Beorn
07-06-2009, 11:20 AM
CORNWALL'S BRAND OF ARDENT NATIONALISM HAS A MEAN FACE, IF A SOFT BITE
Camborne is a drab, down-at-heel town in the south of Cornwall. The buildings are grey and weather-stained. The high street is rundown. In a gloomy Tesco’s car park, track-suited youths take turns on a moped. An elderly woman shuffles out the sliding entrance-doors and looks on disapprovingly.
There must be eight cars here displaying the St Piren’s flag of Cornwall. The white represents tin; the black is raw ore. Some of the road-signs are written in Kernewek too. No one uses the old Celtic tongue, but everyone thinks it’s important. The Cornish are like that.
I’m on the phone, struggling for directions from a retired brick-mason who has lived here all his life. Graham Hart is a desperado Cornish nationalist. He wears a Cornish kilt, sings folk songs about anti-royalist rebellions, and hates rich people who buy second homes.
A year ago, he was arrested for his connections with a militant separatist group called the Cornish National Liberation Army. It provoked a national media storm in the summer of 2007 by circulating emails threatening celebrity chefs Rick Stein and Jamie Oliver, both blamed for the inflation of local house prices.
I find Hart at his snug cottage on the outskirts of Camborne. He is gruff, unshaven and bare-footed. He has just got up, and he is disappointed that I am English.
‘I want Cornwall to be recognised as a country that is next to England, just like Wales,’ he says in the region’s broad, lingering drawl.
‘I want decentralisation for everywhere, and I think it’s coming. Britain is breaking up. England will have to learn to stand on its own feet. :rotfl: Wales and Scotland are moving fast. And we will be there too.’
His eyes are tired and sagging like a stoner’s, but his tone is vitriolic. He is all accusation and ire.
‘They [‘the English’] are suppressing us. :nopity00:They won’t let us get anywhere because they want to protect the duke of Cornwall [Prince Charles]. Charlie takes fifteen million pounds a year out of here and gives nothing back. He’s our figurehead but we hate him. He is above the law in Cornwall, and he’s just looking to protect his income.’
Graham gets irked when I call him a ‘Cornish nationalist’ (‘well, would you call yourself an English Nationalist?’) For him, Cornwall has always been separate from England. The Romans never got this far south, after all – the Anglo-Saxons not much farther - and map rolls from the 14th century define Britain as ‘Scotia, Wallia, Anglia et Cornubia.’ By statute, this land belongs to the eldest prince of England, the duke of Cornwall - not the Queen.
Skint and disaffected - and probably bored – Graham Hart is part of a growing band of Cornishmen who are willing to break the law to assert their region’s independence. He admits to having removed and burnt English flags - ‘the butcher’s apron’ as it’s called in his set- and he encourages local youths to graffiti for the cause. I ask him about internet threats to burn down the houses of second home owners.
‘Well, I’m afraid it works. When Celtic :rolleyes2: groups in Wales threatened to burn down holiday homes no one bought them there any more. You have to get your message out, and people get more and more desperate I suppose. Second homes are bad for Cornwall and they are bad in general. I mean, it is killing communities.’
He’s right. Inequality in Cornwall is as gaping as anywhere in Britain. Whilst the locals are amongst the poorest people in Europe, qualifying for EU bursaries because their average income is so low, houses in the area go at London prices. Typically, that’s 14 times the standard local salary, or double what the Cornish would pay if prices were in line with the national average. Young first-time buyers are being pushed out of Cornwall, and people like Graham are livid.
In the local pubs, the bar-talk is of rugby and the weather. The summer’s inclemency has been disastrous for the Cornish, whose staple income is from tourism. Even Padstow – the chic estuary-harbour - was quiet. People here face an uncertain winter now.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, there is hostility towards the incomers whose slippery cash the people rely on. I witnessed it first hand last year when I was working in a pub on the north coast, and some of the regulars refused to be served by me because I was an ‘outsider’. You’re unlikely to hear the kind of views Graham holds blaring from a megaphone, but most people understand his motives.
In the summer months Cornwall becomes a different place. The region’s rugged, unspoilt coastlines are mobbed by England’s richest, pouring in from the A30 and choking the worn-out coastal-roads - built long before the boom. Seaside villages like Rock and Fowley become enclaves of wealth, hosting families with children called Fergus --(That would be the Scots then??)-- and public-school teenagers who do bad things on beaches long into the night. Come autumn, when the hoards leave, the towns are silent. The houses are empty. Only the surfers are happy.
Things have been like this for a while now, with few signs of improvement. The campaign for a ‘free Kernow’ has made no headway in politics. The Liberal Democrats were returned on a commitment to a Cornish assembly, but they have not delivered. Mebyon Kernow, the local party campaigning for devolution, has made a few gains in local elections, but it has yet to have had an MP elected. Its leader, Dick Cole, is still an archaeologist by trade.
‘There is no hope for us in politics,’ says Graham. ‘You can vote for anyone here now- Liberal Democrat, Conservative, Labour…it’s all just a shuffle in the shite. It doesn’t matter who you put in there. Same puppeteer, different puppets.’
Hart believes that there is a bona fide ‘government-led conspiracy to repress Cornish culture and stifle our calls for recognition.’ Cornish inventors have been whitewashed from the history books; the Devon-based regeneration board is hampering the revival of tin mining; a girl at the local school, expelled for claiming she was not English.
Graham is not a terrorist. But he is fervently Cornish, and he does not shy from controversy. He sends me photographs of himself wearing a balaclava and a Cornish kilt, and he shows me videos of himself performing folk songs in support of the CNLA. They are symbols of defiance, he says, to an ‘imperialist’ English police force that treated him and his wife ‘like pieces of bloody meat.’
Last September, a fourteen-strong armed unit dawn-raided the house. They had been tracking his activities online, and suspected it was Graham posing with a firearm in CNLA photographs. He and his wife were made to dress from nude in front of an officer. All the computer stash in the house was taken. He was even accompanied to the toilet. He declares his police record as if it’s a sentence in itself: Graham Hart, held on bail for five months; questioned for fifteen hours; released without charge.
He is certain it was the work an insider. He thinks that all Cornish nationalist associations – the Stannary parliament and the Cornish Celtic League amongst them – are infiltrated by police stooges. The CNLA is and always was ‘a creation the state’; a piece of negative propaganda designed to damage the cause. Hart’s money is on Michael Chappell, an ex-policeman and leading spokesperson for Cornwall who was in Spain when arrests were made. Needless to say, investigation proves fruitless. But Hart has been riled.
‘All the police have done is made me angrier and caused me to double my efforts. They can do what they like. I think the house is bugged now and I think my phone is tapped, [but] I don’t give a toss.’
I wonder how hard Graham is prepared to push for Cornish independence. The CNLA has claimed responsibility for a number of arson attacks, including one on a major brewery in Redruth. Some people round here think they are fakes, but the police have been taking them at their word - setting up a special unit to investigate the group.
I ask if he has ever thought of burning a house down. ‘Oh I’m not in to that sort of thing,’ he says in a ‘I’m too old for that’ kind of way. ‘I’ve heard of other methods to upset [the incomers]. Like, if they are only using their house for a few days of the year, take a mackerel and post it through the letterbox. By the time they come down next time it will stink.’ He howls his last word with a fat grin.
Nationalist militancy has a history in Cornwall. The Battle of Deptford- fought against royalist forces in 1497- is famous in local folklore, as is the Prayer-book rebellion of 1549. Paramilitary activity came to fore in the 1980s, when a group calling itself An Gof claimed responsibility for a blast at a courthouse in St Austell.
Hart is proud of this legacy, but the latest brand of die-hard freedom fighting has yet to gain much respect. If there is a little bit of Graham that thinks he is in a movie (and there is), then that movie has got pretty dire reviews. The Sun branded the CNLA the ‘Ooh-Arrr-A.’ A Cornish terrorist might be distinguished from a member of Al-Qaida or Eta by smelling of scrumpy and starting any conversation with: ‘Yer not from roun’ these parts, are yerrr?’ Holidaymakers go with the same gags, putting on Long John Silver accents when they read the graffiti next to beaches (‘This is Cornwall. Where are the Cornish.’ ‘Burn second homes.’ ‘Rick Stein has killed Padstow’).
Thing is, unlike Wales with its coal reserves or Scotland with its offshore oil, Cornwall has never really had a big economic asset to wave at Westminster. It has sunny beaches and lovely views. Cornish nationalism is a serious and popular movement, but its task is a hard one. For most people north of the border, Cornwall is a seaside haven at the end of England where everyone walks around with cornettoes and carries crab buckets. It doesn’t get angry; it certainly doesn’t produce terrorists. Graham Hart and the CNLA (whoever they are) are trying to give the region a mean face, but I can’t see it happening. When I ask Graham for a photograph, he gets a shave and puts on a fresh t-shirt. He holds a Cornish flag behind his head, and asks me whether or not he should be smiling.
Source (http://thehilt.blogspot.com/2009/06/english-are-supressing-us.html)
I've never laughed as hard as this all my life. Does this guy seriously think it is the English and the English only which "suppresses" him?
No wonder the guy is poor, penniless and confused. He hasn't a clue.
Camborne is a drab, down-at-heel town in the south of Cornwall. The buildings are grey and weather-stained. The high street is rundown. In a gloomy Tesco’s car park, track-suited youths take turns on a moped. An elderly woman shuffles out the sliding entrance-doors and looks on disapprovingly.
There must be eight cars here displaying the St Piren’s flag of Cornwall. The white represents tin; the black is raw ore. Some of the road-signs are written in Kernewek too. No one uses the old Celtic tongue, but everyone thinks it’s important. The Cornish are like that.
I’m on the phone, struggling for directions from a retired brick-mason who has lived here all his life. Graham Hart is a desperado Cornish nationalist. He wears a Cornish kilt, sings folk songs about anti-royalist rebellions, and hates rich people who buy second homes.
A year ago, he was arrested for his connections with a militant separatist group called the Cornish National Liberation Army. It provoked a national media storm in the summer of 2007 by circulating emails threatening celebrity chefs Rick Stein and Jamie Oliver, both blamed for the inflation of local house prices.
I find Hart at his snug cottage on the outskirts of Camborne. He is gruff, unshaven and bare-footed. He has just got up, and he is disappointed that I am English.
‘I want Cornwall to be recognised as a country that is next to England, just like Wales,’ he says in the region’s broad, lingering drawl.
‘I want decentralisation for everywhere, and I think it’s coming. Britain is breaking up. England will have to learn to stand on its own feet. :rotfl: Wales and Scotland are moving fast. And we will be there too.’
His eyes are tired and sagging like a stoner’s, but his tone is vitriolic. He is all accusation and ire.
‘They [‘the English’] are suppressing us. :nopity00:They won’t let us get anywhere because they want to protect the duke of Cornwall [Prince Charles]. Charlie takes fifteen million pounds a year out of here and gives nothing back. He’s our figurehead but we hate him. He is above the law in Cornwall, and he’s just looking to protect his income.’
Graham gets irked when I call him a ‘Cornish nationalist’ (‘well, would you call yourself an English Nationalist?’) For him, Cornwall has always been separate from England. The Romans never got this far south, after all – the Anglo-Saxons not much farther - and map rolls from the 14th century define Britain as ‘Scotia, Wallia, Anglia et Cornubia.’ By statute, this land belongs to the eldest prince of England, the duke of Cornwall - not the Queen.
Skint and disaffected - and probably bored – Graham Hart is part of a growing band of Cornishmen who are willing to break the law to assert their region’s independence. He admits to having removed and burnt English flags - ‘the butcher’s apron’ as it’s called in his set- and he encourages local youths to graffiti for the cause. I ask him about internet threats to burn down the houses of second home owners.
‘Well, I’m afraid it works. When Celtic :rolleyes2: groups in Wales threatened to burn down holiday homes no one bought them there any more. You have to get your message out, and people get more and more desperate I suppose. Second homes are bad for Cornwall and they are bad in general. I mean, it is killing communities.’
He’s right. Inequality in Cornwall is as gaping as anywhere in Britain. Whilst the locals are amongst the poorest people in Europe, qualifying for EU bursaries because their average income is so low, houses in the area go at London prices. Typically, that’s 14 times the standard local salary, or double what the Cornish would pay if prices were in line with the national average. Young first-time buyers are being pushed out of Cornwall, and people like Graham are livid.
In the local pubs, the bar-talk is of rugby and the weather. The summer’s inclemency has been disastrous for the Cornish, whose staple income is from tourism. Even Padstow – the chic estuary-harbour - was quiet. People here face an uncertain winter now.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, there is hostility towards the incomers whose slippery cash the people rely on. I witnessed it first hand last year when I was working in a pub on the north coast, and some of the regulars refused to be served by me because I was an ‘outsider’. You’re unlikely to hear the kind of views Graham holds blaring from a megaphone, but most people understand his motives.
In the summer months Cornwall becomes a different place. The region’s rugged, unspoilt coastlines are mobbed by England’s richest, pouring in from the A30 and choking the worn-out coastal-roads - built long before the boom. Seaside villages like Rock and Fowley become enclaves of wealth, hosting families with children called Fergus --(That would be the Scots then??)-- and public-school teenagers who do bad things on beaches long into the night. Come autumn, when the hoards leave, the towns are silent. The houses are empty. Only the surfers are happy.
Things have been like this for a while now, with few signs of improvement. The campaign for a ‘free Kernow’ has made no headway in politics. The Liberal Democrats were returned on a commitment to a Cornish assembly, but they have not delivered. Mebyon Kernow, the local party campaigning for devolution, has made a few gains in local elections, but it has yet to have had an MP elected. Its leader, Dick Cole, is still an archaeologist by trade.
‘There is no hope for us in politics,’ says Graham. ‘You can vote for anyone here now- Liberal Democrat, Conservative, Labour…it’s all just a shuffle in the shite. It doesn’t matter who you put in there. Same puppeteer, different puppets.’
Hart believes that there is a bona fide ‘government-led conspiracy to repress Cornish culture and stifle our calls for recognition.’ Cornish inventors have been whitewashed from the history books; the Devon-based regeneration board is hampering the revival of tin mining; a girl at the local school, expelled for claiming she was not English.
Graham is not a terrorist. But he is fervently Cornish, and he does not shy from controversy. He sends me photographs of himself wearing a balaclava and a Cornish kilt, and he shows me videos of himself performing folk songs in support of the CNLA. They are symbols of defiance, he says, to an ‘imperialist’ English police force that treated him and his wife ‘like pieces of bloody meat.’
Last September, a fourteen-strong armed unit dawn-raided the house. They had been tracking his activities online, and suspected it was Graham posing with a firearm in CNLA photographs. He and his wife were made to dress from nude in front of an officer. All the computer stash in the house was taken. He was even accompanied to the toilet. He declares his police record as if it’s a sentence in itself: Graham Hart, held on bail for five months; questioned for fifteen hours; released without charge.
He is certain it was the work an insider. He thinks that all Cornish nationalist associations – the Stannary parliament and the Cornish Celtic League amongst them – are infiltrated by police stooges. The CNLA is and always was ‘a creation the state’; a piece of negative propaganda designed to damage the cause. Hart’s money is on Michael Chappell, an ex-policeman and leading spokesperson for Cornwall who was in Spain when arrests were made. Needless to say, investigation proves fruitless. But Hart has been riled.
‘All the police have done is made me angrier and caused me to double my efforts. They can do what they like. I think the house is bugged now and I think my phone is tapped, [but] I don’t give a toss.’
I wonder how hard Graham is prepared to push for Cornish independence. The CNLA has claimed responsibility for a number of arson attacks, including one on a major brewery in Redruth. Some people round here think they are fakes, but the police have been taking them at their word - setting up a special unit to investigate the group.
I ask if he has ever thought of burning a house down. ‘Oh I’m not in to that sort of thing,’ he says in a ‘I’m too old for that’ kind of way. ‘I’ve heard of other methods to upset [the incomers]. Like, if they are only using their house for a few days of the year, take a mackerel and post it through the letterbox. By the time they come down next time it will stink.’ He howls his last word with a fat grin.
Nationalist militancy has a history in Cornwall. The Battle of Deptford- fought against royalist forces in 1497- is famous in local folklore, as is the Prayer-book rebellion of 1549. Paramilitary activity came to fore in the 1980s, when a group calling itself An Gof claimed responsibility for a blast at a courthouse in St Austell.
Hart is proud of this legacy, but the latest brand of die-hard freedom fighting has yet to gain much respect. If there is a little bit of Graham that thinks he is in a movie (and there is), then that movie has got pretty dire reviews. The Sun branded the CNLA the ‘Ooh-Arrr-A.’ A Cornish terrorist might be distinguished from a member of Al-Qaida or Eta by smelling of scrumpy and starting any conversation with: ‘Yer not from roun’ these parts, are yerrr?’ Holidaymakers go with the same gags, putting on Long John Silver accents when they read the graffiti next to beaches (‘This is Cornwall. Where are the Cornish.’ ‘Burn second homes.’ ‘Rick Stein has killed Padstow’).
Thing is, unlike Wales with its coal reserves or Scotland with its offshore oil, Cornwall has never really had a big economic asset to wave at Westminster. It has sunny beaches and lovely views. Cornish nationalism is a serious and popular movement, but its task is a hard one. For most people north of the border, Cornwall is a seaside haven at the end of England where everyone walks around with cornettoes and carries crab buckets. It doesn’t get angry; it certainly doesn’t produce terrorists. Graham Hart and the CNLA (whoever they are) are trying to give the region a mean face, but I can’t see it happening. When I ask Graham for a photograph, he gets a shave and puts on a fresh t-shirt. He holds a Cornish flag behind his head, and asks me whether or not he should be smiling.
Source (http://thehilt.blogspot.com/2009/06/english-are-supressing-us.html)
I've never laughed as hard as this all my life. Does this guy seriously think it is the English and the English only which "suppresses" him?
No wonder the guy is poor, penniless and confused. He hasn't a clue.