Can Keir solve Labour’s rural problem?
IT is not easy to conjure up the Labour Party and the working countryside in the same frame in one’s mind’s eye. At least, not for me. Statistics back the view that Labour today gathers the vast majority of its support from urban Britain. There are just short of 200 seats in the UK officially classed as “rural.” Labour now holds just 17 of them, or 8.5% . The Conservatives have 89%.
Yesterday, for the first time in many years, a Labour leader addressed the opening day of the National Farmers’ Union conference. If nothing else, it looks as if Sir Keir Starmer realises that, if he has any serious ambitions to win Britain for Labour, he has to include taking seats in the countryside in his plans.
When I covered the farming and countryside beat for this newspaper, I used to attend the NFU conference, a grand affair that in normal times takes place in the Examination Schools of Oxford University. Today, under coronavirus restrictions, it will all be conducted online. NFU delegates are unfailingly polite to conference speakers, but tensions were certainly strained in 2016 when Labour’s then Shadow Environment Secretary, Kerry McCarthy, addressed conference and sought to persuade dairy farmers and pig producers that she was passionate about mending what she rightly called at the time a “broken market” for their produce.
The fact that Ms McCarthy, the MP for urban Bristol East, was and is a committed vegan who campaigns to end meat eating and milk production was not lost on the livestock farmers she purported to want to help, should Labour come to power.
I bring this up not to specifically attack Ms McCarthy, who made a decent speech and was clearly well versed on her subject. Nor do I suggest that veganism should exclude politicians from dealing with whatever issues present themselves in the course of their work. But campaigning to effectively end the livelihoods of farmers and farm workers who rear and keep animals is inconsistent with representing the interests of those same farmers as an Environment Secretary-in-waiting. And in appointing Ms McCarthy to that role, the then Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, helped to fuel the view that Labour did not care about farming, a major plank of country life.
Today’s shadow Secretary of State for the Environment is Devonport MP Luke Pollard. His sister is a farmer and he has backed the agriculture industry, standing shoulder to shoulder with some Westcountry Tory MPs in seeking to get food and farming standards written into the new Agriculture Bill. Progress, then, has been made.
Of course, winning rural seats is not all about backing farmers, but Labour has managed, through its policies, to characterise itself as the party that sees much of what goes on in the countryside to be in need of banning or reforming. Some voters, urban and rural, clearly agree with its position on issues like fox-hunting, which it successfully outlawed under Tony Blair, or the badger cull, which even the Conservative government is now determined to bring to an end.
But Maria Eagle MP, another of Labour’s former shadow Environment Secretaries, warned more than five years ago, in a report entitled Labour’s Rural Problem, that the party’s fixation with animal rights issues was a major turn-off for many rural voters. In the run-up to the 2015 general election, Labour published Protecting Animals as its flagship rural document. Ms Eagle wrote later: “There was a paradox at the heart of the feedback; the Protecting Animals document gained most acclaim, but it was regarded as the least relevant to the politics of rural communities.”
A policy document, intended to appeal to the rural electorate, actually appealed only to urban Labour voters, reflecting how Labour pursued rural issues from the perspective of the urban electorate, Ms Eagle found. When Jeremy Corbyn’s office was asked to comment on her report, his office said they could not find it in the leader’s email inbox. Hopefully Keir Starmer has found it and, perhaps, even read it.
There is nothing about British politics that says Labour can’t do well in the countryside. In 1997 and 2001, it boasted more than 100 rural MPs. Many will say Tony Blair’s government threw that support away – his handling of the Foot and Mouth crisis, whose 20th anniversary we mark this week – may have played a part in that. But if Sir Keir is providing a true alternative for rural voters, then we’re definitely listening.
Labour characterises itself as seeing much in the countryside in need of banning or reforming