On the surface the Labour Party conference in Liverpool was nearly a countryside-free zone. The Prime Minister did not mention the countryside, rural communities, farming, nature or the environment in his main speech. Even the Defra Secretary did not get far beyond water, farming, resilience and climate change. In an address to the Labour Animal Welfare Society, Defra Minister Baroness Hayman mentioned the trail hunting consultation and game shooting evidence review in passing but was much more focussed on the delivery of less controversial policies from the Animal Welfare Strategy.
Outside the main conference, animal rights groups held a sparsely attended fringe meeting to discuss amending the Hunting Act. Inside the Alliance held a Campaign for the Countryside reception which a record number of rural Labour MPs attended, three of whom spoke in support of our call for a rural reset. Subsequently another, Markus Campbell-Savours, has backed a reset, saying: “As a starter for ten, the Government must deliver on its farm profitability plans, reconsider the fertiliser tax but also deliver one final U-turn and scrap its plans to abolish agricultural property relief”.
If you heard anything from Liverpool, however, it was probably a rather bizarre comment about a far-right vision of the countryside involving pubs, warm beer and black Labradors, which never really existed. This, from a Defra Minister, elicited many headlines and endless Labrador memes. In fact, it has been impossible to navigate social media over the last few days without tripping over legions of black Labradors in pubs and by the looks of it there has been a welcome uptick in beer sales.
I heard the Minister, Jenny Riddle-Carpenter, make a version of this claim and winced at the time. Taking on pubs, beer and Labradors in one clumsy swipe was never going to end well. While she expressed it very badly I do, however, think she was trying to make a valid point which should not necessarily be lost, particularly given her track record of working for rural communities. Earlier this year the Alliance published a report on rural poverty with the Labour Rural Research Group. One of the key messages was the challenge of hidden poverty in the countryside and that a superficial image of rural life can hide serious societal problems.
Where I disagree with the Minister is that this is somehow a problem of the “far-right”. The reality is that many on the left have deeply ingrained assumptions about rural communities, wealth and privilege which have dogged rural politics for years. You do not have to go far to the left to hear extraordinarily ignorant and insulting comments like ‘you never see a poor farmer’ and perhaps the apogee of left-wing assumptions about rural life was the Hunting Act. Seven hundred hours of parliamentary time wasted and a prejudicial piece of legislation on the statute book for what Labour MPs openly admitted was a class war against a stereotype of the rural community which never actually existed. Perhaps the real lesson of ‘Labradorgate’ is that self-awareness is a vital political skill whether you are on the left or the right.