Where Is The Real Countryside Alliance?

It is good to see the Countryside Alliance branching out from hunting to attack the complete failure to deliver the promised superfast broadband to Cumbria, North Yorkshire, Herefordshire, and the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, with a view to eventual extension to the whole country. Heaven knows, the Conservative Party did nothing positive, but an awful lot negative, for rural areas the last time that it was in. Yet I have from time to time been told in all seriousness on here that rural areas cannot, by definition, have a working-class population. Clearly, the two Coalition parties, with their present, but historically aberrant, stranglehold on rural representation, agree with that. Why, apparently, does the Labour Party?

Once, there was 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.

In the 1970s, Labour activists in the Scottish Highlands, Islands and Borders accurately predicted that their areas would be balefully neglected under devolution. Betty Boothroyd and Bruce Douglas-Mann supported the Cunningham Amendment that effectively killed off Scottish devolution in those days, and both George Cunningham and Douglas-Mann, together with several more occasional anti-devolutionists, later acceded to the newly founded SDP. Cunningham nearly retained his seat in 1983, and uniquely almost recaptured it in 1987. He has never joined the Liberal Democrats, instead still giving the SDP as the name of his party on the list of those former MPs who continue to hold House of Commons passes. A generation later, there was still a relatively high vote against devolution in those parts of Scotland where the Liberal Democrat vote is also high.

Today, who will take up in the realm of party politics the evident re-emergence of these vitally important, but almost completely ignored, tendencies in our history and heritage? All three parties might have done, but two of them have made that impossible for themselves. The third, however, has defeated the contrary forces by defeating Blairism at its last Leadership Election. Ed Miliband, over to you.