Two miles from where I am writing, the neighbouring village is plastered with posters demanding ‘Say No to Pylons’. The object of loathing is a 112-mile power line from Norwich to Tilbury that would carry wind-generated electricity from the North Sea to a supposed 1.5 million homes. As a concession to the famous landscape of Dedham Vale on the Essex-Suffolk border, the cabling will run underground for 3.3 miles. But because of John Constable’s inexplicable failure to paint the rest of the route, people living near the other 108.7 miles must have their vistas ruined by 160ft pylons. The developers claim it is twice as expensive to bury power lines than to hoist them on great metal towers. Objectors disagree and demand more consultations. East Anglia is an affluent region, the protestors are raising money, and the area is packed with influential, professional people who know how the world works – and many of those who work it. Things will turn ugly.
Labour regards the countryside not as a place of economic activity, but as a theme park
This violation of the eastern counties – historically a notoriously Conservative-voting area – is but one example of the government’s utter disregard for the countryside and those who live there. The scheme to carpet the area with pylons was conceived in the most crackpot net-zero-at-all-costs phase of the last Tory administration; but Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, has grasped it fervently. Why shouldn’t he? There is nothing in his past to suggest he could care less about rural England, so why start now?
This nicely complements Labour’s Budget plans to wreck family farms by levying inheritance tax on them; itself of a piece with the party’s long history of wilfully, or accidentally, misunderstanding country life and country dwellers. These are areas and people who have (with aberrations such as in 1945, 1997 and last July) almost always voted Conservative, and even at the last election supplied the Tory party with almost all of its MPs. As such, doubtless, the view of many Labour politicians is that these people get what is coming to them. Taking dictation from the likes of Chris Packham, they use anthropomorphism, veganism, the idea of apocalyptic climate change and various degrees of class paranoia to shape what passes for their environmental policy.
Despite the small numbers of foxes that hunts killed, the usually instantaneous death of the fox and the well-attested damage that foxes (as vermin) did, Labour banned hunting with hounds. This had more to do with the average Labour MP’s belief that it was a pastime for rich sadistic toffs than with any facts. Now Labour promises to ban in its present form trail-hunting – the pursuit of an artificially laid scent that replicates an old-fashioned hunt – because occasionally an animal is accidentally killed. Some Labour MPs would like to end shooting, despite the British Association for Shooting and Conservation’s finding that the sport contributes around £3.3 billion to the UK economy, supports around 67,000 jobs and contributes around 14 million working days a year to conservation activities. And never mind that game is the perfect food for the government’s anti-obesity drive as it is so low in fat.
But then Labour regards the countryside not as a place of economic activity, employment and production, but as a theme park. Moreover, it is one that can constantly be reduced in size to accommodate housing estates for those desperate to leave the increasingly squalid and malfunctioning towns run largely by Labour councils. (Building on the abundant brownfield land in such places is less satisfying, not least in its failure to punish Conservative voters.) It is, however, a theme park enabling activities that urban-based Labour voters enjoy – rambling, camping and picnicking, as they increasingly say, ‘in nature’. But do they understand why ‘nature’ looks as it does?
Well, some of it may (for the moment) have no housing estates, pylons or new roads smeared across it. There are handsome fieldscapes where farmers grow arable crops or graze livestock. There are pheasants and partridges strutting around because people pay for their breeding so they can be shot and eaten. Many other bird and animal species exist ‘in nature’ only because the land is managed to ensure they have plants and prey upon which to live. Break up farms into smaller units, or force them to be sold altogether, as is now Labour policy, and the countryside will look remarkably different, and a shadow of its present biodiverse self.
A sign of Labour’s disregard for the realities of farming came well before the Budget. Daniel Zeichner, the minister for food security and rural affairs, thrilled Mr Packham and the eco-zealots who comprise his cult by announcing in August the end of the badger cull that had operated for a decade to try to limit the spread of bovine tuberculosis. The government has decided that badgers are as crucial as the cattle that provide us with meat, milk, cheese and butter. To compensate for stopping the cull it has announced a Badger Vaccinator Field Force, which sounds horribly like the Border Force designed to stop illegal small-boat immigration, and will doubtless be as effective. That there is also to be a badger vaccination study to monitor the effectiveness of the programme suggests they haven’t a clue if it will work or not; but since the government apparently thinks all farmers have somewhere on their land a bottomless pit of money, a holocaust of expensive cattle hardly matters.
What would matter would be the subsequent effect on food supply and prices at a time when the cost of living is – supposedly – of deep concern to ministers. Mr Zeichner paid lip service to the hardship bovine TB caused to farmers, with a nice soundbite about ‘devastation to farming communities’, but many of those communities are concerned that the badger is being reprieved long before it is properly understood whether vaccination will make much difference.
Mr Zeichner does at least have a background in rural politics (albeit in barley-baron dominated Norfolk, not in any big cattle-farming area), so perhaps he understands something about agriculture. His boss, Steve Reed, the Environment Secretary, sits for Streatham and Croydon North and before that was a pillar of Lambeth council, so we may presume his credentials in this respect are undistinguished. Labour has 402 MPs in receipt of the whip, so one might have thought they could find an environment secretary for whom the concept of rurality was not a work of the imagination.
Neither Sir Keir Starmer nor Rachel Reeves has the slightest grounding in non-urban life
With neither Sir Keir Starmer nor Rachel Reeves having the slightest grounding in non-urban life, accidents such as the anti-agricultural grotesqueries of the Budget are bound to happen. The National Farmers’ Union is already putting up a formidable fight; the problem it and other opponents to Labour’s idiotic policies may have is the old one of people finding it harder to back down when they go in the wrong direction through stupidity rather than blind malice.
But of course there was an element of malice in the Budget too, which does great discredit to a government that has wasted no time showing its sectarian colours. Although failure to consider the consequences also played its part, one is reminded of perhaps the nastiest politician in Labour’s history. As a minister in 1946, Manny Shinwell ordered open-cast mining in the gardens of Wentworth Woodhouse, Lord Fitzwilliam’s Yorkshire palace, because coal-owners such as Fitzwilliam represented a score a small-minded bigot such as Shinwell felt he had to settle.
Despite the humiliation it would entail, Ms Reeves may have to re-think her toxic taxation policy on family farms. It imperils our long-term food supply. You can’t find in WH Smith a book called Teach Yourself Farming, for the very good reason that learning it takes a lifetime, and it helps if students have been bred to the task. Should family farms go, the outcome will mimic that of Mugabe’s policies in Zimbabwe. Labour may hate farmers because it believes they are rich and privileged, but it should realise that the countryside its people like to escape to for their rambles is profoundly endangered by its intentions. Pylons have the merit of being a visible horror inspiring immediate opposition. Labour’s lack of comprehension of the countryside in general is far more insidious, but just as ruinous.
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