Philip Hosking (Cornwall, The Cornish Democrat): In light of the heated debate around multiculturalism and following recent racist incidents in our Cornish duchy the letter extract below from the Cornish branch of the Celtic League
- An Kesunyans Keltek Kernow - concurs with a number of contributors to
OK who like myself have called for intercultural dialogue between
regional/national cultures and new minority groups.
The Cornish, Scottish, Englishness, Welsh and perhaps English
regional identities do not have to be exclusive, let there be a
thousand Cornwall's and a thousand ways of being Cornish. In the same
manner as Britishness they could be valued and used as the back bones
to civic and inclusive societal projects, with the added bonus of
course of having no imperial connotations and a lot more historical
precedent than the UK, a Kingdom rather than nation.
The
healthy rivalry between the home nations binds their communities
together. Could a nest of competing and cooperating civic national
projects within these isles integrate new peoples in a more effective
manner? Worries that this would make Britain redundant are largely
unfounded; we are an archipelago after all which necessitates
cooperation and perhaps also a shared insular identity of a love / hate
nature.
The extract:
The Celtic League out rightly condemns any racist attack
against members of other ethnic communities in Cornwall and elsewhere,
even if they are only, for the moment, in the form of graffiti. Even
though it was probably only a small number of people who were
responsible for dubbing the graffiti and that the vast majority of
people in Cornwall would equally condemn the attacks, it may
nevertheless be prudent for Cornwall Council, along with members of the
Devon and Cornwall Police Constabulary and other public bodies, to
begin a campaign or series of events to encourage members of Cornwall's
public to engage in intercultural dialogue.
As you may be
aware, 2008 is the European Year for Intercultural Dialogue and is also
an area that the European Union has been promoting for many years
within Europe and beyond. The aim of the project is to forge and
develop good relations between members of different cultural groups.
(More information, including some ideas, can be found at the link
below). Relating to the Year for Intercultural Dialogue events could be
organised between members of different ethnic groups throughout
Cornwall, in an attempt to promote cultural dialogue and understanding.
In the other Celtic countries, where such programs have been
implemented, the results have been very encouraging.
We
are aware of some small scale programs in Cornwall that aim to promote
intercultural understanding e.g. Redruth Polish Society, but the Celtic
League believes that a Cornwall wide approach is needed to overcome the
bigotry and prejudice among some people that has manifested itself in
the graffiti at Quenchwell.
The Celtic League is committed to
combating racism and in 2001 at its AGM in Cymru endorsed the aims and
objectives of the (United Nations) 'World Conference against Racism'.
Rhisiart Tal-e-bot
General Secretary
Comments
Hurray. I finally get to comment on an article by someone Cornish, instead of the other way around.
Disappointingly, I can't find much to disagree with here. I hope all Cornish nats, and English, Scottish and Welsh nats, will adopt a similar attitude: namely, that there are any number of ways of being English, Cornish, or whatever and that, crucially, none of them are based on ethnicity but rather on place.
Having said that, I would have thought the very notion of a 'Celtic' league was a problem in that context, since the very notion of 'Celtic' seems to be an ethnic one. It would be rather like English nats having an 'Anglo-Saxon league' and then wondering why people from ethnic minorities didn't feel like joining.
Having not much to disagree with didn't prevent you from doing so - you have excluded ethnicity and inserted purely place!
I would think, at least from the Australian experience that multi-cultural accommodation takes into account ethnicity and place.
An English person in Cornwall brings their ethnicity (and their attitudes to it) into the Cornish place, as does a Pakistani into Scotland.
The Cornish political scene has been civic and inclusive for a very long time now, just have a look out our mainstream political party Mebyon Kernow: http://www.mebyonkernow.org/
Many of its members are English and one of its councillors of recent was a Lancashire woman.
As for the league and the word Celtic it all really depends on what you mean. If you take the term are referring to the Celtic countries and their Celtic languages then there is nothing exclusive at all.
The Cornish Democrat
I don't exclude ethnicity at all. But the whole 'nationalism' debate in the UK right now is about how to create a sense of national identity and culture that is not ethnically exclusive. If your ethnicity is important to you, that's fine, and no settlement should seek to gloss over ethnic realities. But if nationhood is not based purely on ethnicity, which it can't be, it needs to be based on something else: what's being hotly debated is what that should be.
For my money it is a combination of place, history and new political institutions - the latter would transform both England and Cornwall.
"Hurray. I finally get to comment on an article by someone Cornish"
I don't know how long you've been a reader of Ok but I have contributed several articles of a Cornish nature.
I can dig out the links to them if you like.
The Cornish Democrat
Certainly history is a consideration .... but history is largely written by the winners, so you may find a plurality of versions of history of the same place.
As a Cornish Australian I am sure my view of my family's first days of settlement here are somewhat different to that the local aboriginals.
Certainly a lot of the debate about Cornish nationhood is affected by the text-book/government Anglo-centric view of Cornish history, and the quite different understanding by those of Cornish birth and descent, and also I add by migrants (you call them incomers in the UK I think) to Cornwall who have open minds.
I do agree however with your comment "that there are any number of ways of being English, Cornish, or whatever ..."
Yes, very interesting. I'm part Cornish, and part Scottish. But what I do hope DOES NOT happen is what is happening in parts of Spain/France by that I mean the Basque Region and ETA.
Where so-called 'Nationalism' becomes infiltrated, taken over by extremists and those violent people (Anarchists & Others of that Ilk) who just want to 'Grind their Axes' at other people's expense so that they can indulge in what they see as 'Legitimate Violence'. There is enough violence in society, in the World without Parochial petty-minded, vindictive little Joe Stalin wannabes chucking in their 'two-penny-half pennies' worth of blah!
There - I've had my rant, cyber Soapbox goes back into cyber Shed.
Very true and this is a lesson the Cornish scene has learnt.
J Angarrack one of our leading 'nationalist' writers is certainly trying to set the record stright with his books, the latest being Scat t'larrups' Resist and Survive: http://johnangarrack.co.uk/
I had hoped that OK would post my review of this important book but no luck.
Today I'm not even sure this post will get through.
The Cornish Democrat
There's a discussion ongoing about Cornish self-rule in a website dedicated to European politics. Perhaps someone here might be interested to see how it follows.
http://forum.stirpes.net/baile-na-ceilteach/20877-self-rule-cornwall.html
Good day everyone.
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