I first met Jonathan Cooper when I was prompted by a mutual friend, Georgina Allen, to cover the Totnes Passport story, which she felt was due a fresh look six months into Brexit. I had already heard about Jonathan – a passionate and highly-effective campaigner for LGBTQI rights, a champion of European values and a […]
A recent West Country Voices article on the joys of mountain biking on Dartmoor reminded me how slow we have been to develop some pretty obvious cycling routes. The one that nags at me is the railway track from Yelverton to Princetown, disused since the line was closed 65 years ago. It is, sadly, not […]
Sherryl was elected in 2010 and wasted no time in getting to work, most notably in the Commons bar. The Tories had to apologise after accusations that she drunkenly insulted a doorman before attempting to vote on the minor matter of the 2010 Budget. The media then gate-crashed the party, following which – though I’m […]
“It’s crazy that our banks and pensions are investing in fossil fuels, when these are the very things that are jeopardizing the future that we are saving for.” Sir David Attenborough Campaigners from across the South West set up camp on the lawn outside Devon County Hall in Exeter for four days to demand that […]
Swapping scouse for pasties, misguidedly dissing Dartmoor and a stroll up the Cowsic. When I was 28 work took me from Merseyside to Cornwall: I traded a lively metropolis with easy access to the mountains of Wales and the north west, for the dramatic, breathtakingly-beautiful coastal scenery and pristine sandy beaches of the West Country. […]
On 10 June and 29 June 2021 we published a pair of articles highlighting the lack of engagement by Somerset County Council Highways Department with those seeking to develop rural cycle paths. We turned the spotlight on local ambitions for a short extension to a path near Wells which offered a useful commuter route to […]
Dear EiC Many thanks for Anthea Simmons’ pair of enlightening pieces on Yeovil MP Marcus Fysh. Having cast my line into the Register of Members Interests, I caught a couple of interesting minnows which supplement her arguments. The first article suggested Mr Fysh felt he had acquired some expertise in epidemiology and virology. Well he’s […]
MP for Yeovil Marcus Fysh is on fire at the moment. He’s become an expert epidemiologist and virologist in the space of a few days and now he is acting like a business development exec for private healthcare insurance companies. At first it seemed as though he and Newton Abbot MP Anne Marie Morris were […]
MP for Yeovil Marcus Fysh has miraculously become a medic – and an epidemiologist and virologist to boot. Perhaps he’s piloting a new government strategy aimed at filling the shortages in experienced staff across a whole range of sectors whereby an individual has only to express a nodding acquaintance with a subject or a function […]
Threats to democracy come in many guises. Sometimes they are dramatic, as set out clearly in Julian Andrews’ recent article in West Country Voices. Sometimes they come more quietly but are no less dangerous for being obscure. A series of articles this year has recorded the systematic sidelining of local democracy in Somerset. In March, […]
A tangle of conflicting interests raises questions over how developers have managed to push forward plans to build a new supermarket and a McDonald’s on a wildlife corridor on the outskirts of Helston in Cornwall. In 2019, Helston Town Council declared a climate emergency and announced that Helston was becoming an ‘Earth Protector Town’, a […]
The pandemic The ‘Teaching English as a Foreign Language’ (TEFL) sector has for decades played a vibrant cultural and economic role across the UK, not just in the Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole (BCP) area. The spring and, especially, the summer seasons, used to see large numbers of foreign students arrive to study English, make new […]
Confusion reigns over whether or not the prime minister is currently on holiday in the west of England with his latest family. According to a Number 10 spokesperson, he is definitely not on holiday and is “continuing to work”. Whether or not this is government work was not specified. Perhaps he is labouring at his […]
The south west now has some of the highest Covid-19 prevalence rates in the country. We run a small manufacturing business in Cornwall, and I am updating our business Covid-19 protocols so have the unenviable job of trawling through the government guidelines. It’s been like circulating on a Möbius strip. First up, when to isolate. […]
“Climate change is widespread, rapid and intensifying” Surely no-one could have missed these headlines on the publication of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on 9 August 2021? The UN Secretary-General António Guterres said the Working Group’s report was nothing less than “a code red for humanity. The alarm bells are deafening and […]
The TV pictures from Kabul last weekend were apocalyptic: thousands of desperate Afghans converging on the airport, families and a handful of belongings crammed into their cars. Already refugees in the face of the breaking wave of Taliban at the city’s gates, many of them chose to spend the night parked up around the airport […]
So many of the things we hold dear in our communities and local environment are threatened by the accelerating climate emergency. Tom Scott writes of one spot in Falmouth that’s close to his heart. As Cornish beaches go, Gyllyngvase Beach in Falmouth is pretty modest – without the thundering surf and miles-long stretches of sand […]
When we say Atmos will build 62 truly affordable homes, and that Totnes is experiencing a housing emergency, it is easy to lose sight of the human stories behind that. So @SaputoInc, we’re going to tell you one of those stories. Let’s call our teller ‘Sandra’… It matters that you hear her story, Saputo Inc. […]
Dear Editor, Re: Let’s not mince words: the mass murder in Plymouth was an act of terrorism I worry society is becoming too quick to judge and that we are too easily convinced we are right on every issue (having tapped into the opinions of people ‘like us’ on social media). During the Brexit campaign […]
You may have already seen the story that Plants Galore in Newton Abbot, Plymouth and Exeter will be giving away £100,000 worth of stock because of Brexit. WCB had also been sent a press release from the Horticultural Trades Association (HTA) about a recent visit by Brexit-backing MP for South East Cornwall, Sheryll Murray, to […]
When leaders of the world’s richest countries gathered at Carbis Bay in Cornwall for the G7 summit, the climate emergency was (allegedly) high on their agenda. Could part of the solution lie deep in the Cornish granite? Or is lithium mining yet another environmental disaster waiting to happen? In March, the Conservative MP for St […]
Brownsea is a small island at the entrance to Poole Harbour in Dorset. In the past it has been vital to the defence of the harbour and Poole itself. Originally the island was owned by the church and under the auspices of Cerne Abbey but it was claimed by Henry VIII when he dissolved the […]
Somerset residents face the prospect of a serious cut in the adult education provision available in the county next year, and substantial staffing reductions in their major adult education provider. Somerset Skills and Learning (SSL) is having to turn hundreds of students away and make teaching staff redundant this summer after failing to win a […]
I realised a few weeks back that I’ve been riding bikes off-road, in one form or another, for well over four decades. Some of my earliest childhood memories are of a friend’s older brother rescuing rusty bikes from skips and the local scrapyard, and repurposing them as cow-horn-barred “tracker” bikes which we’d spend the summer […]
Even the most authoritarian of regimes feel the need to pretend that they enjoy popular support. Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong-Un, for example, routinely claim to have won huge majorities in elections that were quite clearly rigged. In a similar way, UK politicians whose actions show scant respect for democracy, work hard to give the […]
In August 2018 the government set out proposals for the creation of ‘garden communities’, intended to tackle the chronic shortage of housing in the UK and raise the standard of building development. The name consciously harks back to the ‘Garden City’ vision of Ebenezer Howard but also reflects one of the stock cliches of property […]
West Country Voices (WCB) launched a year ago with the help and support of Louise Houghton at Yorkshire Bylines, Mike Galsworthy and Tom Brufatto at March for Change and the blessing of Peter Jukes and Simon Colegrave at Byline Times. Run by a team of volunteer, citizen journalists, editors, proof readers and a picture editor […]
It was not a shock but it’s still shocking. Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick has decided to impose a single unitary authority on the people of Somerset when there is clear evidence that local residents would have preferred the alternative two-council solution. To add insult to injury he added “I would like to reiterate that Government […]
The government’s health and social care bill passed its second reading with barely a murmur from the mainstream media, much less any proper public scrutiny. Amongst a number of proposals which open up the NHS to private health providers is the carving up of the NHS into 42 ‘integrated care systems’ (ICSs). One of these […]
