Labour’s Fear of the Countryside

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DOMINIC WIGHTMAN

IT IS a curious thing, but no government in living memory has been so estranged from the British countryside as the present Labour administration. There is something in the very sight of a wheat field or a hedgerow that seems to unsettle them, as though the land itself were a rebuke to their vision of a managed, multicultural Britain. The rural districts, with their ancient rhythms and stubborn self-sufficiency, do not fit neatly into the spreadsheets of Whitehall. And so, like a man who cannot bear the silence of nature, the Labour Party prefers to keep the countryside at arm’s length – when it is not actively seeking to discipline it.

To the urban progressive, the countryside is an anachronism. It is too white, too traditional, too resistant to the grand project of demographic reshaping. The villages, with their church spires and agricultural shows, their fox-hunting relics and farmer’s markets, are an affront to the cosmopolitan ideal. There is no Uber in the sticks, no Deliveroo, no twenty-four-hour convenience. The people vote the wrong way, cling to their firearms, and harbour a quiet contempt for the politicians who lecture them on diversity while knowing nothing of the weight of a milk churn or the price of diesel.

The Labour Party does not understand these people, and worse, it does not wish to understand them. To acknowledge the countryside would be to admit that Britain is not merely a cluster of multicultural cities, but a nation still rooted, however tenuously, in its land. And so, rural Britain is treated as an inconvenient relic, to be managed, taxed, and if necessary, overridden.

Yet the countryside is not so easily ignored. Farmers, that dwindling but still formidable breed, have a power that urban politicians forget at their peril: they can stop the country in a matter of days. A few tractors parked across motorways, a blockade of milk tankers, a refusal to deliver livestock, and suddenly, the great machine of modern Britain grinds to a halt. The supermarkets empty, the lorries stack up, and the government is reminded, uncomfortably, that it does not feed itself.

This is the paradox of Labour’s neglect. They dismiss rural voters as a backward minority, yet they depend utterly on the very people they despise. The recent protests across the country were a warning: impose stupid regulations, strangle farmers with paperwork, and the land will push back.

The British state is far weaker than it pretends, and the countryside knows it.

The Starmer government is detested in rural areas – not with the hot anger of a betrayed working class, but with the cold, enduring contempt of men who have seen governments come and go like bad harvests. Every new law, every green edict, every sneering remark about ‘flyover country’ and ‘small farms not being needed’ is noted, stored away, and will one day be repaid.

And it will be repaid soon. For this government, like all governments that forget where their bread comes from, is living on borrowed time. Its large majority is fragile, its policies brittle, and its urban base fickle. The next election will likely sweep it away, and with it, the whole flimsy apparatus of its rural policy. The incoming government, with the post-Badenoch centre right united just to annihilate them, will tear up Starmer’s farming regulations, his Net Zero land grabs, his punitive taxes on rural businesses. It will do so not out of principle, but because the alternative is revolt.

Governments rise and fall, parties come to power and are flung out again, but the land remains. The Labour Party, in its metropolitan arrogance, has forgotten this. It still thinks in terms of focus groups and social engineering, of quotas and targets and grand schemes. The countryside thinks in seasons, in generations, in the slow, unyielding logic of soil and rain.

And in the end, the land always wins.

This article appeared in Country Squire on June 30, 2025, and is republished by kind permission. 

Via The Conservative Woman