Newspaper Colum – The Cornishman – 11/08/25

• Children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) have been let down. To be fair, the present government inherited an appalling situation. The stories I’ve heard are shocking – of failure, delay and neglect, from families, carers, and educators. They illustrate that our children are being let down by a system that is overstretched and underfunded.  

We must put this right. That’s why I’m holding a dedicated SEND Surgery in mid-September. Constituent parents, carers, and professionals are welcome. To tell me about the issues they’re facing. Please contact my office to book an appointment. 

I’ll then hold a SEND Round Table meeting in October.  Open to families, educators, professionals, and decision-makers; to explore what needs to change and how we make that happen locally. 

I’ve met many parents and children, visited schools and met teachers and governors to better understand the challenges of navigating a broken system. I’ve raised matters in Parliament and with Education ministers, and highlighted the £1 million funding shortfall in Cornwall Council’s budget. 

If you’re a parent, carer, or professional affected by SEND issues, please feel free to contact me. Your experiences help shape the action I’ll campaign for on your behalf. 

 

• Sewage pollution incidents continue around our coast. “Storm” discharges even on the driest of days. If I took up every occasion when there are suspected sewage spills in just my constituency, my staff and I would have to give up the rest of politics!  

However, in the first year of this parliament we’ve successfully campaigned for tougher legislation, ‘encouraged’ Southwest Water’s Chief to ‘retire’, campaigned to scrap OFWAT and replace with stronger regulation and am pressing for honest recording, monitoring and prominent notification where pollution incidents threaten public health. More happening and much more to do of course… 

 

• Protecting the rights of a genuinely free press is as important as protecting freedom of expression and protest. Though it’s clear the far-right Netanyahu government feels it can only prosecute its murderous retribution through Gaza by silencing those journalists who report the inconvenient truths of what he’s really doing. Another 5 journalists murdered by them again this week, taking the number to at least 186 journalists murdered by his government in Gaza in the last 2 years. Of course, many journalists (including all those from the UK) have been banned by the Israelis from entering Gaza at all.  

We’re weakening our justification to criticise, with the government’s passing of legislation to outlaw pro-Palestinian protestors who dare to suggest the Israeli onslaught in Gaza is tantamount to a genocide, and who support an organisation which (though engaged in unacceptable criminal damage for which they should of course be subject to the criminal law) is bizarrely deemed to be a terrorist group. My protest vote against this was to show I believe this is the unacceptable silencing of our entitlement to free speech.