Victim Villages

James Derounian writes:

Thank you, Simon Jenkins for drawing attention to the plight of England's towns and villages (In village politics, as elsewhere, what matters is not agreement but conflict, 3 June).

I too "love villages and the idea of villages". My career has been spent in helping them to retain vital services or to replace these with volunteer-run alternatives like community shops. So I completely agree that in villages "people participate and outcomes matter".

As a community development officer I helped the small east Devon village of Plymtree to retain its school. Numbers rose from 13 pupils during the 1980s to more than 90 today. Similarly, in the 1990s I was able to assist the village of Allenheads, in Northumberland's wild North Pennines, to turn around its fortunes from a dead-end former mining community to a place where local people banded together to restore derelict properties. For me, Allenheads illustrates Jenkins' contention that "the fight to resist extinction is as admirable in communities as in the natural world". Viva "big society"!

However, I don't agree with him that "decades of The Archers ... have led rural communities to see themselves as victims". Let's face it, they are victims – in the sense that reports since the 1980s have persistently highlighted one in four of England's rural households living in or at the margins of poverty. It's popular media – including The Vicar of Dibley – that continue to stereotype twee villages, inhabited by bucolic locals, where everyone farms (in fact, UK Agriculture records that in 2006 Britain's farming workforce totalled just 184,000).

On the other hand I do agree with Jenkins that this rural idyll is seen to represent an "innate goodness that trickles down to all society". When the first world war poet, Rupert Brooke, famously wrote: "That there's some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England", the image is not of Haringey but of the Cotswolds.

Then there's the polarity that Jenkins highlights in terms of "social engineering preserving mixed communities …against a rapacious market". Let's examine the evidence: house prices in seaside towns in England and Wales have soared by 128% since 2001. Without "engineering", in terms of provision of affordable homes in decent numbers, the market will kill off England's villages and cast them in aspic.

So I look forward to the localism bill, translating "fierce social protectionism" from nimbyism (not in my backyard) to "imbyism", a can-do approach built on the back of new neighbourhood plans.

Finally, while I agree with Jenkins about "the value of self-government", he should have mentioned the actual and potential power of parish and town councils, which are surely critical to converting the government's localism agenda from words to reality. He quoted several philosophers, but I would return to Alexis de Tocqueville, a 19th-century Frenchman in the US: "The strength of free peoples lies in the local community. Local institutions are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they put it within the people's reach."

So why do they all vote Tory, then? Well, insofar as they do, it is because they are offered no one else to vote for. One of the great myths of Labour is that it has always been an irredeemably urban party. It was a rural one when it started. Pit villages really were villages, and farm labourers had a long history as among the most militant in the country. The urban working class resisted the rise of Labour for a very long time, and largely did so for as long as either could properly be said to exist.

But where today are 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 organised farm labourers, smallholders, crofters and others in order to secure radical reforms? Those who obtained, and who continue to defend, rural amenities such as schools, medical facilities, Post Offices, and so on?

Whatever happened to the county divisions that predominated among safe Labour seats when such first became identifiable in the 1920s? To the working farmers who sat as Labour MPs between the Wars and subsequently? To the Attlee Government’s creation of the Green Belt and the National Parks? To those who opposed the destruction of the national rail and bus networks, and who continue to demand that those services be reinstated? To 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?

Where are 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? Those who are conservationist rather than environmentalist?

That said, the Presidency of the Countryside Alliance is held by a Labour peer and its Chairmanship by a Labour MP, Kate Hoey. But even so.