Thread: The Government of Cornwall Bill

Good on him. Over 50,000 people (over 10%) of people in Cornwall signed the petition for a Cornish Assembly.

Hopefully the second reading of the Government for Cornwall Bill will get things moving in the right direction.

I hope he succeeds.

Originally Posted by The Bear

I do understand why people want to plough their own furrow but it’s not now the way that’s left open to us.

I see what you are saying, but I don't see anything wrong with putting the basic building blocks in place now to consider moving forward in the future. As I understand it, what is being proposed is essentially that the decisions about spending allocated money for Cornwall is devolved to Cornwall, as has been done in Wales. The Welsh Assembly makes the decisions on how to spend the money allocated to Wales which were previously taken by a combination of the Welsh Office (and Welsh Secretary, appointed by the UK government in Westminster) and a number of unelected bodies. The situation may be a little different in Cornwall in some ways, but the idea seems effectively the same - that the money that would be heading for Cornwall anyway should be spend according to the wishes of the people of Cornwall, rather than according to the political agenda of the party in power in Westminster and their non-elected appointees.

The basic common sense of this sort of idea was highlighed in the period immediately before the 1997 Labour election win, when Wales was ruled entirely by a Conservative party that had no elected MPs, and therefore no mandate at all, in Wales. All of the money to be spent in Wales was spent by tories and tory appointed quangos without reference to the Welsh electorate. All of the decisions for Wales were taken in the same way. In particular, John Redwood was on the far right of the tory party, and ran Wales largely according to his own political beliefs and agenda, which were clearly at odds with the ideals of the Welsh people (he was deeply unpopular here). Wales was a colony under that system, ruled entirely by a governer-general. We had no democracy or democratic accountability for government at all.

This is the sort of situation it seems like the Cornish are looking to get away from (since many there feel themselves to be 'culturally distinct' from England, and they are certainly far removed from Westminster), and I don't blame them at all! Whether they want to go beyond the status of just being able to spend the allocated resources themselves to a more 'independant' status (which is where the really significant issues of national debt and so on would come into play) is another question entirely, and obviously a matter for the people of Cornwall. This simple step of having existing resources allocated by their own elected representatives sems to me to be nothing more than simple fairness and democracy.