As I was eating breakfast, I was informed by the BBC that tomorrow there will be local elections ‘across England and Wales’. Technically correct perhaps, but for the peripheries – Wales, Cornwall, the rural south west, Cumbria and the rural north east, as well as most of the English midlands and East Anglia beyond Essex – there will only be the largely meaningless Police and Crime Commissioner elections, no doubt set to record the lowest turnouts in history.
Almost a half of the local election seats up for grabs are in southern England with most of these concentrated in the south east between Hampshire and Essex. This is where two-tier local authorities still exist, at least for now, as they nervously await bankruptcy after decades of Tory/Lib Dem and Labour Governments’ underfunding. Another quarter of the contests will be in the big city metropolitan boroughs of the West Midlands, Greater Manchester, Yorkshire and the North East.
This takes into account the many LAs with boundary changes, which makes direct comparison with the round of local elections in 2021 over-simplistic
Half-truths and sloppy reporting are not restricted to the location of these elections. There is widespread talk that the Tories could lose half their current seats, with Labour and Reform UK being the main beneficiaries. But, while Labour may gain seats in the metropolitan boroughs, this will be limited as they already hold 50 per cent of the seats being defended there. Furthermore, in much of southern England the obvious centrist non-Tory alternative is not Labour at all, but Liberal Democrats or Greens.
The scale of the Tories’ losses depends on voters’ willingness to vote tactically for the strongest non-Tory party, as they’ve been doing in parliamentary by-elections recently. But, given the less prominent media coverage, this may not be case in the locals.
Moreover, in the vast majority of wards Labour will have to compete with at least one of and often both Lib Dems and the Greens, not to mention TUSC and George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain. Meanwhile, on the far right the Conservatives face opposition from Reform UK in just 21 per cent of wards. Despite excessive hyping by the media, Reform UK’s local election intervention is less than inspiring and far below the levels achieved by its predecessor Ukip in the 2010s.
The electoral arithmetic is therefore working for the Tories which makes claims of 500 lost seats look a mite optimistic. Given the geography and contestation patterns of these local elections, those losses may also not primarily go to Labour. But who knows, given the unpredictable eighteenth-century voting system in England and the various voter suppression scams that have been quietly rolled out by the Tories.
The proportion of older voters (traditionally most likely to vote Tory) and young voters (who may find that they can’t vote even if they’re on the electoral register as awareness of the new ID requirements among young people is shockingly low). The highest number of young voters is found in Truro and Falmouth, a Labour target, while older voters are most numerous in South East Cornwall, which is good news for the Tories’ Sheryll Murray.
Cornish identity – Camborne and Redruth is the most subjectively ‘Cornish’; South East Cornwall the least.
Religion – South East Cornwall again features as the most Christian constituency. Is this good or bad news for Sheryll? Camborne-Redruth is the least.
Social class – It’s somewhat surprising to find that North Cornwall has a greater number of working class C2DE voters than Camborne-Redruth these days.
Economic activity – Camborne-Redruth has the most people who are economically active and North Cornwall the least, possibly a reflection of the migration of early retirees to the latter constituency.
Deprivation – despite having the highest number in work, Camborne-Redruth also has the highest proportion of severely deprived households.
Second homes/holiday lets – the number of properties removed from the local housing stock by tourism is highest in St Ives, with none of the other five constituencies being particularly free of this blight.
Owner-occupiers – the highest proportion owning their homes outright is found in South East Cornwall. They won’t be worried by higher interest rates. In contrast those paying off mortgages will and they are most likely to be found in Camborne and Redruth and St Austell and Newquay.
Tenants – the constituency with the highest number having to rent from private landlords is St Austell and Newquay, while the highest proportion enjoying a social or ‘affordable’ rent is found in St Ives, although even there still well outnumbered by those who are forced to rely on a private landlord.
Mainstream political journalists in Britain are these days committed to Gothic journalism. Usually themselves of vague liberalish or centrist persuasion, they fixate on the far right and the doings of Trump in the US, Farage and Reform UK in Britain and assorted far right parties in Europe. While fascinated and attracted by the conspiracy theories and sheer nuttiness of the ‘alt’-right, they are simultaneously appalled and repelled by it.
Their one-dimensional reporting had less to say about this year’s elections to the parliaments of the autonomous communities of Galicia in February and the Basque Country last weekend. These showed that despite the desires and nightmares of the ‘mainstream’ media there is an alternative to the far right. In the Basque Country the Spanish far-right Vox party won a less than spectacular 1.9% of the vote and just one of the 75 seats in the Basque Parliament. Similarly, in Galicia Vox got 2.3% and no seat.
As in its reporting of Sinn Fein in Ireland, the UK media tends to be more interested in former paramilitary links
In both regions the big winners were the autonomist socialist parties. In the Basque Country Euskal Herria Bildu (EH Bildu) won 32% of the votes and gained six seats to come level for the first time with the centrist Basque National Party, part of ruling coalitions for most of the past 40 years. In Galicia the Galician Nationalist Bloc (BNG) won a record 31% of the votes, a gain of almost 8%, to become the second party in the Galician parliament.
Both parties owed their success to a re-focus on housing, health and employment issues, linking these to their traditional demand for more autonomy and downplaying independence for their regions. Are there any lessons here for any existing or potential Cornish autonomous party? The key issues in Cornwall seem to be the housing crisis, second homes, over-tourism, resentment at gentrification and concerns over the ongoing destruction of the welfare state by Tory and Labour parties. These issues might easily be tied to demands for greater devolution as dependence on Westminster is clearly making them worse.
Meanwhile, Cornwall’s traditional voice of autonomist politics – MK – gives the impression of having apparently reverted to being a pressure group mainly lobbying on behalf of the revived Cornish language. But can it also give a voice to growing resentment over the way the housing market disempowers locals while transforming Cornwall through gentrification? If it’s unable to step up to the task, maybe a more energetic, yet-to-exist radical flank is required to do the job.
On this site I dubbed the last election in 2019 as the ‘election of illusions’. The main illusions were that brexit and boris would be the answer to all our dreams. Instead, they became the stuff of our nightmares. Even the great English voter seems at last to have woken up to the scale of the disasters created or exacerbated by a hapless bunch of ever-changing toxic Tories since 2019. The sheer level of incompetence, moral sleaziness and corrupt greed displayed by the Conservatives has been difficult to credit.
With their ship utterly wrecked, the Government desperately clings on to the resulting flotsam and jetsam as it drifts helplessly towards the impending whirlpool of electoral doom, from which no amount of voter suppression looks capable of saving them. Meanwhile, thoughts turn to the coming general election.
This time around, it’s clearly going to be a zombie election.
The dictionaries tell us that a zombie ‘does not notice what is happening’. The political class, media and most voters wander around blithely ignorant of what’s actually going on. Or if not ignorant dangerously complacent. Or if not complacent, just dangerous. There will be a lot of things the politicians hope we won’t notice in this election. For example, the creeping privatisation by stealth of the NHS, the way the public estate is being quietly flogged off, the erosion of democracy or the deliberate creation of more inequality. But the major thing they trust we aren’t going to notice is what’s happening to the world outside our insulated little bubbles.
Since the 1950s the amount of carbon in the atmosphere has risen from just over 300 parts per million (ppm) to over 420 ppm to reach levels well beyond those of the last 800,000 years. The result is growing climate chaos and knock-on impacts on the planet and the other species that share it with us. Or in many cases used to. As carbon hangs around and takes centuries to dissipate the climate can only get warmer. And warmer. And …
Meanwhile, we’re stubbornly continuing to stoke the fire. At the time of COP 1 in 1995 six gigatons of carbon were being added to the atmosphere every year. By the time another document of well-meaning verbiage was being spewed out by COP 28 in 2023 carbon emissions were over 37 gigatons a year. There’s still no sign of carbon emissions falling, let alone getting anywhere near the rapidly receding ambition of ‘net zero’.
But let’s ignore this. Most politicians unite in soothing us with business as usual and mindless growth of our extinction economy. Voters yearn for normality and security, not realising that normality is undermined by the everyday lives they lead. But zombies have ‘no energy’. Few are left with the energy to confront our looming existential crisis. Or even discuss it. And certainly not during an election.
Zombies ‘act without thinking’. Don’t expect to see much thinking in our zombie election as TV, press and social media do their job to busily distract us with trivia. Zombies also ‘attack and eat humans’. The Tories have been doing a pretty good job of this since 2010, at first aided and abetted by the Lib Dems, funnelling huge wads of cash into the hands of the super-rich, which often includes themselves.
Zombies act ‘as if unconscious’. This presumably includes those Labour tribalists who persist in their endearing belief that the authoritarian centralists who now run British Labour will reverse the process of looting the public sector, immiserating the poor and destroying the natural world. LOL is the appropriate response, I believe.
Zombies move around ‘as if … controlled by someone else’. The political class has long been captured by fossil fuel interests and the other beneficiaries of the extinction economy. But all of us zombies stumble around while being controlled by capital and the logic of profit-making, the real conspiracy that hides in plain sight.
But hey, let’s just party on, parrot profound statements quarried from two minutes ‘research’ on Google and make our decision on who to vote for based on how they eat a bacon sandwich or some other equally important criteria. Elections these days are just a branch of entertainment so settle back and enjoy the coming idiocies.
how to reduce the excessive number of speculative and unaffordable houses being built in Cornwall. The way these are marketed helps to create the current high rate of population growth.
how to do our bit to encourage the transition to a decarbonised economy.
how to reduce our dangerous over-dependence on an unsustainable and damaging tourist sector.
What do the party manifestoes have to say about these issues?
Unaffordable housing
Overall, there is much bluster about affordable housing with everyone promising more of it. Strangely, this promise was also at the forefront of manifestoes in 2017 but the miracle still hasn’t happened. You might have expected this would have given the parties some food for thought and made them search for some radically new solutions. Yet, little is said about unaffordable housing or reining in the activities of developers and estate agents.
Take the Liberal Democrats. ‘No to the developers’ charter’, ‘No to concreting over Cornwall’, they breezily chirrup. This is all very well but isn’t this the same bunch who’ve been supposedly running Cornwall Council for the past four years? Years in which permission has been given to developers to build 60,000 houses in just 20 years. At least 45,000 of these will be unaffordable, even by the Government’s generous definition. This is a house building rate 50% higher than the previous 20 years and 8,000 or so higher even than the target insisted on by the Tory Government.
Full marks for a breath-taking flood of crocodile tears and sheer disingenuity. No marks for owning and apologising for the failure to do anything to stop the suburbanisation/gentrification/colonisation process steamrollering over Cornish communities. Indeed, it’s been ratcheted up during the period the Lib Dems and their Independent chums have pretended to be grasping the levers of power, levers that don’t appear to be attached to anything.
Be very afraid. They have a plan for us!
What about the Tories? Ignoring the issue of unaffordable housing, they discover a mysterious policy of dumping large affordable/social housing projects onto rural areas. Having persuaded themselves that such a policy really exists, they then promise to reverse it, with ‘small pockets’ of affordable housing sprouting all over the place, as they ‘prioritise housing for local people’. Like the Lib Dems, this is an amazing display of chutzpah. Like them, it’s also utterly lacking in any shred of credibility, as the Tories have actually been doing their best for the last decade to prioritise housing for the better-off, the Home Counties middle classes and second home buyers.
Turning from the questionably certifiable insane, we have the Labour Party who want ‘enough of the right housing in the right places’, although what exactly is ‘right’ is left undefined. In a lengthy and detailed manifesto that hardly anyone will read they do promise to change the definition of affordable, which, thanks to the Tory-Lib Dem Government if 2010-15 now means unaffordable, and ‘turbocharge social/council house provision’. Nice, but how is less clear.
The Greens focus more on the planning system and call for ‘democratic accountability’ and a more transparent process that will end ‘destructive development’ and the stitched-up deals between planners and developers. The Council, they say, should resist all building projects that do not meet environmental and carbon criteria.
MK is the only party to explicitly note the need for a ‘lower and more sustainable housing target, geared to local needs’. This will require control over planning by a ‘Cornish Assembly or parliament’. the Greens also commit themselves to a referendum on an assembly. Labour merely claims it will ‘accelerate Cornish devolution’. The Lib Dems have dropped the demand for a Cornish assembly, having miserably failed to deliver it. By ignoring it, they presumably hope the idea will quietly slink away and bury itself forever.
Decarbonisation
The Tories prefer not to utter the distasteful words ‘greenhouse gasses’ or ’carbon emissions’. Instead, they focus on the ‘madcap’ spending schemes of the Lib Dems. Still fighting their brexit campaign for all they’re worth, they highlight the biggest issue to be the continued existence of a Council office in Brussels. However, they take time out from their brexiteering to promise they will put the environment ‘at the heart of all our decision-making’. However, this seems to amount to little more than putting recycling bins in car parks (if people demand them), while working to ‘green space’, whatever that means.
The Lib Dems point proudly to the fact they are retrofitting 0.35% of our housing stock every year, while planting 100,000 trees annually. At this rate all houses will be carbon-zero by 2305! How many of the trees survive is also another matter. For instance, it looks as if almost half the young trees planted on the Tolgus ‘Boulevard’ at Redruth have given up the ghost and expired.
Tree planting and a bit of retrofitting is hardly likely to get us anywhere near being carbon zero by 2030, as they also promise. This is even less feasible as they intend to press on with their grandiose schemes for major housing settlements and new roads, without a clue as to their carbon costs.
When asked for the full carbon cost of their Langarth project the Lib Dem/Indie run Council was unable to answer
Labour even has some Cornish on its front page
Labour has a few more practical and credible suggestions to offer, such as community energy companies or encouraging the local sourcing of goods and services for example. But this is still well below what’s actually needed.
MK rather vaguely promises it will ‘promote initiatives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions’ but doesn’t actually spell out what those initiatives might be.
The Greens also want a community energy strategy and also more generally an end to decisions that increase carbon emissions, plus the rewilding of green spaces and a prohibition on the use of dangerous herbicides by local councils.
But no party, even the Greens, dares to propose we take immediate action to fit the ‘emergency’ part of the phrase ‘climate emergency’, such as closing down the airport that the Council owns for example, or having car-free zones.
Tourism and second homes
Neither the Tories, Lib Dems, Labour nor MK explicitly mention tourism. In contrast, the Greens propose a tourist tax, a ‘small levy on accommodation booked by the 4.5 million visitors’, the money to go to create more sustainable businesses.’
One blight that tourism spawns is second homes, which hollow out our communities and have dire effects on the housing market and local services. All the parties, apart from the Tories, who make no mention of their second homes, promise to do something about this issue.
The Lib Dems are loud in their condemnation of the Tories for ‘forcing’ them to build even more houses to ’accommodate second homes’, and for allowing the owners of second homes to benefit from covid business grants. But they don’t actually tell us what they’re going to do. As they’ve used the last four years to do nothing effective to stop the spread of second homes, their castigations lack a little credibility.
The endearing old Lib Dems – still happily living in their own cloud-cuckoo land
Labour councillors have been strong on this issue. Building on that, they want to close the business rate loophole for second homes and lobby the Government for the right to charge a housing offset levy to offset the damage caused by second homes.
MK wants more planning restrictions on future second homes and local control over planning in order to stop the growth of second homes and then reverse their numbers.
The Greens want to double the council tax on second homes and go further in extending this to holiday lets.
As for Independent candidates you’ll have to ask how they intend to tackle these issues. If the two standing in my ward are any guide they won’t have much to offer other than bland promises that they can’t possibly deliver. These betray an alarming ignorance about how local government works in the over-centralised state that we’re forced to live in,
Enough said.
You’d better get a move on though. By this time tomorrow, it’ll be too late. Happy voting!
Thankfully the election of illusions is over and we can settle down to another five wasted years of political incompetence from the English ruling class. Looking at the election results Cornwall has now converged with rural south-east England, with a very large block of Tory voters and Labour and the Lib Dems trailing far behind vying for second place. In fact, politically Cornwall now resembles West Sussex. This embarrassing outcome was probably inevitable ever since local government in Cornwall adopted its high population growth strategy in the 1970s. Their plan to suburbanise Cornwall has worked.
The Conservative vote is now at a record high at over 54%. The next best performance was in 1979 and then then it fell (just) short of 50%.
Yet Cornwall still managed to differ from southern England in one way. Virtually everywhere east of the Tamar the Liberal Democrat vote rose. In Cornwall it fell again, to a record low. Are the Lib Dems paying the price for the failures of the Lib Dem/indie run Cornwall Council in the same way that northern English voters have punished Labour in Labour-led council areas?
Cornwall may still be exceptional, but this is an exception that is now the diametric opposite of the (albeit exaggerated) radical tradition of the late 1800s and early 1900s. In the meantime, as the old political parties revert to the 1950s and resolutely ignore the need for fundamental and far-reaching reforms, it’s imperative that the Green Party, MK and others begin to discuss an agreement in advance of the elections to a truncated Cornwall Council in 2021. The luxury of continuing to split the progressive vote is madness in the current climate.
This has been an election largely fought in an unreal parallel universe, a fantasy land of nostalgia, fond illusions and political sleight of hand.
Illusion #1 is the conceit that somehow voting in the Tories, or anyone else for that matter, will ‘get Brexit done’. It won’t. Brexit is not an event; it’s a process. It’s a show that’s will run. And run. And run. As interminable trade negotiations drag on and the UK again teeters on the brink of a no-deal brexit, even leave voters may wake up to that. Or more likely not.
Illusion #2 is that this is some sort of old-fashioned exercise in democracy. It’s not. This has been the first really effective post-truth election in Britain, with the Tories in particular ruthlessly manipulating the media (not that difficult in the case of the BBC I admit.) Fake stories, doctored videos, false tweets, misleading ads, outright lies. All’s fair in their quest to buy votes and keep the rusting old wreck on the road for a few years more. Although hardly enthused, voters take refuge in the familiar as they vote back the most incompetent ruling class in British history, kings and queens of the royal cock-up.
Illusion #3 is that this is basically an election just like previous ones. It’s not. This illusion is deeply entrenched in the media and lapped up by the sheepocracy being herded, trance-like, to the polls. But occasionally, despite the soothing distractions and noise of the media, people can sense something looming just out of sight. Like a half-forgotten nightmare or a fleeting ghostly presence glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, there lurks the oncoming climate emergency.
This election shouldn’t have been about who gets brexit done or who patches up the NHS. In a rational or sane world, it would have been first and foremost about who takes the climate emergency seriously and who hasn’t got a clue. This is actually the election to lose. As the implications belatedly dawn, as the Arctic ice melts, as the weather gets ever more unpredictable, two things are likely to happen. Governments will be forced into radical and unpopular action, having complacently ignored the science for at least 20 years, and/or they’ll get the blame for an unravelling environment and overheating planet as they sit back and watch as nature takes its revenge on our greed.
In Cornwall the Tories are so far ahead in the eastern three constituencies that there’s no point at all there in voting ‘tactically’. The battle is for second place, with an eye on the next election.
With a 10% lead in Camborne-Redruth, George Eustice also looks safely beyond the margin of polling error. Even if all those intending to vote Lib Dem switched to Labour’s Paul Farmer, he’ll still lose. So don’t bother voting ‘tactically’ there either.
The gap in St Ives has hardly shifted since the Tories’ Derek Thomas established a lead two or three weeks ago when the Brexit Party ran away. The polls are suggesting an easier win for the Tories than in 2017. Nonetheless, the Conservative lead is still within the margin of error so it’s worth considering a Lib Dem vote here.
A second place where tactical voting is arguably worth even more serious consideration is Truro and Falmouth. Although the Tory lead here is wider than in St Ives, according to the polls it’s narrowing, and relatively quickly. Moreover, there’s still a residual Lib Dem vote here for Labour’s Jenn Forbes to sweep up.
If Lib Dems want to stop the Tory in Truro and Falmouth they must call for a Labour vote. In return Labour could call for a Lib Dem vote in St Ives if they’re really serious about getting rid of Thomas. But are they?
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Steve Double is the Conservative MP for St Austell and Newquay. Steve’s a bit of an enigma. Earlier this year he was an enthusiastic no-deal brexiteer who thought May’s deal was a ‘betrayal’. But now Steve’s a loyal supporter of Johnson’s deal.
One Steve said brexit was ‘an opportunity for the UK to recover some of its diluted heritage’; the other Steve stated ‘Britain is more multi-cultural than ever before and this is something to be proud of’. (These two statements were made at the same meeting!)
Meet the Steve who spurns no opportunity to wrap himself in the St Piran’s flag. This must be a different Steve from the one who’s keen to promote the Great South West.
Steve and others at first meeting of Great South West parliamentary group
One Steve thinks it’s ‘time to truly decentralise Britain.’ This can’t be the same Steve who has ‘almost always voted against transferring more powers to the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly or to local councils’, can it?
Then there’s the Steve who was horrified at the weak jokes tweeted by Lib Dem candidate Danny Chambers in North Cornwall. That Steve wasn’t at all shocked by the other Steve, who happily retweeted doctored Tory videos of an interview with Labour’s Keir Starmer at the beginning of this election campaign.
The only explanation has to be the existence of two Steve Doubles. This explains how he has found the time since February 2018 to take on another half-time job in addition to his parliamentary duties. Not to mention tweeting to all and sundry. Either that or he’s an alien or robot that doesn’t need to sleep.
Neither Steve seems to worry over-much about the climate emergency
The Steve, it’s a bit unclear which one it is, that describes himself as a ‘Christian Cornish Conservative’, has been spending three days of his time since February 2018 as a ‘policy advisor’ to the Good Faith Partnership (GFP). It’s not clear where its funding comes from, but this looks like a bona-fide faith-based charity that works to encourage humanitarian responses to immigration, welcomes resettled refugees, wishes to improve financial inclusion and publicise the challenges Christians face in the Middle East. Although it’s not exactly clear who’s advising whom. While Steve says he’s a ‘policy advisor’ to the GFP, the GFP claims it’s placed advisors with Steve and two other parliamentarians.
Advice doesn’t come free. For this Steve is paid £20,500 a year, not to mention the £500 the GFP handed over to help pay for Steve’s trip to Brussels in November 2018 to discuss UK immigration policy after brexit. Since June this year the number of days Steve has been doing this has been cut from three days a week to two and a half, although the daily rate rose from £133 to £144. This is, of course, in addition to his £79,000 annual MP’s salary.
Amazing how one man can find time to do both these jobs, although one might have thought providing policy advice couldn’t possibly take up three whole days a week. You’d think a meeting every month or so would be quite sufficient.
However does he fit it all in? There’s only one possible explanation. Sorry to break the news to the voters of St Austell and Newquay but there just has to be two Steve Doubles.
which Steve is this?
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Kernowpolitico: notes from the periphery 
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