It's healthcare and housing that rural voters care about, not foxhunting

This week Countryside Alliance CEO Tim Bonner featured in the Times Red Box to highlight the priorities for rural communities. Tim warned political parties not to confuse rural issues with the animal rights agenda.

Political parties have fallen into the same trap as they did in 2017. Using Twitter to make policies has always been a risky business, but it now appears to be normal practice.

Before the 2017 general election, we worked with the research firm ORB International and polled rural voters asking them to identify three issues that would affect their vote. Foxhunting was not a priority.

We ran the polling again in July this year and again fox hunting was not a priority. The issues that really matter in rural areas are access to hospitals and healthcare, local transport and affordable housing. Only 1 in 20 mentioned hunting as a priority.

However, political parties have been duped again by animal rights activists on Twitter. Labour re-announced their foxhunting policy for the third time and the Conservative manifesto yesterday promised "no changes to the Hunting Act".

In the autumn the government announced the microchipping of cats as post-Brexit agricultural legislation remained in limbo. The concern is not only that British agricultural takes second place behind microchipping cats in the order of government priorities, but also that political parties have now mistaken animal rights issues for environmental issues, to the detriment of rural communities and tackling genuine environmental and rural challenges.

When the Countryside Alliance with ORB attempted to unpack what people understood environmental issues to be, we found again that the rural electorate does not view hunting as an environmental priority. The priorities that matter are in fact climate change, biodegradable plastics and air pollution, and rightly so.

The truth is that for those that live and work in the countryside there are so many other issues they want political parties to address. These are not insignificant. Access to healthcare and hospitals, local transport links (to get to hospital), and affordable housing are the serious issues.

We must ask ourselves why, then, do animal rights activists wish to distract the political debate away from these really important problems and make political parties focus on something that only 1 in 20 consider to be an electoral issue?

The truth is that their obsession with hunting is to prevent political discourse from addressing the issues that matter and seek instead to disrupt how people in the countryside choose to live their lives. Why else would political parties not address the real issues in the countryside?

Last year the Fabian Society produced a report, Labour Country — How to rebuild the connection with rural voters, which specifically warned the party that it risked alienating rural voters by mistaking the animal rights agenda as policies that matter to rural people. Yet they continue to prioritise hunting.

Political parties must listen to rural communities and not be influenced by misleading polls, or worse still, out of date polling that deliberately looks to misinform people about the significance of hunting, an issue that does not determine how people vote.