Labour continues to treat rural communities with contempt - Andrew Vine

What hope can there be for the Yorkshire countryside and its people when a government minister speaks of rural communities with open contempt?

In common with most people, I didn’t know much about the nature minister, Jenny Riddell-Carpenter, until she popped up at last week’s Labour conference to make her mark with the most stupid and insulting comments I’ve heard from any politician in a very long time.

She told an undoubtedly sympathetic audience at a fringe meeting that the traditional view of country life as “warm ale, a black labrador by your feet in a pub that doesn’t exist” is a far-right vision of rural England.

Oh really, minister? So those of us who cherish the countryside, love a good pub and are partial to sharing a bag of cheese-and-onion crisps with the friendly dogs we often find there are neo-Nazis are we?

What utter nonsense. It would be easy to laugh off Ms Riddell-Carpenter’s comments as plainly absurd and designed to please a partisan audience were it not for the fact that they illuminated a disturbing truth about this government, which is that it doesn't like rural communities.

That a nature minister – part of the team responsible for looking after the countryside – should hold such views and keep her job after expressing them is cause for pessimism about what lies ahead for the people who live and work there.

The Government can insist as much as it likes that it values the countryside, but the evidence does not support it. On the contrary, everything points to it having an attitude that is at best dismissive, and at worst actively hostile.

In the last month, there has been the farce of a subsidy scheme for nature-friendly farming closing after just six hours when the paltry sum allocated, £233m, ran out leaving applicants high and dry or excluded because the government website crashed.

It is inconceivable that any other area of essential public spending, whether it be the NHS, education or pensions, would be allowed to operate in this amateurish and incompetent manner, but because it concerned farming, the attitude of the government was simply to shrug its shoulders.

Then last week, the campaign group CLA, which champions the countryside, revealed that the ruinous family farm tax remains a running sore for agriculture, despite the government’s U-turn to lessen its impact after a public outcry.

Almost 90 per cent of rural family businesses have paused all investment, and in some cases are actively devaluing what they own to avoid inheritance tax bills that could bankrupt them by forcing the sale of land that would make farms unviable.

The CLA is urging the Chancellor, John Healey, to scrap the changes to inheritance tax introduced by his predecessor, Rachel Reeves, when he delivers his first budget later this month.

He should undoubtedly do so, but I wouldn’t bet on that happening. It simply does not seem to register with the government that its attitude towards farming is causing massive harm to one of Britain’s most essential industries.

It is not only the economic headwinds of increased costs and a lack of government support that are damaging agriculture. The loss of prime farmland to solar and windfarms – and tenant farmers losing their livelihoods as a result – should also be of concern to ministers.

The grim outlook for the countryside is being emphasised by farmer and best-selling author James Rebanks in a new series that began on BBC Radio Four yesterday, called Another Country.

Ahead of the first episode, Mr Rebanks, who farms in Cumbria and wrote the wonderful book The Shepherd’s Life, said, “We’ve become the stupidest country on Earth when it comes to do with farming, land and food.”

That is an accurate summary of what is happening under this government, which in its first two years has done nothing to help agriculture, but much to cause it headaches.

Food security does not appear to be on the government’s radar, even though British farmers now produce only half of what the nation needs to feed itself, leaving us increasingly dependent on imports at a time when international volatility is greater than it has been since the end of the Cold War.

Last month, the Prime Minister said he was more concerned about social security than national security, a soundbite aimed at Labour’s own supporters, but one which will come back to haunt him if there is a problem with imports that leave empty shelves in the supermarkets.