Not too long ago I spent a bank holiday weekend planting fence posts into a field in Somerset (long story …) and something struck me (figuratively, not literally) – For all the toil involved in agriculture, you never really hear Labour taking about the plight of people living and working in the countryside.
‘That’s because they’re all a bunch of Tories’, you might think. Well, sidestepping whether that’s the case, isn’t it true that any political party wanting a parliamentary majority needs to be representative of the country it seeks to govern? Just look at all the soul-searching going on in Labour over how to respond to urban working-class voters expressing frustration at immigration, the European Union and welfare.
Which got me thinking about what Labour could do to properly engage with rural communities, understand the issues that matter to them, develop effective policies and (shock, horror) maybe even win some votes.
Helpfully, this is ground that Progress has previously covered back in December 2011. In particular, Strathclyde University’s professor of politics John Curtice has written about how Labour may have its best opportunity in a generation to reverse some of its rural decline, if the party can tap into disenchantment among rural Liberal Democrat voters.
Moreover, both Labour’s parliamentary candidate for Loughborough Matthew O’Callaghan and Labour’s shadow Defra minister in the House of Lords Jim Knight have pointed the way towards policy and campaigning for Labour in rural areas. And perhaps most interestingly, former Young Fabians lead in the south-west Steve Race has pointed to the successes that the Australian Labor party has had with ‘Country Labor’, as part of his argument for the rebirth of the ‘Rural Labour’ wing of the party here in the UK.
So how about it? Why not the launch of Rural Labour (which already has its own unofficial Twitter feed) or a Labour Rural Network? We’ve already seen great work done by the Labour Women’s Network, the Labour Finance and Industry Group, the Labour Small Business Task Force, Scientists for Labour and Labour Friends of the Forces, so why not another network to reach important constituency (which would also dovetail nicely with Third Place First)?
This then got me pondering about yet another constituency that Labour should think about – men.
‘What?!’, I hear many of you say. ‘Men are hardly underrepresented in positions of power and influence’. But what kind of men? How many men?
Most of my male friends are not members of political parties, but they are interested in politics and they are not averse to Labour. They are your classic floating voters who decide elections. But do they see Labour as for them? No, ‘it’s for political obsessives and minorities’, comes the reply.
And why does any of this matter to Labour? It matters because the party is ultimately in the business of winning votes and donations, now more than ever with the proposed changes to trade union member affiliations, and two years out from an election that the party is by no means at all certain of winning.
Jon Cruddas has recently started to flesh out policies of relevance and importance to men, such as his recent speech which touched upon supporting the concept of fatherhood. Lack of male role models in schools and families is also an issue we still have not cracked. So why not take the next step and make sure issues that pertain particularly to men have a dedicated space in the party – a Labour Men’s Network? How about it?
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Chris Calland is a PR and political consultant, and a member of Progress and Holborn and St Pancras CLP. He tweets @CNCalland
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Labour once did considerably better among rural voters: several large agricultural constituencies consistently returned Labour MPs from the 1930s until the 1970s. North Norfolk, for example, had a Labour MP from 1945 until 1970 – this included some elections where the Tories won large majorities nationally.
I suspect that there are several factors at work here:
1. Rural areas have changed in the past few generations, just as urban and suburban areas have. As agriculture has become less labour intensive, so the economies of rural areas have diversified: even in very rural areas, manual agricultural work makes up a minority of employment. And improved communications mean that people are increasingly able to pursue ‘urban’ careers from rural settings.
2. Politics has become more cultural and less socio-economic in the past 40 years or so. In 1966, Labour won a large majority but only 2m of its 11m votes came from the middle classes – in 2010, there were slightly more middle-class Labour voters than working-class Labour voters. Equally, choosing to live in a rural or urban area is increasingly a lifestyle rather than employment choice. As both voting and location are more and more linked to culture and lifestyle, it’s no surprise that they correlate more.
3. The rise of the Lib Dems – although it will be interesting to see how this changes with their dramatic fall. This is important for two reasons: first, there are plenty of voters in Tory/Lib Dem marginals whose preferred party is Labour, but who vote Lib Dem regularly as a tactical option. Second, there are voters (and their antecedents) who may have voted Labour in the more two-party days of the past, but who find the Lib Dems a more culturally relevant option today (considering Labour to be too urban, metropolitan, or wrapped up in issues which don’t concern them).
As a Labour parish councillor, I deal with issues to do with lack of affordable housing, bus services which mean young people cannot go into town to work, nothing for young people to do, poor employment opportunities locally, viability of the High Street and other issues. We should be thinking about rural communities. My Labour party branch members often vote Lib Dem in local elections, because they don’t see that we have a chance round here. By standing and campaigning as a Labour parish councillor, I and my colleagues are trying to turn that attitude around. Better rural policies from Labour, rather than an attitude that only urban communities will return Labour councillors and MPs, would really help.
Labour really should start focusing on getting more men involved in the Party, I’ve definitely never been to an event and been one of few women in the room before. It should be an absolute priority for us, I really feel that men are starting to lose their voices.
SERIOUSLY?! How many men you ask? Outrageously more than women being the answer
Oh and heaven forbid we ever become a party of minorities, we’ll never win straight, white, male, middle England then.
“This then got me pondering about yet another constituency that Labour should think about – men.
‘What?!’, I hear many of you say. ‘Men are hardly underrepresented in positions of power and influence’. But what kind of men? How many men?
Most of my male friends are not members of political parties, but they are interested in politics and they are not averse to Labour. They are your classic floating voters who decide elections. But do they see Labour as for them? No, ‘it’s for political obsessives and minorities’, comes the reply.”
“Women’s issues” are generally regarded as such because men in power have failed to pay much attention to them – that’s why women have come out to fight for them. I fail to see how the supposed “men’s issues” that you describe are exclusively male at all: in fact, many of those I know who are concerned about, and acting to address, the lack of male representation in schools, for example, are women.
Issues such as paternity leave and work-life balance, for example, are not “men’s” issues – both sexes have an interest in them, as they are implicated in equality more generally. Custody and visiting arrangements for children, aren’t single gender issues, either: both sexes have an interest, given that laws are often made on the basis of long-standing notions about gender roles, which many people, male and female, would wish to contest.
A lot of traditionally “women’s issues” – childcare, for example – should be of interest to everyone and one would hope that, in time, they will be. Let’s not go in the opposite direction by labelling issues as “men’s” or “women’s” in this way.
There needs to be a firm Labour commitment to restore the Agricultural Wages Board and to renationalise the Royal Mail. The latter would kill the privatisation scheme stone dead, since no speculator would take the risk. Ed Miliband ought to have gone to Tolpuddle and promised both.
In the meantime, my friend, neighbour and Pat Glass, has been taking on the Government’s failure to create the promised Supermarkets Ombudsman. Beyond that, we need to make the supermarkets fund investment in agriculture and small business, determined in close consultation with the National Farmers’ Union and the Federation of Small Businesses, by means of a windfall tax, to be followed if necessary by a permanently higher flat rate of corporation tax, and in either case accompanied by strict regulation to ensure that the costs were not passed on to suppliers, workers, consumers, communities or the environment.
There is the most pressing need to revive the movement of those who have resisted enclosure, clearances, exorbitant rents, absentee landlordism, and a whole host of other abuses of the rural population down to the present day. Those who obtained, and who continue to defend, rural amenities such as schools, medical facilities, Post Offices, and so on. Those who opposed the destruction of the national rail and bus networks, and who continue to demand that those services be reinstated.
Those who have fought, and who continue to fight, for affordable housing in the countryside, and for planning laws and procedures that take proper account of rural needs. Those who object in principle to government without the clear electoral mandate of rural as well as of urban and suburban areas. Those who have been and who are concerned that any electoral reform be sensitive to the need for effective rural representation. Distributism and the related tendencies. And those who are conservationist rather than environmentalist.
Farm labourers, smallholders, crofters and others organised in order to secure radical reforms. County divisions predominated among safe Labour seats when such first became identifiable in the 1920s, while the Labour Party and the urban working class remained profoundly wary of each other throughout the period that both could realistically be said to exist at all, with several cities proving far less receptive to Labour than much of the nearby countryside.
Working farmers sat as Labour MPs between the Wars and subsequently. The Attlee Government created the Green Belt and the National Parks. Real agriculture is the mainstay of strong communities, environmental responsibility and animal welfare (leading to safe, healthy and inexpensive food) as against “factory farming”, and it is a clear example of the importance of central and local government action in safeguarding and delivering social, cultural, political and environmental goods against the ravages of the “free” market.
The President of the Countryside Alliance is a Labour peer, Baroness Mallalieu, and its Chairman is a Labour MP, Kate Hoey. For at least three consecutive General Elections until 2010, few or no Conservative MPs were returned by the hunting heartlands of Wales, Yorkshire, the Midlands, Devon and Cornwall.
The present Coalition means, either that Labour is now the only electoral option for the
age-old rural Radicalism of the West Country and Hampshire, and for the combination of that with Unionism (or, at least, with a strong suspicion of rule from the Scottish Central Belt or from South Wales) in the North and South of Scotland and in Mid Wales, or else that the Labour
Party now demands to be replaced with something that can indeed meet this profoundly pressing and electorally opportune need.
The importance of fatherhood is naturally a left-wing cause, and
specifically an anti-Thatcherite one. Only a generation ago, a single manual
wage provided the wage-earner, his wife and their several children with a
quality of life unimaginable even on two professional salaries today.
This impoverishment has been so rapid and so
extreme that most people, including almost all politicians and commentators,
simply refuse to acknowledge that it has happened. But it has indeed happened.
And it is still going on.
If fathers matter, then they must face up to
their responsibilities, with every assistance, including censure where
necessary, from the wider society, including when it acts politically as the
State.
A legal presumption of equal parenting.
Restoration of the tax allowance for fathers for so long as Child Benefit is
being paid to mothers. Restoration of the requirement that providers of
fertility treatment take account of the child’s need for a father. (There is no
point saying that Labour abolished the second and third of those. The point now
is that the Tories are doing nothing to put them back in place.)
For repeal of the ludicrous provision for two
women to be listed as a child’s parents on a birth certificate, although even
that is excelled by the provision for two men to be so listed. (There is no
point saying that Labour introduced, etc.)
And for paternity leave to be made available at
any time until the child was 18 or left school, thereby reasserting paternal
authority, and thus requiring paternal responsibility, at key points in
childhood and adolescence. Of course a new baby needs her mother. But a 15-year-old
might very well need her father, and that bit of paternity leave that he has
been owed these last 15 years.
That authority and responsibility require an
economic basis such as only the State can ever guarantee, and such as only the
State can very often deliver. And that basis is high-wage, high-skilled,
high-status employment. All aspects of public policy must take account of this
urgent social and cultural need.
Not least, that includes energy policy: the
energy sources to be preferred by the State are those providing the high-wage,
high-skilled, high-status jobs that secure the economic basis of paternal
authority in the family and in the wider community. So, nuclear power. And
coal, not dole.
Moreover, paternal authority cannot be affirmed
while fathers are torn away from their children and harvested in wars.
Especially, though not exclusively, since those sent to war tend to come from
working-class backgrounds, where starting to have children often still happens
earlier than has lately become the norm. Think of those very young men whom we
see going off or coming home, hugging and kissing their tiny children.
You can believe in fatherhood, or you can support
wars under certainly most and possibly all circumstances, the latter especially
in practice today even if not necessarily in the past or in principle. You
cannot do both.
No one having an inkling about the countryside would talk of “planting fence posts”. No one who cared about the rural underclass would write a piece about Rural Policy without mentioning AWB, GLA or agric H+S, all under huge attack in recent weeks (I suggest you google the initials Chris, if you can be bothered). Progress should stick to what it does best – making the Labour Party an irrelevance to many working people.