Andy Burnham refuses to listen – and Britain’s villages are about to die a painful death

Growing up, I was fortunate enough to be raised in the English countryside. Surrounded by farmers, rural businesses and more showed me first-hand the difficulties faced by these proud communities.

It also revealed to me very early in life that some elements of our political class – the clipboard-worrying Labourites – lack any care for rural England. Indeed I would go so far as to suggest they actively dislike those swathes of the country which produce our food, and to where many of us seek to escape the clutches of big cities as soon as possible.

One of my earliest ‘political memories’ was a sign, tied with a baling cord, to a tree at the entrance to the village. It was objecting to Tony Blair’s obsessive hatred of the sport of fox hunting.

Perhaps of greater interest was it had been put up by someone who had never been fox hunting, and had never wished to. Their objection was not out of love for the sport, but rather out of a dislike of a perceived ‘class war’ from a Labour Party obsessed with meddling in areas they had never cared about.

To this day, the sign is still there.

Fast forward more than 20 years, and the signs of Labour’s disinterest in rural England have never been more obvious. For decades Britain’s villages have been hollowed out: the closure of cottage hospitals, the boarding up of the village shop and post office (I could go on).

So it was no wonder to me this week when the big guns came out. At an event organised by the Countryside Alliance rural groups came together, groups from across the country, desperate to make their voices heard.

Whether it was the Family Farm Tax, or calls to ban trail hunting, or the hiking of business rates and more, rural England is finally saying – ‘enough’. In the minds of Labour politicians, rural England and those who inhabit it represent a caricature of everything they dislike.

Labour MPs cannot see past their own blinkers and observe what the countryside truly is. It is not a place of the rich and the toffs, rampaging about the green rolling hills with abandon. Rather it is a place filled with the rural working class (who Labour once professed to care about) and those who act as stewards of a shared inheritance – our natural world.

Yet these days Labour seems to have either forgotten about it, or turned it into a focus of their class-war politics and hatred for tradition, history, and self-sufficiency. For all their focus on ‘good growth in every postcode’, Labour has forgotten one in every four of them are rural.

Countryside campaigners do not want much. They simply wish to have things go back to before obsessive meddling eroded their way of life, meddling by metropolitan officials and busybodies with no understanding of the impact of their actions.

Chiefest of these examples is perhaps the call to ban trail hunting. After Tony Blair dedicated hundreds of hours to banning fox hunting, his government then ordered people to commence trail hunting instead. Now that too must be outlawed.

Try making sense of that one.

Campaigners are right to demand a rural reset – but sadly I fear this Government is too far gone. The ideology governing them, that of ruinous socialism, needs a foe to justify its pigheaded ignorance of the facts of life.

Rural England makes for a good foe. But it is time people made their voices heard. Rural communities feed the country, the landscape is our nation’s lungs and its people are custodians of it, Andy Burnham, and the rest of his socialist mob, would do well to listen.