The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
Country people are unrepresented by a political system hard-wired to neglect them
Until 1948, some universities had the right to return their own MPs, elected by their graduates, to Parliament. They liked eccentric independents. One such was the humourist, AP Herbert, who sat for Oxford University. In his election address, he set out his policies on each subject. Under “Agriculture”, he wrote, “I know nothing about agriculture.”
Nowadays, Herbert’s condition is commonplace among MPs. Unlike Herbert, however, they do not have the honesty to admit it. This ignorance spreads to most aspects of rural life – and across all parties.
It was traditionally understood that, if you knew nothing about something, you either shut up about it, or showed a bit of humility and a readiness to learn. The culture of social media and protest activism does not see it that way. Twitter storms (sorry to stick with the old name, but “X storms” sounds wrong) prefer something very fierce, nothing knowledgeable. In the verbal battles about Israel/Gaza, for example, it has been grimly amusing to discover people shouting “from the river to the sea” who cannot tell you, when asked, which river they mean, or which sea.
This false certainty bedevils rural issues. Online passions are stirred up about trees, wildflowers, wild animals, birds. In the run-up to the hunting ban, for example, it was endlessly repeated that foxes were “torn apart alive” by hounds. This was untrue: the lead hound killed the hunted fox in seconds. Hounds then “broke up” the body of the dead fox. That was not a pretty sight, but it was not cruel, the fox being, as I say, dead.
A more recent popular illusion is that, if you abandon all land management, “nature” will restore balance. The truth, especially in a long-cultivated and heavily populated landscape like Britain’s, is more complicated.
On the National Trust’s Winchelsea estate near us in Sussex, for example, the population of wintering and breeding birds, such as the charismatic lapwing, is suffering from neglect since the Trust “rewilded” two years ago. At privately owned Knepp, the nation’s best exemplar of rewilding, doses of sensitive grazing are used to create and preserve the right habitat. But now an ideological template is being imposed across the country by the Trust, ignorance and dogma making a noxious brew.
Traditionally, the Conservatives have dominated rural constituencies, but when I travel in rural England, I find Tory pre-election support at a low ebb. This is not so much because of any single policy. A few are even quite popular, such as “permitted development rights” or “rural housing enablers” which make more affordable housing available. The much-decried badger cull to prevent bovine TB seems to be working well. Ill feeling is more the result of frustrations.
Some Tory Defra secretaries – Liz Truss for lack of interest, Thérèse Coffey for a truly embarrassing failure to grasp her subject – went down badly. Everything to do with the land carries a big emotional charge, so politicians who do not understand this lose respect.
Still more common is frustration that Conservative ministers are not masters in their own house. Brexit restored power to those we elect, but in Defra the chance was not taken.
Defra civil servants have pliant relationships and ideological affinities with quangos such as Natural England and the Environment Agency, and with pressure groups like the RSPB or Friends of the Earth. This makes country-dwellers feel that the people least likely to be consulted are those who live and work with the problems that policy is supposed to address. Michael Gove spoke of “public money for public goods”, meaning environmentalism. Since when, people wondered, had food production and food security ceased to be public goods?
Where is consent for changes in rural life properly sought? Take the Right to Roam, which a Labour government promises. There is much to be said for better public access to the countryside, but farmers and landowners cannot be expected to cooperate with the imposition of a universal right regardless of ownership, circumstances and numbers.
There are problems of cost, liability, damage, livestock fencing, shooting, the protection of sensitive wildlife sites and – sadly common – dangerously behaved dogs. Any sensible reform would seek buy-in from the country people affected. It would also focus on improving our admirable and ancient system of footpaths. Paths are good things. Wandering all over often sensitive land is not.
Recently, there have been waves of farmers’ protests across the European continent – and also, not insignificantly, in Wales, where new
Everything to do with the land carries a big emotional charge, so politicians who do not understand this lose respect
environmental reforms could force farms to take 20 per cent of their land out of production, thus moving most from precarious survival to certain loss. I saw a banner in a Paris demonstration which said,
That means “no country without the peasants”, but the literal translation does not echo the link between the word and the word which means
“peasants”. Perhaps our closest rendering of the phrase would be “no country without country people”.
We should consider that slogan here. Some might argue it is out of date since agriculture is so depopulated that there is now no distinctive rural interest. It is true that farming employs fewer and fewer people. But any political party would be rash to think that is the end of the matter.
The famous Red Wall, which won the last election for the Tories and is now deserting them, is a protest by those who feel they understand their surroundings against people they believe do not.
This knowledge does not make them automatically right: for instance, village residents in southern England are sometimes so keen to guard what they have that they ignore the housing needs of their descendants. But it is highly unwise of politicians to neglect the very people who feel a deep love of country (in both senses of the word) and have strong practical traditions of getting things done, an attractive mixture of the traditional and the individualistic.
In the mid-20th century, socialists wanted to nationalise land. That never prevailed in Britain, but nowadays, even under the Tories, governments are nationalising the of land. Farmers and landowners are made unwilling agents of government policy. Ever more complicated planning, environmental regulation and punitive energy costs frustrate the new, small enterprises that can revive rural economies. This induces despair and weakens community cohesion.
Politicians talk of “our” land. It certainly is a common patrimony, but most of it has actual individual owners. If it did not, it would never have been so well shaped in its fields, woods, hedges and stone walls, so economically productive or so attractive in the appearance of its small towns and villages. Don’t despise the people who know the lie of the land.
If Conservatives cannot defend the little rural platoons against bureaucratic big battalions, those platoons might as well vote Labour. Significant numbers of country people are toying with this idea. As with most subjects as the election approaches, Labour is avoiding specific commitments, though its shadow spokesman recently revealed his party’s tribal prejudices when he promised to ban both trail- and drag-hunting in the next Parliament, despite neither sport pursuing a living creature.
Sir Keir Starmer contents himself with the line that Labour thinks the countryside is wonderful, but is for “the many, not the few”. Compared with the numbers in cities, country people will always be the few, not the many. A wise political party would take care to protect them from the tyranny of the majority.