Great article. With my Labour activist hat on, the half-mile trek to deliver a leaflet does concern me. It seems like you’d really need one or two people who live in the area themselves and are prepared to work incredibly hard to make it happen – which Bickerstaff is clearly lucky to have. At the moment with so many hyper-marginals to defend I’m not sure I can see it happening. But whenever we are next out of power I hope we’ll give your model a go in a big way.

Of course, I’m saying that as a Labour activist and there’s nothing to stop other left groups having a go. Far-left groups are unlikely to be represented in force in those areas though, and I would guess Lib Dems there are likely to be in the mindset of competing for right-wing votes against Tories rather than for left-wing votes against Labour.

I would very much welcome a U-turn by the Left if it became genuinely interested in rural issues. I won’t hold my breath though.

However, I genuinely don’t understand how those on the Left can say “it should be a leftist struggle because it is about the abuse of power ” with a straight face.

The big state solution that has dominated Left-wing thinking for pretty much all of its existence has in its DNA the “abuse of power”. Any collectivist ideology will require individuals to suborn their rights to the State and it is literally impossible for the State to have the flexibility and granularity of outcome to mirror the rights given up with the benefits received. Necessarily, the most important decisions to people’s lives will be taken centrally by a small group of effectively unaccountable people who, even if they had the best intentions, could not provide for individuals’ specific needs.

This conceit, I think, lies at the heart of the Left’s current deep unpopularity in this country. We know that this “centralised democracy” is double-speak. We know that the abuse of power will always follow those who seek to accrue the most centralised power to themselves. We simply do not believe the Left anymore when it claims to have ideological solutions to deal with the “abuse of power”. To give the Left this mandate would be like putting a fox in a chicken coop overnight to “protect” the chickens.

Please do start to think, more than fleetingly anyway, about rural issues and good luck to you if you can deal effectively with these many problems. But, please, do not insult our intelligence by pretending you are not the arch power-abusers.

The answer, btw, is to take the power to meddle in peoples’ lives away from the centre, from the career politicians from the massive layers of bureaucracy and return it to the people themselves (or as close/local to them as is feasible). That is how you deal with the abuse of power – otherwise all you do is switch the abusers.

Paul

Great article. I have to say I couldn’t agree more.

I apologise if my post sounded as if all issues in the countryside were “rural issues” that the rest of us never have to face. That was not my intention. Indeed the other example of a rural problem I gave at the end of the article – poverty – is one that affects people throughout the country.

What I will say however, is that national issues that affect us all do take on a slightly different character in rural areas. So for example, public transport is an issue for rural and urban people alike, but it is particularly bad in rural areas because the distance between people and services tends to be bigger. A lack of choice in education is another example that you yourself laid out in your post.

So it seems to me the left has to do two things. First, it needs to accept that the issues it fights so well over in urban areas also apply to rural areas and that, to be consistent, it needs to campaign in both. But second, it also has to figure out ways of adapting its campaigning and solutions to fit the different context that these problems are operating in. They may have to accept, for example, that both campaigning for and implementing public transport in rural areas is just going to be more expensive in the countryside than the city, and reallocate budgets accordingly.

Paul Cotteril @0:

Good article; I agree with the thrust of what you’re saying and many of the details but didn’t feel I could let this slip.

The blockage to action by the Left appears to be more a psychological one – these areas are supposedly the Tory heartlands and therefore just not worth bothering with. Well, I’d argue that they are much more open to Left action than some of the leafy but well-serviced suburbs the Left has targeted, at least electorally, for years.

I appreciate that you work for the Party, but you seem to be conflating ‘Labour’ with ‘the left’ here? Particularly within your time-frame, this is not only misleading, it feels like spin. Old Labour were a centre-left party, possibly swinging left under Smith: New Labour are not a leftist party and they haven’t really pretended to be one since the Millenium. I speak as a person who truly wishes they were…

The Admiral @2:

This conceit, I think, lies at the heart of the Left’s current deep unpopularity in this country.

As above, I dispute your premise; I think you’re describing Labour. Not the Left.

I also think there’s something in this analysis that’s missing on both sides of the debate. A much higher percentage of rural constituents own land. People who own land (and I mean own: if a bank can evict you it’s not your land) have a level of security which makes them intrinsically more likely to be conservative. Those who can’t even own property (e.g. a flat) let alone land, tend to be more inclined towards socially progressive policies because they live every day under a sense of threat. Lack of security inclines people to vote for change. Security and assets incline them to vote against it.

Excellent article.

“A much higher percentage of rural constituents own land.”

Even in very rural areas (like the sort I grew up in) only a tiny percentage of the population are landowners.

I’m feeling contrarian.

First, I wonder if incomers really do want village pubs, schools and churches. My parents (over 20 years ago) decided to move to a smaller house – they had a listed 4-bedroom one in an acre of land in a National Park but they kept getting burgled – and in the end they preferred to emirgrate to a Canadian exurb (which had no pub etc etc) than do without a garden in a picturesque cottage in any village in England. I can’t imagine they were or are alone in their preferences.

Secondly, if the provision of welfare and collective goods is actually cheaper in towns and cities, what is so obnoxious about making provision there – or at least accepting that there will be a higher standard of provision there?

Alun @6: in the sense that in most traditional married couples only one of them has their name on the house deeds, yes. In the sense that anyone who owns living space in the country (and I appreciate that my own point about mortgages militates against me here) owns land, then it’s presumably a lot higher? Most people in town who own their own home are still owning a flat, not land.

If you take out my security-based caveat about mortgages, and look at home ownership; is there anything even remotely approaching the amount of buy-to-let and rental tenancy in the country that there is in the city? I would be surprised if even 50% of the homes in my borough were owner-occupied since the buy-to-let speculation boom. My guess would be that it’s nearer 75% rental; but I don’t have figures. Anyone know if ONI would have such numbers broken down by local authority?

@ John Q Publican

I think your desire to paint New Labour as not of the Left is getting in the way here. This is all a matter of perspective. From your position to the Left of the Labour party, they are not Left-wing enough. From any position to the right of you (which I imagine takes in most of the political spectrum) the Labour party is well to the Left, Old or New.

In any case, I wasn’t describing the Labour Party, I was describing the Left. From the wilder fringes of the Lib dems, to the Daily Kos Democrats, to the nutty Greens, to the dinosaur SWP, Respect and so on and so on.

I’m not aware of any of them advocating a smaller role for the State, or a desire to keep out of people’s lives and deferring to them as the people best able to run their lives. If you are aware of any part of the Left that does, I would be interested to hear. If not, your point doesn’t stand.

Admiral: but I’m not a left-winger… I did say that, above. I don’t believe in a number of things that left-wingers (i.e. socialists) do believe in, including planned economies and centralisation. I think that Thatcher’s immense Westminster power-grab which eviscerated a tradition of strong local government nearly a thousand years old is an even worse insult to my generation than her theft of our school milk.

I didn’t grow up here, I am an historian by trade and my political analysis is based firmly in academic study rather than partisanship. The terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ have been a bit of a moveable feast for some time but it’s pretty safe to generalise, at least with regard to the 20th century, and say that socialism is leftish and statist capitalism is rightish. The left tends to be religiously indifferent or aggressively pluralist; the right tends to be Judeo-Christian and inclined towards Faith-Based Initiatives. The left tends to be trying to build a “better” future, the right tends to be trying to recreate a “better” past.

New Labour are all about courting the business vote, diminishing the Welfare State, invading places we don’t like, deregulation for the rich, Public Private Partnerships, and Faith schools. They are therefore a centre-right party. The last thing I can think of which was categorically socialist was the introduction of a minimum wage…

The Labour party has always had, particularly at grass-roots level, a considerable membership who were socially, religiously and intellectually right-wing; they were part of the Labour movement because in the high industrial era, Labour meant labour. We’ve been solidly post-industrial for 20 years now; the boundaries have been blurred and the underlying right-wing nature of much of the Labour party has been brought to prominence by an opportunistic pair of lads who worked their way up in an era with only one successful model available in politics: Margaret Thatcher. [1] Go figure.

As I have been forced to make clear here several times before, pigeon-holing me in order to discount my arguments just won’t work: I don’t fit into the partisan boxes British political pundits like to dump people in. I’m not a partisan politician, I have opinions on comprehensive citizen armament which would make the Left’s hair curl and as an economic historian I think Marx’s analysis was brilliant but I have access to 150 years of hind-sight he didn’t, and while brilliant he was also substantially wrong. What do I need to do to get people to stop calling me a lefty, just because my social politics is progressive, compassionate and pluralist?

Now, having got that over with: the Left perceives a very considerable degree of social injustice to exist in the world as it is now. They’ve got a point. Much of the left is aware that the only way to make humans en masse grow up is coercive. We didn’t ban slavery because the British are just nice; we banned slavery because those (including one branch of my ancestors) who were getting rich off it had to be forced by those who weren’t to change their economic and ethical philosophy. Their children (my 4th generational ancestors) ended up dirt-poor and working as stevedores on Coriander Dock, and were stalwarts of the Labour movement two generations later. Today, most of us, including me, can look back and say the liberals were right. It would be nice to be the heir to a global shipping empire; but if the choice is 4 generations of poverty and a clean conscience I’ll take being poor. I grew up in what used to be called the Gold Coast and I know how much Africans hate slavers. [2]

Libertarianism (“advocating a smaller role for the State, or a desire to keep out of people’s lives and deferring to them as the people best able to run their lives”) is not intrinsically right-wing; there’s left libertarians as well. And more importantly, as with my example above, we know for a fact that humans are not yet far enough evolved that even 50% of us have got their heads around the golden rule of civilised, liberty-based society: your right to swing your fist ends at my nose. Until at least 75% of us have got our heads around that, really understood it, started acting like they believed it, then in order for my nose to remain unbloodied someone bigger than me (and more importantly, someone richer than you) has to restrain your fist. In the current capitalist model, the only available candidate for that role is the state.

Now, a return question: if the right wing is in favour of a smaller state, how do you explain Thatcherism? Deregulation of the financial industry != ‘smaller state’.

[1] Being fair to Brown for once; this is more true of Blair than Brown. Brown has genuine socialist tendencies that have been squeezed out of him by years of realpolitik; my analysis of Blair is he was a very ambitious young man, with a practical streak a mile wide. In the 80s, the competition for success in the Labour party was considerably less brutal than the greasy pole-dancing required by the Conservatives.

[2] By which, people where I grew up do not mean ‘white people’ or ‘British people’, they mean Ashanti. We just bought slaves; it was the Ashanti who raided into the other tribal areas to enslave them in the first place.

Can I apologise for not coming back to these comments earlier – stuck in work.

I am now going into a meeting but will respond in detail to all later on if anyone’s interested, but briefly – yes, it is valid to coritcise my conflation of ‘left’ and ‘Labour’ , though I don’t think this affects the core of the argument put here, and yes there are those on left who argue for smaller ‘state’ but this depends on your what you mea by state – it means different things for left and for right, broadly.

Excellent article.

2 – the article argued that people in rural areas want the state to do more/provide better services which are not being provided by the market. Not entirely clear how radically scaling back the state is going to help with that.

10 – “New Labour are all about courting the business vote, diminishing the Welfare State, invading places we don’t like, deregulation for the rich, Public Private Partnerships, and Faith schools. They are therefore a centre-right party. The last thing I can think of which was categorically socialist was the introduction of a minimum wage…”

Using your definition of left and right, you could just as easily have written that “New Labour are all about tax credits; massive increases in spending on international development; civil partnerships; more money for the NHS; winter fuel allowances; Sure Start; free swimming for children and pensioners; free bus travel for pensioners; the Decent Homes Standard and rebuilding thousands of schools. They are therefore a centre-left party.”

Don @12:

to some extent, yes; but how many of those happened after their first term? Civil Partnerships I’ll give you, but that’s not socialism, it’s simple justice. More money for the NHS? Really? As in, an increase of funding of sufficient scale to make up for what has been trimmed away in the last 20 years? Tax credits were first-term, Sure Start was as well, wasn’t it?

Free stuff for kids and pensioners; er, I’m sorry, kids were free on buses under Major, and getting your bus-pass has been a euphemism for retiring since well before Blair got in. Spending on international development has nothing to do with left or right, and everything to do with realpolitik; even the Conservatives, once in power, will be forced to realise that isolationism doesn’t work any more.

The New Deal was a genuine leftist policy, I even know a few people it helped, but then I also know a guy who was assaulted by his New Deal manager and had to hold him off with a chair. Literally. Not Labour’s fault, mind.

The creeping authoritarianism, the creeping moralism, deciding all of a sudden that we ‘do God’ again… can you not see what I mean when I say Labour have been swinging to the right? The bank bail-outs would also have happened if the Conservatives were in; they’re even more deeply invested in the revolving-door culture than Labour. They couldn’t let their mates down. Reversing policy on marijuana classification, ignoring scientific experts, preaching their own equivalent of ‘back-to-basics’; it’s electioneering. They think that only with the right-wing vote will they win power again; of course, they won’t, they’re just shortening the rabid right’s legislative list by passing half their policies for them in advance.

“Alun @6: in the sense that in most traditional married couples only one of them has their name on the house deeds, yes. In the sense that anyone who owns living space in the country (and I appreciate that my own point about mortgages militates against me here) owns land, then it’s presumably a lot higher? Most people in town who own their own home are still owning a flat, not land.”

In a rural context it’s best not to confuse home-ownership (of any kind) with land-ownership.

And, yeah, home-ownership is obviously a lot higher in rural areas than average; in the valley I grew up in about 77% of houses were owner occupied (compares with about 68% in England and Wales) and a disproportionate share of those weren’t mortgaged.

But.

It isn’t as though there are no housing problems in rural areas. It’s now the case that ordinary people can’t afford to live in villages and hamlets that their families have lived in for centuries.

Just to pick up on this;

“The blockage to action by the Left appears to be more a psychological one – these areas are supposedly the Tory heartlands and therefore just not worth bothering with.”

It’s worth pointing out that back when the NUAW was still around and still strong, Labour was often competitive in some very rural areas.

Sorry these are a bit late, but comments on comments from me, the article scribbler

@1 Tim. Yes, resource stretch is a problem, but the answer is to find helpers in the rural area who wouldn’t dream of helping out in town, so that you’re not spreading yourself thin. That though does mean an initial time investment from town to country in order to dig those people out, I don’t deny, and that’s where the confidence to know there are people there who will help out comes in.

@2etc Admiral. My article was aimed fair and square at people who believe there is some validity in the first place in the Left/Labour wanting to involve themselves in the countryside. You clearly don’t think that there is, because you do not believe the Left has a valid case anywhere, so we’re always going to be talking across each other about the subject matter of this article.

However, where you say @9 that I’m not aware of any of them advocating a smaller role for the State’, I might refer you to my article at www. , in which I analyse the different ways in which the right and left – broadly speaking, conceive of what the ‘state’ actually is, and that in my own terms (as a leftwinger) I am just as much against ‘the state’ as you are in yours.

@7Mike. Well I accept you have an experience, but it simply does not tally with mine, which is that both incomers and longtermers want the stuff you mention – pub, school, services – etc and, if organised by bolshie buggers like me, will fight for it. And be proud of it.

I like the logical extreme of your ‘everyone’ should live in towns anyway argument, but I think you admit that you are being contrary for the fun of it. Put simply, people do want to live in the country for a wide number of reasons, and they pay the same taxes as everyone else, so they should get decent services as near as practicably to where they live. Interesting point though, and perhaps one i’l come back to in another post.

All for now, but will finish up tomorrow on land issues and other bits. Thanks all for comments on my first tentative foray into bigger time bloggging. I counted up and five of you thought the article was good, so maybe I’ll aks to come back.

@3 Rowenna. And I in my turn am sorry if I suggested that your original article did not pick up my argument, as it clearly did at the end. I was simply using your article as a counterpoint for mine, but worded the initial ‘faint praise’ of your article awkwardly.

@4 John Q. Yes, you are right john. I do conflate Labour and Left a little, and while I see myself as a leftist within the Labour party, you are right to say Labour as a whole is centrist. My main argument really, though, was that the rural areas should not be seen by anyone opposed to old-style Tories/right wing Countrysdie Alliance fruitcakes as untouchable territory.

Admiral – sorry, the article I half referred to above re: concpetion of state is at http://www.bickerstafferecord.org.uk/?p=678

Alun:

In a rural context it’s best not to confuse home-ownership (of any kind) with land-ownership.

What?

I suspect that the distinction you’re drawing is between those who own what they live on and those who own vast estates, or possibly against those who own working farms. From your point of view (you own your own home,don’t you?) there is a difference there.

I’m broke, in debt, have now lived in exorbitant rented accomodation for 15 years and every time I have to give nearly half my take-home to someone else I’m thinking ‘if only I could be saving that so I could build a deposit, instead of making some other fucker rich’. I’m sorry, no, from my point of view you can’t separate the landlords from the landlords. Those who own their own land are in a different category of wealth, legal standing, security, social standing, and respect from those who do not. Therefore I can’t draw the distinction you do, any more than a Wakefield factory worker in 1957 would care about the difference between a London lawyer who owned a flat and a Surrey lawyer who owned a house with a garden.

Any particular reason why you chose 1957 there? I’m struggling to think what happened to factory workers in Wakefield in 1957…

“I suspect that the distinction you’re drawing is between those who own what they live on and those who own vast estates, or possibly against those who own working farms”

The distinction I am drawing is between people who own their own homes and between people who own land. If you don’t understand that distinction, you don’t understand rural society. Btw, most people in rural areas don’t actually live on farms of any kind.

“From your point of view (you own your own home,don’t you?)”

Not that it’s at all relevant to the point I made but, no, I don’t. Neither do I live in a rural area anymore.

You should also beware of crudely equating home-ownership with affluence, there is often a link but sometimes isn’t; over three quarters of households in the Rhondda are owner-occupied, for example.