A Prince Among Men

Shame about the syncretism. Shame about the Greenery. Shame about the “alternative medicine” or “complementary medicine”, contradictions in terms. Shame about Tibet. But our future King shows his invaluable place in the national life, for very far from the first time, with the Prince’s Countryside Fund, which will radically redistribute wealth from big business to rural communities.

In similar vein, it is very high time to make the supermarkets fund investment in agriculture and small business, determined in close consultation with the National Farmers’ Union and the Federation of Small Businesses, by means of a windfall tax, to be followed if necessary by a permanently higher flat rate of corporation tax. In either case, there must be strict regulation to ensure that the costs of this are not passed on to suppliers, workers, consumers, communities or the environment.

We need to restore both parliamentary and extraparliamentary voices to the tradition of those who have resisted enclosure, clearances, exorbitant rents, absentee landlordism, and a whole host of other abuses of the rural population down to the present day. Of those who organised farm labourers, smallholders, crofters and others in order to secure radical reforms. Of those who obtained, and who continue to defend, rural amenities such as schools, medical facilities, Post Offices, and so on. Of the county divisions that predominated among safe Labour seats when such first became identifiable in the 1920s.

We need to restore both parliamentary and extraparliamentary voices to the tradition of the working farmers who sat as Labour MPs between the Wars and subsequently. Of the Attlee Government’s creation of the Green Belt and the National Parks. Of those who opposed the destruction of the national rail and bus networks, and who continue to demand that those services be restored.

We need to restore both parliamentary and extraparliamentary voices to the tradition of those who have seen, and who still see, real agriculture as the mainstay of strong communities, environmental responsibility and animal welfare (leading to safe, healthy and inexpensive food) as against “factory farming”, and as a clear example of the importance of central and local government action in safeguarding and delivering social, cultural, political and environmental goods against the ravages of the “free” market.

We need to restore both parliamentary and extraparliamentary voices to the tradition of those who have fought, and who continue to fight, for affordable housing in the countryside, and for planning laws and procedures that take proper account of rural needs. Of those who object in principle to government without the clear electoral mandate of rural as well as of urban and suburban areas.

We need to restore both parliamentary and extraparliamentary voices to the concern that any electoral reform be sensitive to the need for effective rural representation. To the concern that any new or reformed second chamber be equally representative of each of the English ceremonial counties, the Scottish lieutenancy areas, the Welsh preserved counties, and the Northern Irish counties, and reflect the diversity of political opinion within each of them. To Distributism and the related tendencies. To those who are conservationist rather than environmentalist.

Who better, when the time comes, to be His Majesty’s Ministers?