Election horns are tooting, the blood is up – and the hunt is on for rural votes. It is a battlefield that has seen a Tory retreat which Labour hopes to turn into a rout. So a lot of urban ministers are digging out their Hunter wellies to visit distant places and share worries about absent local bus services and fertiliser prices.
It reminds me of travelling around my own homeland near a windswept moor on the Durham/Northumberland wing in the Blair years – and one of the camera crew asking if there was a Pret A Manger nearby. The sheep farmer’s expression was a picture to treasure. It’s the kind of question both parties would be wise to avoid as they rally their countryside credentials.
Labour has declared it will “fully ban fox hunting”, which it believes to be an issue which divides rural areas to its advantage as fewer locals have contact with hunting sports and many of the grand old hunts are now as likely to be full of “Down/Up from Londoners” riding to hounds as the local mix of aristos and home-grown enthusiasts.
It is also a sore point for Conservatives, who could do without an internal battle over the limits in Tony Blair’s 2005 hunting ban, which is what happened the last time the matter was pushed to the front of the fray. Rishi Sunak would rather not brand the Tories as the party of minority country sports.
Labour, too, is over-egging the issue. Steve Reed, the shadow environment secretary (reared in the urban milieu of Lambeth council), has sallied forth to announce Labour would “eliminate” fox hunting and ditch a “self-satisfied urban mindset”, citing polling in support of a ban and an advance for the Opposition in rural areas, where the Tory vote does indeed look to have fallen by around two-thirds of its 2019 share.
We are, of course, in the territory of a conditional tense here – dramatic opinion polls would need to be reflected in the general election. “First catch your Tory fox” might be the metaphor that springs to mind – and Conservatives currently hold 96 of the 100 deep countryside seats.
So Sunak has been addressing the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) – never the easiest gig, always one of the tougher crowds for ministers. Farming costs have soared in an energy-intensive industry, while reliance on overseas workers has strained business models as supply was reduced after Brexit and farmers have to lure workers under special schemes with laborious paperwork.
Sunak, sitting for the prosperous Richmond constituency in “God’s own country”, North Yorkshire, can at least affect a passing knowledge of country life (this is not strictly true for Sir Keir Starmer, sitting in London’s Holborn and St Pancras, one of the country’s less bucolic constituencies).
I found on trailing round Richmond to profile the Sunaks a couple of years ago that both he and his wife Akshata are enthusiasts for walks and country fairs (he once guessed the weight of a piglet “more or less correctly”, as my local vet source recalls, at the local country fair). More substantially, he earned local praise for showing personal commitment to keeping Dales schools open in an era of falling pupil roll numbers.
But that does not cut much ice (or hay) outside his own countryside backyard and at the NFU gathering, Sunak had his ear bent repeatedly by farmers complaining about a lack of support for animal-based farming when subsidies have moved towards land conservation. The more awkward truth here is that Sunak cannot afford to commit big tranches of new funding to win back countryside votes.
He has, however, found pounds (£220m) to enhance food productivity schemes and encourage faster and better automation. There is cross-party support for supporting hard-pressed dairy farmers, with talk of more protectionism-light deals for pig and poultry to follow. Both parties would like to loosen planning constraints to allow farmers to start new businesses or diversify.
That does not mean they cannot find things to argue about and dividing lines are emerging over fields, hills and dales as well as in the familiar battlegrounds of towns and cities over everything from wind farms to solar energy – touchy topics in many Tory seats.
Reed’s comments this week show Labour is supporting new wind farms more decisively, arguing that aesthetic concerns cannot override the need to boost the rural economy and ensure energy security. It gives Starmer’s party a pitch to rival the Lib Dems, who advocate most strongly in many areas for offshore wind and solar development – but also opens Labour up to more local pushback over how and where the infrastructure will be built and in whose sightlines.
As for the proposed new fox hunting ban, my guess is that the “vixen vote” will not move very much for the Starmerites, and is really more of a culture war signal to younger and leftish voters and activists who argue that there are too many loopholes in the 2005 legislation, which allow legal “trail hunts” to act in some cases as what Reed calls a “smoke screen” for killing foxes. That is true. But it is also the case that illegal hunting, which is spontaneous or organised in more clandestine ways, accounts for the vast majority of fox-killing out of sight of hunt saboteurs. Reed’s pledge to “eliminate” hunting is likely to end up the same way his predecessor’s pledge did, with patchy implementation and a grumpy new front in the rural culture war.
As the product of rural north-west Durham (home to the Derwent hunt, with a mother who campaigned against open-cast mining in the local valley), I am one of those rural dwellers turned London urbanites who roll their eyes when the main parties start to talk about the countryside. Sunak is an internationalist technocrat with a huge constituency country house from which to survey the sheep. Reed has declared war on fox hunting, with all the nuance of an MP from Croydon North. Country folk may warm to the blood sport less than they did, but it’s not the biggest subject down the local pub.
So when they turn to country matters, you can surely hear what my mother would have disdainfully called the “townie” talking.
Anne McElvoy presents the POWER PLAY podcast for POLITICO
Politicians' rural posturing isn't fooling our farmers
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20.02.2024
Election horns are tooting, the blood is up – and the hunt is on for rural votes. It is a battlefield that has seen a Tory retreat which Labour hopes to turn into a rout. So a lot of urban ministers are digging out their Hunter wellies to visit distant places and share worries about absent local bus services and fertiliser prices.
It reminds me of travelling around my own homeland near a windswept moor on the Durham/Northumberland wing in the Blair years – and one of the camera crew asking if there was a Pret A Manger nearby. The sheep farmer’s expression was a picture to treasure. It’s the kind of question both parties would be wise to avoid as they rally their countryside credentials.
Labour has declared it will “fully ban fox hunting”, which it believes to be an issue which divides rural areas to its advantage as fewer locals have contact with hunting sports and many of the grand old hunts are now as likely to be full of “Down/Up from Londoners” riding to hounds as the local mix of aristos and home-grown enthusiasts.
It is also a sore point for Conservatives, who could do without an internal battle over the limits in Tony Blair’s 2005 hunting ban, which is what happened the last time the matter was pushed to the front of the fray. Rishi Sunak would rather not brand the Tories as the party of minority country sports.
Labour, too, is over-egging the issue. Steve Reed, the shadow environment secretary (reared in the urban milieu of Lambeth council), has sallied forth to announce Labour would........
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