MISSING

Look at this Cornwall unitary council by-election result from St Austell the other day:
Liberal Democrat 690 votes, Conservative 675 votes, Labour 66 votes. The Libdems won the seat previously held by a Conservative. Cheers — diffugere nives — and groans — occidit, occidit — no doubt.

Look again. What do you notice? No, not the winner and losers, not Labour’s parvissimum vote. Here’s a clue. Something is missing. Someone is missing. A party is missing.

Yes, that’s right, Mebyon Kernow isn’t there.

The ‘party for Cornwall’ did not put up a candidate.
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Diffugere nives redeunt iam gramina campis
Arboribusque comae
The snows have gone and now grass comes back to the fields and leaves to the trees
HORACE Odes 4.7

Occidit, occidit
Spes omnis et fortuna nostri
All our hope and luck have gone, gone
HORACE Odes 4.4
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GOVERNMENT INTERVENES IN CORNWALL

The government is responding vigorously to Ofsted’s report on Cornwall children’s services by setting up an improvement board to oversee and help the services. The primary aim of the intervention is to ensure that the services to safeguard children in Cornwall are improved. Details are in the media statement Ministers intervene to improve Cornwall’s children’s services which is here.

The government is acting with effect and everyone should be pleased about its response. That it has come to this is shameful.

Relief at the government’s decisive intervention and a wish to see improvement made should not push away the need for a thorough and public explanation of why the council has failed to such a degree.

See here news of Cornwall council’s setting up a panel to improve children’s services, rather overtaken by the action of the Department for children, schools, and families.

YEAH, RIGHT

Update 17 November 2009

Cornwall council has put out a media statement about waste disposal in Cornwall, Integrated waste management contract statement. It sets out the current position and does not mention EU taxes. A public inquiry looms about the St Dennis proposals and the future is very unclear and looks to be costly whatever happens.

Original post 30 March 2009

The argument about whether to build an incinerator in Cornwall for our rubbish has been settled, at least temporarily: the county council planning committee voted against on 26 March. What happens now is much more problematical as EU landfill taxes loom and there appears to be no ready-to-go alternative to an incinerator or landfill and the company may appeal against the decision to reject the incinerator.

Amid the celebrations and gloom of the decision Matthew Taylor, Libdem MP for Truro and St Austell, which includes the area earmarked for the incinerator, said the decision to reject the incinerator proposal showed that “Liberal Democrats are all about listening and democracy…”

What!

“All about listening and democracy” is a leaping generalisation too far: mia gar chelidon ear ou poiei.

As I argued in several posts here in 2007 and 2008 the Libdem-controlled Cornwall county council foisted the unitary council on us without engaging the people of Cornwall in full and open debate; refused to poll the voters of the whole county about it; was casually dismissive of the district polls that showed people didn’t want the particular unitary scheme; and obviously believed people in Cornwall shouldn’t be allowed to decide about their own local government. In short, in my view, about the unitary proposals over several months it was neither listening nor liberal nor democratic.

And now, we are assured, Libdems here are the party that listens and chooses the democratic approach.

Yeah, right.

(And let me degeneralise and say that some Libdems in Cornwall did oppose the unitary and bulldozer approach to local government change.)

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mia gar chelidon ear ou poiei (one swallow does not make a spring): Aristotle Nichomachean ethics
I cannot write Greek characters in the blog.

ONE CORNWALL, MANY CORNWALLS

A report about Sheffield, A tale of two cities, makes an interesting and important point. A team from Sheffield University looked at life in two different areas of the city, Brightside (Labour MP David Blunkett) and Hallam (Liberal Democrat MP Nick Clegg). We are talking chalk and cheese, about serious inequalities between areas in the same city.

I have said often on this blog that Cornwall is not one uniform place, that life differs very much across the county, that there are Brightsides and Hallams here (see this postand this for example). It does not make sense to talk as though there is one Cornwall, disregarding signal differences, and I have indicated some of the mass of readily available evidence that shows the differences even within towns.

The talk of one Cornwall is entirely political and entirely unrelated to reality for people who live here. People who believe Cornwall is a political and national entity and should therefore have a devolved/independent government stress the oneness and tend to disregard the important differences. Cornish political nationalism totalises varying experiences and views.

What then do people who live here think?

Look at the post on the dispute in Penzance about the ferry terminal(s) there and about the wind turbines at Davidstow. Apparently not for them a one-Cornwall governing their county and lives and deciding local issues affecting them; they see that as Truro-centric. Listen to a meeting at Wadebridge on 30 October 2009 on the future of the town suggesting that people in distant west Cornwall might be indifferent about north Cornwall.

There are many Cornish identities, as there are many English identities. On the ground people rationally and emotionally identify with their immediate locality: Cornish from Padstow, Cornish from Camborne, Cornish from Troon, English from Newcastle, from Kentish Town. They also identify with other things and people, their social class and work and interests and friends, as I shall explore in a forthcoming post about identity in Cornwall. Of course, some people indeed claim a general Cornish identity and see Cornwall as their home county (or country), especially against another large identity; but to understand that properly look again at the messages from Penzance and Davidstow and Wadebridge.

Cornish political nationalism, seeing Cornish identity as a simple, monotone matter, does not sufficiently understand these complexities and lacks any comprehensive theoretical or pragmatic way of handling them.

Beyond the politicking of one Cornwall there are difficult questions of local empowerment within Cornwall. There are also important inequalities across Cornwall communities that should be tackled robustly and with effect; those are what we should focus relentlessly on, targeting the places and people of most need, and by reducing the inequalities thus make one Cornwall less of a slogan and more of a reality. Nationalism does not seem up to that task.

DISUNITARY

See the addendum at the end

ORIGINAL POST 14 October 2009

One of the arguments for a single authority for Cornwall is that Cornwall would then speak more strongly and more effectively with one voice for all the people of Cornwall.

Oh dear, it has gone wrong so quickly. Cornwall unitary council, imposed by an alliance of some local Liberal Democrats and the Labour government, is at odds with people in Penzance. The new council, now run by an alliance of Conservatives and Independents, is accused of not listening to what local people in Penzance want. Forget London-based, London-centric, the perpetual moan of the nationalists; the complaint in west Cornwall is in effect against Truro-based, Truro-centric.

This long-running row, which began when the county council existed, is basically about where the Penzance freight depot and passenger terminal of the Penzance-Scillies sea run should be. Polls have shown about three quarters of respondents in Penzance are opposed to the proposal of the unitary council. There have been vigorous comments from both sides.

Nationalists and others often cry against the centre, London-based decision-making, and urge the devolution of authority to the periphery, Cornwall. But in this dispute west Cornwall cries against Truro, where the unitary council sits, and Truro against west Cornwall. Note that this is not indigenes against adventives but a row between a new centre and a new periphery.

At present it seems not so much One and all as One and all at one another.

This dispute throws up an old question. What principles command us when government and people disagree with each other on a particular issue? It is an issue that localists tend to ignore, naively believing that devolving powers from an old centre to what turns out to be a new one dissolves problems of decision-making. In Cornwall we see it most keenly with proposals for affordable housing: often local people do not want houses that government or council, seeing the larger picture, promotes. We have seen it in the planned moving of UGI cancer surgery to a specialist centre at Plymouth. We should see it if there were to be a Cornish parliament.

In practice what usually happens when there is this disunity, this disagreement between the centre and the peripheries, between one group and another, government and governed? Not usually a referendum in Britain so not decision by numbers. Not usually automatic deference to the centre or the locality so not decision by geography. People argue and with goodwill, and sometimes abuse, an answer is thrashed out which pleases everyone or no one or most or few. Sometimes of course an issue cannot logically or physically be resolved with a compromise and one view eventually prevails, not always the most reasonable one and often, I must say, the view of those with most power or nerve or stamina. That’s how democracy works. Argument, debate, thrashing out, the struggle of reason to be heard, are all part of the process of getting to an imperfect answer. Being positive, that’s what is happening here. It is merely an awakening to the new world of shifting centres and peripheries and the realisation that to listen is not necessarily to agree.

ADDENDUM 26 October 2009

Another difficulty showing that ‘one and all’ Cornwall is problematic. Near Davidstow in north Cornwall a planning application for twenty wind turbines is opposed by many local residents, environmental and other groups, and local councillors. The local planning councillors — the East Sub-Area Planning Committee in the unitary lexicon — rejected it. However, the Cornwall Council strategic planning committee, to which it was referred, has approved it. Short of appeals, that is that.

I am not here discussing the merits of the proposal or those of the ferry terminals: I am pointing out the unsustainability of the idea that one council for all Cornwall would speak unchallenged and democratically for all Cornwall, that a one-Cornwall council would solve decision-making difficulties. There is understandable dismay in north Cornwall about what is seen as the loss of the principle that the people in an immediate area affected should decide rather than people from all over Cornwall deciding, a principle which district councils came nearer to realising and which unitary sub-area planning committees were designed for. I have discussed this in the last two paragraphs of my original Penzance ferry terminals post about who gets to decide in unitary Cornwall.

Those who advocate localism have a hard question to answer. How local is your localism?

Is Truro-centric becoming the new London-centric?

AFFORDABLE HOUSING IN CORNWALL

I have already looked at Labour’s failure on child poverty. Now another important and dismal failure: housing waiting lists. On 1 April 1997 there were 8 124 households on the public housing waiting lists for housing in Cornwall. In 2008 there were 17 728. The figures are here and the explanatory notes should be read, especially note 1.

This increase is not unique to Cornwall; there are increases across England. It isn’t down to second homes, or empty houses, or the increase in household formation, or any of the litany of excuses: it is at bottom a failure to build enough houses for rent and purchase that local people can afford, a failure by a government in effect indifferent to such housing and lacking the resolve to push for it, and councils timid about nimby ire. Public housing has been neglected by the Labour government. The numbers being built are pitiful. There has been a lack of will, a failure of determination, much talk and few houses. Is housing and child poverty the “failure that topples all our success”?

Finance for affordable housing is difficult and there has been a notable lack of imagination in realising new schemes for making land acquisition and building and rent and purchase feasible. There has been insufficient will. The government should think of letting councils keep the housing receipts to finance the building of new houses.

Why does it matter?

People need houses to rent and to buy at a price they can afford. Put aside for the moment notions of fair play and social justice and even interdependency, it’s in our own interests to ensure people have a roof over their heads. People more easily believe they have a stake in their community and are less alienated from society and more socially minded if they have decent place to live. It pays us to ensure people are housed well. Children, the people who will work tomorrow and create the wealth and pay the taxes for our pensions and health service and roads, deserve better than third rate, insecure accommodation. They have the best chance of flourishing and growing up straight in a loving and stable home with a sense of being important to their family and their society. A decent, permanent house is part of that. It pays us to ensure children have a decent house to grow up in.

A decent place to live is also necessary ground for an autonomous life, a resource and right of positive freedom. People do not become independent, rational, self-realisers without the means to education and health and housing. For most of us society makes possible the circumstances wherein we might live with independence and dignity.

Affordable houses and child and adult poverty: key matters where Labour has let us down and where Conservatives are unlikely to seriously try to succeed.

We mustn’t give up in Cornwall or anywhere on building much more affordable housing. In Cornwall we should explore whether the new council should seek to build and own some housing; who provides isn’t a question of dogmatism but of what mix delivers best for people in need of a home. We mustn’t abandon those local people struggling to get a house. There has to be more determination and imaginative intelligence and I hope that the government even at this late time and the new unitary council will have those in spades, though the latter has set a cautious and unchallenging target.
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“a failure that topples all our success”: John Steinbeck The grapes of wrath

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CORNWALL ELECTION RESULTS 2009

I have merged the posts on the EU and unitary election results for Cornwall

EU PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS IN CORNWALL 4 June 2009

The EU electorate in Cornwall was about 409 000 and the turnout in these elections was about 41 percent. There were six seats to be filled from the southwest.

These are the number of EU seats won in the southwest region, the number of candidates in the southwest region, the proportion of the total votes cast in Cornwall (including rejected votes), and votes cast in Cornwall (not votes in the southwest region as a whole):

Conservatives 3 southwest UK seats, 27.6 percent of the Cornwall EU vote, 6 candidates in the southwest, 46 589 votes in Cornwall

UKIP 2 southwest UK seats, 23.6 percent, 6 candidates, 39 954 votes in Cornwall

Liberal Democrats 1 southwest UK seat, 17.4 percent, 6 candidates, 29 436 votes in Cornwall

Greens 7.9 percent, six candidates, 13 361 votes in Cornwall

Mebyon Kernow 6.8 percent, 6 candidates, 11 534 votes in Cornwall

Labour 5.0 percent, 6 candidates, 8483 votes in Cornwall

BNP 3.0 percent, 6 candidates, 5118 votes in Cornwall in Cornwall

English Democrats 1.1 percent, 6 candidates, 1781 votes

Others (eight groups plus one independent) 6.5 percent, 11 071 votes in Cornwall

In the thirty three seats MK contested in the unitary elections it got a mean average of 16 percent of the votes cast in the ward; on the Isles of Scilly MK got 39 votes, 4 percent of the total EU vote.

The EU candidates who stood are listed in this post of 21 May 2009 which also links to a list of the unitary candidates.

CORNWALL UNITARY COUNCIL ELECTION RESULTS 4 June 2009

For the 4 June 2009 unitary council election the full results for each seat are here.

The Cornwall unitary electorate is about 412 000 and the turnout was 41 percent. There are 123 seats on the new council which replaces the county council and six district councils. The unitary Cornwall Council results are:

Conservatives 50 seats won on the unitary council, 34 percent of the total unitary vote, 123 candidates stood, 57 115 votes in total

Liberal Democrats 38 seats, 29 percent, 119 candidates, 48 187 votes

Independents* 32 seats, 24 percent, 112 candidates, 39 807 votes

Mebyon Kernow (MK) 3 seats, 4 percent, 33 candidates, 7290 votes

These parties did not win any seats:

UKIP 4 percent, 28 candidates, 6350 votes

Labour 3 percent, 60 candidates, 5698 votes

Greens 2 percent, 16 candidates, 3139 votes

Liberals 0.6 percent, 9 candidates, 945 votes

BNP 0.2 percent, 4 candidates, 363 votes

English Democrats 0.05 percent, 1 candidate, 81 votes

* I have included in the Independents both candidates who described themselves as Independent on the ballot paper and the candidates who did not put any political description on the ballot paper.

The number of seats a party contests influences it share of the total vote and thus if a party contests only a few seats its share of the total vote of all seats is perhaps misleading. However, I think parties by and large contest seats which they think are most favourable to them and for which they have candidates; this is an indication of the strength and health of the party in Cornwall. The proportion of votes a smaller party wins in the seats it chooses to contest cannot be extrapolated to uncontested seats; such an extrapolation is arithmetically invalid and politically not sensible, and in any case would be an average of proportions that much vary among those seats.

Labour sinks

For Labour the Cornwall unitary elections were a catastrophe. It won less than a fifth of the votes it got in the last county elections and its mean average vote per seat was ninety five compared with 693 in the last county elections. It contested sixty unitary seats and in seven-tenths of those it polled fewer than a hundred votes. These figures suggest it spread itself far too thinly for its present intrinsic strength and it would have fared better if it had focussed hard on its few possibly winnable seats. Labour will not recover easily in Cornwall from this disastrous result.

Mebyon Kernow stands still

In the Cornwall unitary elections Mebyon Kernow (MK) has not advanced on the immediate past though the number of MK candidates has increased absolutely and proportionately.

MK had no county councillors and seven elected district councillors out of a grand total of 331 before these elections: it now has a pro rata three on the unitary council. It won 7290 votes in these unitary elections; in the last county council elections it won 9421 votes and in the last district council elections 8919 votes (not all district seats were up for election in Cornwall as in one of the districts, Penwith, only a third were so the MK district votes can be reasonably likened to the county votes). The mean average votes in each seat MK contested are: county 523, district 372, unitary 221: these figures suggest that MK has, like Labour, overstretched itself this year.

The MK leader, Dick Cole, polled 927 votes, 78 percent of the total vote, in his unitary ward, a very impressive result.

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Also see the post How has MK done in the 2009 elections?

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HOW HAS MK DONE IN THE 2009 ELECTIONS?

This is a summary of MK’s record in recent local and EU elections:

2005 COUNTY: 9421 votes, no seats, 3 percent of the vote
2007 DISTRICT: 8919 votes, 7 seats, 4 percent of the vote
2009 UNITARY: 7290 votes, 3 seats, 4 percent of the vote

2009 EU 11 534 votes, no seats, 7 percent of the vote

The % number is the percentage of the total vote; for the EU election this is the total vote in Cornwall.

Unitary election
In local elections MK has made no progress. Its 2009 unitary council vote is less though it put up more candidates than in the earlier years. In terms of votes per MK candidate the figures are county 523, district 372, unitary 221 which suggest that it overstretched itself this year. MK had seven elected councillors out of 331 county and district ones before the 4 June election and after the election it has three elected out of 123 unitary councillors; pro rata it has stood still. MK is primarily a party which seeks a devolved Cornwall, which focuses on the local rather than the transnational. Cornwall and its government is MK’s speciality and here it has not advanced. Even in its most propitious seats, the seats it contested, voters in Cornwall largely rejected MK as their choice for governing the county and MK got an absolute majority of the votes in only two of the 123 seats. It is reasonable to assume that in rejecting MK the people of Cornwall are rejecting its version of concern for Cornwall, its nationalism, and choosing other versions of concern. MK does not speak for Cornwall.

EU election
The turnout in Cornwall was similar in both the unitary and the EU elections. What we are looking at is a shift, a reassignment, from Conservative, Liberal Democrat, and Independent unitary voters to different parties in the EU election. In the EU elections MK received more votes than in the unitary election; so did the BNP, English Democrat, Green, Labour, and UKIP parties. UKIP polled six times as many EU votes in Cornwall as it did unitary votes, presumably because its focus is on the EU rather than local government. Arithmetically, MK received fewer ‘extra’ EU votes than either UKIP, or the Greens, or the BNP.

MK also received EU votes outside Cornwall — 63 in Tewkesbury and four hundred in Wiltshire, for example. I think most of these were general protest votes rather than outposts of Cornish nationalism.

Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.

I think we can be clear about the unitary vote: people chose the candidate or the party they preferred to see running Cornwall and that was overwhelmingly not MK.

The EU vote is more problematic. The increased UKIP and decreased Libdem EU votes seem clear as those two parties are seen to have distinctive views on the European Union. The rise in the EU votes of the other parties cannot be easily separated from the fact that votes were available for reassignment as it were and perhaps the extra EU votes are best seen as representing secondary not core support.

In short, Cornwall rejected MK very clearly and MK did not advance on its previous position. It will be interesting to see how MK does in next year’s parliamentary election when they contest all six seats in Cornwall. Historically, it does very poorly in these elections.

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Now here, you see…Lewis CARROLL Through the looking glass, chapter 2 (the Red Queen to Alice)

See also the post Cornwall election results 2009

MEBYON KERNOW’S ELECTORAL RECORD

We’re coming up to local unitary and European elections in a few weeks on 4 June and it is timely to set out the recent electoral record of the nationalist party in Cornwall, Mebyon Kernow (MK). I’ve explored in previous posts my beliefs that MK represents only a small minority among Cornwall voters and that political nationalism misreads the affection for Cornwall felt by people here; therefore I’ll largely focus this post on the electoral facts.

MK has not contested every available seat in the past and this has reduced its total vote but this partialness probably reflects its political health and estimation of its chances. It has candidates selected for every Cornwall seat for the next general election, probably in 2010.

The local elections are for a new-start unitary council of 123 seats, replacing the county council which had 82 seats and six district councils which had a total of 249 seats. The European elections are for six seats in the vast southwest constituency stretching from Land’s End to Gloucestershire and Wiltshire.

European elections
MK fought in the 1979, 1989, and 1994 European elections but those results are too distant in time to be relevant to 2009; the voting system and constituency have also changed. MK has never had an MEP.

Cornwall county council
The last elections were in 2005. MK won no seats. It did not contest every county council seat and in the the seats it contested, approximately a quarter of the total, MK got 9 percent of the votes cast (not ballots issued as in some seats voters had more than one vote). Overall MK got 9421 votes, that is 3.2 percent, of the total votes cast (not ballots issued ) in all the county council seats in which there were elections.

There are online maps of the unitary electoral divisions here.

Cornwall district councils
There were 249 district/borough councillors in the six district councils at abolition in March 2009 and MK had 9 district councillors. In the 2007 district council elections in Cornwall there were 225 seats out of the 249 for election; MK put up twenty four candidates and they polled a total of 8919 votes. Seven were elected and since then two other councillors have joined MK, making a total of nine district councillors.

Cornwall parish and town councils
There are 208 parish/town councils in Cornwall. MK has 19 councillors out of several hundred (March 2009).

Parliamentary general elections
MK has fought eight of the ten general elections between 1970 and 2005. In the 2005 general election in Cornwall MK won about one in sixty of the votes cast in the four seats it contested. MK has no MPs.

4 June
In its forty years as a political party Mebyon Kernow has so far made no discernibly consistent progress in the numbers and proportion of voters it attracts, though by and large it does better at local rather than national elections. It is a decidedly minority party. In the unitary elections for the whole county MK starts from a base of about three percent of the total (county council) votes cast, about 9 percent in the county seats it contested, and 9 (district) councillors. The new council has far fewer seats than the old county and district councils combined so MK’s likely haul is difficult to forecast but to stand still it must expect to win some. There is little chance that MK, a one-county party, will win any of the six seats in the Euro constituency which stretches surreally way, way beyond Cornwall.

Sources
Election results are published by a variety of sources including national and local newspapers, councils, and various websites. For individual parliamentary constituency results see the websites here and here.

UNITARY CORNWALL’S COSTS AND SAVINGS (2)

The other day in a House of Commons debate there was a reference to the costs of transition to the unitary council in Cornwall as £42.5 million (Hansard 24 February 2009 column 20WH). At first sight this looks alarmingly different from the figures usually quoted: see my post Unitary costs and savings 1.

Let me explain. They are the costs over four years. The details are found here in the Benefits realisation plan presented to the 10 February 2009 meeting of the Finance and Performance Group, a committee of the Implementation Executive of councillors which is overseeing the move to a unitary council.

We can now see more clearly the disposition of costs and savings associated with the creation and first four years of the new unitary council.

Over the four years 2008/09-2011/12 the new council will have total transition costs – the costs of setting it up, implementation costs – of about £42.582 million. It will make total savings over those four years of £71.592 million. A simple subtraction gives a total of usable savings of £29.010 million over the four years.

The Benefits realisation plan says the unitary council will generate “planned ongoing savings of over £29 million per annum.” This is higher than the £20 million mentioned by Lavery, the new chief executive, last month.

I have caveats.

The transition costs include an estimate of £21.936 million redundancy costs: this figure may go up or down depending on the individuals who become redundant; each individual has different redundancy entitlements. In consequence the transition costs may change; this is acknowledged by the Benefits realisation plan. There is an estimate of 462 redundancies.

The figures are estimates and projections, planned expenditure and savings; they are not reports of what has happened already.