Hugh Reilly: Marx’s ‘rural idiots’ are plainly no fools

‘MARY had a little lamb – the midwife was somewhat perturbed.” We urbanites like to poke gentle fun at those who choose to live closer to nature. I think it would be fair to say that Karl Marx was not a son of the soil.

In his seminal work, The Communist Manifesto, he talked of the “idiocy of rural life”, a statement that caused stalks of straw to fall from the mouths of farmers and field-hands.

As someone who now spends half the week living in a down-at-heel hamlet masquerading as a Victorian market town, it is my view that Marx grossly understated the brain-squelching effect of living an agricultural existence.

To be fair, many people enjoy a non-urban environment. Pupils at Alford Academy in Aberdeenshire have formed a club, the Alford Aces, to learn more about the countryside and possible careers in the great outdoors. They learn skills such as monitoring abscesses on lame ponies (no doubt with a loaded shotgun close at hand to dispatch the crippled colt should the herbal poultice prove less than efficacious).

To my city slicker eyes, drystane dyking is a tedious occupation that only a Lego-addict could take pleasure in, but it is an archaic construction method these kids are taught.

Thanks to Postman Pat, there is a certain romance to working the hills and dales. Through rose-tinted glasses we see an image of a pretty milkmaid, a yoke across her shoulders with a bucket of milk dangling from each end. Today, instead of using fingers and thumbs to de-milk the cow, the onerous task of a white-stuff operative is to lock automated machinery on to the udders and sit on a stool reading Farmers Weekly till the Wiseman tanker turns up.

Hopefully the children at Alford will appreciate the privileged position farmers enjoy in our society. In cities, aesthetic sensibilities dictate that planning permission is required to erect a bird box in a back garden, yet councils are as outspoken as scarecrows when entire hillsides are covered in plastic sheeting by fast-grow, fast-buck farmers. Perhaps I’m being a little harsh on the yokels; after all, some of their other brethren receive EU funding not to grow produce, the payments justified because they are “guardians of the countryside”. If I selflessly decide not to build a driveway to link my house to the road, can I claim cash from the European Regional Development Fund as a guardian of the highways? No wonder farmers have red faces.

Recently, a Panorama programme highlighted the problem of heavily-subsidised red diesel finding its way into private cars and lorries, depriving the Treasury of revenue. OK, I’m thinking outside the yellow box here, but a simple solution is to stop giving fuel to farmers at half the price hauliers, taxi-drivers and other essential road users are forced to cough up. There should be a level paying field.

Before gin-traps are set outside my front door by irate members of the NFU, I must point out that, without exception, every farmer of my acquaintance is poor. I don’t share the view of those cynics who believe hidden cameras would reveal a farmer’s life to be one long running episode of the Secret Millionaire.

I have seen at first hand the raw poverty farmers endure. In our deprived countryside, it is a pathetic sight at cattle auction car parks to see impoverished farmers egress from Range Rovers, Mitsubishi Shoguns and Toyota Ravs that may be two, or, even more humiliatingly, three years old. Watching helplessly as their livestock is sold off for a pittance, the tears roll down their Barbour waxed jackets and on to their bespoke Hunter wellingtons. These deserving poor are down to the last field they can sell to Cala homes for a miserable £2 million.

Hopefully, the youngsters at Alford will embrace the pioneering methods designed to keep pesky ramblers off the land. Barbed wire fencing was sooooo 20th century, thus a more creative solution to city folk trekking through the 57 hectares of a farmer’s front garden had to be found.

Walking a herd of cows on a high-fibre diet along a public right of way leads to IEDs (Innumerable Excrement Deposits), stepping on which can be bad luck… or good luck if you are the superstitious type.

Must dash – all this talk of farmers has me hankering to listen to my Wurzels’ Greatest Hits CD!