Peter Mandelson: The Politics of the Countryside
Speaking at the Future Countryside event on Tuesday 6 June Lord Mandelson spoke of his passion for the countryside, recognising it as the national asset it is and reminding those at this landmark event that no party can claim to represent the country if it doesn’t represent the countryside.
“And this is a reminder that the people who live and work in the countryside, and especially the successive generations of farmers who produce food and who are the land’s principal custodians, by and large know what they are doing.”
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When over a decade ago the Spectator magazine portrayed me on their front cover as Farmer Mandelson – I had suggested in an interview with Fraser Nelson that I wanted my post-government life to be spent on a farm - I did not imagine that I would be speaking at such an inaugural Future Countryside event today.
But thank you for asking me.
You might wonder why I wanted to come.
Why when my life in the Labour Party has been devoted overwhelmingly to urban and industrial Britain.
The answer is that I care. Like so many I love the countryside. So do my dogs. I find solace, decompression and enjoyment including in my garden which – probably like many of yours – has suffered a few fatalities in the odd winter we have had.
So let me say this to you and sorry to be blunt but the countryside does not belong to the Conservative party.
The countryside doesn’t belong to any one party. It is there for all the people of Britain, not just those who live in it.
And the countryside was, is and will be a Labour cause just as much as it is anyone else’s. As Keir Starmer said to the NFU annual conference a year after he became leader “I want there to be a new relationship between the Labour Party and British farming and between Labour and rural communities”.
This history is in my DNA. My grandfather Herbert Morrison, first as Labour’s leader in London and then as Clement Attlee’s Deputy Prime Minister, brought about the creation of the green belt.
Indeed, looking back at a lifetime’s work, he said “the making of the Green Belt must be regarded as a somewhat sacred thing”. That was in 1964 in one of his last contributions to parliament and that spirit lives on today even though the green belt’s precise shape and perimeter can change.
It was the 1945 Labour government he was part of which created the National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
Indeed, my grandfather who was famously known as Mr London, notably during the blitz, loved the countryside and cared about the cause so much he published a pamphlet entitled Labour and the Countryside.
His vision was that it should be part of all our lives for health and enjoyment, for employment, and as a source of national pride.
A place to bring us together as a people.
And he was far from alone in the Labour movement.
He was part of a generation whose attitudes were shaped by a World War and the national unity it fostered and required.
A famous wartime poster by Frank Newbould depicts a charming South Downs landscape, the English Channel just visible between the hills, with the slogan “Your Britain, Fight For it Now”.
The countryside was thought to be so much part of our national identity that it could invoke patriotic fervour and the will to fight.
The countryside sheltered children from our cities, its farm labourers dug for victory, and its sons fought and fell alongside the sons of our towns and cities.
In Hugh Dalton’s first Budget speech, he eulogised the British landscape. “We have a great wealth of natural scenery”, he said. “There is a wonderful, incomparable beauty in Britain – the hills, moors, downs, woodlands”.
It is hard to imagine a Chancellor of the Exchequer saying that in a Budget speech today.
Tom Williams, Agriculture Minister in the Wartime coalition and then the post-war Labour government – and incidentally my mother’s first father in law, the family story knows no end - was a Yorkshire Miner. And yet Williams won the hearts of England’s farmers. Attlee said that “he effected nothing less than a revolution in British agriculture.”
Two generations later, I wonder what an aspiring government can learn from these giants of Labour history.
They understood that Labour’s appeal had to be to the whole country. My grandfather said: “We are a national party or we are nothing”.
Of course, they championed the working man and woman against the selfish interests of capital.
But they would never have dreamt of pitching town against village, city against countryside. That is not the divide they either saw or wanted.
It’s true that, since the Industrial Revolution and the exodus of labour from the fields to factories, there have been two worlds in our nation, with incomplete understanding between them.
The profound rural-urban links which endure in France were broken here.
The question is whether we should seek to bridge our divides or widen them further.
For a party, a national party, aspiring to government, the answer to that question should be obvious.
Even if it wasn’t an electoral necessity, failing to win rural seats would be a weakness for any government seeking to represent the country as a whole.
Just as in the 1990s the Conservative Party’s almost complete absence from our cities was rightly seen as a weakness, so Labour’s absence from rural areas in recent years has undermined our breadth and appeal.
In any case, regaining rural seats won’t be an optional extra at the next election.
And that means winning back the trust of rural people.
Because, again as Keir Starmer told the NFU, no party can claim to represent the country if it doesn’t represent the countryside.
Of course, people who live in rural constituencies have the same hopes and concerns as those who live our towns and cities.
They want well-paying jobs, an affordable home in which to live, a good local school for their children, a first rate health service that is there for them.
And in common with those who live in the towns and cities, they currently feel let down.
I see a Conservative Party which has taken rural Britain for granted.
It has assumed it can hoover up rural votes at election times but has given little coherent idea about the countryside between elections.
It has chased trade deals which let farmers down.
It is currently trying to rip up environmental standards in law.
It has no great vision of the sort we saw from that 1945 Labour government about the importance of the beauty of our finest landscapes, or about public pleasure and well-being.
If I was a voter in rural England who had backed the Tories I would be wondering who speaks for me.
And that’s what the local election results suggest.
It seems that rural voters are as ready for change as anyone.
And this is Labour’s opportunity.
Labour’s message of hope and renewal, our ambition to transform the economy and restore public services, will be as relevant for the country as it is for the town.
But our message will not be heard if rural people feel we don’t understand them, or — worse — somehow want to pick a fight with them.
Naturally politicians receive calls from pressure groups to take action. Some of these calls are right.
But governments cannot behave like single issue groups.
And if it is wrong for the Right to stoke culture wars against minorities, it is just as wrong for the Left to stoke culture wars against rural minorities.
I know that in this room there are experts on rural issues, brimming with ideas to make our countryside better.
And that’s a great thing.
But, as with so much of our public discourse, if we are not careful the narrative on the countryside can be relentlessly negative.
We hear that nature is depleted. Green spaces are threatened. Farmers are tearing up hedgerows or poisoning the soil. And so it goes on.
And in this fog of criticism it is perhaps hard for us to see an important truth.
A truth that visitors to our country perceive straight away, but we perhaps take too much for granted.
It is that our countryside remains utterly magnificent.
Not just beautiful and iconic.
But visibly far better managed, building on centuries of care.
It’s not without challenges, of course.
Those who live and work in the countryside aren’t always right, and all of us should be open to change.
But in essence the countryside — as the official adverts promoting Britain tell us — is great.
And this is a reminder that the people who live and work in the countryside, and especially the successive generations of farmers who produce food and who are the land’s principal custodians, by and large know what they are doing.
I think we need to remember this when we frame policy.
The perception that politicians who neither represent nor understand the countryside want to impose or assert control, and that we fail to listen, has I think added to a sense in rural Britain of ‘them and us’.
And this is why I welcome this event.
Because it embraces the idea of a common purpose. That what unites us in caring about the countryside is more important than what might divide us.
That everyone has a part to play in the national debate about the countryside.
That good policy solutions for food, or nature, or water, or health will best be reached by discussion and agreement, not by conflict.
The countryside is, as we have been hearing today, truly a national asset. And so it should be something whose future matters to all of us.
A point of unity, not division.
So I hope the next government will resist single issue agendas and shape an optimistic, positive and inclusive agenda for the countryside.
An agenda about better food, restoring nature, opening access to people in cities who do not think the countryside is for them.
An agenda “for” the countryside, not a plan to be inflicted “on” the countryside.
That is the spirit in which my grandfather and his generation of Labour approached the cause.
It was based on a simple understanding.
That the countryside is a national asset.
That it is held in trust by its present owners but ultimately belongs to us all.
That we all therefore have a responsibility to care for it.
And that a national government must speak for it.
Thank you.