We’re sitting in a Starbucks off a roundabout near the inland Cornwall village of Fraddon. It’s an ungodly early hour. Outside, the rain is biblical. Inside, the talk is political, as local councillor Dick Cole explains that he is absolutely not an Englishman.
Cole is a Cornish nationalist. Suddenly he points across the cafe, past the frappuccinos and the flapjacks at something out the window in the middle distance.
“See that clay pit over there?” he says in his distinctive Cornish drawl. Not really. I see nothing through the showers of the sudden squall battering the land.
“The pit is a half mile that way. My great- grandfather worked the clay pit that was underneath it. Farther down the road, at the old brickworks – my great-great-grandfather was the superintendent.”
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Cole’s self-identity is firmly rooted in the soil of this picturesque southwestern peninsula that, like Britain’s temperature-testing toe, creeps out into the chilly waters of the Celtic Sea and English Channel.
“I am Cornish and I am British – in fact we are the ancient Brits. I am a Celt. But I am not English,” says Cole, for 28 years the leader of local nationalist party Mebyon Kernow (the Sons of Cornwall, although these days they prefer to style it as the Party of Cornwall).
The UK government officially recognised the Cornish as a national minority 10 years ago. They have distinct culture, identity, flag (a white cross on black background) and language – although the latter is struggling a little bit. Yet the English establishment still treats Cornish nationalism as a national joke.
There was once a shadowy nationalist group, the Cornish Republican Army – condemned by Mebyon Kernow and unrelated to it – that went around vandalising symbols of England. In a nod to the local accent, the Sun newspaper dismissed it as the Ooh-Arr-Ay.
Cornwall Council has been granted observer status at British Irish Council intergovernmental meetings, but only for discussions on language. “After that we have to get out of the room,” says Cole.
This month, Cornwall Council, of which Cole is a member, backed an official petition to the Westminster government calling for Cornwall to be officially designated a fifth nation of the UK, joining England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
The Cornish want their own parliament. The petition had 24,000 signatures when it closed last Thursday, enough to require Westminster to consider an official response. As we speak, Cole and his colleagues have yet to receive it: “There will probably just be some silly statement that will p**s us off greatly.”
Many Brits think of Cornwall, which is adjacent to Devon, as little more than a summer holiday destination. A plague of second-home ownership has driven up prices and caused friction with some locals who are priced out of the market.
Cornwall’s £2 billion (€2.3 billion) tourism industry is concentrated in pretty villages and towns around the coast such as St Ives, Port Isaac and Falmouth. Away from the coasts, however, Cornwall is a different land – more industrial and working class.
Its mining industry is well past its heyday. Poverty and deprivation are entrenched issues in some areas, while the grievance politics of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK has made the party the biggest force on Cornwall Council.
It has 28 seats versus 26 for the Liberal Democrats and just seven for the decimated local Tories. Labour has only four seats, just ahead of Mebyon Kernow’s three.
I stayed in St Austell in the northeast, where Cornish extremists bombed the courthouse in the 1980s. The town has a dated, rugged handsomeness. But the surfeit of boarded-up shops suggests the local economy has its struggles.
Newquay on the northern coast has more of a touristy buzz with a distinct surfer vibe. But as you walk up the hill away from the centre’s Cornish pasty shops and towards the residential areas to the east of the town, the signs of neglect are more obvious: bargain booze outlets and a bewildering oversupply of barbers amid other shuttered premises.
There are even a few English flags of St George hanging from some Newquay windows: it is not hard to see why Reform is making inroads in areas such as this.
The cathedral town and county seat of Truro, where the tin industry once had its own parliament, is better kept with a stronger retail core. But farther south, the working class town of Redruth feels more like one of the pit towns of the South Wales valleys: post-industrial and depressed, as seen in the number of people with addiction issues congregating in the centre.
As the tourism season tails off, fishing villages such as pretty Megavissey are beginning to say goodbye to Cornwall’s hordes of summer visitors. When I visit, strutting seagulls spewing adolescent aggression seem to be taking back over the town.
Meanwhile, the Cornish petition for nationhood receives a disappointing if unsurprising response from Westminster on Monday.
“The Government does not plan to change Cornwall’s constitutional status,” the response reads.
Instead, it says the region could benefit from greater devolution, although it has been suggested that Cornwall might have to team up with the English county of Devon to gain a more powerful mayor. That would be anathema to Cornish nationalists.
“People from outside Cornwall – they just don’t get it,” says Cole.
