COUNTRYSIDE: That was the march that was
Guess what might just make a difference to rural Tory fortunes?
So there it was. Three weeks after the biggest demonstration in British history the Conservatives gathered in Bournemouth — and completely ignored nearly all the issues raised. 25 policy announcements and not one about the countryside. Perhaps the great minds at CCO believe the IFAW-funded MORI poll which claimed that 82% of the marchers were Conservatives and assume that this is a constituency that they can rely on. In fact, they must, as otherwise there can be no excuse for not giving David Lidington, who my spies tell me was most impressive on the fringe, a platform speech. After all Mrs Beckett had her moment at Blackpool even if she wasn't too keen to talk about agriculture. Farming is dying, the countryside is on the verge of revolt and the Tories give us a Working Country Fair — it would make you weep if it wasn't so expected. Can there be a more obvious example of CCO's obsession with abandoning the people who do vote for them in order to pander to those who won't?
One has to assume that much of this reticence about the countryside stems from the radical and progressive policies brought forward at the last election. Tim Yeo realised by the end of his tenure in agriculture that the answers to the crisis in farming did not lie in Common Agricultural Policy, reformed or otherwise — he even muttered the words re-nationalise on one famous occasion. The pledge to ban the import of food products that do not come up to our animal welfare and food safety standards was one of the most radical in the election manifesto. It would have gone a long way towards levelling the very squint playing field that British farmers are expected to play on. Being radical, purposeful and potentially popular, however, it was obviously not something that was ever mentioned in the 2001 campaign. Like that other supremely sensible policy of scrapping LEAs, and instead direct funding schools, it was buried as a 'stealth' policy — we've got it but we are not going to talk about it.
Why should agricultural policy be so controversial? After all there aren't many votes in farming. The problem, for the party that dare not mention Europe, is that the only sensible course for British agriculture is withdrawal from the policy that defines the EU, the CAP. How successive Tory governments could have continued to support a policy that distorts markets, wastes vast sums of tax payers money and destroys the environment to boot is quite beyond your correspondent, but it happened and now that the real effects of the CAP are hitting the countryside the Tory opposition does not seem to have the nerve to stand up and give it the kicking it deserves. Like the Common Fisheries Policy, CAP stands for everything that is truly dreadful about the European project and questioning it leads directly to considering what the point of the whole mad enterprise is. But by ignoring the issue and hoping that it might go away the party is denying the principles it allegedly stands for.
Whatever the boys in CCO think rural Britain does not vote Tory by default. In fact in the real countryside where communities are still based around agriculture, rather than the glorified suburbia which makes up most of the remaining Conservative constituencies, the peasants have already shown a willingness to look elsewhere. In Devon, Cornwall, Somerset, Northumberland, Shropshire, Herefordshire and Norfolk the Lib Dems have made serious inroads in seats that should be solidly Conservative and, while the relentlessly urban nature of the Tory front bench certainly hasn't helped, the real killer has been our old friend and continuing obsession: candidate selection.
Lib-Dem candidates in rural seats come in two guises. Either they are more Tory than the Tories — think John Burnett, Malcolm Bruce or Paul Tyler — or they are very, very nice — Andrew George, Nick Harvey or Adrian Sanders — but most of all they are very local, mostly by upbringing, but at the very least by political priority. At the last two elections the Conservatives have sent out hoards of bankers, barristers and assorted other London types to do battle in the key rural marginals against Lib Dems and with very few exceptions they have returned to town bloodied and bowed. Many of the Tory candidates were fine upstanding individuals worthy of the support of ERO readers but however impressive their views on the great political questions of the day, they were cut down by Lib Dem obsessives with an intimate knowledge of their constituencies and an instinctive feel on which way the wind is blowing on every local issue. Some more sensible Tory MPs were well aware of the problem prior to the last round of selections and there was even an embryonic move towards regional candidates’ lists which was cut down before it could develop.
While CCO consistently lays the blame for the party’s dismal selection of candidates with associations it is clear that just as most women who were on the list were selected so most candidates from the regions were also picked to fight a seat in their area. In fact your correspondent knows of at least two who were sent away from Parliamentary Selection Boards with the words ‘you will never be a candidate’ ringing in their ears yet managed to get selected by approaching constituency associations directly and fought creditable campaigns. If our new Chairman really wants to know why our candidate selection failed so badly she should be asking why, when there were vacancies in all five Cornish constituencies before the last election, there was not a single Cornishman on the list and why every one of the candidates in Devon lived and worked in London.
On the fringes of our country there are still a few seats, many of them marginal, where many voters put their cross by a person rather than a party and individual candidates can buck the national voting trend. What these rural seats need are not female candidates, gay candidates or candidates from ethnic minorities, but suitable candidates whatever shape they come in. The best way of getting them is offering associations a real choice, not one made up of CCO clones. This should include giving associations encouragement to go out and ask prominent or potentially interesting people in the constituency whether they would consider applying. After all the biggest electoral handicap that most candidates have is that they want to be politicians.
Amongst the most shocking experiences your correspondent has ever had was exposure to Tory candidates en masse. It was absolutely clear that every single one considered that their route to 10 Downing Street was pre-ordained and there was not a Tory squire or even a stolid yeoman to be seen. No-one whose ambition stopped at looking after their own little piece of England and warming the backbenches with ample buttocks for a couple of decades. The advantage of being a Lib Dem is that ambition is essentially pointless once you have reached the house: what we need are people with similarly limited horizons. The real problem the Conservatives have is not too many white men, or too many public school types, but too many politicians.
Oscar, an ex-farmer, writes The Last Ditch, ERO’s rural affairs column
The Last Ditch, October 13, 2002 10:32 AM