It’s not often that I find myself agreeing with our esteemed council leader Linda Taylor but her calling out of the planned protests at the Beresford Hotel is something that I find I can agree with though with the slight reservation that it is her party that has done so much to stoke the fires of anti asylum and immigration views as a diversionary tactic from the governments other failings.
I do not intend to say much about the planned protest as the organisers of this protest thrive on the oxygen of publicity be it positive or negative viewing all publicity is good publicity.
But there is one question that I am interested in : How many of the people organising this protest and trying to fan the flames of division are Cornish?
And if they are, maybe they should remember their own history.
Between the 1850’s to the early 1900’s somewhere between 250,000 to 300,000 Cornish people left the Duchy with the collapse of mining and the lack of work to find employment and a better life and to send money back to Kernow to support families who without that financial support faced the brutality and cruelty of the workhouse.
Many of these people who left were young Cornish men, some barely in their teens who emigrated abroad, the famous cousin Jacks or to work in England and were often met with hostility that they were taking employment from the local population.
Even today with the mass house building that is going on in Kernow many Cornish families are being forced to leave the Duchy because they cannot afford a home in Kernow.
Yet people wish to protest about a handful of asylum seekers housed in a hotel who are waiting to hear whether their claim will be accepted.
Social media reports stories of women feeling unsafe and gangs of asylum seekers hanging around the streets,but this is no new phenomenon. Look at the media coverage in the UK in the 1950’s and 60’s the same hysteria was being whipped up during the waves of immigration from Ireland,India and the West Indies .
Like our Celtic cousins our history is one of sadness of the export of people and the heartbreak and longing for home and family of those who had no other choice and we in Kernow with our history should be more understanding what forces young men to risk everything for a better life for themselves and their families.
KernowCalling 