn’t matter which end of the egg you open.