KernowCalling

KernowCalling launched in March 2012 to draw attention to the history and culture and identity of Kernow.

From the very start there was little in the way of planning how we would approach KC preferring to take a lets see what happens and how can we do it approach.

The only plan was to keep it small with no membership or steering groups. This gave us the ability to react to a situation quickly.

We knew our budget was tight so we had to be creative. one of the first ideas was to produce our own advertising signs. We place these signs on main roads around the Duchy with a statement about things that were relevant to Kernow. We would leave the signs in one place for a couple of hours then move them to another location, this proved surprisingly effective.

KC sign in Truro wayback in May 2012

From there KC hit the ground running,to name just a few of our campaigns , we investigated why the Queen’s sail barge had a St Pirans flag flying equally with the other home nations of the UK and made a very memorable call to Buckingham palace press room who did not seem happy to hear from us. We were asked to help draw attention to the brilliant short film Horn of Plenty which had been commissioned by Visit Cornwall who then decided not to use it. We started a viral campaign and this drew a lot of attention to the film . We had a meeting with Malcolm Bell head of Visit Cornwall to ask why the film was rejected. During the meeting we persuaded Mr Bell to remove references to the words county and England on their site and changed the way Visit Cornwall promoted the Duchy . We challenged whether Cornwall councillors should receive an allowance increase during a time of pay freezes and austerity and helped to get the plan dropped. We got in touch with John Kirkhope and convinced him that he should publish his work on the powers of the Duke of Cornwall into a book which became The Duchy of Cornwall – A Feudal Remnant?.

Then in 2016 we hit on our next idea to stand an independent candidate for the council elections under the KC name.

We drew up a manifesto with a few key pledges that we would ask our candidate to uphold and to never consciously act like a politician. We did not think we could win a seat but would throw everything we had at it and try to make it entertaining and generally just shake things up a bit.

We wiped everything that had gone before and came up with a rough idea of what we might do for the next stage of KC but unfortunately some people found this a bit challenging so we ended up shelving the idea.

The plan then was to take a few weeks break and come back refreshed but life has a way of throwing curveballs and few weeks turned to a four year break.

Late last year a promise was made to restart KC so here we are up to date.

This is early days at the moment and we are just getting going.

KC is back to ask questions and try to get answers but in the spirit of the original idea of KC nothing is planned so I cannot say what we are going to be working on but it should be interesting.

If there is something in Kernow that you think should be looked into please get in touch through our contact page.

April 2021