The "traditional rural way of life"

We are endlessly told that the foxhunting community have the preservation of this mysterious entity as their highest priority. It is repeated endlessly in the press, which often uses the terms "rural" or "countryside" when it means "hunting". It does not seem to matter to the media what it means - it is simply one of those reflex phrases they repeat time and time again until they feel they have successfully brainwashed the nation into following their own agenda and nothing else.

But what exactly *is* this way of life? I suppose I would best define it in the words of, improbably, the right-wing polemicist Robert Henderson, most notorious for his 1995 article 'Is it in the blood?' which criticised the selection of non-white and non-English-raised players for the England cricket team:

"it is about living as men have lived since time out of mind. It is about living in a way that comes as close as a man in the First World can come, to living as nature designed men to live. It is about the rhythms of the seasons, the watching of Nature change. It is about fulfilling a primal need of Man, the satisfaction of hunger. It is about seeing that there is something beyond material progress and power."

When the British political right recognised and understood these things, so did its representatives in the countryside, just about. But they always peddled a myth, always wiped away vast swathes of rural history in favour of their own simplistic reading cast firmly in that "rich man in his castle, poor man at his gate" mould that is the bulwark of romantic Conservatism.
In recent years, like virtually all other Tories, the landowners have lost the (admittedly patronising and simplistic) niceness they seemed to have in the post-war era, and become a nasty, threatening little bunch, dislocated by any number of changes (many of which they promoted themselves, although they can't see that), fighting to maintain the position in "the establishment" which they lost, in practice, some years ago now. Their desperation shows the shallowness of the sands on which their cultural
myths - now dying all around us every day - were built.

Once there were Conservative MPs who, for all their rather childish paternalism and assumption that everyone in the countryside was happy knowing their place, at least shared and understood the values Henderson articulated - they had higher concerns than the pure capitalist lifestyle.
Quite recently we had Richard Body's sterling work against pesticides and in support of organic farming methods - he was at least brave enough to vote against his own party many times on these issues, even when its majority was slipping inexorably away. But in recent years the Tory party has, of course, been taken over by the suburbanites - it is a terrible indictment of the supposed "party of the countryside" that the centre-left parties all have MPs who understand the genuine issues in hand (as opposed to the
concerns of a tiny neo-feudal gang) and the Tories quite simply don't.

As one would expect, it was in the 1960s that the old certainties began to unravel, as a new subculture developed among the young which aspired to reclaiming the countryside, exploring its history, opening it to all. In 1968, the Pentangle - a group at the heart of the "new ruralist" movement of the time (itself a clear descendant of the whole William Morris / Arts & Crafts thing of the 19th Century) - got close to the heart of this issue.
In their song "Pentangling", they celebrate a land opened to all, for sheer enjoyment and relaxation ("flowers bright with people walking / drinking wine and eating fruit and laughing"). But all the time there's a sense that this might actually be a dream, a mirage, and about halfway through, there's an ominous change of pace and they suddenly express doubts, as though they're fully aware that there are landowners, masters of foxhounds and the like who would take this earthly paradise away from them and keep it to themselves forever ("Oh, does this river belong to everybody I know? ... to ease my body and soul / To sit and to dream by the riverbank ..."). The eternal divide between the exclusive idea of the countryside and the inclusive one was here crystallised and rendered more obvious than ever. It is a divide that never leaves us, and is certainly showing itself at the moment as the Countryside Alliance and their shadier hangers-on shout louder and louder in their attempts to drown out those of us who believe in a countryside for everyone.

Since they hitched a ride on the Thatcherite bandwagon and started busily joining in the business of global capitalism - otherwise known as the surest way to turn the countryside into one big suburb - the Countryside Alliance brigade have, like the Tory party as a whole, contradicted themselves at every turn and come to look more and more ridiculous. The hunting fraternity are the ones who buy everything from Harrod's and the other ridiculously expensive department stores while at their London
pied-a-terres - they have shown little or no interest in the farmers' market movement and its fine work over the last few years. They are the ones whose ultra-capitalism has led them to support manipulation of nature and of the land which has done untold harm (the late Tory MP Michael Colvin - a member of the Countryside Alliance and a friend of Prince Charles - was fined for polluting the water supply to a village in his Hampshire constituency. Their concern is indeed, purely for "material progress and power" - whenever those ruralists who actually want to live off the land and treat it with the respect it deserves dare to come within 10 miles of their homes, they call the police to get them off and, if they felt they could get away with it, they would shoot them off. Needless to say, the first time they kicked up a fuss about the Labour government was in 1997 when it had the temerity to restrict the ownership of these weapons. It is truly sickening to see landowners who claim to be about "preserving the
countryside" sneerily describe people with a long-term attachment to rural values, crafts and traditions as "woolly liberals", "bearded eccentrics", "brown rice hippies" or other such vaguely-defined insults, simply because they dare to have a communal, outward-looking worldview and are not held back by the old boy network and do not cry crocodile tears over supposed "freedoms" (to hunt a fox, to own a gun) while seeking to remove the freedoms of the massed working classes. The absurdity of the whole business
was exposed rather wonderfully when the thriller writer and devoted pro-hunting campaigner Frederick Forsyth wrote an article in The Times about "preserving the rural idyll" in which he had grown up in East Kent, which was then published a matter of days before the 40th anniversary of the arrival of commercial TV, and its relentlessly American-capitalist ethos, in that area.

In short, the Countryside Alliance establishment are no friends of the countryside. The small farmers, the craftsmen, the back-to-nature movements throughout history, the gypsies and some of the modern travellers - people who wouldn't touch the CA with a bargepole - have the interests of nature and its rhythms at heart. Those who endlessly tell us that these are their concerns, those who are endlessly puffed up by the media as "representatives of the countryside", are in fact the ones least fit to pontificate on the
preservation of its traditions and values. They write letters to the Telegraph from their Kensington residences, pontificating about the wellbeing of people they would never be so vulgar as to mix with when they could go up for another lunch in town with Mr Moore and Mr Johnson (contrary to popular myth, the CA mob spend much of their time in London, they just rarely go outside Kensington and Belgravia, but they would be no more likely to encounter the - gasp! - ***working-class*** people of the countryside than to encounter the same people in London). They send their children to boarding schools which think purely in terms of their own arcane traditions and their rivalries with other private schools, and take no interest in the local events where, even
today, the state schools always put up a showing. They did nothing to stop the poison that is factory farming until the evidence against it was staring them in the face, and needless to say they never campaigned against the mass closures of village schools, shops and post offices between 1979 and 1997 - they couldn't bring themselves to criticise their "own" party of government, and they couldn't really motivate themselves to care. The only schools or shops whose closures would have angered them would have been the likes of Horris Hill, Eton and Harrod's.

And when you strip all the flummery away, the basic fact of the matter is that the landowners who form the backbone of the Countryside Alliance aspire endlessly towards DVD players, high-speed internet connections, multi-channel TV and all the other cultural influences that do far more to damage the traditional countryside than New Labour ever could. The people in this country living the simple life, the timeless rural life, today (and they are still out there) are the ones who would have no connection with the CA, the quiet and unassuming people whose only aim is to make the best use
they can of their patch of countryside. They have no ambitions to promote themselves vociferously and violently in the media - they simply love the countryside, not their own voices.

Those of us who genuinely love the countryside - and I do, passionately - would be advised to fight the Countryside Alliance in their heartlands. The formal establishment of the right to roam in the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 was a great start. A hunting ban would finally prick their pathetic egos and assist in the gradual democratisation of the countryside, as it should always have been, before they got their grubby little hands on it.

Robin Carmody, Portland, Dorset, 13th September 2002
"so come all ye rolling minstrels
and together we will try
to rouse the spirit of the air
and move the rolling sky"
(Fairport Convention 1969))