Opinion: Tories are the ‘party of the countryside’ no more
© Mark Richardson/Alamy Stock Photo Occasionally I need to venture a few miles east and over Offa’s Dyke into North Shropshire. It rains there a lot, and the people are a little odd (hello to my in-laws if you’re reading this), but generally I quite like it.
It’s a sleepy sort of place and hasn’t been in the headlines much since the days when Charles Darwin caused Victorian churchgoers to clutch their pearls in horror at his theory of evolution.
But that changed dramatically last month with what turned out to be a famous and wildly against-the-odds by-election victory for the Liberal Democrats.
See also: North Shropshire farmers react to shock Lib Dem by-election win
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I say “against the odds” because the Conservatives had held this safest of safe seats for almost 200 years.
As one Oswestry man interviewed for the BBC in the build-up wryly remarked: “You could stick a blue rosette on a goat here and people would vote for it.”
Not on this occasion, though, as it turned out. What was highly noticeable as I drove around the area was the difference in locations of signs and banners supporting the two parties.
There were exceptions, but mostly it was Lib-Dem in the villages and towns, and Tory on farmland – the urban-rural divide writ large.
I’ve met them [George Eustice and Victoria Prentice] both and wouldn’t trust either to know hay from straw, let alone contribute towards a coherent and forward-thinking UK agricultural policy
This begs the question, just what would it take to get English farmers to turn their backs on the self-styled “party of the countryside”?
Because here’s the thing, the Tories aren’t that anymore.
Sure, they’ll talk up their backgrounds. The current Defra secretary, George Eustice, is from a farming family, don’t you know, as is farming minister Victoria Prentis.
But, as someone once said, a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. I’ve met them both and wouldn’t trust either to know hay from straw, let alone contribute towards a coherent and forward-thinking UK agricultural policy.
Even the most vocal of pro-Brexit farmers must be realising by now that they’ve been had. Where are the much-vaunted opportunities? When does the bonfire of red tape start? Who’s going to lead us into those promised sunlit uplands?
Certainly not an incompetent and corrupt government, led by the clown prince of “vote leave” and the gang of mediocre buffoons and empire-fetishists he’s assembled.
If you really need proof of this, look no further than the desperate pursuit of trade deals at seemingly any environmental cost, coupled with the broken promises on food production standards, the staggering failure to prepare for and deal with worsening food sector labour shortages which have resulted in millions of pounds worth of fruit and vegetables rotting in fields, and the shameful response to the situation in the pig sector.
It is widely reported that more than 30,000 healthy animals have had to be culled, causing unimaginable distress and financial hardship for the farmers involved.
This alone should see high-level resignations at Defra, but that’s sadly out of style; blaming everyone else but themselves is the in thing now.
What can we do then? Protest? Hit the streets with our tractors, like the French?
We could (and perhaps should), but home secretary Priti Patel will have us off to the gulag for that under her new policing bill, and who’ll do the farm work then?
So, if we can’t have a revolution, it’ll just have to be evolution, and what more fitting a place for that to start than North Shropshire.