The Invisible Rural Poor

Tobias Jones writes:

It's hard to imagine a time in which it's been tougher to live in the countryside. It's not just a question of the usual complaints: that access to services – transport, hospitals, schools, even mobile phone coverage or broadband – is patchy. It's not just the fact that the countryside is suddenly vulnerable to all sorts of diseases: to ash dieback, to bovine TB and the Schmallenberg virus. It's that there's acute poverty in rural areas and it's a poverty that is seemingly invisible.

At least one-quarter of all farming families live on or below the official poverty line and, as the Observer reports today, many endured a rough 2012. The levels of borrowing that farmers require in order to run their businesses is mind-boggling; it's not uncommon for farmers to have debts well into six figures. The cost of animal feed seems to rise exponentially each year (an almost 40% increase in the two years I've been breeding pigs). The weather means many of us grew nothing other than a bumper crop of slugs last year, while the paperwork required for livestock is byzantine.

Farming used to be a communal activity, involving dozens of people sharing the highs and lows. Now, it can often be a lonely, isolated career. Farmers are often proud, private and practical people; their instinct is that an animal in distress should be put out of its misery. Little wonder that suicide rates among them are some of the highest in the country.

There are many areas of the rural economy not involved in farming. But the situation there is, if anything, even more stark. Whole villages and towns are disconnected from the land that surrounds them. I frequently meet schoolchildren in my small town in Somerset who don't know that eggs come from chickens. When rustic knowledge has been so eroded, the classic consolations of the countryside disappear and people no longer forage for food or fuel. (Most housing estates don't have open fires, let alone woodburners.)

The average wage for people working in rural communities is nearly £5,000 lower than the national average, yet house prices in the shires are astronomically high because demand to live in the supposedly bucolic countryside is stoked by dippy TV programmes and urban dinner parties. Poverty is always a tragedy, but at least urban poverty is well documented and is often, in music and film, glamorised. The streets are tough, but they're thought cool, even cutting edge. The rural poor are still considered yokel and backward, in the unlikely event they're considered at all.

There are many reasons for the invisibility of the rural poor. The most obvious is that agricultural workers (and this is, sadly, a self-portrait) have a similar appearance to the stereotype of the homeless or needy: muddy boots, ripped jumper, unshaven, possibly smelling of dung or dirt. A wayfarer or tramp is, simply, well camouflaged out here. But the invisibility is also down to the old chestnut of class: the British countryside is still identified, in the national psyche, with the nobility, with the landed gentry and with well- spoken squires. People persist in idealising (or demonising) it as a place of horsey types and manor houses. The reality is that it's a place of yeomen who've left the land and who often can't make ends meet as decorators or plumbers.

Pat Glass, of this Parish, has been taking on the Government’s failure to create the promised Supermarkets Ombudsman. Beyond that, we need 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, and in either case accompanied by strict regulation to ensure that the costs were not passed on to suppliers, workers, consumers, communities or the environment.

There must be a tax on the productive value of land per acre, other than that occupied by the homes of the less well off, perhaps making possible the abolition of stamp duty, and in any event establishing and enforcing the principle that no one should own land other than in order to make use of it; this was proposed by Andy Burnham when he was a candidate for Leader of the Labour Party. There must also be a statutory requirement of planning permission for change of use if it is proposed to turn a primary dwelling into a secondary dwelling, a working family home into a weekend or holiday home.

All in all, there is the most pressing need to revive the movement 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. Those who obtained, and who continue to defend, rural amenities such as schools, medical facilities, Post Offices, and so on. Those who opposed the destruction of the national rail and bus networks, and who continue to demand that those services be reinstated.

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. Those who object in principle to government without the clear electoral mandate of rural as well as of urban and suburban areas. Those who have been and who are concerned that any electoral reform be sensitive to the need for effective rural representation. Distributism and the related tendencies. And those who are conservationist rather than environmentalist.

Farm labourers, smallholders, crofters and others organised in order to secure radical reforms. County divisions predominated among safe Labour seats when such first became identifiable in the 1920s, while the Labour Party and the urban working class remained profoundly wary of each other throughout the period that both could realistically be said to exist at all, with several cities proving far less receptive to Labour than much of the nearby countryside.

Working farmers sat as Labour MPs between the Wars and subsequently. The Attlee Government created the Green Belt and the National Parks. Real agriculture is the mainstay of strong communities, environmental responsibility and animal welfare (leading to safe, healthy and inexpensive food) as against “factory farming”, and it is 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.

The President of the Countryside Alliance is a Labour peer, Baroness Mallalieu, and its Chairman is a Labour MP, Kate Hoey. For at least three consecutive General Elections until 2010, few or no Conservative MPs were returned by the hunting heartlands of Wales, Yorkshire, the Midlands, Devon and Cornwall.

The present Coalition means, either that Labour is now the only electoral option for the age-old rural Radicalism of the West Country and Hampshire, and for the combination of that with Unionism (or, at least, with a strong suspicion of rule from the Scottish Central Belt or from South Wales) in the North and South of Scotland and in Mid Wales, or else that the Labour Party now demands to be replaced with something that can indeed meet this profoundly pressing and electorally opportune need.