Here in rural England there has traditionally been a feeling that the Labour Party is the voice of a very metropolitan hostility and non-comprehension of the issues associated with 'the Countryside'. In truth possibly many Conservatives are little better informed, albeit their inherent instincts are not hostile to landowners.
In the 1990's, BBC radio's Any Questions came from Castle Cary in Somerset, from where I am writing this. We sit in the midst of an attractive pastoral landscape of very productive dairy farming. On the panel was Michael Portillo, then a government minister during a period of expanding European integration with the Common Agricultural Policy. As I left our church where the programme had been broadcast, Mr Portillo emerged from the vestry door and I said conversationally "It seems astonishing that we had no farming or countryside question tonight". Portillo replied genially and candidly "Probably just as well. I don't think we know anything about it".
Quite so, but in my experience Socialists, to a greater or lesser degree, embrace the philosophy of the 18th century anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon "All property is theft". Dishonestly in most cases the interpretation of 'property' is specifically assumed to be any land capable of being commercially-farmed. In fact the composition of English rural land ownership has been historically far broader than that seen in Europe where (generalising) there were peasants and large aristocratic estates until various revolutions at the end of the 18th and into the 19th. Century. By contrast, English agriculture has served a far broader society well.
The Black Death of the 14th century had a socio-economic benefit rarely recognised. This was that tracts of land lay abandoned as the disease was impartial to social class and un-tilled lands could be acquired - survivors moved in and claimed them. In the 16th century the Dissolution of the monasteries resulted in monastic land being sold-off and a class of gentlemen farmers emerged. Many were adept at producing a steady supply of foodstuffs and the great produce markets and royal warrants for fairs originated by 1600.
In the 18th century the population expanded quickly, in part due to a better diet. The episode that infuriates the political Left most was the reorganisation of land rights under 'enclosure acts'. The fencing-off of areas of 'commons and wastes' was indeed in many instances 'unfair'. On balance, for the broader public now in towns, it ensured a supply of food from which society benefited. In the 1790's the Rev. Thomas Malthus lamented the explosion of population and predicted that food supply would fail to match this. General starvation and misery was, in his view, an inevitable consequence. This never happened.
Larger commercial landholdings led to the adoption of new methods, machinery, selective breeding and comparative plenty. Socialists never deplore immigration and the reckless family growth of the 'Poor'. This remains the 'elephant in the room' into the current debate on living standards, housing and the other public services that buckle under excessive demand. Perversely, people who cannot afford the family they have, produce yet more children. Would 'society' be better off if land had remained held by small owner-producers in a 21st century version of 'peasant holdings?'.
Some socialists, one suspects, might even admire Stalin's land-grab from the Kulak peasant landowners in 1920's Russia. The consequence of State ownership and bureaucrat control through a '5 Year Plane' was catastrophic starvation. Almost certainly Stalin's dogmatic adherence to political dogma out-killed Nazi brutality.
In 2000 Tony Blair exercised his petulant anti-landowner credentials with the Countryside Act which gave the public rights of access to farmland and endorsed the general urban impression that the 'Countryside' is pretty and clean and we can use it. Broadly farmers cooperated, partly spotting a fight they were unlikely to win and also enjoying the sweetened pill of subsidies including payments not to farm.
Politicians and what are colloquially still called 'housewives' can apparently be relied upon to advocate British food products. In a strange disconnect it seems that even the Left that resents land ownership, are swayed by an adhesive sticker of a union flag tractor adhering to produce produced by landowners they resent.
As shown by the recent tax increase for farming families there appears to be no real comprehension of what the expression 'farming family' means in terms of acquired knowledge and a duty of custodianship towards land. Such attitudes clearly do not hold sway in the world of toolmakers where the nearest thing they have seen to green is a slick of Swarfega to clean-up "working people". At leat thanks to the antics of Jeremy Clarkson there is a wider respect for the job of farming. Whether, in a society where 'expectation' translates to 'entitlement', people fully understand the uncertainty of weather, market-price, vicarious regulation and all those pressures that require a farmer's resolve is a different question. Thank goodness we have farming families that do.
The third pressure on agriculture comes from the 'environment' lobby with its small dollop of science augmented by hysteria, fashion, social media and simply false science. There is now a 'woke' element to food consumption. How odd to have people who reject good quality natural locally grown food and prefer weird beans and grains imported and processed, faux meat knitted from lab-made proteins and 'milk' – not worthy of the name – synthesised from heaven knows what. This same lobby advocate the 'natural countryside' utterly unaware that the countryside people know and love is a man-made environment of planted hedges and dug ditches teeming with wildlife, of verdant pastures and yellowing corn rippling in the breeze. Most depressingly ignorant is the 're-wilding' lobby. They need to abandon their window-boxes in Dulwich and go to an abandoned garden or council allotment and see whether they really want a landscape of nettles, brambles, docks, ivy and thistles that are the real products of 'nature – 'rewilding '. Reality rarely matches fantasy!
