I don't usually quote the Shropshire Star here, but they have a report this morning that says:
[A] poll, carried out by Survation on behalf of the Country Landowners and Business Association, found Conservative support had fallen by 25 points since the 2019 election, with just 34% of voters in the 100 most rural constituencies in England saying they would vote for the party.
Labour support has risen over the same period, going from 20% in 2019 to 37% at the start of this year – giving the party a narrow lead in what has traditionally been considered Conservative territory.
They add, no doubt from a press release that I cannot find elsewhere:
Victoria Vyvyan, president of the Country Land and Business Association (CLA), told the PA news agency:
“My overwhelming impression is that both of the major parties have very little support in the rural economy at all. They might be vying for two halves of nothing at the moment.
And that's because neither of them have produced an ambitious plan for the rural economy.
Our vote is there for the taking, and they need to show us that they understand and respect our community."
The same could be said for almost anywhere in the country, rural or not.
People are noticing that we have politics almost wholly disconnected from what people want or need.
How long can that continue before something has to change?
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I’m starting to suspect that the economic status quo is just so baked in now (and not even the rise of fascism can shake it), that it’s going to take something devastating to shake it, such as an existential threat from Trump or Putin.
Maybe we won’t wake up until we have to literally choose between existence, or neoliberalism’s fiscal rules.
Aren’t we already facing that choice, and sadly choosing the latter?
When none of the main parties is delivering, that presents an opportunity for populist insurgents. Thank heavens they have not identified a polarising issue, like Brexit, to unite around. Immigration or “culture wars” doesn’t quite seem to be doing it.
What’s really weird is the inability of the British to understand that it was changes in the country’s monetary system that drove the world’s first industrial revolution in particular binding the private and public creation of money to create a stable funding system for national development. I say weird because so many inhabitants of the country are proud of the country’s past yet can’t be bothered to understand it in any detail. There is an air of superficiality in the country!
Fast forward to today and what’s also weird is the failure to see that although the British Industrial Revolution provided a massive boost to human productivity it also incurred a mindless attitude to the damage such industrial activity would do to the planet. Starmer’s outlook on the need to tackle that damage is of the same mindlessness because he can’t or won’t sweat the detail. “Power was his all but for what purpose?” should be engraved on his tombstone.
I’m told the Greens are doing well in rural areas. Evidently not well enough, but I guess that means there’s hope on the horizon.
Thank you and well said, Richard.
Further to the former Country Landowners’ Association, https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/politics/english-candidate-whose-family-second-26849308 and Starmer’s guest article in Country Life last year, I’m surprised, but, having come across some Labourites recently, equally unsurprised. Henry Tufnell’s father preceded Victoria Vyvyan.
I live in mid Buckinghamshire and note a common complaint about public transport. A former colleague from Wiltshire noted similar. Corbyn’s Labour had a plan, but we know what happened.
If you go back to the 1950’s there were Labour MP’s in if not Rural areas County Towns like Taunton so who knows what might happed
Might our political set up have become/been made into a form of caste system?
What looks like popular sentiment like this will only begin to mean something when we have dealt with political funding by rich vested interests.
This would break the cycle of more of the same and break the orthodoxy we have been living with or will continue to live with.
As long as that political funding enables ‘dead cats’ to be thrown on tables and promotes the use of fascist political science to disaggregate common causes, nothing is likely to change.
If rural Shropshire is abandoning the tories then things must be very bad indeed. I remember spending a holiday with relatives down there at the time of the 1992 election and they were the bluest of blue voters you can imagine. Quite a contrast from school in West Fife!
I too have relatives in rural Shropshire. They were also true blue died in the wool Daily Mail readers. (You can’t choose your relatives). You may recall that there was a by election there in 2021, caused by the downfall of one Owen Paterson. I was surprised to hear that they all voted Lib Dem, and Helen Morgan was elected. If they can do it once….
I think it was New Statesman that covered local elections a year or so back. I took at look at the before after voting – & in Shropshire the collapse in the tory vote was in the range 30 to 70%. I think I mentioned it on this blog as a “sign of the times”. It was at the time that Johson was pretending to be PM.
I doubt if things have improved – so perhaps the tories do face a wipe out – not that LINO will be any better & based on what they are saying – nothing will change.
Another major disconnect is the Post Office. The Post Office is still managing the compensation of Postmasters. This is quite simply a scandal in itself. The Post Office should be excluded from handling this whole matter, from tomorrow.
Why is the Government not acting? Because it needs the Post Office as scapegoat. The Government owns the Post Office; all of it. The buck stops in Downing Street. The Government wants to stay out of the firing-line; that is why there is so little being achieved, and a deathly quiet has descended, in place of action.
There is no escape. Big bonuses were approved and paid to senior Executives of the Post Office in 2021, just to cooperate with the official enquiry set up by Government. It is astonishing, and shocking. They have now been repaid by the executives, they are so egregiously unjustifiable.
But the question is, who approved the bonuses? The Treasury and Business Department. Alex Thomson, C4 News tonight reports on the sorry state of affairs (about 40/45 minutes in). Kwasi Kwarteng and Paul Scully were the relevant Business Department Ministers at the time. Kemi Badenoch, now the Business Department Minister, and from her recent history of public political pronouncements, something of a self-righteous prig; appeared in front of the Business and Trade Select Committee on the Post Office scandal last year, but does not appear to understand how anything actually works, or who takes – or is responsible for – the decisions (see Thomson’s report).
This is a Post Office scandal, only in the sense of the responsibility of a tethered scapegoat. Ultimately, this is a Government and Parliament scandal, and justice requires it’s blindfold to be removed and start wielding its sword in the direction of those who take decisions but may believe they they have special immunity (above the Old Bailey, stands Justice, with scales of justice in one hand, sword in the other).
It is scarcely a month, and already we need a bigger programme (if I may borrow from Chief Brody).