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No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

Politics in Cornwall in the twentieth century was dominated by the rivalry of two major parties: the Conservatives and the Liberals. Unlike much of the rest of Britain Cornwall retained a different political paradigm in which Labour did not replace the old left, with socialism, and until the modern day this localised duopoly has persisted. This thesis looks at the potentially different reasons why this divergence persists and identifies three possible explanations for this phenomenon: culture, character and campaigns. In Part I of the thesis, there is a comparison of politicians from the past and the attributes that these politicians possessed which are compared with modern day politicians to evaluate their relative strengths. The thesis also assesses historic campaigning as a cause of Liberal success as well as the different nature of Cornwall, with its distance from Westminster and its Celtic and Methodist background, which set it apart from much of the rest of England. Then in Part II, using modern day voter surveys conducted by telephone, this thesis identifies particular peculiarities in Cornwall which would seem to suggest that although there have been traditional cultural ties to Liberalism, mainly through the pre-dominant faith, Methodism, this cleavage towards the modern day Liberal Democrats has changed in nature as cultural reasons have become less significant. It also identifies the importance of so-called personality politics, in the Cornish context, as a key aspect of maintaining and then augmenting support for the party. As such major personalities from historic Cornish politics, such as Isaac Foot and David Penhaligon, are compared to modern day politicians to assess their relative significance. However, the significant majority of the original research conducted across Cornwall, and other parts of the country, attempts to identify whether the resurgence of the Liberal Democrats in the 1997 election, and subsequently, is linked to the campaigning the party conducts rather than these traditional assumptions for their electoral success. Conducting telephone surveys across thirteen parliamentary constituencies, before and after the 2010 general election, from the Highlands of Scotland to West Cornwall, this research identifies that grassroots campaigning, commonly referred to as Rennardism in the most recent past, but more accurately described as Community Politics, is the primary reason for the success of the Liberal Democrats in Cornwall between 1997 and 2010. By assessing not just seats in which the Liberal Democrats have been successful in recent years in Cornwall but also in similar, and different, regions of Britain a better assessment of the value of the party’s successes and failures can be evaluated both in Cornwall and comparatively. The research compares different potential reasons for voters supporting the party but the evidence would seem to suggest that in the period under discussion the party had built substantial levels of campaigning capacity in the target areas for the party and this helped to win all the seats in Cornwall for the Liberal Democrats in 2005. Surveys were conducted before and after the 2010 election and there is also evidence that as the party became a less effective campaigning machine it began to lose support in Cornwall and this helps to explain why the party lost seats in Cornwall in 2010. This thesis adds to the increasing awareness, amongst political scientists, of the significance of local constituency campaigning, in British politics, which has been the subject of debate in this field in recent years. Historically scholars have debated the significance of national swing, with early political scientists, like David Butler and Robert Mackenzie, favouring this explanation to electoral success assessing the general election campaign as being essentially a national one. However, as three and now arguably four or even five party politics is the norm academics such as David Denver, Dennis Kavanagh and Philip Cowley have identified that constituency campaigning matters much more to those parties breaking into the post-war duopoly, than early political scientists have suggested. This thesis evaluates, not just whether there is a local campaign factor in the Liberal Democrats’ success, but whether the volume and penetration of this local campaign matters and, as such, this research is original and forms a unique contribution to academic debate in this field.

The political events of the 1960s and 1970s in 'Celtic Britain' led to the demise of the Anglocentric conventional wisdom which had asserted the fundamental homogeneity of the United Kingdom, and ushered in a new orthodoxy which stressed diversity and the territorial dimension of the state. These events were mirrored to an extent in Cornwall, with competing explanations seeking to interpret 'peripheral protest', but with a more comprehensive model of emerging to emphasise the complexity of the relationship between 'centre' and 'periphery' in modern western European states, pointing in particular to the existence of historical phases of peripherality. In an initial phase of 'Older Peripheralism', Cornwall was isolated territorially and culturally from the core of the expanding English state, conquered and annexed but with an array of constitutionally 'accommodating' devices and a multi-faceted Celtic identity. However, political and economic change eroded this isolation, creating a new era of 'second Peripheralism'. This phase was marked by a rapid industrialisation which brought Cornwall into the forefront of technological innovation but which was over-specialised and incomplete, leading initially to a new, assertive sense of identity based upon technological prowess but precipitating in the longer term industrial collapse and a consequent Cornish social, economic and political paralysis. This paralysis endured from the end of the nineteenth century until after the Second World War, an experience which was highly distinctive when compared to that of England. However, this paralysis was at length disturbed, with post-war Regional Development policies facilitating the construction of a branch factory economy in Cornwall and encouraging a process of counterurbanisation Paradoxically, this socio-economic movement led not to the erosion of Cornwall's peripheral status but was in fact evidence of a 'Third Peripheralism', with the Cornish economy acquiring features which continued to contrast with those of England's core, and with an increasingly politicised 'Cornish Revival' injecting an important strand of antimetropolitanism into Cornish political behaviour, with its critiques of regional policy and demands for renewed constitutional 'accommodation'.

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Goonbarrow, a China Clay pit situated within the St. Austell granite China Clay region, is the subject of a varied geochemical and isotopic study to determine the mode of genesis of the kaolinite and associated tin/tungsten mineralisation. Detailed geological mapping in conjunction with a geochemical study of the micas indicated that Goonbarrow is situated at the junction of the petrographically distinct phases of the St. Austell granite. An unusual assymmetric curved-feldspar-crystal pegmatite is found at the junction. Elvans at Goonbarrow and three other locations within the St. Austell granite are shown to be intruded during hydrothermal activity and in some cases after major vein formation. Three main types of vein were recognised in Goonbarrow, the major ones being spatially associated with zones of kaolinised granite. A potassium/ argon age study showed that the granites, pegmatite and greisens (and by inference tin/tungsten mineralisation) were formed at about 280 ±10 m.y. Four elvans, including Goonbarrow, were dated at around 272 m.y. Three of these elvans crosscut major vein, swarms. Age determinations on fine grained muscovite produced predominantly during kaolinisation and several kaolinised potassium feldspars also gave Hercynian eges. Scanning electron microscopy studies on daughter minerals in fluid inclusions indicated the presence of Al, As, Ca, Cl, Cu, Fe, K, Kg, Mn, Na, S, Sn and Zn although many of these elements were not present in minerals in the pit. Temperatures, pressures and salinities of vein fluids were determined by conventional fluid inclusion studies, which also indicated that the veins vere boiling. Hydrogen and oxygen isotope studies on vein quartz and greisen muscovites coupled with a re-interpretation of previous work and the fluid inclusion study produced a new model for the genesis of Cornish China Clay. Kaolinite genesis from the vapour phase of hot boiling fluids intimately associated with greisen bordered quartz/tourmaline veins of Hercynian age is favoured.