Last week, I predicted that the leadership of Cornwall Council would publish a report which tried to discredit the results of the public consultation about the proposed Mayor for Cornwall. 

Sure enough, when the report was published (with 69% of respondents saying they oppose a Mayor), it claimed that these 6,105 responses “cannot be seen as representative of the views of the whole population of Cornwall”

On the other hand, the report claimed a face-to-face and telephone survey of 1,100 people “can provide a reliable picture of public opinion” and “the views on the entire population can be inferred from the views of those sampled with considerable confidence.” 

The survey appears to show that 65% of Cornish residents support the proposed Mayor; exactly the opposite of the feedback from the public consultation! But I know enough about statistics to understand that the answer you get depends on the way you ask the question: Participants were not asked if they knew anything about the Deal or the proposed Mayor before they began the survey; they were not required to read any background information; and the questions put by the interviewers were extremely leading.

The truth is that after spending £60,000 on a public consultation, the Council still has no idea whether or not Cornwall wants a directly elected Mayor. 

The Liberal Democrats believe that the only viable options now are to put a clear and unbiased question to a full public referendum, or to abandon the project altogether.

Another prediction I can make with absolute certainty is that Cornwall is going to miss its target to be carbon-neutral by 2030. 

Councillors voted unanimously to adopt this target in 2019, but since then, the Conservative Council has failed to spell out what would be needed to deliver this transition, and the Conservative Government has failed to provide the funding for any such plan to be put into action. 

This won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has been watching the Government’s performance at a national level. A succession of Conservative Prime Ministers have repeated the (true) statement that the UK was one of the first countries in the world to set a legally binding target to reach net zero by 2050. They have been less vocal about the fact that the High Court ruled that their policies and funding did not match up to this promise. Last week, the Government published 44 new energy and climate policies to try and get back on track for 2050, but they all fall short of the Liberal Democrat plans to invest £40 billion in clean transport over the next three years and insulate every home by 2030.