All our political parties lack rural focus

WITH the party conferences over, parliament back in business and a potentially scary budget just over the horizon, voters who live and work in the countryside will be casting around for a political party they can look to for support.

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Among the current crop of parties, however, they will look in vain.

It is remarkable to note that, despite around nine million people living in rural Britain, UK farmers producing well over half of the food we consume and a wide range of rural workers caring for the landscape, the vast majority of our politicians lack any kind of rural focus.

For decades it was the Tory squires, representing rural constituencies up and down the country, who would have rightly seen themselves as defenders of the rural way of life. In more recent years it was the Liberal Democrats, here in the South West at least, who could make a claim to have their fingers on the pulse of country life, holding seats in Devon and Cornwall partly through a clear understanding of rural issues.

Even a handful of Labour MPs, in the heady early days of Tony Blair's Government when the party won a significant number of rural constituencies, began to show an interest in rural issues, although they blotted their copybooks with ill-advised forays into country sports, most notably the hunting ban.