It's 'K' for Cornwall - but only for a year.

After what can only be called a terribly sorry tale, Cornwall - which was last year awarded formal National Minority Status - has been allowed to use the 'K' secondary locator.  But only for a year.

The RSGB and OFCOM have, to most minds, handled the whole 'K' for Kernow bid badly.  The RSGB, whilst giving signals that it supported the bid, and who handled its making to OFCOM, can be seen from documents released under FoIA to have immediately lobbied against it.  Most comments left online suggest that it may have been a vocal miority of contest-avid operators that swung matters against Cornwall at the RSGB.

OFCOM have now acceded to a request that the 'K' secondary locator be allowed for the whole of 2016.  This is a step in the right direction, but does highlight the needlessly political and adversarial nature of this whole, actually very minor issue.

OFCOM continues to claim that it has no policy to award permanent secondary locators.  This is rather odd, because it perfectly well allows the use of several other regional locators, which themeselves appear to have arisen and been accepted into law simply on the basis of convention dating back to the 1930s, and not due to any policy or lack thereof.

The RSGB has also attempted to apply spin to the whole locator business, leaving it with a lot of yellow stuff on its face.  For example, it advanced the view that regional locators were only allocated to those areas with their own governments or similar arrangements.  This is readily disproven, because power only began to be transferrred to regional assemblies, and then governments, towards the very end of the 20th century, when regional locators had already been in use for decades.  I'm not sure when the 'C' alternative to 'W' came into effect within Wales, but it hasn't been that long, and so again, it seems that OFCOM isn't quite telling the right story when it claims it can't mess about with regional locators.

This was the straw that broke the camel's back for me, when I decided the RSGB and OFCOM had firstly bungled its handling of the whole thing, then applied entirely spurious and, frankly, wrong arguments to try and recover face.

I hope the year-long use of the 'K' RSL is very successful.  Indeed, it would seem impossible that it won't be.  Let's also hope it's a wedge into a permanent allocation.

On a final note, one wonders whether there is in fact any legal prohibition that can be backed up with prosecution on simply going ahead and using the 'K', or any other RSL?