New Labour Was Away On Holiday

Labour's neglect of the countryside, although there have always been important exceptions to it, goes back a long way. Many seats with Radical traditions were allowed to turn Tory by default after the First World War, and most of them have remained so. The great exceptions were in those areas which have retained strong Liberal and Lib Dem presences. And those areas suffer particularly from, among other things, wildly inflated house prices due to the buying up of properties by New Labour or Cameroon types who barely set foot there. In some Cornish villages, for example, holiday homes now account for seventy per cent of housing.

For the anti-ruralism became particularly severe in the New Labour years, a virulent form of the hostility, quite fierce in itself, towards all things less than achingly metropolitan. Cameron is in exactly that vein. But his coalition partners are not. So, at last, some action. There was none whatever in thirteen long years of the previous Government. It has things of which to be proud, although most, if not all, of them occurred during its first term. But it also has much of which to be utterly ashamed. Including that it has taken David Cameron, of all people, as Prime Minister to address the pricing of working people out of housing in large parts of the country.