Labour is destroying the backbone of Britain
The Editor of Country Life magazine once said to me, over a pint in Hampshire, that English people are very different to the French. It's not, according to him, the quality of wine we respectively produce, the bureaucracy, or the taste for protest.
What it apparently comes down to is our relationship with the countryside. When the wealthy die in France, Mark notes, they are buried in Paris. But the greatest burial an Englishman can have is in rural soil. There is a babbling brook running through the nation's soul.
It's just over a week since Keir Starmer dealt the British fishing fleet an extraordinary body blow in the form of allowing EU vessels to pillage UK waters for 12 years. Fishermen throughout the country are justifiably up in arms. The remarkable thing is that Starmer, in his limp response to the outrage, has suggested this is a win for the industry because of Scottish salmon exports. It's a response that's insulting to fishermen and environmentalists alike.
Keeping densely packed and sickly salmon in cages and feeding them on highly-processed food isn't fishing. It's factory farming at its most destructive. As Elspeth McDonald of the Scottish Fishermen's Federation put it: 'if you and your Government had bothered to understand anything about the fishing industry you'd know that farmed salmon and wild capture fisheries are completely separate industries.'
But therein lies the point. When it comes to nature, the sea, and the countryside, the Labour Government seems neither to know nor care. Their follies mount by the month. Their reneging on the commitment not to change taxes on land was troubling enough for farmers, but the devil was in the detail.
Steve Reed's suggestion that only the largest farms would be affected was patently nonsense – the only landowners, of any flavour, who've done well out of the Labour's meagre threshold are essentially wealthy retirees with a few paddocks or smallholders with a couple of sheep. It wasn't just a betrayal but an admission that the Government doesn't understand the working countryside.
There are all sorts of things you can deduce from their destructiveness, but ultimately they just don't seem to care about something that so many of us hold dear, something that is part of who we are.
When this Government came into office, it became known that they were going to scrap the proposed and long fought for Natural History GCSE. This would give young people across the country, from urban spheres to rural ones, the opportunity to get out into nature to learn about why it matters.
Young people are hardly going to be concerned about the near-extinction of birds like the turtle dove and the curlew if they don't know that they exist. The story was that Labour was going to dump the GCSE because they viewed it as a Tory initiative.
The other great horror of recent months has been the effective scrapping of the Sustainable Farming Incentive, which encouraged farmers to manage their land in a way that gave space to nature. In the weeks that followed the announcement, vital habitat across the country was torn up and planted with cereals. Less for wildlife, more food for us.
Yearly, the population of Britain grows. In 1500 there were 2.5 million people; there are now almost 70 million. Angela Rayner has said herself that we cannot allow the protection of endangered species to get in the way of more building. Concrete means progress.
The Tories weren't much loved in the countryside, and Labour had a real chance, but their disregard for British heritage is remarkable. He's certainly not going to get my vote, but Nigel Farage sees the rural disaffected voter and they in their droves are starting to see him too.
Patrick Galbraith's Uncommon Ground: Rethinking our relationship with the countryside was published last month by William Collins
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