Nick, great minds think alike. Wrote this last night for my newspaper column tomorrow:
Well, jolly good show to all those rural types who marched in force at the weekend to protest against the ongoing victimisation of country-folk.
I completely agree with them. As one woman pointed out on the news, city-dwellers often just turn up to the countryside for the weekend or even, God forbid, for their oiky little summer holidays. What, do they think just anyone can go there whenever they feel like it? It's not a hotel, you know. Except for the bits that are hotels, of course, and rely on visitors with their city-filthy ten pound notes to come and keep them open.
There is a lot of poverty in the countryside, though. I spotted in one of the TV news reports that nice Noel Edmonds marching through Hyde Park. I mean, he hasn't worked for years. I imagine he's having real trouble with the up-keep of his sprawling country estate at the moment.
That's the other thing about the country; house prices are being driven through the roof by city-folk coming in and wanting to live there. Some people who have lived their whole lives in the country find it almost impossible to move up from the seven-bedroom renovated farmhouse with indoor swimming pool and a hundred acres of land to something a little more suitable directly because of this situation. Now, is that fair?
Of course, you always get some clever clogs throwing in the fact that farmers get something along the lines of £3 billion in direct subsidies, but what can that buy you these days?
And anyway, isn't it a fact that there's something like 20 per cent extra spending on services in the cities? It's one rule for the urbanites, another one for the poor country-folk. Just because there's supposedly more poverty and deprivation in the cities and people tend to have a much poorer quality of life and suffer from illnesses a lot more, well, is that any reason to be spending all that money on them? They've only themselves to blame, surely. No-one makes them live in those boxy little flats on sprawling council estates, after all. If they just went out and got proper jobs they could make a lot more of themselves.
You see, no-one thinks about all this. All everyone talks about is fox hunting. Fair enough, a lot of the people marching at the weekend do like a bit of the old tally-ho. Is that a crime? People who live in the country know what's best for the country, and if they say that the best way to control the fox population is to spend a whole day dressing up like clowns and stampeding across fields until a pack of dogs tear a single, solitary fox limb from limb, then who are we to argue with them? It's tradition, after all, and we should be doing all we can to preserve this way of life for those that can afford to spend Sundays doing that.
What struck me, though was how good-natured the whole march was at the weekend. I mean, whenever you get any other kind of demonstration in London, against something stupid and meaningless like unfair taxes, war or the increasing power of global corporations, the police generally feel duty-bound to wade in with batons and smash a few of those dreadful people around the head. But you don't get that with country-folk, do you?
And I'm absolutely sure that was nothing at all to do with the fact that a good portion of the 400,000 on that march on Sunday were wealthy, well-connected, and spoke the Queen's English.
Exactly the kind of down-to-earth folk who should be allowed to do just what they want in this country. After all, they've had their own way for hundreds of years. To stop them now would be just cruel. |
