A debate marked by old prejudices and new hatreds

AS THE song goes, "I’ve looked at life from both sides now" - and I’ve found that, in a working lifetime split fairly evenly between full-time farming and full-time journalism, both town and country have something to commend them.

Unfortunately for the Prime Minister, his rural critics believe that he has looked only at the town side and knows nothing about rural affairs. That is why, they say, he is making such a big mistake - not to mention, paraphrasing a little, a total mess - of trying to ban fox hunting.

No matter how much is written or said, the PM and the Countryside Alliance will come no closer to seeing life in general, and fox hunting in particular, from the same angle. Just as they claim he knows nothing about the countryside, he could claim that most of them, excluding a few legal, business and estate-agent types with rural antecedents and a weekend urge to dress up and jump on a horse, know nothing about the city or how the voters there think or live.

He would be right, and it is a discussion I have had many times over the years with farmers, both as journalist and farmer.

This is the farmers’ argument: we’re here in the countryside, working hard with crops and livestock to make a living, coping with the weather, European Union farming policies and supermarket buyers, and no-one understands us - not the government or the civil service, or the tens of millions who live in towns and cities. What we have to do is educate them, show them how much they rely on us to preserve the environment and provide food.

The Countryside Alliance and tens of thousands of rural dwellers - note the crucial difference between millions and thousands when it comes to elections - have taken that a stage further by claiming the right to continue fox hunting, as they have done for centuries. They also argue that, if fox hunting is banned, then fishing and shooting will be next on the government’s hit list.

My counter to the farmers’ argument that the public should be better educated about life in the countryside was to ask what we knew about how they lived, worked, enjoyed their leisure time or did their shopping? Until about ten years ago, the usual reply was a blank look.

For those of us who lived and worked in the countryside, town and city types were simply a nuisance. They made a fuss about mud on the roads and country smells like silage, farmyard manure, pigs and hens. They became impatient when following a tractor and passed on suicidal corners. They threw cigarette ends and plastic wrappers and bottles out of cars.

More annoying, they filled lay-bys with rubbish and used them as toilets, or trespassed on farmland with dogs and ferrets.

What did it matter what us rural types knew about city folks? Those that weren’t a waste of space were a sandwich short of the picnics they insisted on having two feet from the road.

Understanding them was not only impossible, went the farming argument, it was not the point. The point was to get them to understand us. It was to encourage them to spend more on food that British farmers produced, even if they could buy imported products more cheaply and even if that meant spending less on - and this was a phrase still being used until recently - "booze, baccy and bingo".

The same logic, or lack of it, is being used to claim that, unless you have hunted and killed foxes, you (as in the PM and a majority of MPs) have no right to ban it. I guess the same arguments were used about bull and bear baiting, cock fighting and badger baiting.

However, whether fox hunting should be banned in England, as it has been with a half-way house effect in Scotland for the past two years, is beside the point. Tony Blair and New Labour raised the hackles of countryside Conservatives from the beginning. No matter what they did, it would have been resented.

That was clear during the foot-and-mouth epidemic of 2001, when the then Ministry of Agriculture made a hash of dealing with one of the biggest outbreaks of the disease the world has ever seen.

Scotland, with much closer links between Executive and the National Farmers Union, shorter communication lines and a county headquarters in Dumfries and Galloway geared up for disasters, dealt with the epidemic more effectively. A few miles away, in Cumbria, there was chaos, disorganisation and panic. The PM’s ill-fated attempt to visit the area, dressed sensibly in yellow protective waterproofs, was a disaster. In Cumbria, he was howled down by farmers. Abroad, the message was of a disease out of control.

He was doing his best, but from then on, whatever tenuous hold a PM seen as a London trendy had on the countryside had gone.

Where we have to be clear is that the Countryside Alliance does not represent all those who live in the countryside. It might represent a cross-section of the population who hunt, shoot and fish, but the types who broke into the Commons last week indicate how that cross-section is weighted.

If I had still been farming, they would not have represented me, and I wonder how many of them have enough sense of irony to remember the critical comments they made about the pitched battles of the miners’ strike of 1984. Jobs were at stake then. Now it’s a leisure-time pursuit. Small wonder the PM doesn’t understand the depth and bitterness of the reaction.

In a way, the alliance is right to claim that fox hunting has class-warfare overtones. But that comes as much from the alliance as it does from New Labour, because Tony Blair irritates rural types more than any of his Labour predecessors, such as "Uncle Jim" Callaghan, Harold "white heat of technological revolution" Wilson, or Clement Attlee.

Then, in the mainly Conservative countryside, there was a belief that any Labour government would not last long - and farmers even privately agreed that Labour was a limited good, bringing in subsidies and secure tenancies. Landowners knew their land was unlikely to be nationalised and that not even Labour would interfere with the right of a true-born Briton to hunt small furry animals to death.

That changed with New Labour and Tony Blair. The threat to ban fox hunting, well meant but a political mistake, opened the box of prejudices against wine-drinking, fancy-restaurant politicians who had never killed a fox, shot a rabbit or hooked a trout. Lots of us in the countryside have never done any of those things either, or not often. We concentrated on growing crops and feeding animals. But we didn’t count. The dislike for Mr Blair has become hatred for a hard rural core.

Yet another irony his critics don’t see is that the Prince of Wales, a fox hunter and a man opposed to almost everything modern, who believes in the good life, as long as it doesn’t interfere with his comfort, and hard work on farms, as long as he doesn’t have to do it, is the rural hero for our times. Last year, readers of Farmers Weekly voted him the man who had done most for the countryside, an award Tony Blair is unlikely to ever receive.