Lynn Walsh: Rural reaction

[Socialism Today, No 27, April 1998, p. 9-10]

Lynn Walsh on the Countryside Alliance, a political reaction dressed up in a populist lament about rural decline.

The countryside’s march swamped central London on Sunday, 1 March. The night before, a chain of hilltop beacons rallied support and signalled the alleged threat to Rural England – to “a way of life and the habit of freedom”, claimed the right-wing Daily Telegraph (28 February). According to the organisers, there were 280,000 on the march, though an independent monitoring group put the real figure at around 150,000.

This was not a spontaneous peasants’ revolt. The Countryside Alliance, a coalition of hunting, shooting and country sporting organisations, spent £500,000 on the event. Millions of pounds are being channelled into the campaign by the Countryside Business Group, the British Field Sports Society, and the Countryside Movement, which are backed by wealthy landowners, big business, and overseas sponsors, including the US gun lobby.

The immediate aim of the march was to protest against the anti-fox hunting bill which was about to be debated in parliament. A ‘private member’s bill’, moved by Labour backbencher Michael Foster, there was no chance of this becoming law. But the Alliance sees the threat to ban hunting as a dangerous act of urban interference in the countryside.

The Alliance brushes aside the fact a recent Mori poll showed that 63% of people who live in rural or semi-rural areas are opposed to fox hunting. For them, it is an issue of ‘individual freedom’ and (the Telegraph says), ‘the rights of private property’. To broaden their appeal, however, the Alliance’s publicity machine has tried to highlight broader social issues: the disappearance of village schools and cottage hospitals, the closure of village shops and post offices, non-existent public transport, and the squeeze on rural incomes.

Many of those making up the numbers on the march have genuine grievances on this score. Small farmers, small-holders and hill-farmers scrape a very poor living on the land, many of them barely surviving financially. Farm workers are notoriously low paid. But these working people of the countryside have far more in common with workers in the towns and cities than with the wealthy landowners and big-business farmers. There were undoubtedly quite a few rural employees on the march who had to be there or risk losing their jobs or tied cottages.

The Alliance’s touching concern for the problems of rural decline is in marked contrast to their total indifference to 20 years of urban decay. When whole swathes of industry were wiped out, shipbuilding and mining destroyed, and the inner-cities blitzed by Tory spending cuts, the lords of the manors had nothing to say.

Fox hunting is a symbolic issue: For its opponents, the cruelty of hunting foxes or deer with dogs is linked to the wider despoliation of nature: destruction of the environment by intensive farming methods; cruelty to animals through factory farming; pollution of the soil, water sources, and the food chain by chemical pesticides and fertilisers. Interestingly, a blunt-speaking Ulster Unionist MP complained during the Commons debate that some people oppose fox hunting because of their hostility to the hunting fraternity for cultural and class reasons.

The hunting lobby, for their part, are defending the right they claim to exploit the land as they please, pursuing wealth, power and pleasure without outside interference. Every country estate has its ‘no trespassing’ signs. And that’s the Alliance’s real message: keep out – but don’t dare cut the subsidies to landowners and farmers. These cost tax-payers £4.3bn a year, or an average £4 a week each.

The farming lobby is currently squealing about the recent squeezing of farm incomes. Some farmers have suffered losses because of the BSE crisis – which, of course, the big agribusiness companies created, helped by a Tory government totally subservient to farming interests. Many farmers have been hit by the strengthening of the pound, which has reduced their income from EU Common Agricultural Policy subsidies, which boosted their incomes for so long.

But the farm income figures quoted are the average for all farms, taking no account of the concentration of farm ownership. Around 6% of farms are large holdings of more than 500 acres, accounting for around 50% of Britain’s farm land. This minority of farm businesses produces a massive share of the country’s agricultural output – they collect a lion’s share of government subsidies and they are still banking huge profits. These big capitalist farmers hide behind the problems and hardships of small owner-occupiers or tenant farmers.

Despite all the myths about the decline and fall of the landed aristocracy, rural land is still a major source of wealth in capitalist Britain. The big landowners – most of whom, even today, have inherited their land – are still the country’s wealthiest group, a key section of the bourgeoisie. The richest 1% of Britain’s population own more than half (52%) of all personally- owned land, while the top 5% own 74%.

Despite their professed antipathy to the city, many big landowners are linked to City financial institutions and own vast tracts of urban land. The Duke of Westminster, for instance, who put £1.3 million into the Countryside Alliance, collects lucrative rents from his properties in London’s Belgravia.

The landed property-owning class is extremely possessive. They are dedicated to reproducing themselves and their properties generation after generation, through intermarriage and the jealous defence of their property rights. Their tribal rituals, particularly leisure pursuits like fox hunting and other blood sports, serve to bind their class together and set them apart from the rest of society.

“The people who are coming to London’, declared the Telegraph, “are the backbone of the nation. They are those who have always been ready to fight for their country when required. For them ‘country’, in the sense of nation, is closely bound up with ‘country’, in the sense of green fields”.Land-ownership, it seems, gives them the feudal right to lord it over the whole country.

In the past, landed interests were protected by the Tory Party. Under Thatcher, however, the party fell into the hands of urban upstarts, moneylenders and estate agents. Such was the scale of the Tory defeat in 1997 that 15 of the 100 most rural seats fell to Labour – which set alarm bells ringing in the country estates.

While city financiers welcomed Blair’s victory, the rural barons were incensed by New Labour’s liberalistic stance on hunting, rural access, and environmental protection. At the moment, Hague’s depleted and divided Tory Party does not offer them much of an alternative. Hague’s attempt to give the party a ‘human face’, aimed at wooing back suburban voters, has no appeal to the rural backwoodsmen.

So the rural barons have launched a new political vehicle, the Countryside Alliance. Even before 1 March, it notched up victories. Blair’s government retreated on the ‘right to roam’ across the countryside, now proposing a voluntary code rather than legislation. Plans to build 4.4 million homes in rural areas have been shelved. The farmers have been promised another £70 million to deal with BSE. And it now seems extremely unlikely that Blair will allocate government time to the anti-hunting bill, which means that it has virtually no chance of success, despite support from a big majority of MPs.

The countryside march on London revealed the form of a political reaction, dressed up in a populist lament about rural decline, against the feeble reforms proposed by New Labour. Blair will no doubt continue to retreat on every issue. But the Countryside Alliance is a warning for the future. It is organised and financed predominantly by one section of the property-owning, ruling class. But the minute Blair ceases to serve the needs of the financiers and manufacturing capitalists, they too will set the hounds on his government.