Rural Britain is at breaking point, and Labour just doesn’t care

Everywhere you go outside of the cities, you can feel the impact of Starmer’s policies Daily Telegraph 15/03/26 The narrative goes that Sir Keir Starmer is the most un-ideological Prime Minister that Britain has ever had. Try telling that to its rural communities.

While the government has been buffeted around by a series of economic, diplomatic and internal crises, one part of its agenda appears to have remained perfectly consistent since the last General Election: a committed and unrelenting campaign to render rural life unviable. If one was in a forgiving mood, you might put it down to ignorance. Not a single member of Starmer’s cabinet represents a rural seat. Labour’s voter base is predominantly urban. For a Prime Minister who by own admission prefers the society of Davos’s “anywheres” to fellow countrymen and women in Parliament, England’s green and pleasant land and its inhabitants are unlikely to hold any particular charm. Perhaps the war on neighbourhood planning, or the inequities of the local government funding model, or the imposed hardships on farmers, or the new crackdown on field sports, are just oversights. But these are not merely sins of omission; they are deliberate acts which stem from a view of the countryside not as something of intrinsic value, but as a means to ends set by the government in Westminster. England’s countryside is a place – beautiful, particular, precious. In fact, it isn’t just one place, but many places, each defined by their natural and geographical patterns, but also by the people that inhabit them, the stories they tell about themselves, their customs, and their way of life. Dartmoor, the Fens, the Mendips, the Yorkshire Dales, Cranborne Chase – all are recognisably parts of England, but all are highly distinctive too. And therein lies the problem. Particularity is a dilemma to be solved for this government – an obstacle in the way of their journey towards a world of greater equality, uniformity, and interminable greyness. Which is why recent calls to “decolonialise the countryside” and make it more “diverse” ring so hollow; ultimately the desire to introduce whacky DEI policies in rural areas is less about true variety in our country and more about making everywhere more or less the same. Unfortunately, this nonsense has even come to format the thinking of bodies that are the trustees of our rural areas. One such body recently stated in a paper that while “most white English users value the solitude and contemplative activities which the countryside affords, the tendency for ethnic minority people is to prefer social company (family, friends, schools)”. Beth Collier, a “nature allied psychotherapist” referenced in the same paper, argues that community is something experienced by minorities in cities, but implicitly not by people in rural areas. These ideas really are unhinged. Can anyone really doubt that if you wanted to find genuine community life in Britain, then the best place to look would probably be our nation’s villages and towns, where people know their neighbours personally, where trust and social capital are high, and where people continue to share a common cultural language? That powerful sense of community in rural areas is why so many residents are distressed by the government’s proposals to do away with trail hunting. For Labour MPs, hunting exemplifies the class war that they wish to read into all aspects of British society. But how many of them have actually been to a hunt meet? How many have seen the quite remarkable social diversity of this ancient practice, which brings together farmers and families, young and old, working class and the landed? How many have inquired into the interdependency of hunting with rural life, from the disposal of fallen stock to the stewardship of woodland and hedgerows? It is not enough that the countryside must serve as a subject for Labour’s ideological engineering. It must also make way for the millions of new houses that they are unwilling to build in our undersupplied cities. In Labour-run London, there were less than 6000 new starts last year – as John Burn-Murdoch writes, that’s “94 per cent below target, a 75 per cent year-on-year decline, the steepest drop in the country, the lowest tally since records began almost 40 years ago and the lowest figure for any major city in the developed world this century”. Meanwhile, centrally-imposed housing targets in counties like Dorset have doubled, while funding for neighbourhood planning has been slashed. 50,000 homes have been chalked up for the county for the period up to 2043; to meet those numbers, the council will be pressured to put any concern – apart from the purely quantitative one of how many housing units can be built on a given parcel of land – to one side. Nor is housing the only area in which the government is looking to juice the countryside. It also increasingly views rural areas as a means to balancing the books. Even with a late concession on the threshold, many more family farms are now to be subject to inheritance tax, which in practice they will cease to operate. Pubs are being crushed under the weight of business rates, beer duty and national insurance hikes. At the same time, the inequities of local government finance means that rural authorities, with their own challenges related to connectivity, deprivation and isolation, will be subsidising townsfolk as urban councils are set to receive about a third more per resident in government grants. There’s a future in which rural England is at the heart of our country’s rejuvenation. In which beautifully built new streetscapes are accompanied by a great proliferation of community land trusts delivering homes for local people. In which farmers are supported to provide public goods with public money, and family farms continue to pass from one generation to the next. In which the values of self-sufficiency, community and family life are promoted and help us to address issues with social provision. And in which national pride is restored through a heightened sense of place and belonging. But that is not a future that Labour has any interest in. Rural Britain needs a government that values the countryside for what it is, not for what can be extracted from it. Unfortunately, it may suffer irreparable damage before one materialises. James Vitali is a Conservative Councillor in North Dorset