If you want to deliver a political message then an ex-Prime Minister and an ex-Home Secretary are not a bad vehicle, especially when one is from the Conservative Party and another is from Labour. David Cameron and David Blunkett proved an inspired pairing as they launched our Campaign for the Countryside in Westminster on Monday (14 September).

Our Chairman, Nick Herbert, introduced the campaign to an invited audience of rural representatives with the observation that “none of us should have to be here…but we’re here because the challenges and threats to the countryside have never been so great”. No one was going to argue with that after two years in which Keir Starmer’s government has introduced no less than 27 policies that are detrimental to rural communities. The tone of the event, however, was relentlessly positive, because there is a new Prime Minister in town and all political logic is crying out for Andy Burnham to turn his back on the chaos of proposals like the Family Farm Tax and the proposed trail hunting ban, both of which David Blunkett described as “mistakes”, and to reset Labour’s relationship with rural communities. Blunkett stressed that Andy Burnham’s commitment to “family, community and place” fitted exactly with the aims of the Campaign for the Countryside.

David Cameron said that he “learned a lot of lessons as Prime Minister…one of them was never to forget the importance of rural Britain.” Describing the proposed ban on trail hunting as “completely wrong”, he urged people from across rural Britain to unite and appreciate that policies that damage one area of the countryside damage the countryside as a whole. He urged the countryside to: “Stand together, fight together and we’ll win together.”

These arguments were underlined by polling we commissioned for the event which found that just 15% of those living in rural communities thought that the Labour party cares about the people that live and work there. But the findings also pointed to a clear opportunity for the government as over a quarter (28%) of rural residents said they would be more likely to vote Labour if the party resets its relationship with those communities.

The challenge is that even the most logical arguments are useless if you cannot get them heard. Which is why the Alliance had brought together a powerful rural coalition and the most prominent cross-party political voices the countryside could muster to cut through all the competing noise and get a message onto the Prime Minister’s desk. We can be confident that we will achieve that both because of the extraordinarily diverse representation of rural stakeholders and because David Blunkett, who Andy Burnham describes as his “truest mentor”, promised us he would deliver it personally.

The Campaign for the Countryside does not stop there, however, and the next stage requires all of you to send a personal message to the Prime Minister, copied to your MP. Next the Alliance will be taking the campaign to the heart of the Labour Party at its conference in Liverpool. There could not be a more important moment for the countryside we all love and with your support we will deliver a message to every part of government and the Labour Party.