RURAL/URBAN DIVIDE
Posted: 12 Mar 2026, 02:53
RURAL/URBAN DIVIDE
14 August 2004
I have a feeling I’m going to have to be fairly disciplined as I write this because I start from a bad place. Few things annoy me more than the sound of people making confident assertions on subjects about which they are totally ignorant. One of the worst examples of this is politicians in the Westminster village trying to run the countryside.
Just one example, if power had been given to the local vets at the start of the F&M outbreak things would have been far less serious, as it was everything had to be done through London and the consequence was almost three weeks of inactivity giving the original infection time to spread, after that it all went downhill.
We are seeing the same thing at the moment with the changes in EU farm policy whereby hill farmers are going to be paid for ‘looking after the land’ instead of being subsidised to graze it. They don’t realise that without the sheep and cattle the present landscape can’t be maintained.
See what I mean? I’m flying off at a tangent before I even get going. Let’s have a look at the history, the first thing we need is a definition of urban. For the purposes of this piece let’s agree that urban is any place where people live that isn’t within sight or easy walking distance of countryside. Leaving London on one side as it was always a special case, I suppose we are talking about the rise of the large conurbations in the latter stages of industrial evolution, say about 1870 onwards. The thing that enabled these large towns to grow was the economic power of industry and the availability of transport for the supply of essential goods and movement of people from home to work. Historians make a distinction, ‘the walking distance town’. This is a town where it is possible to get from one end to the other easily on foot. We have reached the stage now where it is possible to live in a city and never see a blade of grass. People’s lives are totally divorced from the land and many have absolutely no idea as to how the countryside is run and what goes on there.
All this didn’t present too much of a problem as long as the ruling class was essentially a land-owning aristocracy. With all their faults, they did have an understanding of the land and in general pursued a laissez faire attitude towards agriculture, they just left it alone to get on with it. As the power base shifted in politics the legislators became divorced from the land and this reservoir of understanding ebbed away. At the same time the disparity in income between the urban dwellers and country folk meant that if some townie wanted to pursue a Utopian dream he or she had the money to do so and could easily afford to buy into a village or rural area. This pushed prices up and now there are many parts of the countryside where the locals can’t afford to buy houses in their own village. Even worse there are villages in England now where half the houses stand empty during the week because they have been bought as second or holiday homes. The first consequence of this is that the school closes, usually closely followed by the post office, the general store, the garage and the pub. All you are left with is a dormitory, the heart has been ripped out of another community.
There is an even worse consequence to this. Once the townie has moved into the country they often try to impose their standards, quite reasonably in their opinion. They do not expect to be woken during the night by cocks crowing or foxes screaming. They object to the smell of dung drifting over their property after it has been spread on the fields. Cow muck on the road is regarded with distaste and as for being held up by cattle being brought in on the road for milking! How many times have you seen news items of court cases over matters like these?
Back in the town we have a class of people totally divorced from the land who at some time in their lives become aware that the bacon on their breakfast plate wasn’t manufactured from crude oil in a factory on the industrial estate but is a consequence of shooting a cuddly little pig, cutting its throat and chopping the quivering flesh up. All this carried out by large blood-stained men with crude cutting tools and no general anaesthetic! Another vegetarian is born. Vegetarians, like converted smokers, are a dangerous breed. They are absolutely sure of their convictions and some attempt to force them on everyone else. Anyone who eats meat is beyond the pale and anything to do with the ‘exploitation’ of animals is anathema. Another subtle influence creeps in here, the well known British predilection to defend cuddly animals.
By definition, the farmer, the person who carries out the ‘exploitation’ becomes a hate figure. Add to this the fact that they are being ‘feather-bedded’ by the government who pay them enormous subsidies to farm and you have an explosive recipe. This syndrome first arose during and after WW2 when British agriculture was encouraged to increase production to save us from famine. Add all these things together and divorce the legislature from the land and all the elements were in place for the destruction of farming as we know it. One more element comes into the equation here, the advent of the supermarkets and the availability of cheap food from overseas.
So, we have our evidence, there are two basic classes of people in the country, those who have a knowledge of agriculture and how it works and those who don’t. Give the economic power to the ignorant ones and transplant them to the countryside and there can only be one outcome, conflict. This is the root of the rural/urban divide and I am forced to say that there seem to be more country dwellers with knowledge of the towns than there are town dwellers with knowledge of the country.
Let’s step back here and look at a more intangible but nevertheless powerful factor that is at work here. If you search the Bible, art and literature you will find that there is a concept which posits that the rural idyll that Adam and Eve enjoyed in the Garden of Eden was without blemish, there was no sin. The concept of Utopia is that there is a state where all is perfect, every prospect delights the eye and that by embracing industry and commerce we have lost this heaven on earth. Inside almost everyone is a love of the country and surroundings unspoilt by the hand of man.
This is of course complete rubbish. There was always as much poverty, cruelty, disease, death and everyday nastiness in the country as there was in the town. Further, the ‘unspoilt’ prospect that delights the eye is not natural, it is the result of two thousand years of farming and ‘exploitation’. What the vegetarians and those ignorant of the workings of the countryside cannot grasp is that if you remove animal husbandry and the day-to-day operations of farming you destroy the landscape that is prized so much. An essential by-product of livestock is manure which preserves the basic fertility of the land. By moving out into the countryside and imposing urban standards the incomers destroy the very qualities that attracted them to move in the first place.
Of course, this is worst case. Not all migrants from town to country make this mistake but enough do to cause trouble. One of the strategies being considered by the government to help the integration of foreign immigrants into our society is compulsory learning of the language, social customs and ethics of the native population. I’m not at all sure that this is the right way to go about it, integration by education is fine but let it be organic, let it happen naturally and protect the status quo while this conversion takes place. Exactly the same applies to migration from the urban to the rural. The concept of the Muslim religion replacing the Church of England is anathema to us so why should the vegetarians and animal rights people be allowed to modify and eventually destroy a system which has served us well for two thousand years and is far older than any church?
The bottom line is that we have to co-exist and the secret is live and let live. If a country dweller moves to the town they have to conform, the same should apply the other way round. I would like to see the country divided into areas graded by levels of economic activity based on average wage, price of houses and population density. Anyone moving from a high grade area to a lower grade should be subject to a tax that removes the economic advantage of moving. The product of this tax should be invested in low cost housing in rural areas, in local transport and subsidising services in villages. It could also be used to subsidise those who wanted to move the opposite way into the towns to further their education or get a better paid job. This would not prevent townies from attaining their rural idyll, indeed, in the end it would benefit them by preserving the very qualities of life they moved to embrace. It would also enable the young to stay in the area of their birth.
Of course, this would be seen as an attack on the economic freedom of the higher earners and will never happen. Unfortunately, if we don’t adopt this strategy or something very much like it the whole of England will eventually become one amorphous lump of character-less housing and boring lawns. This is the power and the danger of the Rural/Urban divide and I’m afraid there is very little we can do about it except shout.
14 August 2004
14 August 2004
I have a feeling I’m going to have to be fairly disciplined as I write this because I start from a bad place. Few things annoy me more than the sound of people making confident assertions on subjects about which they are totally ignorant. One of the worst examples of this is politicians in the Westminster village trying to run the countryside.
Just one example, if power had been given to the local vets at the start of the F&M outbreak things would have been far less serious, as it was everything had to be done through London and the consequence was almost three weeks of inactivity giving the original infection time to spread, after that it all went downhill.
We are seeing the same thing at the moment with the changes in EU farm policy whereby hill farmers are going to be paid for ‘looking after the land’ instead of being subsidised to graze it. They don’t realise that without the sheep and cattle the present landscape can’t be maintained.
See what I mean? I’m flying off at a tangent before I even get going. Let’s have a look at the history, the first thing we need is a definition of urban. For the purposes of this piece let’s agree that urban is any place where people live that isn’t within sight or easy walking distance of countryside. Leaving London on one side as it was always a special case, I suppose we are talking about the rise of the large conurbations in the latter stages of industrial evolution, say about 1870 onwards. The thing that enabled these large towns to grow was the economic power of industry and the availability of transport for the supply of essential goods and movement of people from home to work. Historians make a distinction, ‘the walking distance town’. This is a town where it is possible to get from one end to the other easily on foot. We have reached the stage now where it is possible to live in a city and never see a blade of grass. People’s lives are totally divorced from the land and many have absolutely no idea as to how the countryside is run and what goes on there.
All this didn’t present too much of a problem as long as the ruling class was essentially a land-owning aristocracy. With all their faults, they did have an understanding of the land and in general pursued a laissez faire attitude towards agriculture, they just left it alone to get on with it. As the power base shifted in politics the legislators became divorced from the land and this reservoir of understanding ebbed away. At the same time the disparity in income between the urban dwellers and country folk meant that if some townie wanted to pursue a Utopian dream he or she had the money to do so and could easily afford to buy into a village or rural area. This pushed prices up and now there are many parts of the countryside where the locals can’t afford to buy houses in their own village. Even worse there are villages in England now where half the houses stand empty during the week because they have been bought as second or holiday homes. The first consequence of this is that the school closes, usually closely followed by the post office, the general store, the garage and the pub. All you are left with is a dormitory, the heart has been ripped out of another community.
There is an even worse consequence to this. Once the townie has moved into the country they often try to impose their standards, quite reasonably in their opinion. They do not expect to be woken during the night by cocks crowing or foxes screaming. They object to the smell of dung drifting over their property after it has been spread on the fields. Cow muck on the road is regarded with distaste and as for being held up by cattle being brought in on the road for milking! How many times have you seen news items of court cases over matters like these?
Back in the town we have a class of people totally divorced from the land who at some time in their lives become aware that the bacon on their breakfast plate wasn’t manufactured from crude oil in a factory on the industrial estate but is a consequence of shooting a cuddly little pig, cutting its throat and chopping the quivering flesh up. All this carried out by large blood-stained men with crude cutting tools and no general anaesthetic! Another vegetarian is born. Vegetarians, like converted smokers, are a dangerous breed. They are absolutely sure of their convictions and some attempt to force them on everyone else. Anyone who eats meat is beyond the pale and anything to do with the ‘exploitation’ of animals is anathema. Another subtle influence creeps in here, the well known British predilection to defend cuddly animals.
By definition, the farmer, the person who carries out the ‘exploitation’ becomes a hate figure. Add to this the fact that they are being ‘feather-bedded’ by the government who pay them enormous subsidies to farm and you have an explosive recipe. This syndrome first arose during and after WW2 when British agriculture was encouraged to increase production to save us from famine. Add all these things together and divorce the legislature from the land and all the elements were in place for the destruction of farming as we know it. One more element comes into the equation here, the advent of the supermarkets and the availability of cheap food from overseas.
So, we have our evidence, there are two basic classes of people in the country, those who have a knowledge of agriculture and how it works and those who don’t. Give the economic power to the ignorant ones and transplant them to the countryside and there can only be one outcome, conflict. This is the root of the rural/urban divide and I am forced to say that there seem to be more country dwellers with knowledge of the towns than there are town dwellers with knowledge of the country.
Let’s step back here and look at a more intangible but nevertheless powerful factor that is at work here. If you search the Bible, art and literature you will find that there is a concept which posits that the rural idyll that Adam and Eve enjoyed in the Garden of Eden was without blemish, there was no sin. The concept of Utopia is that there is a state where all is perfect, every prospect delights the eye and that by embracing industry and commerce we have lost this heaven on earth. Inside almost everyone is a love of the country and surroundings unspoilt by the hand of man.
This is of course complete rubbish. There was always as much poverty, cruelty, disease, death and everyday nastiness in the country as there was in the town. Further, the ‘unspoilt’ prospect that delights the eye is not natural, it is the result of two thousand years of farming and ‘exploitation’. What the vegetarians and those ignorant of the workings of the countryside cannot grasp is that if you remove animal husbandry and the day-to-day operations of farming you destroy the landscape that is prized so much. An essential by-product of livestock is manure which preserves the basic fertility of the land. By moving out into the countryside and imposing urban standards the incomers destroy the very qualities that attracted them to move in the first place.
Of course, this is worst case. Not all migrants from town to country make this mistake but enough do to cause trouble. One of the strategies being considered by the government to help the integration of foreign immigrants into our society is compulsory learning of the language, social customs and ethics of the native population. I’m not at all sure that this is the right way to go about it, integration by education is fine but let it be organic, let it happen naturally and protect the status quo while this conversion takes place. Exactly the same applies to migration from the urban to the rural. The concept of the Muslim religion replacing the Church of England is anathema to us so why should the vegetarians and animal rights people be allowed to modify and eventually destroy a system which has served us well for two thousand years and is far older than any church?
The bottom line is that we have to co-exist and the secret is live and let live. If a country dweller moves to the town they have to conform, the same should apply the other way round. I would like to see the country divided into areas graded by levels of economic activity based on average wage, price of houses and population density. Anyone moving from a high grade area to a lower grade should be subject to a tax that removes the economic advantage of moving. The product of this tax should be invested in low cost housing in rural areas, in local transport and subsidising services in villages. It could also be used to subsidise those who wanted to move the opposite way into the towns to further their education or get a better paid job. This would not prevent townies from attaining their rural idyll, indeed, in the end it would benefit them by preserving the very qualities of life they moved to embrace. It would also enable the young to stay in the area of their birth.
Of course, this would be seen as an attack on the economic freedom of the higher earners and will never happen. Unfortunately, if we don’t adopt this strategy or something very much like it the whole of England will eventually become one amorphous lump of character-less housing and boring lawns. This is the power and the danger of the Rural/Urban divide and I’m afraid there is very little we can do about it except shout.
14 August 2004