mudhook

In the post How many are Cornish? I collected together data, of varying status, for the number of people in Cornwall who describe themselves as Cornish. This post is an update.

In Britain people have a free choice as to how they describe their ethnicity and one can freely change one’s ethnic description if one wishes. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) uses numerous ethnic categories though only a few appear discretely on spatially constrained census forms.

There are two major local sources of information about the numbers of people in various ethnicities in Cornwall, the annual school census and the periodic Cornwall quality of life survey. The sets of data from each of these are neither comparable between the two sources nor, strictly, within them and this should be borne in mind when reading the sets or assuming apparent trends. The national census has not had an open tick-box option of the two main ethnicities in Cornwall, English and Cornish (actually, White English and White Cornish) and thus is unhelpful here.

Pupils
Here are the ethnic results from the school census (PLASC), taken in January each year, for the overall proportion of pupils described as (White) Cornish, presumably so described by their parents:
2006: 24 percent
2007: 27 percent
2008: 30 percent.

This data on the surface suggests that the proportion categorising as Cornish is rising regularly as new primary pupils enter school but that simplism is misleading. More analysis of changes within the school year groups and more years of data are needed to assess what is happening.

Adults
The 2004 Cornwall Quality of Life Survey for the county council showed that 35 percent of respondents described themselves as “White Cornish” (Table 5). In the 2007 survey this is 26 percent (table 3.1.15). The fall is unexplained in the survey. Note that there is a fall here but a rise in the pupil figures.

Data discrimination against the English?
The 2004 survey also showed 48 percent describing themselves as White English and 11 percent as White British. The 2007 survey omitted the White English tick box and offered White British which 72 percent ticked. I don’t know why the English category was omitted, especially as it was the largest single group in 2004. Whatever the reason or intention, the effect might be seen as data discrimination against those in Cornwall who regard themselves as English and is a loss of useful information about a community. I find the the omission regrettable. The Cornwall PLASC census also includes Cornish but not English as an open ethnic option; again this might be seen in effect in Cornwall as data discrimination. (The 2001 census had neither English nor Cornish as an open tick-box option; the next one will apparently include English as an open option but not Cornish, an omission which I also regret.)

There are acknowledged difficulties in how representative of the population of Cornwall the populations in the two data sets are. The response to the quality of life surveys under-represent the younger groups; the pupil surveys naturally are tilted to the young and their largely youngish parents. The populations of the school censuses are very much larger than those of the quality of life surveys.

Summary
In summary, based on these sources the proportion of people in Cornwall describing themselves, or describing their children, as Cornish ranges from about a quarter to about a third of Cornwall’s population. The proportion is not consistent, varying by age and location. The total population of Cornwall is currently estimated at 538 000.

I discuss in a later post what these ethnic figures might mean.

Which end do you break your egg?
I’m putting here a paragraph from my post How many are Cornish? as it makes a point I think important about ethnicity and nationalism:

“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.”
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Related posts

Ethnicity and Cornwall

How many are Cornish?

And biologically speaking -

Blue-eyed Cornish and English are brothers

English and Cornish are sisters under the skin

English and Cornish have same milk gene

“which end of the egg you open” - Jonathan SWIFT, Gulliver’s travels, part 1, chapter 4

Practically everyone with blue eyes is descended from a single, common ancestor who lived 6 000-10 000 years ago perhaps in the north west region of the Black Sea.

You can read the research report of 3 January 2008 by Hans Eiberg et al in Human genetics here and an article in today’s Independent here.

Look back at the post about the milk gene shared by most Cornish and English people. Now there’s the blue eyes mutation. Practically everyone in England and Cornwall who has blue eyes is biologically recently related whether they call themselves Anglo-Saxon or Celt or English or Cornish or British or…

Oh and here’s some other research about blue eyes. This post goes back to the beginning of our species of anatomically modern humans. On origin for us all.

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.

Life’s getting better

I’ve said before that people here differ in how they see Cornwall. Some see themselves as Cornish not English and Cornwall as in sundry ways a separate country. Others see themselves as English or Cornish-and-English and Cornwall in 2007 as a county of England; there are other identities and combinations too. I’m sure most of us get on with our lives and one another and don’t fret about our identities. We are concerned with seizing life and opportunities ourselves and encouraging others to do so.

And life and opportunities are improving in Cornwall and are there for the seizing. The economy is growing, there are more jobs, British and EU funds are making a difference, Cornwall is not the worst-off place in England. In large ways and in a thousand small ways Cornwall is going forward: see the Vorsprung Cornwall posts for the latter.

Oh, of course Jerusalem is not yet. For example, housing for those starting out is a serious problem, as it is elsewhere in England; and the obvious solution of building enough housing specifically for them is costly and hampered by a variety of unconvincing objections. Many wages are debilitatingly low but objective one and convergence EU funds together building the economy are our best hope of raising them significantly.

However, overall there is very much about twenty-first century Cornwall to be upbeat about. Be of good cheer. This is the liberation of Cornwall.

Nationalist difficulties in the face of more prosperity

Faced with the demonstrable improvements in life nationalism has a problem. A common argument is that Cornwall is at the bottom of every league and suffers from deliberate neglect and unfairness by the British government and only nationalist solutions can work. This nationalist argument is falling apart. More and more people here can see with their own eyes it is not true. Cornwall is doing well as a county of England. The economic grievance agenda is looking ludicrous and surreal.

Of course, the argument that “we’re ethnically different and that’s important” still persuades some people here and I am happy for people to identify themselves as Cornish and celebrate their Cornishness. However, the vast majority of people here, whatever ethnic label they give themselves voluntarily or if asked or pressed and whatever they celebrate, are not agitated about ethnicity and genetics and happily get on with their lives and one another. It is a small minority that sweats about labels or minisculely different DNA. Most people walking down the street or drinking in the pub cannot tell who is Cornish, who is English, who is whatever; and for most people it is not an everyday concern at all.

Devastatingly for nationalism, most people are able to celebrate Cornishness without signing up to nationalist politics. The constitutional argument does not touch them; they celebrate Cornishness but do not believe Cornwall is a separate country from England and instead believe that Cornwall is and has been for centuries a county of England. Only nationalism links contemporary Cornishness with some form of Cornish political separateness.

I believe the nationalist constitutional argument, the belief that Cornwall is truly not a county but a country and the county arrangements are illegal as would be clear if only a court could be found to say so, is of interest to only a handful who look backward to a contested history.

Nationalism in fact largely stresses localism and a claimed administrative efficiency as the argument for devolution, though this apparently can incorporate the belief that using the word Cornish in front of an institution necessarily makes it work better, and the claim that Cornwall is a “Celtic nation” is still advanced as a reason for devolution.

Electoral nationalism fails

Real life gets in the way of nationalist theory. Hardly anybody votes for explicit nationalists or, as far as I can see, joins their organisations. Mebyon Kernow (MK), the largest and most public nationalist group, has made no serious electoral progress for years. The other political nationalist organisations here are distinguished for their insignificance in the lives of most people in Cornwall.

Electoral nationalism has failed.

The changing improved circumstances of real life and the failure to make headway among voters and people generally have, however, energised some on the nationalist spectrum. I shall look at these in another post.

Did modern humans - that’s you and me - originate in a single place in Africa or were there several originating places? Paleoanthropologists have not been of one mind about this. However, the latest research points unequivocably to a single African origin for all of us. Read the letter in Nature from Andrea Mandica et al here. There is a Reuters report here too.

Whatever miniscule and irrelevant genetic differences nationalists cry up, English people and Cornish people all come from the same place and the same people in Africa. All humans are the same people.

[‘The effect of ancient population bottlenecks on human phenotypic variation,’ a letter from Andrea MANICA et al in Nature 19 July 2007, volume 448, pages 346-348.]

An article in the Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences of the USA shows that the ability to digest milk found among northern Europeans became dominant in that population only in the last seven thousand years. The research was done by scientists from University College, London (UCL) and Mainz University who looked in neolithic human remains for the gene that enables milk tolerance in adults.

The ability to digest milk and other dairy products is called lactase persistence or lactose tolerance and is down to an enzyme called lactase in the small intestine. Lactase breaks down lactose, the main sugar in milk, and enables it to be digested. Infants can digest milk, but in many adults the amount of lactase falls off and they become unable to handle milk. To be able to continue digesting milk people must have a variant gene which goes on producing lactase in adulthood and this is so for most people in northern Europe, the middle east, east Africa, and north America. The research suggests that the predominance of successful milk-digestion in northern Europe adults arose after the rise of dairy farming and proved evolutionarily very advantageous.

Note, about 95 percent of the White British group have the milk gene, the gene which enables lactase persistence. This means most English and Cornish people share this gene.

See PNAS USA (2007) volume 104, pages 3736-3741

There is a difficulty in any discussion of nationalism, be it English, French, Cornish, whatever: discussion tends to treat the ideology as monolithic and its advocates as part of a collective and not as diverse individuals. Cornish nationalism, like others, healthily varies, encompassing different views and approaches. This makes it difficult to generalise succinctly and to pick out the features which I think are defining, but which individual nationalists or strands may well not subscribe to. With that caveat – nationalism is not homogeneous and all the following comments should be read as about “some” not “all” people and strands - perhaps I can raise issues that I have with Cornish nationalism generally:

(1) I don’t think the right balance of difference and commonality is there; the focus seems to be on difference.

Of course some people wish to say they are Cornish, just as some people wish to say they are English or Chinese or Western European. Of course some wish to celebrate Cornish cultural particularisms – though many of these turn out to be more widespread practices than cistamar nationalism appears to know and some of the rest are, well, unimpressive, and one finds cultural particularisms all over England. Of course people in Cornwall, like people everywhere in England, wish to have a very large say in what happens in their governing. Different people in Cornwall will interpret these desires differently, and working out the differences and choosing between them is politics.

However, there is a balance to be had. It is right that individuals and groups celebrate the particularisms that they see as important to their identity. However, it is also important that this does not lead to estrangement from the generality of life throughout Britain and the range of universalisable values that make us all part of the enlightenment west. Do we not have more in common than nationalism supposes?

(2) There is too much attention on identity questions and too little on practical questions. I suggested in the post about Cornish rights: the real pro-Cornish agenda, to focus on identity issues rather than social and economic questions disfavours people in Cornwall. I strongly believe that the right to a roof over your head or local hospital services are more important than having a box to tick on a census - look at the post on petitions and which one commands most support among people in Cornwall. A house, a hospital, a school, a living wage or pension are real gains for people, a tick box or a formula is a token. Yes, one can argue for both but one should devote very much more energy into fighting for what makes everyday life better. (I shall write about formal recognition of the Cornish as a minority under the Council of Europe convention in a later post.)

(3) People here who aren’t nationalists genuinely care about Cornwall and legitimately see problems, causes, and solutions and possibilities in ways that differ from the routine nationalist ones. It is not anti-Cornish to disagree with what nationalism says. Nationalism does not have a monopoly of concern for people and life in Cornwall. It is not the only view of Cornwall, it is not the only vision.

(4) There is a victim culture: Cornish people are discriminated against, the government deliberately short changes Cornwall which does not get its fair share of public spending, and Cornish rights and true history are suppressed. Achievements in the economy are underplayed. There are indeed difficulties in Cornwall but most people find this grievance discourse to be simplified and nonsense.

(5) There is a naivety in identifying problems, attributing causes, and suggested solutions. Let me caricature this: as a general rule everything imperfect in life in Cornwall is the fault of the English and if the Cornish were allowed to get on with it all would be well; an assembly/parliament would turn Cornwall into a land flowing with milk and honey, a garden of Alcinous, just like that.

(6) The reality is that people here differ in their views about Cornwall and themselves: some people see Cornwall as an integral county of England and some as not part of England but a distinct country; and people here see themselves as English, or as Cornish, or as both, or as something else, or some other combination. I think that the only reasonable and democratic approach is to acknowledge these differences and to let everyone express his view and display the symbols of his views, flags and whatever; but nationalism offers a confused response.

Additionally, I think a large part of generalised Cornish nationalist sentiment arises not from identity issues but from the real and perceived poverty of Cornwall and a mistaken sense that Cornwall uniquely does not get a fair economic and financial deal from the British government. As people in Cornwall experience more prosperity the misperceptions of the grievance and victim agenda resonates with fewer and fewer people.

These things leave me chary of Cornish nationalism; and, indeed, of all nationalisms.

Nationalists demand rights for the Cornish.

There is an imprecision about many Cornish nationalist beliefs and different nationalists believe differently but I think what this seems to mean is issues about identity, such things as formal recognition of people’s Cornish identity, the right to tick a box saying one is Cornish on forms, including the census, the right to teach pupils in schools in Cornwall a particular version of history, and the right to access much more of taxpayers’ money to promote Cornish cultural desiderata. Nationalists also believe that Cornwall should be partly or wholly independent of England: devolution within England, home rule outside England, or a fully independent country.

I should think most people have no difficulty in agreeing that people should be free to categorise themselves as they wish and claim whatever ethnic, cultural, religious, racial, and so forth, identities they wish. The possible financial ramifications are, like most public financial matters, contentious (and largely undiscussed).

However, focusing on identity issues detracts from what I think are the real issues for people in Cornwall, however they see themselves, the issues that will make everyday life better for everyone. I’m not sure they are rights but these sorts of things are certainly what we should be working for and concentrating on:

An all-year-round job with decent pay and conditions
An affordable house to buy or rent
A health service that works well - and is as local as possible
Schools in one’s locality that offer an excellent standard of education
An end to poverty, or at least serious progress towards ending it
A healthy and life-enhancing environment.

I suspect that most people in Cornwall see these issues, the right to seek and work for a good life, as what is most important.This is the real pro-Cornish stance. This is the real pro-Cornish agenda.

It is also the agenda of progressives throughout Britain.

Every year schools undertake a census of the ethnicity of their pupils. In January 2006 the results of this for over 72 000 pupils in Cornwall showed that about 23.7 percent were described as Cornish, presumably most of them by their parents. The proportion among primary pupils was in round terms 26 percent and among secondary pupils 20 percent. These are claims of identity by people, how people see themselves and their children.

A different ethnicity is one of the claims of nationalists in Cornwall for distinguishing it from the rest of England.

Ethnicity is a fluid word which can refer chiefly to culture but also to biological descent. It is no longer usual to use the word “race” so ethnicity covers some of what was referred to in the past as race and also culture.

Culture
Some nationalists distinguish Cornish people as an ethnic group on cultural grounds. The chief claims for the cultural distinctions put forward are:

(1) Cornwall was politically and administratively incorporated into England at a comparatively late and contested date. Some claim that Cornwall is still legally if not de facto independent of England and a country in its own right.

(2) People in Cornwall historically spoke one of the Celtic Indo-European languages, different from English, related to Welsh and Breton, and other Celtic languages in the British Isles, and now reconstructed and revived. The date of this language’s cessation in general everyday use is unknown and contested but is probably no later than the end of the seventeenth century in the west of Cornwall, the last area to use the language. The reasons for its cessation are disputed.

(3) As a development of (2), the modern culture of Cornwall is claimed to be Celtic and different from English culture (which some apparently see as uniform and undifferentiated) and an affinity, cultural and by some genetic, is claimed with other historically Celtic-speaking areas of Britain. The modern, distinctive manifestations of this Celtic culture in Cornwall, apart from language, are not clearly defined by its claimants or are, to me, unconvincing. Celticity is also used as a marketing tool in Cornwall.

The details of the claims in (1) are much contested; (3) is contested; and the language claim in (2) is accepted but the scale of the revival is contested. A survey in 2000 by MacKinnon/Government Office of the South West suggested that about 300 people spoke one or other of the varieties of the reconstructed/revived Cornish fluently and several hundred spoke it less than fluently. Read it here.

There is a long-standing view that a Celtic-speaking people arrived here in what is now called England in the iron age bringing Hallstatt and La Tene Celtic culture from central Europe; and that in the fifth century AD Anglo-Saxons from north Germany and south Denmark invaded and killed many of these Celtic-speakers and drove the rest to the west – Wales, Cornwall, Cumbria; Ireland and Scotland also remained outside the Anglo-Saxon influx. This fifth-century Anglo-Saxon adventus is the view basically told by Gildas in De excidio Britanniae (The ruin of Britain) writing in about 540 AD; and Bede, who was influenced by Gildas’s account, in his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical history of the English people) written about 731 AD and naming Angles, Saxons, and Jutes as the migrants. Procopius writing in about 550 AD said that Britain had three peoples: Britons, Angiloi, and Phrissones, the last two being Angles and Frisians, I presume (De bello gothico). He also said that people from all three went back to the continent.

This traditional view was challenged in the last quarter of a century. The evidence from archeology and historical writings is inconclusive but some believe that the adventus was a migration here by a smaller elite; the culture was changed without the significant replacement of population. See also the reference below to work by Mark Thomas and others (2006).

Popularly now the present and past Celtic-speaking people are called Celts – the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle called them Welsh - though most Celtic scholars affirm that Celts are a linguistic and not a genetic, biological group. No one has explained satisfactorily how the Celtic language was replaced so thoroughly by English.

Some modern research has questioned the claim of a uniform Celtic people and culture in Britain, though not of the existence of Celtic-speaking peoples. This is another contested area – see work by, for example, John Collis and Simon James.

Biology
The claim for the genetic distinction is that in the past and in the present people in Cornwall were genetically different from people in the rest of England and genetically similar to people in historically Celtic-speaking areas such as Wales. The term indigenous is sometimes used to describe these distinct Cornish people and they are usually described as Celts (which is another contested word when applied to people rather than language). Descent is an identifier of Cornish people used by some nationalists; others stress cultural identity rather than biology.

Several recent surveys of the genetic inheritance of the people of Britain and Ireland have looked at the distribution of ethnic genes and these surveys are not easily reconciled. They do not enable a clear settlement of the question of whether the Anglo-Saxon adventus in the fifth century AD was the first migration of Germanic people into England and whether it was a substantial migration or a smaller one of an elite.

Questions are raised too about the origins of the Celtic-speaking people here and whether they are the indigenous people of Britain, that is the first people to settle here permanently after the last ice age in paleolithic times, or a later migration. There is much that is not yet definite.

Research by Cristian Capelli and others was published in ‘A Y chromosome census of the British Isles’ in Current biology journal for 27 May 2003, volume 13, issue 11, pages 979-984. One may read it here.

This research looked at twenty five sites in the British Isles and distinguished Anglo-Saxon (North German and Danish), Norwegian, and indigenous inheritances. They found that the indigenous population was not wholly displaced by an Anglo-Saxon migration anywhere in Britain and that in the south of England the population is “predominantly indigenous.” The results from the Cornwall samples fell midway between indigenous and Anglo-Saxon predominant areas.

See here for research by ME Weale and others in 2002 which found a difference between males in central England and north Wales which, they argued, suggested a large scale migration of male Anglo-Saxons into central England but not north Wales : ‘Y chromosome evidence for Anglo-Saxon mass migration’ in Molecular biology and evolution (2002), volume 19, pages 1008-1021.

These studies seem to require an Anglo-Saxon male migration larger than some consider likely. Mark G Thomas and others (2006) have suggested that an apartheid-like arrangement could explain the Anglo-Saxon ascendancy without an initial very large immigration. Read it here.

Research by Brian McEvoy and others was published in the America journal of human genetics as ‘The longue duree: multiple genetic marker systems and Celtic origins on the Atlantic facade of Europe,’ October 2004, volume 75, number 4, pages 693-702. One may read it through this website.

This McEvoy research challenged the view that the origins of Celtic-speaking people lie in central Europe and concluded that there was a common ancestry in the Atlantic coastal area of Europe from northern Spain to western Scandinavia dating from about 10 000 BC, the end of the last ice age.

The latest research chronologically is ‘Myths of British ancestry’ by Stephen Oppenheimer, a summary in Prospect magazine for October 2006, pages 50-53. One may read it here. His book is The origins of the British: a genetic detective story. Oppenheimer argues in his Prospect article that most of the genetic inheritance of the present British (English, Scottish, Welsh, and Cornish) and Irish comes from the hunter-gatherer migrants from what is now Spain and that Celtic-speaking people and Anglo-Saxons are later arrivals who had little impact on our genetic inheritance. He asserts that Celts, Anglo-Saxons and later arrivals, “are all minorities in the modern British gene pool” (‘What does being British mean? Ask the Spanish’ in the Daily Telegraph 10 October 2006.)

These studies leave one uncertain: more evidence is required before a settled view can be stated. Much is contended.

See also the post of 9 October 2007 How many are Cornish?