Don't Make The Rural Myth A Reality

The removal of Labour from even Opposition status across great tracts of the English countryside, and the removal of the Lib Dems from the running of certain counties, is as big a story as the banishment of the Tories from the council chambers of the great Northern and Midland cities.

The Rural Myth is that the Tories have some sort of ancestral right to represent the countryside in Parliament. But that is contrary to the plain facts of history.

Moreover, in the "long nineteenth century" glory days of the old Liberal Party, and in the early days of the Labour Party (wholly mistakenly assumed to have been a purely urban phenomenon), those MPs returned by agricultural workers and smallholders, and those trade union leaders (often the same people, such as Joseph Arch) who represented those interests, were frequently more radical than their urban-based brethren in demanding democracy, liberty and social justice. In this, they fully represented the views of their constituents and of their members.

And such views are still widely and deeply held in rural Britain. Indeed, much of today's lack of radicalism in the face of rampant poverty, ignorance, ill health, squalor, homelessness, unemployment, war, corruption and anti-democratic practice is attributable to the silencing of those voices.

It is very high time to make them heard again.