Opposition to a controversial proposal for a new executive mayor for Cornwall—described by one resident as a “near dictatorship“—has derailed a £360 million ”devolution deal” brokered between the UK government and Tory-run council.
The Department for Levelling Up had said the “historic” arrangement would see almost half of England covered by a “devolution deal.”
But the delayed announcement of results from a 10-week public consultation involving events in Cornish town halls, markets, schools and colleges, and online, revealed 69 percent were against it and just 25 percent in favour.
As recently as January, the leader of Cornwall’s unitary council, Linda Taylor, urged acceptance in a statement on its website, warning: “If we reject the deal, we won’t get this funding. No mayor, no £360m.”
“We cannot pick and choose what we want from the devolution deal on offer,” Taylor insisted.
In the same statement, Taylor said the executive post would be cost neutral to Cornwall. But a petition launched by the campaign group Let Cornwall Decide called for a referendum on the deal to “stop them forcing us to have a million-pound mayor,” garnering thousands of signatures.
Now the new banner adorning Let Cornwall Decide’s Facebook page gleefully proclaims, “MAYOR OF CORNWALL... CANCELLED!”
Bowing to pressure, Taylor acknowledged in a fresh statement on Tuesday that while there was “considerable support for the proposed Cornwall Devolution Deal, there is also significant concern about the requirement to move to a directly elected mayor.”
Taylor went on to say she would be recommending the lower “level 2 deal” while trying to retain elements of the original proposal that had been “overwhelmingly supported” such as a £10 million annual devolved adult education budget.
‘Drop in the Ocean’
But an opposition leader called all the government’s proposals for Cornwall “a drop in the ocean compared to what proper devolution would look like.”Colin Martin, acting leader of the Liberal Democrat group on Cornwall Council, told The Epoch Times the region should be handed the funding and devolved powers without having to accept any mayor.
“There’s a great suspicion that when someone’s tinkering around with the precious democratic system, you want to be sure they’re doing it for the right reasons,” Martin said.
One resident supporting Cornish autonomy, 69-year-old retiree Philip Polley from Camborne, was also jubilant at the U-turn.
“The near absolute power to legislate this proposed mayor would have had, that’s not an increase in democracy, it’s creating a near dictatorship,” Polley told The Epoch Times. “They simply couldn’t get away with it. It’s good news for our local democracy.”
Polley continued: “A ‘level 2’ devolution deal offers less, and a lot less money, but the decisions made about how the money we do get is spent won’t be in the hands of just one person, it will be decided by the full council.”
Polley also took aim at what he said was the failure to replace the promised “matched funding” post-Brexit.
“Cornwall lost over half the EU funding we would have enjoyed had we remained in the EU,” Polley stressed. “The mayoral devolution deal still didn’t come close to matching that. It was a gimcrack nonsense in a fancy wrapper.”
Devolution Isn’t a Single Event
In her recent statement, Taylor expressed recognition that “devolution is a continuous process and not the result of a single negotiated event.”Polley said he hopes the council will now work with other parties to achieve devolution for Cornwall equivalent to Wales, with its own Assembly.
And he’s not alone.
Like Scotland, Cornwall has a centre-left nationalist political party, Mebyon Kernow, or “Sons of Cornwall” in Kernewek, the Cornish language.
The party began life as a pressure group in the 1950s with Daphne du Maurier an early member. Her acclaimed novels—“Rebecca,” “Jamaica Inn,” “Frenchman’s Creek,” and “My Cousin Rachel”—are all set in Cornwall.
Mebyon Kernow’s vision is for the Celtic nation of Cornwall to have the same right to self-determination as Wales or Scotland.
Cornwall is one of seven original Celtic nations, along with Scotland, Wales, Ireland, the Isle of Man, Brittany on France’s northwestern coast, and Galicia, an autonomous region on the northwestern coast of Spain.
Martin says the Lib Dems also largely support aspirations for Cornwall to have a level of devolution equivalent to Wales with its own Assembly.
Describing himself as a Cornishman by choice as he was born in Yorkshire, Martin rejected the idea of independence for Cornwall as campaigned for in some other Celtic nations.
“It would be nonsense to say that Cornwall should have its own army, navy, air force, foreign policy, and all the rest. It’s clearly too small a population for that. But why does Westminster have to decide how we do our recycling?” he asked.
“When you’ve got any area that can have a coherent identity—it can be in language, in a common culture, it could be a sense of separateness historically—then you have at least some grounds for asserting that identity in political terms,” journalist and historian Greg Neale told The Epoch Times.
But there were also other considerations, Neale suggested, depending on how you read the “economic runes.”
“Post-Brexit, Cornwall has relatively limited opportunities to become a self-sustaining economy; not that you couldn’t have a vibrant fishing industry, perhaps, or agriculture or indeed, tourism.
“Whether that would provide sufficient funding to support all the kinds of public services that people would expect in the 21st century—road building, new hospitals, all kinds of infrastructure if it were purely independent, is to put it mildly, moot,” he said.
Could Cornwall lead the way in England towards a federal UK? Martin believes Cornwall is a case apart because it is so “isolated.”
“It’s a different scale of community identity. The way we’ve been treated as a community over decades … as somewhere maybe to go on holiday, but as far as government is concerned never really made a top priority.”
