New Year Message

2012 has become the most talked-down year for decades. Expectations chilled, we live in trepidation. Preparing to batten down the hatches and weather the perfect storm of global recession, slashed public services, falling incomes and rising unemployment.

We awake up from the hangover of 2011 we may reflect on a year which deteriorated in spite of the promising ‘Arab Spring’. Ok, we have fewer despots and tyrants, but it wasn’t a great year for the economies of the great democracies either.

So, as we recover from the ritual of unrealistic expectations and ambitious resolutions, perhaps, as the diets and fitness regimes peter out, we should look 2012 straight in the face.

It will be those nations and economies which spot the sectors of future growth, who invest while others batten down their hatches and who strive while others weather the storm who will prosper.

In Cornwall and on Scilly: the inevitable expansion of green technologies; the adding of value to the food we produce; using our location and identity for marketing advantage rather than seeing our geography as a disadvantage; developing our maritime potential; fully exploiting the head start we have in communication technologies to promote creative and new industries; and the new opportunities at Goonhilly Earth Station all suggest we should face up to rather than run away from the impending storm.

The badly scripted ‘docusoap’ of life, as seen through the variously tinted spectacles of our Parliament, will throw up enough challenges to preoccupy MPs and their media friends in the Westminster Village. Some of those challenges have been brought upon us by the script writers in Government circles. The NHS still faces catastrophe unless we can stop (or majorly amend) the crazy and incoherent Health Bill. And there’s still more to be done to curtail other examples of insanity and to make sure that we really are “all in it together”!

And finally, now that the Higgs Boson (“God Particle”) has been properly pinned down perhaps we should start asking it some questions. Like, how come whenever there’s some tough and unpopular announcement to be delivered it always seems to be Nick Clegg’s turn, and yet when the most popular causes are to be given the answers they yearn for it’s strangely the soon to be beatified PM who does the press call? Another mystery to be resolved in 2012?

Blethan Noweth da