Why rural crime is still rising
CLAIMS that rural Britain is getting a raw deal when it comes to policing have been repeatedly made – and repeatedly refuted by forces up and down the country.
But on top of revelations that rural crime is now costing £40.5 million a year comes research from the BBC showing that miscreants are 25 per cent more likely to be charged for crimes in urban areas than in the countryside.
Which will come as no surprise to any farmer or countryside inhabitant, used as they are to levels of policing which range from the minimal to the non-existent.
Chief constables regularly trot out the old mantra about advances in technology enabling new and different approaches to be taken to crime and that, ergo, there is no need to have as many policemen in rural areas as once there were. An assertion which the constantly spiralling cost of crime in the countryside would appear to challenge rather robustly.
But it is beyond challenge that the mere visible presence of a police car can still act as an effective deterrent, as it always did.
The undeniable fact is that rural areas have had their police cover systematically reduced with the wholesale closure of police stations and reductions in manning, and no soothing words from any chief constable is going to convince farmers and other victims of the growing rural crime wave that the countryside is now anything other than a soft target for villains.
Occasionally public outrage will elicit a positive response: when our local MP complained loudly that the decision to close our police station (previous establishment: one chief inspector, one inspector, three sergeants and 22 constables) and provide cover for a large rural area from a shared office nine miles away was leading to a state of lawlessness something did happen.
Suddenly police were all over the place and highly visible, both on foot and in vehicles. For two weeks. Then, once the furore had simmered down, it was back to normal.
A couple of weeks ago an acquaintance who provides door security at one of the pubs had to eject a customer who had assaulted his partner. The man promptly assaulted him then ran down the street and kicked in two shop windows.
The door staff ran after him, overpowered him, rang the police and waited. And waited. And waited. Eventually after 45 minutes two Pcs arrived having had to drive 27 miles from their base – and doubtless cursing the extra paperwork they now faced for dealing with two cases of common assault and two of criminal damage – offences which would have gone unrecorded and unpunished had not a couple of publicspirited security staff stepped in to do the job the police themselves weren’t around to undertake.
But let me divert you from this grim prospect with the news that the great, Victorian spirit of festive overindulgence is very much alive. I know that for a fact having been sent a thick, richly illustrated guide offering me all the components I could possibly want for the Christmas to end all Christmases, to mount celebrations on an epic scale which will leave friends and relations openeyed with wonder.
I didn’t request the publication: it has arrived here as a result of my details appearing on some mailing list somewhere, a stroke of misfortune which regularly sees the postie struggling up the path with brochures offering me exclusive deals on everything from fine wines to weapons-grade corsetry.
It is a glossy compendium guiding me through all the ingredients necessary for epic celebrations, illustrated by first-class photography. And if I were ever driven to wonder how the cost of producing such a publication could be contemplated then it only takes a quick glance at the first few pages to discover the answer.
Because this company – I will not name it but it’s based in the West Midlands – appears to have perfected the art of separating fools from their money. And copious quantities of it.
It is an unparalleled exercise in applied psychology: persuading people that if they are paying what appears to be an outrageous price for something then that’s because it is of the ultimate quality and worth every last penny.
Thus I am being invited to part with £97 for a bone-in Wiltshire ham or £69 for a boned and stuffed duck and that’s even before we get into the serious prices, such as £170 for a five-rib beef joint (five kilos, admittedly, but that includes an awful lot of bone).
And if I’m splashing out that sort of money I might as well go the whole hog and treat myself to a carving knife and fork with which to serve it all – a snip at just £260 (£330 and they’ll thrown in a sharpening steel).
Then there are the accompaniments. Two 400g packs of ‘extrameaty’ sausage meat will be mine for £11 (though I am driven to ask how you can make meat meatier); 10 rashers of bacon will be a steal at £14 and 24 chipolatas a gift at just £19; while a one-kilo chicken liver terrine (while containing only just over 40 per cent chicken livers) can be mine for a mere £36 – which, since I regularly make my own at Christmas and thus know how little it costs has to be the biggest rip-off of the lot.
I am sure many people will fall for this smoke-and-mirrors trick of offering the ultimate in festive feasting. Equally there will be a lot of farmers, I suspect, who will view the yawning gulf between the modest sums they are paid to produce the ingredients for this stuff and the prices being charged for it and conclude that they, as well the punters, are being well and truly stitched up. closed for business with an unsafe spire atop the tower threatening to topple and plunge through the roof at any minute.
But while only one among scores of country pubs which are putting up the shutters, the Butcher’s Arms has more of a pedigree than most. Because for decades it was the only location in the cider country of Somerset and Devon where the ancient wassail ceremony survived.
The January 17th ceremony was once widely observed across the South West but died out after the First World War until landlord William Tarr revived it in Carhampton in the 1920s, with his son, Eric, later taking on responsibility.
The Butcher’s Arms celebrations, held in the orchard behind the pub, became such an attraction that Taunton Cider Company started its own wassail in the guise of corporate entertainment, paving the way for a general revival of wassailing across the county and beyond.
That no-one was ever killed or maimed at the Butcher’s Arms was little short of a miracle given that the revellers would spend a couple of hours fortifying themselves liberally with mulled cider before adjourning to fire 12-bore volleys through the branches of the apple trees.
One year the BBC sent an eager young graduate trainee down with a camera crew to report on the event.
Flinching as shotguns were discharged deafeningly close to his ears he shouted to me: “Lucky they’re firing blanks!”
I pointed out that had they been firing blanks we wouldn’t have fragments of twig and branch raining down on us. Never have I seen a man’s face turn quite so white quite so rapidly, as, with his camera crew in tow, he covered the ground to the orchard gate at the speed of an oiled weasel.