Contesting Rurality

Politics in the British Countryside

Michael Woods

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351948913
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Rural issues have gained national prominence in Britain in recent years. The future of hunting, the Foot and Mouth outbreak, farm income and agricultural reform and housing development have all claimed political and media attention, promoted by a vocal rural lobby and headline-grabbing protests and demonstrations. Combining detailed empirical research and case studies with theoretically informed critical analysis, this book provides an overview of the contemporary politics of the British countryside. It explores how and why rural issues have suddenly achieved such political prominence, by examining the changing politics and governance of rural Britain from the local to the national scale over the past century. It investigates the social, economic and institutional restructuring of rural communities and argues that we are witnessing not so much a rural politics, but a 'politics of the rural' in which the definition and representation of rurality itself has become the key focus of conflict.

1
The Strange Awakening of Rural Britain

Introduction

In April 1991 a ripple of excitement ran through the small Somerset village of Hinton St George as political machinations and alleged dirty tricks in the elections to the parish council briefly brought notoriety for the community in the national press. According to a report in The Independent newspaper the controversy had been sparked by the decision of all seven serving members of the council to stand down at the election. Action to fill the vacuum had been taken by one senior villager, an elderly widow ‘whose husband used to run the Suez canal’ (Dunn, 1991, p. 3.), who took it upon herself to recruit seven new candidates – a strategy that is not unusual in the politics of English parish councils (see Edwards and Woods, 2004). In Hinton, however, the apparently secretive way in which the recruitment was undertaken led to accusations of ‘plotting’ from the retiring councillors.

As the Independent journalist, Peter Dunn, observed, the story said ‘a lot about the changes in English rural life’ (Dunn, 1991, p. 3). Hinton St George is, as Dunn described, a former estate village where ‘older residents still remember touching their caps to the local squire, Lord Poulett’ (ibid). Yet, the last Earl had died twenty years previously and the ‘big house’ sold by the family. As the ‘old village’ had ‘drifted away’, excluded by spiraling property prices, middle class inmigrants had moved in. Alongside the neighbourhood watch scheme and the cheese and wine parties in aid of the lifeboat charity, advertised in the window of the ‘Personal Service Stores’, the newcomers had also introduced their own ideas about the management of the village:

Incomers, retired or simply seeking a better life, have transformed their adopted villages from communities of poorly-paid estate workers to places of chocolate box tranquility. They brought in street lighting with signs on the lamp posts warning old ladies about their incontinent dogs. They demanded, unsuccessfully, that the parish council should change the name of Gas Lane to something less offensive. A feminist element complained the village snooker hall, known as The Men’s Reading Room, was a sexist affront. (Ibid).

Yet, the Hinton story is not a tale of conflict between locals and incomers. All of the central characters in the dispute were incomers, testifying to the complexity of the reconstituted British countryside in which simplistic dichotomies belie the heterogeneity of in-migrants. Rather, the tensions in Hinton involved a challenge to the leadership of established upper middle class incomers by more recent, service class, in-migrants with ‘a sense of mission’, who accused the older elite of ‘only [paying] lip service to issues like low-cost housing for needier families’ (ibid.). In this way the newspaper article about Hinton St George could have been written, with a few changes to the details, about any number of rural communities in Britain that experienced significant social and economic restructuring in the late twentieth century. The key themes in the Hinton story are leitmotifs across the British countryside – the decline of paternalism and the agrarian economy, the effects of counterurbanization, class recomposition and gentrification, the influence of particular individuals who orchestrate rural community politics, the contrasting ideas of rural life mobilized by different factions, and even the symbolic importance of village institutions – as the dispute in Hinton revived old feuds between ‘committees running the village hall and primary school’ (ibid.).

For all its rich comment on rural community change, though, perhaps the most significant statement in the Independent article is the opening paragraph:

Hinton St George, a serene Somerset village south-west of Yeovil, seems an unlikely setting for infighting you would expect in Tower Hamlets or some other troubled corner of metropolitan Britain. (Dunn, 1991, p. 3).

Thus even whilst describing a rural political conflict the myth is perpetuated that the countryside is a stable, ordered, virtually apolitical society. Dunn was not alone in reproducing this perception. Whilst a robust political scene has long been accepted as part of rural life in countries such as France and, to a lesser extent, the United States, in Britain ‘politics’ have been identified in the popular imagination with urban society. Even the routine practice of governing rural territories has been somehow seen as devoid of politics. Madgwick (1974), for example, in his study of Cardiganshire in The Politics of Rural Wales, quotes one party secretary who told his research team, ‘if you give me a tenth of your grant I’ll try to see that there’s some politics going on for you to study’ (p. 11).

Fast forward now to September 2003. The streets of central London are filled with more than 400,000 protesters participating in the Liberty and Livelihood March. According to the event’s organizers, the Countryside Alliance – a organization that with 90,000 members had grown in the space of five years to become one of Britain’s most prominent pressure groups – the demonstrators had come to the capital from all over rural Britain. There were 39 coaches from Cumbria, 11 from Pembrokeshire, 36 from Cornwall. From Lincolnshire came 44 coaches and a chartered train, from Durham, 15 coaches and three trains. As with the preceding Countryside Rally in 1997 and Countryside March in 1998, the over-riding motivation for the marchers was the threatened ban on the hunting of wild mammals with hounds, yet mingled in the crowd were individuals who voiced other rural concerns – about the state of agriculture, about the closure of rural services, about rural housing and about the introduction of unfettered public access to open countryside.

In contrast to the earlier demonstrations, however, there bubbled beneath the surface of the Liberty and Livelihood March a mood of defiance and belligerence that had already found expression in the activities of militant pro-hunting groups such as the Countryside Action Network – which had blockaded motorways – and the ‘Real Countryside Alliance’ – which had placed a giant papier mache huntsman on the Uffingham White Horse and hung a pro-hunting banner from the wings of the Angel of the North. Moreover, these gestures were mirrored by the direct action tactics of militant farmers, notably the Farmers for Action group, who had played a leading role in the blockade of fuel refineries and depots in September 2000 and who had subsequently targeted dairies and food processing plants. At the same time, elsewhere in the British countryside, local protests were being mobilized against proposed housing developments and new roads, and to protect village schools and post offices. Some of the communities affected were still recovering from the consequences of the Foot and Mouth epidemic in 2001, an agricultural crisis that had attracted huge amounts of political and media attention and had generated numerous local conflicts over the handling of the outbreak and the designation of disposal sites for culled livestock.

Against this visible background of apparent rural discontent a new arrival to Britain browsing through domestic news reports from any of the last five years would find the idea that the British countryside is an ‘apolitical space’ frankly incomprehensible. In the course of just a decade the concerns of rural Britain have moved to the centre of political discourse and activity. This book seeks to document, analyze and explain this ‘strange political awakening’ of rural Britain. It does so by knitting together the myriad different processes of change that have contributed to this transition, operating at different scales and in different contexts. Thus the early chapters examine the impact of social and economic restructuring on the local political structures of rural areas. The book proceeds to trace the ‘scaling-up’ of rural conflicts from the local to the national political arena, investigating the growing prominence of rural issues in national politics and the policy developments that have both responded to and contributed to this process. Finally, the later chapters explore in detail some of the key areas of conflict in contemporary rural politics, including agriculture, hunting, housing development, windfarms and road-building.

However, before the impression is created that this book is about the politicization of the British countryside, it is perhaps necessary to first return to the notion of the ‘apolitical countryside’ and to critically examine its providence and its effect in disguising the historically entrenched exercise of power in rural society.

The Myth of the Apolitical Countryside

The British countryside is a land of myths. Despite the periodic attempt of academics and government officials to establish and impose ‘objective’ definitions of rural space, the ‘countryside’ as an idea has always been at its most vivid and most powerful in its cultural construction in the popular imagination. The ‘rural idyll’ myth, for example, has been a central tenet of British culture, influencing leisure and residential patterns. The attraction of the ‘rural idyll’ has been a strong driver in the process of counterurbanization and has informed attitudes towards countryside conservation. The ‘rural idyll’ also contributed to the development of separate myths that identified the countryside with national identity in England, Scotland and Wales. These myths helped to propagate a moral geography in which rural places and rural people were located as the repositories of ‘true national values’ – and later informed a politics of exclusion in rural space with racist and xenophobic undertones (see chapter four). They have also been drawn upon by the Countryside Alliance and rural protesters who have reproduced their own modem myths of the countryside as a space of freedom and liberty, and of the countryside as a disempowered, beleaguered space.

These ‘discourses of rurality’ have long been entwined with discourses of power to promote particular hegemonic (or proto-hegemonic) representations of rural space and society that have served the interests of dominant power elites (Woods, 1997). As will be discussed at greater length in chapter three this purpose was most explicitly advanced in discourses such as those of the ‘country gentleman’ and of the ‘agrarian community’ which constructed power in terms of rurality, and rurality in terms of power. The idea of the ‘apolitical countryside’ was a similarly mythic construct, designed to direct attention away from the political structures that did exist in rural Britain and to discourage challenges to the existing power elite.

The principles of the discourse of the apolitical countryside are simple. Politics, it suggests, are a modern, frivolous invention produced by the alien and morally corrupt society of the city. Politics are divisive, setting class against class, party against party, and generating violent demonstrations and damaging industrial strikes. Moreover, politics encourages a fascination with the ephemeral and the trivial and works against the natural order of things. The countryside, in contrast – so the myth goes – is characterized by a stable and order society, by the natural leadership of a landed elite, and by natural, informal and consensual governance. The ordinary working people of rural areas are too busy engaged in virtuous and productive labour to have time for politics, and they identify more readily with their community – in which their interests can be elided with those of their employers and landlords — than with their class. In sum, urban society and politics were portrayed as artificial, in stark contrast with the naturalness of the rural.

Significantly, these ideas gained currency in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. They were reproduced through a variety of media, including the fashionable local pageants that were hosted by small towns across Britain in the first half of the twentieth century (see Woods, 1999), and the burgeoning literature of rural community studies. Notable among the latter is a study of the community of Luccombe, on Exmoor in south-west England, by W. J. Turner, published in 1947 as Exmoor Village. As Matless (1994) observes, Turner’s account of Luccombe invested the village with a sense of permanence, ‘a stability contrasting with, and holding lessons for, the changing world around’ (p. 24). The community was explicitly and overtly represented as different to the city, and that difference included the absence of politics:

The men of Luccombe all work with their hands – with horses, trees, stones and paint ... Life is therefore very much stripped of all superfluities, and most of the questions that are hotly debated in cities and big industrial centres have no interest whatever for Luccombe people as they have more serious business of their own to attend to. There are strictly speaking, therefore, no political opinions or discussions. (Turner, 1947, pp. 30-31).

Turner hence attributes the apparently apolitical current of country life to the nature of rural work and to the connection of rural people to the enduring harsh realities of everyday existence. In turn, these characteristics of the countryside are used to suggest that rural life is morally superior to urban life and to valorize the absence of politics, Matless (1994) for example noting that,

The permanence of meaning resident in Luccombe was contrasted to what were regarded as the whims of fashion and politics, urban ephemera less enduring than the deeper reality of the country. Luccombe becomes a site of the real, a place of vital meaning rather than of the superficial language of the media and the politician. (p. 24).

However, the underlying biases of this representation are revealed in the two pages that Turner devotes to his chapter on ‘polities’. Noting that there was only one declared Labour supporter in the village who would talk ‘vigorously and dogmatically against the "gentry"’, Turner comments that ‘more typical’ were the remarks of one villager about a visitor to Luccombe:

He was Socialist, you know. Not the sort of man I’d like to be seed out with. You’d soon get into a barny, you know. He’d got no time for gentry nor the likes o’ they. I mind well the day I went out with him to buy some cigarettes. He was running down the farmers all the time, and I was very glad to get back indoors. No, I don’t say you’ll find any Socialists among the farm-workers here. (p. 45).

What becomes clear here is that politics is being associated with Socialism and with change – with a threat to the existing order. The entrenched Conservatism of rural society and the established paternalistic power structure headed by the landed gentry and large farmers, in contrast, were represented as being ‘natural’ and therefore not political. In this way the propagation of the myth of the apolitical countryside helped to shore up the traditional power structure in rural areas at a time of great social and economic change and political uncertainty. As will be discussed in detail in chapter two, the leadership and authority of the old landed elite was seriously tested during the inter-war period as a result of economic pressures and the consequences of aristocratic deaths in the First World War. As the aristocracy and gentry retreated their place in the rural power structure was taken by the growing ranks of independent farmers – but as landowners and employers such farmers shared a broad ideological outlook with the gentry and the transition between dominant elites represented more the expansion of a hegemonic power bloc than a radical redistribution of power (Woods, 1997).

The rise of the labour movement nationally, however, posed a more dangerous challenge to the rural elite. Trade unions had organized among farm labourers and other rural workers and Labour party branches were beginning to be formed in rural towns and villages – often in spite of considerable intimidation. At the 1945 General Election, Labour captured over fifty rural or semi-rural constituencies, particularly in the Midlands and East Anglia. In constituencies such as Norfolk South West, where Sidney Dye, a local farmer and member of the National Union of Agricultural Workers, won with a slender majo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Perspectives on Rural Policy and Planning
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 The Strange Awakening of Rural Britain
• 2 The Changing Balance of Local Power in the Countryside
• 3 Contemporary Rural Elites
• 4 National Politics and Rural Representation
• 5 The Countryside Alliance and Rural Protest
• 6 Agricultural Politics
• 7 Developing the Countryside
• Bibliography
• Index