At last, one of Britain’s most colourful but endangered and rapidly dwindling communities has been afforded special, protected “minority” status.  The nation’s last remaining colony of possibly Liberal Democrats voters, known to the public as “Cornwall”, is to be recognised by the European Union.  This joyful news was announced by the, er, Liberal Democrats chief secretary to the Treasury, Danny Alexander.

Cornwall is henceforth a special entity – a bit like Transnistria, say.  No longer simply a weekend destination for braying Hooray Henrys and middle-class families with mewling brats and Labradors called Oscar.  No longer simply a “county” like all the other counties.  It has been “recognised” under the European Framework Convention for the Protection of Pixies and People Who Have Been Too Generously Apportioned Fingers and Toes.

A small minority of the Cornish have long proclaimed that they are not part of that awful oppressive and imperialistic thing from which they get all their money – England.   Some of the more radical separatists have protested by placing razor blades and broken glass beneath the sands of the country’s better known beaches, so as to impress upon the incomers their profound loathing at being afforded a decent living.  Their claims to a special status have some force, mind – there is a distinct language in Cornwall, a Celtic hand-me-down that is spoken and understood by precisely 557 of the half a million people who cling to its photogenic and precipitous cliffs, or paddle about its bogs in search of peat.

That’s even fewer than the number of people in London who speak English, but never mind.  Northumberland for example, doesn’t have its own language, even if the people up there are no less intelligible than the Cornish and use the mysterious dialect word “netty” for lavatory basin and refer to those people with whom they have sort of primitive affection as “marra”.  So this recognition thing has been a long time coming and it remains to be seen what will happen next.

Will the people of Cornwall press for full-scale independence, like the Catalans and Venetians and Galicians?  Should we envisage passport checks as we approach the Tamar and import duties on their sickly, tooth-rotting fudge?  Or will they instead simply sulk in an adolescent manner, mindful of which side their bread is buttered?

Of course, this recognition business is a nominal thing meaning little more than an expenditure of taxpayers’ money and in effect amounting to precisely nothing.  Some public sector employees and third-sector activists will undoubtedly coin it, to a limited degree.  But it is largely – if you will excuse my terminology – piss and wind, as is so much that Brussels churns out in its increasingly desperate attempts to undermine the notion of the nation state.

It is in the EU’s interests to perpetually encourage regional factional dissent against the national governments that, it believes, are archaic and redundant concepts.  The more the disparate parts of – particularly – Italy and Spain can be encouraged to renounce the hegemony of Rome and Madrid, the stronger the EU feels itself to be.  And so there are EU departments determined to pay homage to Catalonia, or the Basque, or the Bretons, or the Cornish.  Anything that loosens the ties towards the capital cities and thus, by default, strengthens the ties to Brussels. 

He said it showed people did not take the opportunity to declare themselves as Cornish.

Mr Tilbrook told the West Briton from his home in Essex: “The census figures show that not many people are precious about declaring themselves as Cornish. There’s at least five times more people for English nationalism than Cornish.

But come ye back, when summer’s in the meadow
Or when the valley’s hushed and white with snow
I’ll be here in sunshine or in shadow
Oh, Danny boy, oh, Danny boy, I love you so

But if you come and all the flowers are dying
And I am dead, as dead I well may be
You’ll come and find the place where I am lying
And kneel and say an ave there for me