General election 2024: are the Tories about to lose control of the countryside?
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As the general election campaign enters its final stretch, you can always tell a lot about the state of play by the location of leaders’ campaign events.
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Hide AdKeir Starmer spent Monday touring the Home Counties, visiting Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire - all places that were previously safe Conservative seats. The Labour leader stopped by a farm in David Cameron’s former constituency, with Starmer firmly planting his tanks on rural Tory lawns.
Today, the Prime Minister appears to be trailing him, visiting farms and factories in a mammoth tour across the country. This shows that Rishi Sunak is desperately trying to hold onto his base, while Labour advances in seats it never thought possible to win.
Last November, I watched as Labour won a by-election in Mid Bedfordshire for the first time in history - a seat with the biggest town of 13,000 people. In March, as farming protests hit Westminster, a Leave-voting farmer told me that the government’s free-trade agreements were “s***” and said Brexit has gone “terribly”. The anger was palpable.
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Hide AdIt showed a shift in voting in electoral battlegrounds that seemed improbable. A poll for the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit think tank (ECIU) found rural seats now back Labour by 35% compared to the Tories on 30%. The latter figure is down from around 50% during the 2019 election.
Beyond the common reasons for distrust in the government, from Partygate to the mini-budget, there is a deep-seated anger amongst the farming community. I’ve spoken to dozens of farmers for my reporting throughout the last year, and they feel as if they’ve been sold out by the Conservatives, from botched trade deals through to Brexit.
Liz Webster, who runs the Save British Campaign group, said the current government has overseen the “biggest destruction of agriculture in a generation”. She told me: “Farmers are angry about the unfair trade deals, the unlevel playing field which can only be solved by getting back in the single market. The loss of labour and freedom of movement is another issue, and the lack of financial support for food production which is pushing farmers into environmental schemes.
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Hide Ad“There is an electoral price to pay for that. It doesn’t mean it’s easy for farmers to think I’m going to vote for the alternative, because Labour’s manifesto was sadly left seriously wanting for agriculture and farming. It was pretty much a blank sheet.”
But Starmer’s party is pugnacious about its hopes in the countryside. A spokesperson told me: “Our farmers have been abandoned by this Conservative government. They have been undercut by poorly negotiated trade deals, locked behind unnecessary trade barriers blocking the export of high-quality produce and face skyrocketing energy prices forcing tens of thousands out of business.
“It’s time for change. Labour will give farmers their future back. That starts with introducing a new deal for farmers to turbocharge rural growth and boost Britain's food security. We will cut energy bills for farmers by switching on GB Energy, slash Tory red tape at our borders to get food exports moving again, protect farmers from being undercut in trade deals and use the government’s own purchasing power to back British produce.”
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Hide AdI spoke to Zoë Billingham, Labour’s candidate in the South Cotswolds constituency, about this electoral shift. She told me that Net Zero policies resonate “far more in rural communities than people think, because here we’re at the brunt end of the climate crisis”.
“Mitigating the worst of climate change and supporting our farming community are two sides of the same coin,” she said. “I think the fact that the manifesto speaks to food security being national security has resonated really well with the farming community, National Farmers Union and people locally, because it shows that we get it.”
Billingham explained: “There are so many other things that are affecting the farming community and are causing them to move away from the Conservatives. Another big one is the trade deals that have been struck post Brexit with countries outside the EU. British farmers are being undercut from food coming in from outside the EU of lower quality, so therefore they undercut us on price.
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Hide Ad- Zoë Billingham (Labour Party)
- Martin Broomfield (Social Democratic Party)
- Bob Eastoe (Green Party)
- James Gray (Conservative and Unionist Party)
- Owen Humphrys (Independent)
- Desi Latimer (Reform UK)
- Roz Savage (Liberal Democrats)
- Sandy Steel (Independent)
- Chris Twells (The Liberal Party)
“Why is it that the government allows our British farmers to be undercut when we’re holding other people to lower standards? That’s not right and it’s not fair - and it’s no wonder the farming community is saying there was this big promise of Brexit, but post-Brexit it’s even worse than we’ve ever had it, because we’re being undercut by a whole new market.”
The Tories have promised to introduce “a legally binding target to enhance our food security”. It will apply across the UK, alongside the Food Security Index, to determine where best to concentrate farming funds. Throughout the campaign, Sunak has been out at campaign events at farms, tweeting: “We shouldn’t be reliant on foreign food. Buy British.”
However, as Webster and Billingham said, farmers believe the government policy has allowed them to be undercut by foreign produce and encouraged them to move fields out of food production. On Thursday night, the swing in rural constituencies will be one of the most interesting aspects of this election. Will the Tories lose their hegemony over the countryside? We’ll find out on Friday morning.
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Hide AdRalph Blackburn is NationalWorld’s politics editor based in Westminster, where he gets special access to Parliament, MPs and government briefings. If you liked this article you can follow Ralph on X (Twitter) here and sign up to his free weekly newsletter Politics Uncovered, which brings you the latest analysis and gossip from Westminster every Sunday.
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