Laughing in the
face of its few detractors, Cornwall Council has achieved new heights of popularity. The Council’s latest carefree initiative sees the launch of a novel benefits
form, sent to households all across the Duchy.
Keeping up-to-date with modern
trends, within the form the Council asks for information on applicants’ ethnicity.
You just find the box which best describes you, and tick it. The final choice
provided by the Council is for people whose background is ‘Gipsy / Traveller /
Cornish.’
Councillor Alex Folkes is a haven
of sense in the lunacy of Cornwall Council’s wider thinking. Of the form, he
said: "Some people will suggest it is offensive. And they are right. Not
because being likened to a gypsy or traveller is an insult. It isn't. But
because the two backgrounds are so entirely different.”
"What Cornwall Council
has done in designing this form is to create a 'bucket' category for anyone who
doesn't appear to fit into 'normal' definitions.”
The Council was swiftly
alerted to its idiotic blunder and has issued an ‘unreserved’ apology, whatever
that means. The on-line form will be reworked while a slave at County Hall has
been set the task of altering, by hand, all the printed versions.
You may feel anyone in
Cornwall Council with half a brain would have an awareness of Cornish
identity, culture and heritage. You might also believe some kind of vetting and
approval process takes place before the Council issues documents into the
public domain. But these are times of austerity, where careful hands are needed
at the helm; why waste money on trivial niceties?
1 comment:
"You may feel anyone in Cornwall Council with half a brain would have some awareness of Cornish identity, culture and heritage."
They don't.
The best way to deal with the Cornish, after all this years, according to CC practice is to ignore the Cornish. Members are frightened to offend officers and terrified some non-Cornish people will feel slighted, and officers personally don't like the Cornish as a people and professionally and ideologically want Cornwall to demonstrate no difference to a standard English county.
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