There is a current fallacy in British politics that it is difficult to do anything, that the state does not work and that when Ministers pull the levers of power nothing happens. The reality is that during Keir Starmer’s two years as Prime Minister, the government did things, they just tended to be the wrong things. If you just look at rural issues, Ministers took clear decisions on removing agricultural property relief from inheritance tax, on aligning shotguns and section one firearms and on banning trail hunting. Their civil servants went away and started to deliver those policies. There can be no blaming government departments for bad policies developed for the wrong reasons.

Two challenges remain from Starmer’s legacy. The first is that retreating from a policy is much more difficult than initiating it. There has been a partial u-turn on inheritance tax, but we know how long that took and how much pain both farmers and ministers suffered before that inevitable decision was made. The proposal to restrict shotgun ownership is currently ‘in the long grass’ to use Westminster parlance. That means that ministers have recognised that it was a stupid policy and that our proposal for a single firearms licensing body is a far better route to addressing any issues with legal gun ownership. They cannot say that, however, so instead the proposal has been parked in the long grass where it is hoped that people will just forget about it. I am sure that some Ministers would like to do the same thing with trail hunting after the huge negative response to the proposal to ban it, but that will be more difficult given the Labour party’s bizarre obsession with hunting.

The second challenge is creating a government which does not do stupid things in the first place. Andy Burnham, the new Prime Minister has an opportunity both to reshape the government to deliver his agenda and to reset its relationship with rural Britain. Will his commitment to devolution go beyond Manchester and other major cities to the millions of people who live in the countryside?

Burnham has said that the government needs to revisit both the inheritance tax changes on family farms and increased tax and National Insurance on pubs. Rolling back these policies would be a good start, but perhaps the most telling interventions would be to halt Defra’s drift towards culture war in the countryside. Neither No 10 or Defra will be able to ignore the huge opposition to the proposed ban on trail hunting, and that will be matched by the reaction if Ministers push ahead with plans to restrict and license game shooting and the release of gamebirds. Neither of these proposals will do anything to stimulate growth in the rural economy, tackle the cost-of-living crisis or bring communities together. In fact, they would deliver the exact opposite: stagnation, job losses and division.

The countryside is not a sideshow, and a new Prime Minister needs to be as committed to rural communities as he clearly is to urban ones.