I hope our elected politicians are listening to rural Britain

Today a microscopic virus has achieved what the combined might of Tony Blair’s government, a league of po-faced Labour councils and well-funded pressure groups failed to do: it has stopped Boxing Day meets. Not this morning the traditional sight of large crowds greeting their local hunt in market towns and on village greens across the land, the countryside’s joyous, festive rebuff to the puritans who said the hunt was over.

In fact, in most areas, hunts will go out today in their new and lawful form. Only the fox will be missing, replaced by a human being dragging a smelly rag which the hounds then follow. As an organised outdoor activity, taking the correct precautions to prevent the transmission of Covid, trail hunting can continue, albeit without the traditional meets.

But not, of course, in the Tier or Level 4 areas where the countryside, like its nearby towns and cities, is sadly locked down and silent. Pubs are closed again, the already-fragile high streets of market towns are empty, and only individual or household exercise is allowed. Rural businesses have stopped and started as the regulations chopped and changed, many only clinging on thanks to the precarious lifeline of the Chancellor’s largesse. Much of rural Britain cannot wait to see the back of an awful year, yet it awaits the inevitable new restrictions with trepidation.

There have been consolations. Entrepreneurial pubs and restaurants have turned to home deliveries, and the public has rediscovered the pleasure of the countryside for recreation and good local produce. Village shops, open all hours and there for the community, are being valued again. And the Scotch Egg, prince of foods for truck drivers and gourmands alike, has seen off the disapproval of the healthy eating police and emerged as a triumphant symbol of the resistance.

For sure, rural Britain – no less than its urban cousin – is infused with British stoicism, the cheerful belief that we must soldier on, that things will surely, eventually, get better. Yet underneath, the countryside is feeling increasingly beleaguered, troubled by more than the virus. Agricultural policy is about to be up-ended as Britain finally leaves the EU, farming support is redirected and cheap food imports are threatened.

Climate change, once the fault of frequent flyers and coal burning power stations, is now laid at the door of farting livestock. January, already the most miserable of months, is now a corporate celebration of veganism. For Britain’s farmers, the unsung custodians of the countryside, Twelfth Night seems to be looming.

A tiny number of animal rights extremists, often exploiting social media to create attention, cause disproportionate trouble. Farms are attacked for the crime of feeding the nation. Hunt supporters are screamed at by balaclava-wearing saboteurs who trespass on private land while demanding that the law is observed. The RSPB campaigns against shooting, attacking the control of predators while hypocritically killing foxes on its own reserves. Chris Packham openly challenges the BBC’s newly-required presenter impartiality as he launches one tirade after another against rural communities.

The courts have become a new battleground for control of the countryside as activists manipulate habitat laws to attack shooting. The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has been forced to justify even the most basic wildlife management such as the control of crows and pigeons. To the traditional countryside, the big-hearted people who quietly manage the woodlands and moors, tend the fields and produce the food, whose care gives us the British landscape we know and love, the world appears to have gone mad.

The prevalent mood in rural Britain is that most politicians are no longer on their side. Perhaps country people put up with inferior services and feeble broadband as the price of their isolation. But when they come under attack it’s a different matter. It doesn’t seem to the gamekeeper or the farm worker, as he watches news reports of war, urban violence and street crime, that his pastoral life is the source of all modern evil. He doesn’t need to be loved. But he does want to be able to get on with his life and recreation without being pilloried by a pressure group, tormented by an official with a clipboard, or treated as a criminal.

Next year new Government animal welfare legislation is expected in the House of Commons. The measures may largely be well meaning, but animal rights pressure groups are set to hijack the Bill with unjustified new restrictions on trail hunting, shooting and farming. If the Conservatives, once the Party of the countryside, allow this to happen they will never be forgiven by the rural community.

It has been nearly two decades years since half a million people descended on London with the cry “listen to us”. Today the countryside is once again feeling undervalued and ignored, and the next rural revolt is likely to be angrier. Rural Britain is about to find its voice again. I hope our elected representatives are listening.

This article appeared in the Telegraph on 26 December 2020