Nominations for the leader of the Labour Party will close this week. It looks like the only person who will be put forward is Andy Burnham and the United Kingdom will have a new Prime Minister within a matter of days. The PM-in-waiting gave a key speech at the People’s History Museum in Manchester at the end of June. It contained plenty of generic statements, which I found hard to disagree with, and his presentation had a key focus on the…
Westminster politics in recent years has been pretty febrile. This was certainly the scenario with the Conservative Party in the period leading up to the 2024 General Election, which was evidenced by considerable internal dissent and regular ministerial resignations. Only a couple of years on, it seems like the present Labour Government is also within a very unsettled space. There have also been a number of ministerial resignations in recent weeks, and the Prime Minister certainly looks to be under immense…
MPs started their deliberation on the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill in July 2025 and, over the last nine months, Cornwall’s representatives in the House of Commons have consistently argued for a meaningful devolution settlement for Cornwall. They have had repeated meetings with Ministers and, I understand, they have received positive feedback from them. At a meeting of the Public Bill Committee in October, Perran Moon MP reported that: “I have had several conversations with Ministers and am satisfied with…
I remain exasperated at the top-down diktats from central government, which have fundamentally undermined the planning process in Cornwall and England. The housing target for Cornwall was 2,625 new residential units per annum but, at the end of 2024, the UK Government imposed a new annual target of 4,421. This means that the unitary authority is unable to “demonstrate a five-year supply of deliverable housing sites” and Ministers have decreed that key “local” housing policies should no longer carry weight. As…
Article by Cllr Dick Cole published in the Cornish Guardian (25th March 2026) and West Briton newspapers (26th March 2026) On 26th November 2025, Steve Webb, the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, ruled out the threat of a Devonwall Mayoral Strategic Authority being imposed on Cornwall. In a letter to the unitary authority, the Minister stated that the UK Government “is minded, on an exceptional basis, to work” with Cornwall Council “to explore designating the council as…
On Monday 26th January, the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood launched Labour’s latest plan for policing, which was set out in a document titled “From Local to National.” The UK Government is planning, in its own words, to “radically reform the structure of policing” by “significantly reducing the number of police forces,” and it is about to set up a “review of police force structures.” They have stated that this will examine their “optimal configuration … and the best approach to implementation”…
