Identity Censorship Rules!

The Kernow Branch of the Celtic League is to be thanked for posting on Facebook the following cautionary tale:

“Heritage Kernow – a study in ‘English’ Heritage sabotage

European Objective One funding was awarded to Cornwall some years ago.  Its Single Programming Document was supposedly legally binding and its Priority 5 identified Celtic affinities, heritage, language and identity to be beneficiaries of the funding.  This did not sit well with UK officialdom (national and local), which has tended to trivialise and diminish Cornish culture as the Eden Project and Trebah Gardens.  As John Angarrack remarked, this is like defining French culture as being represented by Disneyland, Paris.

That the ‘legally binding’ part was to be ignored came first from the unelected South West Regional Development Agency who stated: ‘It doesn't particularly help this (the Government's) building of a regional identity from Cornwall up to Gloucestershire and across to Dorset to have the European Union recognising Cornwall as a separate region’.  The Government Office for the South West also urged an avoiding of Priority 5 because: ‘it will encourage the separatists’.

Nonetheless, and after the European Court of Auditors had visited Truro, the Objective One Heritage Task Force employed consultants to look at the Cornish heritage and culture issue.  In October 2001, they recommended setting up an organisation to be called Heritage Kernow, which would develop a Cornwall Heritage at Risk Programme, to conserve and protect key elements of Cornish culture, with an initial budget of £1,400,000.

Two months later, 100 guests were invited to a conference in Truro where Heritage Kernow was officially launched, with its operations to commence in April 2002.

It never happened.

Objective One officials eventually confessed to giving way to pressure from ‘English’ Heritage. ‘English Heritage was not happy (with the proposal)’, they said. ‘English Heritage felt that Heritage Kernow would not be able to deliver much more in the historic environment sector than was already being delivered, or could be delivered, by existing bodies’.”

Or, to put it explicitly, by EH themselves, who know best how to tell the State-approved lies in place of the truth.  Any excuse will do if it slows down the building of a Europe of real regions, and substitutes a load of impractical nonsense about ‘The South West’ that dates from the days of Dad’s Army.  And why mention this now, 12 years later?  Because a lot of folk have short memories.  Some of them would like to see Ed Miliband sitting in No 10.  And his bureaucratic hellhounds sent west once more to sneer and belittle and suppress, Wessex no less than Cornwall in their grip as they roll out London's new imperial project yet again.