Gawain Towler responds to the claims of a British MP that the nostalgic view of the rural life in England that George Orwell praised is something that the “far-Right” will try to capitalize on even though, she says, it “never really existed”:
I was going to go to bed, but the malevolent inanity that is Jenny Riddell-Carpenter MP has riled me. She has disturbed my sleep, because she says that she cannot sleep. She told a Labour fringe meeting in Liverpool today what keeps her awake, and it was not rural bus cuts or the last shop closing in a Suffolk village. It was her own voters. She fears the far right will fight the next election on “a nostalgic vision of Britain that never really existed“, one of “warm ale, a black Labrador by your feet in a pub that doesn’t exist, and with symbolism of fox hunting all around them“.
A pub that doesn’t exist. The Minister for Nature represents Suffolk Coastal. Allow me to draw her a map.
Adnams brews in Southwold, just inside the protected landscape of the Suffolk Coast and Heaths, and the town is in her seat. From there a rowing-boat ferry crosses the Blyth to Walberswick for a pound, worked by a family that has pulled the oars for generations. The Bell on the far bank is six hundred years old and lets dogs in. The Cross Keys at Aldeburgh has served drink since 1540, and the Crown at Snape is a fifteenth-century inn with its own allotment. Most MPs would put these places on the constituency Christmas card. Ms Riddell-Carpenter prefers to tell a hall in Liverpool they are a far right hallucination.
Her non-existent warm ale has a pedigree she ought to recognise. She must be thinking of John Major in 1993, but he lifted it from George Orwell, who had written of “old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning“. Orwell was a socialist who spent years at his parents’ house in Southwold. The fantasy she fears was written by a man of the left, in her constituency. She clearly doesn’t know.
Then comes the sentence that gives her away. Labour, she said, must make the case for “what we believe rural communities look like“. Not what they are. What Labour believes they look like. The countryside is not to be listened to but corrected, its shape agreed at a fringe meeting and posted back to the people who live in it. When they describe their own lives, the pub, the dog, the Saturday match, their MP hears Ladybird nostalgia and smells fascism.
Cricket will be next on the charge sheet. Yoxford plays at Grove Park beside St Peter’s church and fields girls’ sides at under-11, under-13 and under-15, alongside women’s teams. At Orford the Sudbourne Hall ground drained well enough to save every home game in a previous sodden summer, and women’s sessions ended with a Pimm’s at close of play. This is the reactionary idyll that haunts her nights. It is busy doing, on a village green, what her party only issues press releases about.
She cannot plead ignorance, which makes it worse, no culpable. Her family moved to Martlesham Heath when she was seven, and she went to Woodbridge School. At eighteen she left and did not come back until the voters sent her. The years between went to London, to SOAS (oh brother), to the housing developer L&Q and to the lobbying trade, where she rose to run Cratus Group. Her husband still works in London social housing. She came home remembering every pub by name and having learned in town to be embarrassed by all of them. She now chairs the Labour Rural Research Group, which is a little like putting a vegan in charge of the pork pie.
A rural minister’s job is to carry the countryside’s case into Whitehall. This one carries Whitehall’s sneer back out and waits for the applause. Nobody who talks about her own patch like this can be trusted to defend it when a solar farm or a trail-hunting ban comes over the hill. She will side with the department and call it progress. She will be wielding the new Landuse Framework that tokenises the countryside, and she hates what exists before.
