Disingenuous George

The Right Honourable George Eustice, our esteemed MP for Illogan (and elsewhere), certainly knows how to take some simple concepts and turn them on their heads!

Cornwall suffers an extremely high rate of population growth compared to parts of the UK. This growth is not down to the indigenous population increasing, but due to decades of Westminster policy which dictates that social and economic problems are best solved by growth.

It matters not that this philosophy has been a complete failure for Cornwall, each new generation of Westminster politicos tell us that growth is the way forward and this is swallowed hook, line and sinker by our Cornish councillors.

The Cornishman on the Camborne omnibus would tell you that we don't need more unaffordable housing, which is never built to meet local need, simply adding to the pressure on Cornwall's economy. Most local opinion would be against the building of houses - a plain and simple fact.

Not to be deterred by facts, Mr Eustice has cast his eye over the Localism Bill and urges us to believe that:

" In future, parish councils will be able to put forward their own plans and put them to a referendum of local residents. If supported, these parish plans will take precedence over the opinions of Cornwall Council planners."

So the person on the Camborne omnibus might look at that and think that MrEustice's friends in the ConDem government were finally trying to give some real power back to local people.

Utter rubbish unfortunately! What Mr Eustice actually means is that, where local plans include development and house building, the plan might override the local authority. In other words if Cornish councillors have managed to get past all of the hurdles such as "predeterminism", "a presumption in favour of 'sustainable' growth" and the threat of legal action if planning permission is denied, then local town and parish councils can still insist that houses get built. In other words what Mr Eustice points to as a golden opportunity for people to have a say in what their communities look like is merely another way of promoting development and the construction of houses.

If the 'local plan' states that the community does not want any development then this will be ignored and outweighed by the presumption in favour of development. In no case will a local plan, which attempts to block house building, be allowed precedence over London based developers.

For the Westminster politicians 'localism' is all about how to ensure that their ideologies are the only options for people to adopt!

Cornwall needs to adopt a 'steady state' policy towards development. We need time to rebuild our communities and to find real and lasting solutions to economic problems. The people of Cornwall are quite capable of doing this - if only we were able to be left to get on and do it.

The AV Factor

George Eustice would have us believe that the AV system of voting is extremely complex. In fact all you have to do is rank the candidates in your order of preference, from one to however many candidates there are. It’s really not rocket science is it? Once the voter has done this then the result is determined in the same way as the X-Factor unfolds – except it happens in one count except over several weeks.

If you watch the X-Factor you will know that every week the public vote for their favourite and the singer with the least votes gets booted off the show. The following week all the people who voted for the singer that lost the previous week now choose their next favourite and vote for them instead – and so on until, at the end, the singer with over 50% of the vote wins the record contract.

This is what happens with AV.

As the least popular candidate gets booted out of the election so the votes that he or she got get distributed to the next favourite candidate on the list.

It’s as simple as that!

George will also tell you that AV is very unfair because some people get to vote more than once.

This is also a complete load of nonsense.

In fact everyone, clearly, has the same vote. The point is if you have voted for the front runner then your vote continues to count for them in the subsequent round. If you really want to think of each round as a separate poll then everyone has the same number of votes – but if you vote for the front-runner then your vote remains with them.

Now George Eustice, of course, knows all of this so why is he so set against AV and why does he come up with such blatantly misleading and scaremongering untruths?

Perhaps it might be that Mr Eustice is very afraid that, being a Tory, no-one is going to give him a second or third preference. The Tories usually have a strong core of voters that go out to vote come rain or shine – but not many others would normally consider voting for the Conservatives. This means that as the lowest ranked candidates get kicked off the show so anyone but the Conservative candidate is likely to pick up the next round of voting preferences.

George might start off with 35% of the vote but that percentage is likely to decrease as the result is calculated, and by the final round he has only a slim chance of winning.

AV is not a particularly good or representative voting system. Mebyon Kernow believe that the best system would be a Single Transferrable Vote system, achieving true proportional representation. We have campaigned for proportional representation for many years. However, AV is a big improvement on First Past the Post and is much more preferable.