Hunting is not the issue

Author wrote:
House prices are too high, farm earnings are falling, bus links are poor and tourism is wilting. Ed Douglas warns that an obsession with fox-hunting obscures the real struggle
Sunday September 15, 2002
The Observer
Derbyshire's Derwent Valley, at the heart of the Peak District, is basking in late summer sunshine, its pretty villages suffused with a sense of calm prosperity. Games of cricket are being played, old men sit outside pubs supping pints. It seems idyllic and peaceful but there is conflict here, and growing discontent.
In fields and outside farms throughout the valley, large white banners proclaim the Countryside Alliance's campaign for 'Liberty and Livelihood'. Julie Webb has seen them everywhere. A single mother, she lives in one of the few council houses left in this corner of the Peak District with her son.
She doesn't know much about the Alliance, although she doesn't agree with hunting. She won't be among the tens of thousands marching through London next weekend. But Julie's story is just as much a reflection of what's happening in the countryside, especially to those living on low incomes. It's also a story of how Labour has failed to reach what should be a core constituency in rural communities. And it has absolutely nothing to do with foxes.
Julie grew up on a council estate in Moston in north Manchester, experiencing the worst of what urban deprivation has to offer. Despite this, she went to Leeds University and later did a teacher training course in Sheffield. She even bought her own home, in Moston, before watching its value collapse.
When she got pregnant she was determined not to let her child cope with the same problems. 'No way was I letting him deal with all that,' she says. 'I wanted him to grow up in the countryside.'
Julie and her partner moved into a two-bedroom flat in a converted cottage close to where she lives now. 'It was expensive for what it was,' she says. The landlord had been trying to sell for years but, as Julie explains: 'Those who could afford to buy it wouldn't want it.' The asking price was £110,000, in a village where houses regularly sell for half a million.
When she and her partner separated, Julie discovered what it was like living in the countryside without a car. Because there was no shop in the village, she would catch the bus into Sheffield and stock up on five or six weeks' shopping, relying on friends to bring her home. There were two bus companies passing through the village, thanks to deregulation, but they would leave within a few minutes of each other, every two hours, and Julie found the £3 return fare expensive.
For fresh food, Julie would walk to the nearest village shop two miles away, pushing the pram. She went to the same village for the nearest toddler's group as well, as much to get away from the isolation of being a single mother in the countryside with no means of transport. This went on for six months, over a winter, while Julie learnt to drive and scraped enough money together to buy a car. 'It might explain,' she says with a laugh, 'why I'm so skinny.'
She and her partner had applied for a council house. 'I think growing up on a council estate helped,' she says. 'I understood the system.' Six months ago a cottage became available in a nearby village. Julie's rent has dropped to £32 and she is in the process of setting up her own design business. Her son is already down for the primary school at the bottom of the lane.
Julie is an exceptional woman dealing with unexceptional circumstances – because the crucial issue obsessing rural policy-makers, and one that the Countryside Alliance has barely addressed, is housing. The biggest threat to rural culture, whatever that may be, is not from any reduction or ban of hunting with dogs but the gradual erosion of communities who can no longer afford to live in their own villages.
On the basis of income alone, the countryside is not that badly off, with a smaller percentage of households on low incomes compared to urban communities. Unemployment is substantially lower too. But the statistics on affordable housing tell the real story of why the countryside is changing so fast.
The Countryside Agency reports that, in all eight regions of England, rural areas are worse off for affordable housing than urban areas. Almost 60 per cent of the rural population spend more than 50 per cent of their household income on their mortgage, compared to just over 30 percent of the urban population.
In a nutshell, those on low incomes can barely afford to live in the countryside and, if house prices continue to rise faster than wages, rural communities will become exclusively middle class as they already have become in more beautiful or wealthier parts of the country.
Nor was it the Labour Party which created this social change. The Conservative right-to-buy policy emptied rural social housing stocks of almost 100,000 homes while only 20,000 were built in the Nineties against a background of rising demand. The buzz phrase now is 'social diversity' and the Countryside Agency is calling for 10,000 new affordable homes a year for the next decade. It welcomed the idea that council tax relief on second homes be ended.
The problem is dramatically illustrated in the Lake District, perennially popular for second-homers from the cities, where local farmers, surviving on average incomes reduced to £5,000, have watched house prices rocket. If the Countryside Alliance has ignited rural discontent, then the swamping of local communities by economics beyond their control provided the fuel.
Eric Robson, known to millions as the presenter of Radio 4's Gardeners' Question Time, has just been appointed chairman of the Cumbria Tourist Board, an industry still picking itself off the floor after foot and mouth. More than 40 per cent of cases occurred in Cumbria and large swaths of the region lost all their animals.
Robson recalls how US President Woodrow Wilson preferred holidays in the Lake District to the wilderness of America's national parks because of the link between landscape and the people who lived on it. Now, Robson says, that is disappearing as hill-farming communities splinter in the face of spiralling house prices.
'This way of life has never been more under threat,' he says. 'The average age of farm tenants here is now 58; on National Trust properties it's 62. Sons are simply not taking over from their fathers. And why would they want to, for so little money? I'm an optimist and thought that foot and mouth would at least bring the changes that are needed. So far I've been disappointed.'
The Lake District tourism industry, despite the setbacks of foot and mouth, remains 10 times the size of agriculture and there was resentment among tourism workers that compensation for lost business arrived, if at all, much more slowly than that for farmers did.
Robson, however, is adamant that neither industry can survive without the other. He argues that important landscapes need to be paid for: 'With farming, the public sees good money going after bad and doesn't like it. And yet hill farming is subsidising the conservation of landscape. That kind of work deserves investment, in the same way that the Government supports new industries.'
As it is, farmers are starting to walk off the land. Robson says that one landowner told him recently that they would have to pay someone to take a farm tenancy, the first time this has happened since the agricultural slump of the Twenties and Thirties. New schemes ask tourists to make a voluntary contribution to the upkeep of the landscape they come to enjoy.
Agriculture has had a spectacularly bad decade. Its contribution to the national economy has halved to less than 1 per cent of GDP and yet the taxpayer is subsidising the industry to the tune of £3 billion. Cattle farmers have watched a £600 million export business destroyed by BSE.
There is also intense fury at the mishandling of foot and mouth, despite compensation and the fact that the crisis may have cost urban tourism as much as £1 billion. Hunting may be the reason that the directors and wealthy backers of the Countryside Alliance are generating so much heat, but it does not explain the frustration among ordinary members and supporters. There is a deep-rooted feeling that Labour is a metropolitan party with no understanding of the countryside.
'There is a growing anger about the situation,' says Ewen Cameron, Chair of the Countryside Agency. 'There's a sense in the countryside that everything is going wrong.' But Cameron – a former Chairman of the Country Landowners Association – says the impression is unfair.
'The countryside is being treated fairly in terms of funds, reform, the Government's White Paper and so on,' he says. 'Labour has understood its weaknesses and tried to overcome them. Tony Blair has worked harder on these issues more than any other Prime Minister I've worked with. It's simply that people in the country don't like to feel they're being dictated to.'
Cameron believes that the way forward for agriculture is for the public to get more value for money from the subsidies they support. Payments for farmland environmental improvements have doubled in the past five years to £240.3m, a welcome boost to farmland biodiversity devastated by modern farming practices. The Countryside Alliance may demand liberty to hunt, but it is opposed to new legislation giving greater access to the countryside, something tax-payers may not value so highly.
Not for the first time, Labour blames the media for being obsessed with the hunting issue and allowing the Countryside Alliance to dominate the agenda. Alun Michael, the Rural Affairs Minister, has tried to change the mood music by insisting that hunting is not the real issue.
Peter Bradley, MP for Wrekin and Michael's Parliamentary Private Secretary, told The Observer: 'For a small minority, hunting is hugely important, but for most people the real issues are housing, transport and services. Why should people in the country be any less concerned about education or healthcare?'
The Burns Report estimated that only a maximum of 8,000 jobs were involved in hunting with dogs, so in that sense Labour is right. But the perception that the party is obsessed with hunting is starting to frustrate the public. A Mori poll last week showed 73 per cent believed the Government has spent too much time on the issue. Last week's announcement of imminent legislation and a possible compromise suggests Ministers want the issue buried as quickly as possible.
'The whole thing is completely out of proportion,' says Malcolm Bruce, Liberal Democrat spokesman on rural affairs. 'Both sides are wrong to go so hard on this. Agriculture is in crisis because of the exchange rate of the pound against the euro, not because of hunting. There's a growing perception that the Government doesn't understand the nature and complexity of the rural economy.'
But while many in urban areas assume the Conservatives are the automatic choice for rural communities, Labour has most to lose in the countryside if the perception that it is out of touch persists. The party has more MPs in rural or semi-rural seats than the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats put together, more than 40 per cent of the parliamentary party, with more than 100 MPs sitting in Labour's Rural Group.
Still, it is hardly surprising that the media have caught a whiff of old-fashioned class warfare in the hunting debate, with Camilla Parker Bowles going in to bat for the toffs. Labour MPs whose constituencies were devastated by redundancies in the Eighties will not be shedding too many tears at the sight of enraged Tory grandees fighting to save their country pursuits.
For Julie Webb it won't make the slightest difference. She is more interested in housing and local services. 'I'm a Labour voter,' she says, 'although it's not the party I grew up with. What worries me is that there's no real opposition.'
        

Author wrote:
House prices are too high, farm earnings are falling, bus links are poor and tourism is wilting. Ed Douglas warns that an obsession with fox-hunting obscures the real struggle
Sunday September 15, 2002
The Observer
Derbyshire's Derwent Valley, at the heart of the Peak District, is basking in late summer sunshine, its pretty villages suffused with a sense of calm prosperity. Games of cricket are being played, old men sit outside pubs supping pints. It seems idyllic and peaceful but there is conflict here, and growing discontent.
In fields and outside farms throughout the valley, large white banners proclaim the Countryside Alliance's campaign for 'Liberty and Livelihood'. Julie Webb has seen them everywhere. A single mother, she lives in one of the few council houses left in this corner of the Peak District with her son.
She doesn't know much about the Alliance, although she doesn't agree with hunting. She won't be among the tens of thousands marching through London next weekend. But Julie's story is just as much a reflection of what's happening in the countryside, especially to those living on low incomes. It's also a story of how Labour has failed to reach what should be a core constituency in rural communities. And it has absolutely nothing to do with foxes.
Julie grew up on a council estate in Moston in north Manchester, experiencing the worst of what urban deprivation has to offer. Despite this, she went to Leeds University and later did a teacher training course in Sheffield. She even bought her own home, in Moston, before watching its value collapse.
When she got pregnant she was determined not to let her child cope with the same problems. 'No way was I letting him deal with all that,' she says. 'I wanted him to grow up in the countryside.'
Julie and her partner moved into a two-bedroom flat in a converted cottage close to where she lives now. 'It was expensive for what it was,' she says. The landlord had been trying to sell for years but, as Julie explains: 'Those who could afford to buy it wouldn't want it.' The asking price was £110,000, in a village where houses regularly sell for half a million.
When she and her partner separated, Julie discovered what it was like living in the countryside without a car. Because there was no shop in the village, she would catch the bus into Sheffield and stock up on five or six weeks' shopping, relying on friends to bring her home. There were two bus companies passing through the village, thanks to deregulation, but they would leave within a few minutes of each other, every two hours, and Julie found the £3 return fare expensive.
For fresh food, Julie would walk to the nearest village shop two miles away, pushing the pram. She went to the same village for the nearest toddler's group as well, as much to get away from the isolation of being a single mother in the countryside with no means of transport. This went on for six months, over a winter, while Julie learnt to drive and scraped enough money together to buy a car. 'It might explain,' she says with a laugh, 'why I'm so skinny.'
She and her partner had applied for a council house. 'I think growing up on a council estate helped,' she says. 'I understood the system.' Six months ago a cottage became available in a nearby village. Julie's rent has dropped to £32 and she is in the process of setting up her own design business. Her son is already down for the primary school at the bottom of the lane.
Julie is an exceptional woman dealing with unexceptional circumstances – because the crucial issue obsessing rural policy-makers, and one that the Countryside Alliance has barely addressed, is housing. The biggest threat to rural culture, whatever that may be, is not from any reduction or ban of hunting with dogs but the gradual erosion of communities who can no longer afford to live in their own villages.
On the basis of income alone, the countryside is not that badly off, with a smaller percentage of households on low incomes compared to urban communities. Unemployment is substantially lower too. But the statistics on affordable housing tell the real story of why the countryside is changing so fast.
The Countryside Agency reports that, in all eight regions of England, rural areas are worse off for affordable housing than urban areas. Almost 60 per cent of the rural population spend more than 50 per cent of their household income on their mortgage, compared to just over 30 percent of the urban population.
In a nutshell, those on low incomes can barely afford to live in the countryside and, if house prices continue to rise faster than wages, rural communities will become exclusively middle class as they already have become in more beautiful or wealthier parts of the country.
Nor was it the Labour Party which created this social change. The Conservative right-to-buy policy emptied rural social housing stocks of almost 100,000 homes while only 20,000 were built in the Nineties against a background of rising demand. The buzz phrase now is 'social diversity' and the Countryside Agency is calling for 10,000 new affordable homes a year for the next decade. It welcomed the idea that council tax relief on second homes be ended.
The problem is dramatically illustrated in the Lake District, perennially popular for second-homers from the cities, where local farmers, surviving on average incomes reduced to £5,000, have watched house prices rocket. If the Countryside Alliance has ignited rural discontent, then the swamping of local communities by economics beyond their control provided the fuel.
Eric Robson, known to millions as the presenter of Radio 4's Gardeners' Question Time, has just been appointed chairman of the Cumbria Tourist Board, an industry still picking itself off the floor after foot and mouth. More than 40 per cent of cases occurred in Cumbria and large swaths of the region lost all their animals.
Robson recalls how US President Woodrow Wilson preferred holidays in the Lake District to the wilderness of America's national parks because of the link between landscape and the people who lived on it. Now, Robson says, that is disappearing as hill-farming communities splinter in the face of spiralling house prices.
'This way of life has never been more under threat,' he says. 'The average age of farm tenants here is now 58; on National Trust properties it's 62. Sons are simply not taking over from their fathers. And why would they want to, for so little money? I'm an optimist and thought that foot and mouth would at least bring the changes that are needed. So far I've been disappointed.'
The Lake District tourism industry, despite the setbacks of foot and mouth, remains 10 times the size of agriculture and there was resentment among tourism workers that compensation for lost business arrived, if at all, much more slowly than that for farmers did.
Robson, however, is adamant that neither industry can survive without the other. He argues that important landscapes need to be paid for: 'With farming, the public sees good money going after bad and doesn't like it. And yet hill farming is subsidising the conservation of landscape. That kind of work deserves investment, in the same way that the Government supports new industries.'
As it is, farmers are starting to walk off the land. Robson says that one landowner told him recently that they would have to pay someone to take a farm tenancy, the first time this has happened since the agricultural slump of the Twenties and Thirties. New schemes ask tourists to make a voluntary contribution to the upkeep of the landscape they come to enjoy.
Agriculture has had a spectacularly bad decade. Its contribution to the national economy has halved to less than 1 per cent of GDP and yet the taxpayer is subsidising the industry to the tune of £3 billion. Cattle farmers have watched a £600 million export business destroyed by BSE.
There is also intense fury at the mishandling of foot and mouth, despite compensation and the fact that the crisis may have cost urban tourism as much as £1 billion. Hunting may be the reason that the directors and wealthy backers of the Countryside Alliance are generating so much heat, but it does not explain the frustration among ordinary members and supporters. There is a deep-rooted feeling that Labour is a metropolitan party with no understanding of the countryside.
'There is a growing anger about the situation,' says Ewen Cameron, Chair of the Countryside Agency. 'There's a sense in the countryside that everything is going wrong.' But Cameron – a former Chairman of the Country Landowners Association – says the impression is unfair.
'The countryside is being treated fairly in terms of funds, reform, the Government's White Paper and so on,' he says. 'Labour has understood its weaknesses and tried to overcome them. Tony Blair has worked harder on these issues more than any other Prime Minister I've worked with. It's simply that people in the country don't like to feel they're being dictated to.'
Cameron believes that the way forward for agriculture is for the public to get more value for money from the subsidies they support. Payments for farmland environmental improvements have doubled in the past five years to £240.3m, a welcome boost to farmland biodiversity devastated by modern farming practices. The Countryside Alliance may demand liberty to hunt, but it is opposed to new legislation giving greater access to the countryside, something tax-payers may not value so highly.
Not for the first time, Labour blames the media for being obsessed with the hunting issue and allowing the Countryside Alliance to dominate the agenda. Alun Michael, the Rural Affairs Minister, has tried to change the mood music by insisting that hunting is not the real issue.
Peter Bradley, MP for Wrekin and Michael's Parliamentary Private Secretary, told The Observer: 'For a small minority, hunting is hugely important, but for most people the real issues are housing, transport and services. Why should people in the country be any less concerned about education or healthcare?'
The Burns Report estimated that only a maximum of 8,000 jobs were involved in hunting with dogs, so in that sense Labour is right. But the perception that the party is obsessed with hunting is starting to frustrate the public. A Mori poll last week showed 73 per cent believed the Government has spent too much time on the issue. Last week's announcement of imminent legislation and a possible compromise suggests Ministers want the issue buried as quickly as possible.
'The whole thing is completely out of proportion,' says Malcolm Bruce, Liberal Democrat spokesman on rural affairs. 'Both sides are wrong to go so hard on this. Agriculture is in crisis because of the exchange rate of the pound against the euro, not because of hunting. There's a growing perception that the Government doesn't understand the nature and complexity of the rural economy.'
But while many in urban areas assume the Conservatives are the automatic choice for rural communities, Labour has most to lose in the countryside if the perception that it is out of touch persists. The party has more MPs in rural or semi-rural seats than the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats put together, more than 40 per cent of the parliamentary party, with more than 100 MPs sitting in Labour's Rural Group.
Still, it is hardly surprising that the media have caught a whiff of old-fashioned class warfare in the hunting debate, with Camilla Parker Bowles going in to bat for the toffs. Labour MPs whose constituencies were devastated by redundancies in the Eighties will not be shedding too many tears at the sight of enraged Tory grandees fighting to save their country pursuits.
For Julie Webb it won't make the slightest difference. She is more interested in housing and local services. 'I'm a Labour voter,' she says, 'although it's not the party I grew up with. What worries me is that there's no real opposition.'
        

Author wrote:
Dear Burkie,
You could be right but I have given this a lot of thought and there is
another explanation. Ignorance, just plain stupid, dumb, ignorance.
These people are arrogant bureaucrats who have become so immersed in their
own bullshit they have totally lost touch with reality. They go to endless
meetings, seminars, conferences, anything at all but do the job they are
supposed to do.
I may be wrong but I don't think they have got the intelligence to organise a
conspiracy.
Have a nice day,
Bill.

Dear Bill: I certainly appreciate your reply...but you've said yourself that things just didn't seem to add up. Science was tossed. Good sense was thrown away. We knew vaccination was being used in foreign countries....successfully, unaware that the "rules" would be "bent" by Brussels within months of second applications of vaccines....so as to re-initiate imports of beef and pork from South America. Now the British livestock producer is literally becoming a dinosaur...and the government (Labour) admits they don't even know how it all occurred.
If you believe that....especially , after the last two weeks we 've learned there were as many as 160 Australian vets and support lab people, playing their games...then you need to go to the pub and get royally drunk. I would be glad to help you bend your elbow.
Last year, we all didn't know very much about FMD...but, little by little, with contibutions from everyone, just like yourself...we began learning. And darn it, the Truth does hurt.
Jane and Sue were two that got this whole deal started......it's called "awareness." They are both True Blue Troopers.
It's only taken 18 months for you to come out and tell us all about the antibodies and tests. Well, Sir, I don't know you..and have absolutely nothing against you......but your Government (Labour) was offerred test equipment to use by my government that can damn near test anything. Your government refused to use it. In all your Labour government's wisdom, they refused to use the most modern technology available.....and continued to harass and destroy a whole population of livestock for what reason?
One thing.....change the complex of living in Rural England.
I don't think they wanted to ever stop it.
But...on Sept. 28th last year, it was suddenly "over."
Oh, yeah, a virus just "Stops"
The True story hasn't surfaced yet.
BUT....
Mr. Blair and his henchman got part of the job done.
They got interrupted when the EU said it wouldn't pay anymore.
So don't give me this crap about "antibodies" and all the science. There was no science ever used in your outbreak.
The science was available and was also forewarned by your own "experts" at Pirbright, England. Your government never used a damn tool in their toolbox. And that's a FACT.
Burkie in Kansas

Author wrote:
Dear Burkie,
You could be right but I have given this a lot of thought and there is
another explanation. Ignorance, just plain stupid, dumb, ignorance.
These people are arrogant bureaucrats who have become so immersed in their
own bullshit they have totally lost touch with reality. They go to endless
meetings, seminars, conferences, anything at all but do the job they are
supposed to do.
I may be wrong but I don't think they have got the intelligence to organise a
conspiracy.
Have a nice day,
Bill.

Author wrote:
Dear Jane: Exactly the same situation as here in the States!
When a farmer can't generate enough income to keep up with his expenses and increasingly raised property taxes....it results in sales of the farms. The farms were "hacked up" into smaller and smaller tracts. As that's been done....land and housing prices rose even more. And then came demands for Public Works Services....burdenting the utilities companies with expense and little hope of recovering those expense, other than by increased cash flows, over time. The "rural" community was destroyed, people commute many miles to their jobs....and it's been a literal "wreck." Of course, as the populations of urbanites in rural areas increased, so came complaints of animal smells...pollution....bad ground water....contaminated streams....ad infinitum....ad nauseatum. But the countryside, for many fringe agricultural areas, will be forever changed....and with that change, will ultimately be lost the heritage, beauty, and naturalness of our rural country-sides.
Bottom line....costs of living were increased for everyone as a result of these more or less "unplanned" developments.
And as for farming livestock, in those areas, that day has gone by.
All the Best,
Burkie in Kansas

---

Author wrote:
House prices are too high, farm earnings are falling, bus links are poor and tourism is wilting. Ed Douglas warns that an obsession with fox-hunting obscures the real struggle
Sunday September 15, 2002
The Observer
Derbyshire's Derwent Valley, at the heart of the Peak District, is basking in late summer sunshine, its pretty villages suffused with a sense of calm prosperity. Games of cricket are being played, old men sit outside pubs supping pints. It seems idyllic and peaceful but there is conflict here, and growing discontent.
In fields and outside farms throughout the valley, large white banners proclaim the Countryside Alliance's campaign for 'Liberty and Livelihood'. Julie Webb has seen them everywhere. A single mother, she lives in one of the few council houses left in this corner of the Peak District with her son.
She doesn't know much about the Alliance, although she doesn't agree with hunting. She won't be among the tens of thousands marching through London next weekend. But Julie's story is just as much a reflection of what's happening in the countryside, especially to those living on low incomes. It's also a story of how Labour has failed to reach what should be a core constituency in rural communities. And it has absolutely nothing to do with foxes.
Julie grew up on a council estate in Moston in north Manchester, experiencing the worst of what urban deprivation has to offer. Despite this, she went to Leeds University and later did a teacher training course in Sheffield. She even bought her own home, in Moston, before watching its value collapse.
When she got pregnant she was determined not to let her child cope with the same problems. 'No way was I letting him deal with all that,' she says. 'I wanted him to grow up in the countryside.'
Julie and her partner moved into a two-bedroom flat in a converted cottage close to where she lives now. 'It was expensive for what it was,' she says. The landlord had been trying to sell for years but, as Julie explains: 'Those who could afford to buy it wouldn't want it.' The asking price was £110,000, in a village where houses regularly sell for half a million.
When she and her partner separated, Julie discovered what it was like living in the countryside without a car. Because there was no shop in the village, she would catch the bus into Sheffield and stock up on five or six weeks' shopping, relying on friends to bring her home. There were two bus companies passing through the village, thanks to deregulation, but they would leave within a few minutes of each other, every two hours, and Julie found the £3 return fare expensive.
For fresh food, Julie would walk to the nearest village shop two miles away, pushing the pram. She went to the same village for the nearest toddler's group as well, as much to get away from the isolation of being a single mother in the countryside with no means of transport. This went on for six months, over a winter, while Julie learnt to drive and scraped enough money together to buy a car. 'It might explain,' she says with a laugh, 'why I'm so skinny.'
She and her partner had applied for a council house. 'I think growing up on a council estate helped,' she says. 'I understood the system.' Six months ago a cottage became available in a nearby village. Julie's rent has dropped to £32 and she is in the process of setting up her own design business. Her son is already down for the primary school at the bottom of the lane.
Julie is an exceptional woman dealing with unexceptional circumstances – because the crucial issue obsessing rural policy-makers, and one that the Countryside Alliance has barely addressed, is housing. The biggest threat to rural culture, whatever that may be, is not from any reduction or ban of hunting with dogs but the gradual erosion of communities who can no longer afford to live in their own villages.
On the basis of income alone, the countryside is not that badly off, with a smaller percentage of households on low incomes compared to urban communities. Unemployment is substantially lower too. But the statistics on affordable housing tell the real story of why the countryside is changing so fast.
The Countryside Agency reports that, in all eight regions of England, rural areas are worse off for affordable housing than urban areas. Almost 60 per cent of the rural population spend more than 50 per cent of their household income on their mortgage, compared to just over 30 percent of the urban population.
In a nutshell, those on low incomes can barely afford to live in the countryside and, if house prices continue to rise faster than wages, rural communities will become exclusively middle class as they already have become in more beautiful or wealthier parts of the country.
Nor was it the Labour Party which created this social change. The Conservative right-to-buy policy emptied rural social housing stocks of almost 100,000 homes while only 20,000 were built in the Nineties against a background of rising demand. The buzz phrase now is 'social diversity' and the Countryside Agency is calling for 10,000 new affordable homes a year for the next decade. It welcomed the idea that council tax relief on second homes be ended.
The problem is dramatically illustrated in the Lake District, perennially popular for second-homers from the cities, where local farmers, surviving on average incomes reduced to £5,000, have watched house prices rocket. If the Countryside Alliance has ignited rural discontent, then the swamping of local communities by economics beyond their control provided the fuel.
Eric Robson, known to millions as the presenter of Radio 4's Gardeners' Question Time, has just been appointed chairman of the Cumbria Tourist Board, an industry still picking itself off the floor after foot and mouth. More than 40 per cent of cases occurred in Cumbria and large swaths of the region lost all their animals.
Robson recalls how US President Woodrow Wilson preferred holidays in the Lake District to the wilderness of America's national parks because of the link between landscape and the people who lived on it. Now, Robson says, that is disappearing as hill-farming communities splinter in the face of spiralling house prices.
'This way of life has never been more under threat,' he says. 'The average age of farm tenants here is now 58; on National Trust properties it's 62. Sons are simply not taking over from their fathers. And why would they want to, for so little money? I'm an optimist and thought that foot and mouth would at least bring the changes that are needed. So far I've been disappointed.'
The Lake District tourism industry, despite the setbacks of foot and mouth, remains 10 times the size of agriculture and there was resentment among tourism workers that compensation for lost business arrived, if at all, much more slowly than that for farmers did.
Robson, however, is adamant that neither industry can survive without the other. He argues that important landscapes need to be paid for: 'With farming, the public sees good money going after bad and doesn't like it. And yet hill farming is subsidising the conservation of landscape. That kind of work deserves investment, in the same way that the Government supports new industries.'
As it is, farmers are starting to walk off the land. Robson says that one landowner told him recently that they would have to pay someone to take a farm tenancy, the first time this has happened since the agricultural slump of the Twenties and Thirties. New schemes ask tourists to make a voluntary contribution to the upkeep of the landscape they come to enjoy.
Agriculture has had a spectacularly bad decade. Its contribution to the national economy has halved to less than 1 per cent of GDP and yet the taxpayer is subsidising the industry to the tune of £3 billion. Cattle farmers have watched a £600 million export business destroyed by BSE.
There is also intense fury at the mishandling of foot and mouth, despite compensation and the fact that the crisis may have cost urban tourism as much as £1 billion. Hunting may be the reason that the directors and wealthy backers of the Countryside Alliance are generating so much heat, but it does not explain the frustration among ordinary members and supporters. There is a deep-rooted feeling that Labour is a metropolitan party with no understanding of the countryside.
'There is a growing anger about the situation,' says Ewen Cameron, Chair of the Countryside Agency. 'There's a sense in the countryside that everything is going wrong.' But Cameron – a former Chairman of the Country Landowners Association – says the impression is unfair.
'The countryside is being treated fairly in terms of funds, reform, the Government's White Paper and so on,' he says. 'Labour has understood its weaknesses and tried to overcome them. Tony Blair has worked harder on these issues more than any other Prime Minister I've worked with. It's simply that people in the country don't like to feel they're being dictated to.'
Cameron believes that the way forward for agriculture is for the public to get more value for money from the subsidies they support. Payments for farmland environmental improvements have doubled in the past five years to £240.3m, a welcome boost to farmland biodiversity devastated by modern farming practices. The Countryside Alliance may demand liberty to hunt, but it is opposed to new legislation giving greater access to the countryside, something tax-payers may not value so highly.
Not for the first time, Labour blames the media for being obsessed with the hunting issue and allowing the Countryside Alliance to dominate the agenda. Alun Michael, the Rural Affairs Minister, has tried to change the mood music by insisting that hunting is not the real issue.
Peter Bradley, MP for Wrekin and Michael's Parliamentary Private Secretary, told The Observer: 'For a small minority, hunting is hugely important, but for most people the real issues are housing, transport and services. Why should people in the country be any less concerned about education or healthcare?'
The Burns Report estimated that only a maximum of 8,000 jobs were involved in hunting with dogs, so in that sense Labour is right. But the perception that the party is obsessed with hunting is starting to frustrate the public. A Mori poll last week showed 73 per cent believed the Government has spent too much time on the issue. Last week's announcement of imminent legislation and a possible compromise suggests Ministers want the issue buried as quickly as possible.
'The whole thing is completely out of proportion,' says Malcolm Bruce, Liberal Democrat spokesman on rural affairs. 'Both sides are wrong to go so hard on this. Agriculture is in crisis because of the exchange rate of the pound against the euro, not because of hunting. There's a growing perception that the Government doesn't understand the nature and complexity of the rural economy.'
But while many in urban areas assume the Conservatives are the automatic choice for rural communities, Labour has most to lose in the countryside if the perception that it is out of touch persists. The party has more MPs in rural or semi-rural seats than the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats put together, more than 40 per cent of the parliamentary party, with more than 100 MPs sitting in Labour's Rural Group.
Still, it is hardly surprising that the media have caught a whiff of old-fashioned class warfare in the hunting debate, with Camilla Parker Bowles going in to bat for the toffs. Labour MPs whose constituencies were devastated by redundancies in the Eighties will not be shedding too many tears at the sight of enraged Tory grandees fighting to save their country pursuits.
For Julie Webb it won't make the slightest difference. She is more interested in housing and local services. 'I'm a Labour voter,' she says, 'although it's not the party I grew up with. What worries me is that there's no real opposition.'
        
        

        

                        
At 11:15 17/09/2002 +0100, you wrote:

Dear Friends: Here is a current and "classic" example of how urban
sprawl aka "rural development" has occurred here in the U.S., and how it
is affecting an existing hog producer.....

<snip>

My comment:
This producer was "there" first. But now that the area is being
developed....he's the one that's "under-the-gun." This article also
raises another question about his feeding practices. Table scraps? Not
allowed here in Kansas. But apparently, ok in Nevada? Personally, I
would be more concerned about that than the smells.

But if he wasn't feeding waste food then his farm would almost certainly not be financially viable – why else would anyone choose to site a hog farm in the middle of a desert?

But then, this is still an example of Progress and what happens when the
Public outweighs the Individual.

The Public has always outweighed the Individual in human societies – it's the whole basis for/of 'family', 'tribe', 'community', 'nation' and 'civilisation' isn't it?

Regards

Andrew

Andrew Stephens
MediaVets
Tel: +44-(0)1638–781468 Fax: +44-(0)870–1337217
Email: ...
Web: http://www.mediavets.co.uk
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Author wrote:

At 11:15 17/09/2002 +0100, you wrote:
Dear Friends: Here is a current and "classic" example of how urban
sprawl aka "rural development" has occurred here in the U.S., and how it
is affecting an existing hog producer.....

<snip>

My comment:
This producer was "there" first. But now that the area is being
developed....he's the one that's "under-the-gun." This article also
raises another question about his feeding practices. Table scraps? Not
allowed here in Kansas. But apparently, ok in Nevada? Personally, I
would be more concerned about that than the smells.

But if he wasn't feeding waste food then his farm would almost certainly
not be financially viable – why else would anyone choose to site a hog farm
in the middle of a desert?

But then, this is still an example of Progress and what happens when the
Public outweighs the Individual.

The Public has always outweighed the Individual in human societies – it's
the whole basis for/of 'family', 'tribe', 'community', 'nation' and
'civilisation' isn't it?
Regards
Andrew

---

Andrew Stephens
MediaVets
Tel: +44-(0)1638–781468 Fax: +44-(0)870–1337217
Email: ...
Web: http://www.mediavets.co.uk
WebCam: http://www.mediavets.org.uk/webcam
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

-----Original Message-----
From: ...

Originally from: ... [...]
Sent: Monday, September 16, 2002 6:37 PM
To: ...
Subject: [farmtalking] RE: Hunting is not the issue

Dear Jane: I thought some more about this for a few minutes.

It seems to me your Labour government had this countryside development on its agenda from the "git go." regarding FMD and BSE and Scrapie legislation.

How better to "rid the countryside" of all the cow paddies, sheep dung and pig dung, than to let an outbreak get totally out-of-control. After all, the EU was going to compensate the "poor farmer" for his losses at a rate schedule better than he could obtain "at the market."

The Labour government's appointees were all big-business-orientated....and told to "let it go, FMD, that is."
Get rid of all those stinking animals! Then, came the "farmer bash." "It's all THEIR fault," Labour said.

No...Jane it was a planeed, executed exorcism of livestock for the purpose of land development. That's what it was and is.

Burkie in Kansas

P.S. Labour's claim to represent the "little guy" is hype.
Labour represents upper-mid-class people and higher, with enough money or credit at available to be able to buy these old farmssteads....and sign their lives away to mortgages, for their banking budd's....their dairy budd's....the larger processors, importers and supermarket friends.

FMD was a matter of convenience to make it happen.

The policies were made and implemented with a definite PLAN.

Just look at the things we posted last year and the things that have taken place since, with regard to Whitehall.

Author wrote:
House prices are too high, farm earnings are falling, bus links are poor

and tourism is wilting. Ed Douglas warns that an obsession with fox-hunting obscures the real struggle

Sunday September 15, 2002
The Observer
Derbyshire's Derwent Valley, at the heart of the Peak District, is basking

in late summer sunshine, its pretty villages suffused with a sense of calm prosperity. Games of cricket are being played, old men sit outside pubs supping pints. It seems idyllic and peaceful but there is conflict here, and growing discontent.

In fields and outside farms throughout the valley, large white banners

proclaim the Countryside Alliance's campaign for 'Liberty and Livelihood'. Julie Webb has seen them everywhere. A single mother, she lives in one of the few council houses left in this corner of the Peak District with her son.

She doesn't know much about the Alliance, although she doesn't agree with

hunting. She won't be among the tens of thousands marching through London next weekend. But Julie's story is just as much a reflection of what's happening in the countryside, especially to those living on low incomes. It's also a story of how Labour has failed to reach what should be a core constituency in rural communities. And it has absolutely nothing to do with foxes.

Julie grew up on a council estate in Moston in north Manchester,

experiencing the worst of what urban deprivation has to offer. Despite this, she went to Leeds University and later did a teacher training course in Sheffield. She even bought her own home, in Moston, before watching its value collapse.

When she got pregnant she was determined not to let her child cope with

the same problems. 'No way was I letting him deal with all that,' she says. 'I wanted him to grow up in the countryside.'

Julie and her partner moved into a two-bedroom flat in a converted cottage

close to where she lives now. 'It was expensive for what it was,' she says. The landlord had been trying to sell for years but, as Julie explains: 'Those who could afford to buy it wouldn't want it.' The asking price was £110,000, in a village where houses regularly sell for half a million.

When she and her partner separated, Julie discovered what it was like

living in the countryside without a car. Because there was no shop in the village, she would catch the bus into Sheffield and stock up on five or six weeks' shopping, relying on friends to bring her home. There were two bus companies passing through the village, thanks to deregulation, but they would leave within a few minutes of each other, every two hours, and Julie found the £3 return fare expensive.

For fresh food, Julie would walk to the nearest village shop two miles

away, pushing the pram. She went to the same village for the nearest toddler's group as well, as much to get away from the isolation of being a single mother in the countryside with no means of transport. This went on for six months, over a winter, while Julie learnt to drive and scraped enough money together to buy a car. 'It might explain,' she says with a laugh, 'why I'm so skinny.'

She and her partner had applied for a council house. 'I think growing up

on a council estate helped,' she says. 'I understood the system.' Six months ago a cottage became available in a nearby village. Julie's rent has dropped to £32 and she is in the process of setting up her own design business. Her son is already down for the primary school at the bottom of the lane.

Julie is an exceptional woman dealing with unexceptional circumstances –

because the crucial issue obsessing rural policy-makers, and one that the Countryside Alliance has barely addressed, is housing. The biggest threat to rural culture, whatever that may be, is not from any reduction or ban of hunting with dogs but the gradual erosion of communities who can no longer afford to live in their own villages.

On the basis of income alone, the countryside is not that badly off, with

a smaller percentage of households on low incomes compared to urban communities. Unemployment is substantially lower too. But the statistics on affordable housing tell the real story of why the countryside is changing so fast.

The Countryside Agency reports that, in all eight regions of England,

rural areas are worse off for affordable housing than urban areas. Almost 60 per cent of the rural population spend more than 50 per cent of their household income on their mortgage, compared to just over 30 percent of the urban population.

In a nutshell, those on low incomes can barely afford to live in the

countryside and, if house prices continue to rise faster than wages, rural communities will become exclusively middle class as they already have become in more beautiful or wealthier parts of the country.

Nor was it the Labour Party which created this social change. The

Conservative right-to-buy policy emptied rural social housing stocks of almost 100,000 homes while only 20,000 were built in the Nineties against a background of rising demand. The buzz phrase now is 'social diversity' and the Countryside Agency is calling for 10,000 new affordable homes a year for the next decade. It welcomed the idea that council tax relief on second homes be ended.

The problem is dramatically illustrated in the Lake District, perennially

popular for second-homers from the cities, where local farmers, surviving on average incomes reduced to £5,000, have watched house prices rocket. If the Countryside Alliance has ignited rural discontent, then the swamping of local communities by economics beyond their control provided the fuel.

Eric Robson, known to millions as the presenter of Radio 4's Gardeners'

Question Time, has just been appointed chairman of the Cumbria Tourist Board, an industry still picking itself off the floor after foot and mouth. More than 40 per cent of cases occurred in Cumbria and large swaths of the region lost all their animals.

Robson recalls how US President Woodrow Wilson preferred holidays in the

Lake District to the wilderness of America's national parks because of the link between landscape and the people who lived on it. Now, Robson says, that is disappearing as hill-farming communities splinter in the face of spiralling house prices.

'This way of life has never been more under threat,' he says. 'The average

age of farm tenants here is now 58; on National Trust properties it's 62. Sons are simply not taking over from their fathers. And why would they want to, for so little money? I'm an optimist and thought that foot and mouth would at least bring the changes that are needed. So far I've been disappointed.'

The Lake District tourism industry, despite the setbacks of foot and

mouth, remains 10 times the size of agriculture and there was resentment among tourism workers that compensation for lost business arrived, if at all, much more slowly than that for farmers did.

Robson, however, is adamant that neither industry can survive without the

other. He argues that important landscapes need to be paid for: 'With farming, the public sees good money going after bad and doesn't like it. And yet hill farming is subsidising the conservation of landscape. That kind of work deserves investment, in the same way that the Government supports new industries.'

As it is, farmers are starting to walk off the land. Robson says that one

landowner told him recently that they would have to pay someone to take a farm tenancy, the first time this has happened since the agricultural slump of the Twenties and Thirties. New schemes ask tourists to make a voluntary contribution to the upkeep of the landscape they come to enjoy.

Agriculture has had a spectacularly bad decade. Its contribution to the

national economy has halved to less than 1 per cent of GDP and yet the taxpayer is subsidising the industry to the tune of £3 billion. Cattle farmers have watched a £600 million export business destroyed by BSE.

There is also intense fury at the mishandling of foot and mouth, despite

compensation and the fact that the crisis may have cost urban tourism as much as £1 billion. Hunting may be the reason that the directors and wealthy backers of the Countryside Alliance are generating so much heat, but it does not explain the frustration among ordinary members and supporters. There is a deep-rooted feeling that Labour is a metropolitan party with no understanding of the countryside.

'There is a growing anger about the situation,' says Ewen Cameron, Chair

of the Countryside Agency. 'There's a sense in the countryside that everything is going wrong.' But Cameron – a former Chairman of the Country Landowners Association – says the impression is unfair.

'The countryside is being treated fairly in terms of funds, reform, the

Government's White Paper and so on,' he says. 'Labour has understood its weaknesses and tried to overcome them. Tony Blair has worked harder on these issues more than any other Prime Minister I've worked with. It's simply that people in the country don't like to feel they're being dictated to.'

Cameron believes that the way forward for agriculture is for the public to

get more value for money from the subsidies they support. Payments for farmland environmental improvements have doubled in the past five years to £240.3m, a welcome boost to farmland biodiversity devastated by modern farming practices. The Countryside Alliance may demand liberty to hunt, but it is opposed to new legislation giving greater access to the countryside, something tax-payers may not value so highly.

Not for the first time, Labour blames the media for being obsessed with

the hunting issue and allowing the Countryside Alliance to dominate the agenda. Alun Michael, the Rural Affairs Minister, has tried to change the mood music by insisting that hunting is not the real issue.

Peter Bradley, MP for Wrekin and Michael's Parliamentary Private

Secretary, told The Observer: 'For a small minority, hunting is hugely important, but for most people the real issues are housing, transport and services. Why should people in the country be any less concerned about education or healthcare?'

The Burns Report estimated that only a maximum of 8,000 jobs were involved

in hunting with dogs, so in that sense Labour is right. But the perception that the party is obsessed with hunting is starting to frustrate the public. A Mori poll last week showed 73 per cent believed the Government has spent too much time on the issue. Last week's announcement of imminent legislation and a possible compromise suggests Ministers want the issue buried as quickly as possible.

'The whole thing is completely out of proportion,' says Malcolm Bruce,

Liberal Democrat spokesman on rural affairs. 'Both sides are wrong to go so hard on this. Agriculture is in crisis because of the exchange rate of the pound against the euro, not because of hunting. There's a growing perception that the Government doesn't understand the nature and complexity of the rural economy.'

But while many in urban areas assume the Conservatives are the automatic

choice for rural communities, Labour has most to lose in the countryside if the perception that it is out of touch persists. The party has more MPs in rural or semi-rural seats than the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats put together, more than 40 per cent of the parliamentary party, with more than 100 MPs sitting in Labour's Rural Group.

Still, it is hardly surprising that the media have caught a whiff of

old-fashioned class warfare in the hunting debate, with Camilla Parker Bowles going in to bat for the toffs. Labour MPs whose constituencies were devastated by redundancies in the Eighties will not be shedding too many tears at the sight of enraged Tory grandees fighting to save their country pursuits.

For Julie Webb it won't make the slightest difference. She is more

interested in housing and local services. 'I'm a Labour voter,' she says, 'although it's not the party I grew up with. What worries me is that there's no real opposition.'

—If you want to share pictures, use the calendar, or start a vote
visit http://www.smartgroups.com/groups/farmtalking

To leave the group, email: ...
                        

-----Original Message-----
From: ...

Originally from: ... [...]
Sent: Tuesday, September 17, 2002 11:15 AM
To: ...
Subject: [farmtalking] RE: Hunting is not the issue

Dear Friends: Here is a current and "classic" example of how urban sprawl aka "rural development" has occurred here in the U.S., and how it is affecting an existing hog producer.....

---

http://www.thepigsite.com/frame.asp?LINK=http://www.lvrj.com/lvrj_home/2002/
Sep-16-Mon-2002/news/19622083.html
                        

-----Original Message-----
From: ...

Originally from: Andrew Stephens [...]
Sent: Tuesday, September 17, 2002 4:04 PM
To: ...
Subject: Re: [farmtalking] RE: Hunting is not the issue

At 11:15 17/09/2002 +0100, you wrote:

Dear Friends: Here is a current and "classic" example of how urban
sprawl aka "rural development" has occurred here in the U.S., and how it
is affecting an existing hog producer.....

<snip>

My comment:
This producer was "there" first. But now that the area is being
developed....he's the one that's "under-the-gun." This article also
raises another question about his feeding practices. Table scraps? Not
allowed here in Kansas. But apparently, ok in Nevada? Personally, I
would be more concerned about that than the smells.

But if he wasn't feeding waste food then his farm would almost certainly not be financially viable – why else would anyone choose to site a hog farm in the middle of a desert?

But then, this is still an example of Progress and what happens when the
Public outweighs the Individual.

The Public has always outweighed the Individual in human societies – it's the whole basis for/of 'family', 'tribe', 'community', 'nation' and 'civilisation' isn't it?

Regards

Andrew

---

Andrew Stephens
MediaVets
Tel: +44-(0)1638–781468 Fax: +44-(0)870–1337217
Email: ...
Web: http://www.mediavets.co.uk
WebCam: http://www.mediavets.org.uk/webcam

---

—If you want to share pictures, use the calendar, or start a vote
visit http://www.smartgroups.com/groups/farmtalking

To leave the group, email: ...
                        

Author wrote:
Dear Burkie,
You could be right but I have given this a lot of thought and there is
another explanation. Ignorance, just plain stupid, dumb, ignorance.
These people are arrogant bureaucrats who have become so immersed in their
own bullshit they have totally lost touch with reality. They go to endless
meetings, seminars, conferences, anything at all but do the job they are
supposed to do.
I may be wrong but I don't think they have got the intelligence to organise a
conspiracy.
Have a nice day,
Bill.