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10.51 am
Mr. Richard Spring (West Suffolk): Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, for giving me the opportunity to raise the important issue of tourism in Cornwall. Many representations have been made to me about the eclipse that is about to take place and its effect on tourist activity there.
On 11 August, there will be a total eclipse in a corner of Devon and right across Cornwall. The rest of the country, by contrast, will experience only a partial eclipse. This is an important moment in the life of Cornwall and its all-important tourist industry.
The eclipse will take place in the middle of the tourist season, and Cornwall is perhaps more dependent on tourism for its revenues than any other part of the country. Cornwall is less prosperous than the rest of England, measured by gross domestic product per capita or in employment terms--hence its success in obtaining objective 1 status.
Unfortunately, there has been ridiculous and damaging hysteria connected with the eclipse and its effect on tourism, with lurid tales of traffic gridlock, food shortages and overcrowding. In the Adjournment debate secured by the hon. Member for Truro and St. Austell (Mr. Taylor) on 25 November 1998, that was all graphically described. Talk of tourists being fleeced, hordes of journalists and amateur astronomers arriving, and water purification and distribution problems have led to press comment that has been deeply damaging to the crucial tourist industry in the county and for the entire United Kingdom in the run-up to the millennium celebration.
In south-east Cornwall, bookings are down by 30 per cent. so far for the entire season. The Cornwall tourist board has told me that in respect of eclipse bookings to date, the percentage of hotels with accommodation still available are Newquay 60 per cent., Falmouth 16 per cent., Padstow 31 per cent. and Looe 37 per cent.
Speaking on behalf of the self-catering industry, which is vital throughout the United Kingdom, Alice Mumford from Canonstown, near Hayle, described the situation in these terms:
On 24 May, The Times carried an article about the matter. It told us, for example, how farmers who had set up campsites to cope with hundreds of thousands of
visitors are now facing huge losses. We already know about the terrible state of agriculture in the UK, which has arisen particularly in the past two years.
The west country has traditionally been a major holiday area. The West Country tourist board tells me that one in six tourists come in August--the very month in which the eclipse will take place. The area's reputation is fully deserved. According to the latest Cornwall holiday survey, 35 per cent. of respondents stated that they were fully satisfied with the provision of tourist services in the county. The tourist industry in Cornwall is in most cases operated by small businesses. They are already suffering from the imposition by the Labour Government, egged on by their Liberal Democrat friends, of a whole raft of job-destroying and additional cost measures, including the working time directive, the part-time workers directive and the parental leave directive. Those impose huge additional burdens on an industry whose umbrella organisation, the English tourist board, has had its marketing function axed by the Government.
The fact is that tourists will not be fleeced in Cornwall. Extensive and comprehensive arrangements have been put in place to minimise any problems that may arise. Such arrangements do not include the crackpot ideas such as visitors road taxes that have apparently been advanced by some local councillors. There is a Cornwall county eclipse planning co-ordinator, Gage Williams, who is heading the contingency arrangements.
The Highways Agency already has a helpline in place. Two million explanatory leaflets are shortly going out to all motorway service centres throughout the country. A comprehensive traffic plan has been devised by the police, Devon and Cornwall county councils, the Highways Agency and the emergency planning services to keep the traffic moving not only in Cornwall, but on the approach to Cornwall during August in particular.
I am told by Steve Winston, the county emergency planning officer, that there will be a test run this weekend. A number of minor diversionary routes will be created with one-way traffic flows at such congestion spots as the village of Dobwalls, to get greater movement along the key A38 arterial route.
The Highways Agency is putting in more CCTV cameras along the A30 and A38 and feeder roads. There will be a contingency centre based in Cornwall, with information fed in from Devon and elsewhere. The information plan extends right up the A5 and beyond. Trafficmasters will help the police control and monitor traffic movements. So-called minutemen will be available at the time of the eclipse to help with possible breakdowns of cars. Electronic signboards will be fully operational. In other words, comprehensive measures are in place for any additional major congestion. If, indeed, the figure of more than a million people in the county in August is realised--almost twice the usual population--the matter looks clearly in hand in contingency planning terms.
Mr. Paul Tyler (North Cornwall):
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Spring:
I should like to complete my comments. Cornwall remains one of the great jewels of the British Isles. It would be tragic if the negative comments about
Mr. Tyler:
I have been listening to the hon. Gentleman's speech outside the Chamber, and I am grateful to him for giving way. Is he aware that the control of the county council is not in the hands of the Liberal Democrats? It is in the hands of an all-party alliance, including members of his own party. The instructions given to the gentleman to whom he referred were given on an all-party basis. I respect the hon. Gentleman's views, but he is making an unworthy speech by making a party point.
Mr. Spring:
Clearly, the hon. Gentleman has not been listening to a word that I said. I have made no critical reference to the county council. I have made no critical reference to any Liberal Democrats or anyone else. Clearly, the hon. Gentleman has not been listening to the speech. It is appalling that he should come in and introduce party politics into the matter, which is nothing of the kind. Had the hon. Gentleman been here at the beginning of my remarks, he would have heard me speaking about the concerns that have been expressed about tourism in Cornwall during August because of the eclipse. I very much regret the hon. Gentleman's remarks.
Mr. Tam Dalyell (Linlithgow):
I should like to express vehement opposition to the proposal to use ground troops in Kosovo. In particular, a substantive motion ought to be debated by the House of Commons before any decision is taken on the matter. It is simply not the case that there is no such precedent, because substantive motions were tabled on the Falklands and Iraq.
My specific question is, how is it proposed to conduct such a campaign? The port of Piraeus will not be available to us, if the mayor of Athens is to be believed, and not a finger will be lifted by any dock worker in that port to transport supplies or personnel to a war in Kosovo. The railwaymen and others of Thessaloniki have made it abundantly clear that that port will not be available for our use. I ask a straight question: is it true, as military pundits have said, that, without the availability of Thessaloniki as a port, it would be impossible to sustain a military engagement in Kosovo for more than a fortnight?
Furthermore, precisely how is it proposed to conduct such a campaign? Macedonia has made it clear that it will not act as a springboard for an offensive against neighbours with whom Macedonians will have to live in the coming centuries. The Hungarians have the problem of 350,000 ethnic Hungarians living in northern Yugoslavia, on whom retribution could be wreaked. As for Albania, what consideration has been given to the inadequate facilities of the port of Durres and to the fact that the roads peter out into dirt tracks near the Kosovo border? Furthermore, there are 6,000 ft high mountains.
Before any decision is made--and if any decision is to be made during the recess, Parliament ought to be recalled--a thorough explanation of what we are up to should be given to the House of Commons. It is entitled to that.
On this day, when India has threatened an air strike against rebel peoples, as it puts it, and has defied Pakistan to interfere, I can remark only that, once people embark on the kind of action on which we have embarked in Yugoslavia, it can be catching. I ask for the Government's reflections on the report of Lieutenant-General Satish Nambiar, the head of mission of the United Nations forces deployed in the former Yugoslavia between 1992 and 1993. He is a former deputy chief of staff of the Indian army and is currently director of the United Services Institution of India.
Lieutenant-General Nambiar says:
Lieutenant-General Nambiar's second point is that it
"Self-catering has been vary badly hit by the hysteria surrounding the eclipse week. The knock-on effect of all this has meant that people are staying away for the whole summer. It has definitely affected us--we are way down on last year--I would say roughly 50 per cent."
Last year, she obtained eight weeks of bookings from advertising in the national press. So far this year, regrettably, she has had none. Incidentally, she lives directly under the path of the eclipse.
"My year long experience as the Force Commander and Head of Mission of the United Nations Forces deployed in the former Yugoslavia has given me an understanding of the fatal flaws of US/NATO policies in the troubled region. It was obvious to most people following the events in the Balkans since the beginning of the decade, and particularly after the fighting that resulted in the emergence of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, that Kosovo was a 'powder keg' waiting to explode. The West appears to have learnt all the wrong lessons from the previous wars and applied it to Kosovo."
Lieutenant-General Nambiar makes four points. First, he says:
"Portraying the Serbs as evil and everybody else as good was not only counterproductive but also dishonest. According to my experience all sides were guilty but only the Serbs would admit that they were no angels while the others would insist that they were. With 28,000 forces under me and with constant contacts with UNHCR and the International Red Cross officials, we did not witness any genocide beyond killings and massacres on all sides that are typical of such conflict conditions. I believe none of my successors and their forces saw anything on the scale claimed by the media."
I should like to hear a comment on that.
"was obvious to me that if Slovenians, Croatians and Bosnians had the right to secede from Yugoslavia, then the Serbs of Croatia and Bosnia had an equal right to secede. The experience of partitions in Ireland and India has not been pleasant but in the Yugoslavia case, the state had already been taken apart anyway. It made little sense to me that if multiethnic Yugoslavia was not tenable that multiethnic Bosnia could be made tenable. The former internal boundaries of Yugoslavia which had no validity under international law should have been redrawn when it was taken apart by the West, just as it was in the case of Ireland in 1921 and Punjab and Bengal in India in 1947. Failure to acknowledge this has led to the problem of Kosovo as an integral part of Serbia."
Lieutenant-General Nambiar's third point is that it
"is ironic that the Dayton Agreement on Bosnia was not fundamentally different from the Lisbon Plan drawn up by Portuguese Foreign Minister Cutilheiro and the British representative Lord Carrington to which all three sides had agreed before any killings had taken place, or even the Vance-Owen Plan which Karadzic was willing to sign. One of the main problems was that there was an unwillingness on the part of the American administration to concede that Serbs had legitimate grievances and rights. I recall State Department official George Kenny turning up like all other American officials, spewing condemnations of the Serbs for aggression and genocide. I offered to give him an escort and to go see for himself that none of what he proclaimed was true. He accepted my offer and thereafter he made a radical turnaround. Other Americans continued to see and hear what they wanted to see and hear from one side, while ignoring the other side. Such behaviour does not produce peace but more conflict."
26 May 1999 : Column 292
Lieutenant-General Nambiar makes a final point. He says:
"I felt that Yugoslavia was a media-generated tragedy. The Western media sees international crises in black and white, sensationalizing incidents for public consumption. From what I can see now, all Serbs have been driven out of Croatia and the Muslim-Croat Federation, I believe almost 850,000 of them. And yet the focus is on 500,000 Albanians (at last count) who have been driven out of Kosovo. Western policies have led to an ethnically pure Greater Croatia, and an ethnically pure Muslim statelet in Bosnia. Therefore, why not an ethnically pure Serbia? Failure to address these double standards has led to the current one."
The Indian view--that of a man who had first-hand experience--at least ought to be reflected on before we embark on the folly of starting a ground war, the result of which can be known to none of us.
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