The Contested Countryside: Rural Politics and Land Controversy in Modern Britain 9780755622474, 9781845117153

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editors would like to thank the Scouloudi Foundation in association with the Institute of Historical Research for its generous financial support in facilitating the publication of this book. They are also grateful to the staff of I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd, particularly Dr Lester Crook, Elizabeth Munns and Jayne Hill for their assistance, and to Dr Matthew Worley of the University of Reading and Jason Cohen and Selina Cohen of Oxford Publishing Services for their expert help in preparing the manuscript.

CONTRIBUTORS

Paul Brassley is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Geography at the University of Plymouth. Much of his teaching has been concerned with rural policy, and his book Agricultural Economics and the CAP was published by Blackwell in 1997. His research has covered various aspects of the history of rural England from 1600 to 2000. In addition to articles on technical change in agriculture and developments in the rural economy, he has contributed to two volumes of the Cambridge University Press’s Agrarian History of England and Wales and is chair of the British Agricultural History Society. Jeremy Burchardt is a Lecturer in History at the University of Reading and chairman of the Interwar Rural History Research Group. His research interests are centred on nineteenth and twentieth-century rural history. Previous publications include The Allotment Movement in England, 1793–1873 (Boydell and Brewer, Woodbridge, 2002) and Paradise Lost: Rural Idyll and Social Change in England since 1800 (I.B.Tauris, London, 2002). His current research includes the local allotment movement in the nineteenth century, village halls and rural leisure organizations between the wars, and urban attitudes to the countryside. Philip Conford is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of History at Reading University. His book The Origins of the Organic Movement was published in 2001 and he is now researching the history of the organic movement since the 1950s. He writes a regular column, ‘Organic Origins’, for the Soil Association magazine Living Earth. Graham Cox is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social and Policy Sciences, University of Bath. In addition to researching and publishing extensively on the countryside, the politics of agriculture and environmental policy he has, since 1978, contributed regularly to a range of countryside and sporting magazines. He also breeds and trials golden retrievers under his own Wydcombe affix and made up a Field Trial Champion in 1989. Berkeley Hill is Emeritus Professor of Policy Analysis, University of London. He was on the staff of Wye College from 1970 to 2000, in the Department of Agricultural Economics and Business Management, transferred to Imperial College when the two institutions of London University merged in 2000, and left in 2005. His main area of research has been the use of economic statistics in agricultural policy-making, and in particular the measurement of the income and wealth of farmers and their households; his book Farm Income, Wealth and Agricultural Policy is

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in its third edition. He has been a consultant on income measurement methodology to Eurostat, the OECD and the UN Economic Commission for Europe, and active as an evaluator and analyst of rural development policies in industrialized countries. Alun Howkins is Professor of Social History and Director of the Graduate Centre in Humanities at the University of Sussex. He has written widely on the history of the countryside in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His most recent book, The Death of Rural England: A History of the Countryside Since 1900, was published by Routledge in 2003. Sir John Marsh is an Emeritus Professor of the University of Reading. He was Head of the Agricultural Economics and Management Department at Reading University and Director of the Centre for Agricultural Strategy. He is President of the British Institute of Agricultural Consultants (BIAC), Chairman of the Council of RURAL (the Society for the Responsible Use of Resources in Agriculture and on the Land), and a governor of the Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester and of the Scottish Crop Research Institute. He is currently Deputy Chairman of DEFRA’s Science Advisory Council. He has acted as Specialist Advisor to several Select Committees. His academic interests include agricultural and food policy, the development of the Common Agricultural Policy and the role of research in economic development. Paul Milbourne is a Professor in the School of City and Regional Planning at Cardiff University. His research interests include rural welfare, rural housing systems and nature-society relations. His recent books include International Perspectives on Rural Homelessness (with Paul Cloke, Routledge, 2006); Rural Poverty: Marginalisation and Exclusion in Britain and the United States (Routledge, 2004), and Rural Homelessness: Issues, Experiences and Policy Responses (with Paul Cloke and Rebekah Widdowfield, Policy Press, 2002). Simon Miller graduated from Sussex University in Anthropology and then converted to History. Drawn to the tensions of change between the city and the countryside, his main publications featured the Hacienda and the Mexican Revolution. He taught at Manchester and Cambridge, among other places, his final academic position being Gibson Professor in Land, Food and Environment at Queen’s University, Belfast. He is currently working on a political thriller and a biography of Alison Uttley.

INTRODUCTION: FARMING AND THE COUNTRYSIDE

Jeremy Burchardt

The core of the contemporary British countryside is farming – farming, not agriculture, because agriculture implies merely the production of food from the land, whereas farming rightly shifts the emphasis to the people who produce the food. This is, perhaps, a controversial way to begin a book one of the main aims of which is to suggest ways of resolving controversies about the countryside. Certainly there is much more to the countryside than farming, increasingly so, as many of the ensuing chapters will demonstrate. Farmers now represent a small and decreasing proportion of the rural population, whilst agriculture’s share in the economy follows suit, having fallen below 1 per cent of the UK’s GVA (gross value added) for the first time in 1999 (Countryside Agency, 2001: 55). Indeed, it has even been argued that the countryside no longer differs significantly from urban areas in any respect other than land use. On almost all other measures – occupational structure, productivity, income distribution, ownership of consumer durables, life expectancy and the like, the countryside now approximates to national averages (DEFRA, 2004). It would be easy to conclude that the distinctiveness of the countryside, insofar as any now remains to it, must lie in its non-built landscape. Certainly the equation between the countryside and nature, the city and the absence of nature, is a venerable one. Yet, we should pause before applying it to England, for it misses the very thing that differentiates the English countryside from the rural landscapes and traditions of so many other countries. In the United States, for example, the word countryside enjoys little currency. Here the contrast is between the city and wilderness (Nash, 1967). The latter consists ideally of untamed, unadulterated nature. In other parts of the world a similar emphasis often prevails. The Australian outback bears comparison with the American wilderness, as within limits does the Canadian tundra, Amazonian rainforest or Arabian desert. Closer to home, one might even make a case for the Scottish Highlands or Snowdonia. Although many of these landscapes have in fact been shaped more or less comprehensively by human activity, each is typically represented as a pure

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preserve of nature, and those drawn to these areas come in search of an encounter with nature in the raw. The English countryside is different. Medieval churches and manor houses, farm buildings, stone walls, haystacks and ploughed fields occur as commonly in representations of rural England as do mountains, moors, woods and rivers. What distinguishes the English countryside is, principally, the conjunction of nature and the hand of man, mingled inextricably through the passage of centuries. The English countryside is nature humanized, and its profound and widely-felt appeal derives in no small part from this unique harmonization of what is one of the fundamental antitheses of Western culture. The agents of the reconciliation have, principally, been farmers. Others have contributed too – landowners, with their great houses and estate landscapes, planners and legislators through landscape protection – national parks, areas of outstanding natural beauty and the like. Yet, the contribution of landowners lies mainly in the past, whilst that of planners and politicians has been largely negative – preventing unwelcome developments rather than fostering desirable ones. The constructive, visible, ongoing work has been mainly that of farmers. They maintain the fields, hedgerows, walls and farmsteads. Furthermore, as will be argued below, they, far more than any other social group, play a central role in the construction of a living, human counterpart to the physical landscape. Farmers have had a bad press for many years. They are still widely regarded as undeserving recipients of generous hand-outs from the government. Whilst the high-profile travails of farming since the 1990s – BSE, Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) and the associated crisis in farm incomes – have taken some of the sting out of derisive terms like Barley Barons, the fact that farmers include among their ranks some of the wealthiest people in the country and that these people often receive colossal sums in agricultural subsidy still attracts attention from the media. The Duke of Westminster, for example, who frequently tops lists of the wealthy, pockets over three hundred thousand pounds in public subsidy annually (Oxfam, 2004: 3). The position of farmers in this regard has seemed increasingly anomalous as subsidies for other industries have been removed or refused. If the British shipbuilding, mining and car-manufacturing industries can be allowed to perish, why should farming be treated differently? Moreover, farmers have incurred unpopularity for their perceived contribution to the destruction of the rural environment. A pivotal moment was the publication of Marion Shoard’s The Theft of the Countryside in 1980, documenting a disturbing tale of hedgerow removal, heedless application of chemical pesticides and fertilisers, ploughing up of moorland and draining of marshes, at the expense of some of England’s rarest and most cherished wildlife (Shoard, 1980). Whether or not the environmentalist critique was exaggerated, the notion of a betrayal of England’s rural heritage by those to whom it was entrusted has sunk deeply into the public psyche. In the last few years it has been reinforced by the succession of food scares relating to animal

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diseases. Salmonella in hen eggs, BSE and FMD were all caused, or widely believed to have been caused, by a cavalier attitude amongst farmers to food safety. Salmonella spread through the unhygienic conditions in which battery hens were kept, BSE was caused by the feeding of offal containing rendered diseased cattle brains to cows, whilst FMD spread through the transport of live animals over long distances to slaughter houses. Farmers have not always been regarded as villains. They were particularly popular during and after the Second World War, when it was widely perceived that their remarkable achievements in ploughing up land for corn and in raising food output had saved the nation from the alternatives of starvation or submission (Howkins, 2003: 135, 140). It was also believed that they had suffered excessively between the wars due to a short-sighted cheap food policy that had exposed them to the full rigours of the global depression and left British agriculture in a perilously weak position in 1939. There was a parallel with public attitudes towards miners. Both groups were doing vital jobs for the nation, providing the basic necessities of food and fuel respectively, both had been victims of the depression and of the nowderided laissez-faire government response, both were regarded as working hard in difficult or even dangerous conditions, and both, it was felt, should be rewarded more appropriately in future. The standing of farmers in the public eye has fluctuated over a long period of time. During and after the First World War they were widely seen as profiteers: farmers had had a good war. In the nineteenth century, divergent stereotypes portrayed the farmer as either an uneducated, exploitative boor or as John Bull, the very embodiment of the nation (Taylor, 1992: 93–128). Politically, the central issue for over two hundred years has been whether farmers should be supported by the state. For about half this period farming has in fact been subsidized on a fairly extensive basis (until 1846 and from 1947). The main argument for doing so, powerfully reinforced by the experience of the two world wars, has throughout been the need to achieve or maintain food security. However, there have always been other arguments – agriculture’s contribution to the balance of payments, farmers as custodians (stewards) of the countryside, and the role of agriculture in the wider rural economy. One argument that is not currently as prominent in this country as elsewhere – in continental Europe or the USA, for example – is the value of farming as a way of life. Yet, from Cobbett onwards, at least until the Second World War and more mutedly thereafter, this perspective has been present in the English tradition. The following paragraphs reprise the argument.

FG One of the fundamental features of modern industrial economies is the division between workplace and home, work-time and leisure. This has often been criticized

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by sociologists and historians (Thompson, 1991). It creates an artificial divide between productive and non-productive time, arguably to the detriment of both. Work, when cast as the antithesis of leisure, becomes a chore, realizing the hypothesis of the classical economists, who assumed that work was a disutility in which rational beings would only engage if offered some other inducement (typically financial). When work and leisure are split from each other, work becomes something to be got through as quickly as possible, or even avoided altogether. Leisure fares no better, becoming passive, uncreative, defined by the absence of effort. We are well on our way to Richard Sennett’s hedonistic consumer society, where, infantilized by advertising, we adopt the open-mouthed posture of mere recipients (Sennett, 1977). Farming dictates a very different pattern of life. For virtually all farmers, work and home are the same place. The farmer is, in one sense, always at work because at any hour of the night or day a situation may arise that requires his (only five per cent are female) attention – a cow calving, sheep straying into an arable field, crops threatened by the weather. In another sense, the farmer is always at leisure, in that he is the master of his own time, and if he chooses to lean over the gate watching the world go by, go shooting, or for that matter put his feet up and watch television, he can do, or at least there is no one to prevent him but himself (Women’s Environmental Network, 2005). Closely related to the division between work and leisure is alienation: the situation in which the worker does not control the products of his or her own labour. In most industrial economies, it has become the norm to work for someone else. Again, farming avoids this. The independence of the farming life has been celebrated by writers from Horace onwards. In England the tradition can be traced back to the fourteenth century, when Langland’s Piers Plowman established the dignity of the independent husbandman as a literary trope. Perhaps every century, and many nations besides the English, has developed its own version of the myth: from the bold peasantry, their country’s pride of Oliver Goldsmith’s celebrated poem to Thomas Jefferson’s vision of agrarian democracy or even, in our own times, BBC Radio 4’s Phil Archer, born on St George’s Day and, according to the website, of the type seen by many as the backbone of rural England, the son of yeoman farming stock (BBC, 2006). The mythologizing is blatant, yet the persistence and popularity of this way of seeing farmers suggests it has at least some basis in fact. Whilst farmers have always been dependent on the vagaries of the weather, plant and animal diseases and the fluctuations of market prices, and more recently on government decisions, they have also always been their own masters, and potentially self-sufficient. Even today many farmers drink their own milk and eat their own eggs and meat; and if other foodstuffs like bread and fruit are more often purchased, this reflects convenience rather than necessity. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries farmers became increasingly unusual in this respect. The typical Englishman or woman in the 1880s, still more the 1930s

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or 1960s, lived in a town, worked in a workshop, factory or office and was employed by someone else. Yet farmers became if anything more independent in these years. The main source of dependency in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had been tenurial: most farmers rented land from a landowner, typically on an annual tenancy. How far English landlords provided de facto security of tenure is an unresolved question but there is no dispute that landlords exercised a large measure of political and religious influence over their tenants. In the years after the First World War this changed dramatically. It has been estimated that 25 per cent of the land in England changed hands in 1918–21; much was sold to sitting tenants, who were normally offered first refusal (Thompson, 1963: 22). The land sales continued through the Second World War up until landownership again came to seem an economic asset in the inflationary 1970s. By this time more than 60 per cent of farmers were owner occupiers. This not only gave farmers control of their land but largely removed the social stratum above them – the gentry, who had exercised such close social control over many nineteenth-century parishes. In other ways, too, farmers became more independent during the twentieth century. Government subsidies, especially after 1947, may have created a new form of dependence but under the aegis of the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) farmers succeeded in establishing a large measure of influence over agricultural policy. The security provided by subsidies without doubt much outweighed the initially not too irksome requirements of the governmental paymaster, although entry into the EEC in 1973 in the long run led to a less benign environment, with increasingly oppressive regulation and less generous assistance. Nevertheless, living standards for most farmers rose during and after the Second World War and remain at a much higher level than in the first half of the twentieth century. Farmers were, therefore, the dominant figures across much of rural England by the 1920s and gained a substantial measure of economic security in 1947. At the same time, advances in agricultural science and technology did something to emancipate farmers from their perennial foe, the weather. New methods of preserving fodder such as silage and haylage made livestock farmers less vulnerable to untimely rainfall during hay making, whilst combine harvesters did much the same for the grain harvest (Brassley, 1996: 63–87). More powerful tractors with wider tyres allowed the cultivation of land that would previously have been too wet to work. Most important of all was probably the development of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, the first removing the constraint of needing to provide enough manure to keep the land in good heart for arable farmers and the second going far to protect farmers from severe outbreaks of crop disease. The farmer’s experience of work, therefore, diverged significantly from that of much of the rest of the population in the twentieth century. At its best, this fostered, and fosters, the development of an unusual type of character. Ideally, the farmer is sure in and of himself. He knows his land, his work and his own powers.

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More often than is the case for most other occupations, farmers are likely to follow in the footsteps of a relative, so professional knowledge is accumulated through generations as well as acquired by the individual. Howard Newby and his fellow researchers found that almost 80 per cent of farmers in their 1000+ acres sample and 72 per cent of those in their 44-parish sample were the sons of farmers. No doubt a significant proportion of the remainder also had farming relatives (Newby et al., 1978: 61). The farmer has, or can have, something of the self-sufficiency of the craftsman. Just as the craftsman regards him or herself as the best judge of his work, so the farmer has standards of good husbandry that are beyond the power of assessment of the majority of the population (Fish et al., 2003: 19–41). As his own judge, the farmer has little to prove to anyone else. This sets him at a distance from a society of spin, increasingly media driven, in which status, reputation, cool and image are more and more the real currency, in which everyone whirls round everyone else in a ceaseless, breathless attempt to make an impression (Debord, 1994). There are other ways in which farmers stand apart from modern trends. In an advanced service economy like that of the UK, most work involves only the mind. More and more of us spend our weekdays tapping away at work stations. Others, the losers in a service economy, work almost solely with their bodies: the cleaners, builders and road makers. Farming, increasingly, involves both: familiarity with price trends, grant opportunities, the operation of complex, unfamiliar machinery and application of correct doses of chemicals are as much stock in trade of modern farming as is lifting a heavy bale, manhandling a recalcitrant animal or mucking out a byre. Alienation from nature is one of the most fundamental aspects of the modern human condition. Whilst specialization and the rise of factory farming (a revealing phrase both ways round – it shows what is being done to farming and how farming is, rightly, regarded as the antithesis of this) have brought some of this alienation into farming, farmers remain far closer to animal life and to nature than most of the rest of us. This is often mentioned when farmers are asked what the best thing about their job is (Voice of British Agriculture, n.d.). Another aspect of alienation is division from the family. Most modern couples, as Hardy recognized more than a century ago, are together only in their leisure: men and women associate, not in their labours, but in their pleasures merely (Hardy, 1985: 458). When a family shares only leisure, it shares what has become the passive, unproductive part of life. There is much less scope for comradeship. Farming, almost always, is a collective family work, and again became more so during the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, many farmers employed quite large numbers of workers but by 1950 most farmers employed only family members. The gender-based division of labour can, at its best, provide great strength to the family unit. The key figure here is the farmer’s wife. Gender roles in agriculture were redefined in the early

Introduction

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twentieth century: as dairying shifted from supplement to mainstay, so milkmaid was replaced by dairyman. Hay-making, weeding and stone picking lost their significance in women’s employment too. But laying hens and, on some farms, sheep remained important. The major new role was probably book keeping, which in the era of subsidies and production grants became quite central. Agriculture was unusual in that farm women were likely to be at least as well educated as their male counterparts by the mid-twentieth century. On the face of it, the new roles confined women increasingly to the farmhouse and its immediate environs but whilst this was sometimes constricting it could also be a source of great strength, putting the farmer’s wife at the centre of the farm operation and giving her an overview of it that her spouse did not necessarily possess. These complementary gender roles largely precluded competition, gave men and women separate but mutually necessary roles and could provide the basis for family relationships of great strength and durability, in a period in which marriage and divorce were often mentioned in the same breath. There is a strong inverse correlation between farming and divorce in the USA (Ruggles, 1997: 460). Were statistical evidence available it seems likely it would demonstrate the same in the UK. Perhaps as important is the relationship to place. Sociologists and human geographers increasingly value dwelling and farmers exemplify this more powerful, permanent and rooted relationship to place better than any other contemporary occupational group (Ingold, 2000). Because farmers work and live in the same place, and because their working and living space is a landscape rather than merely a house and garden, or a desk in someone else’s building, a much deeper relationship to place can develop. As Williams showed many years ago, by no means all farmers work land that their fathers worked before them (Williams, 1963). But land often does remain within the wider family for generations. That can, of course, produce agony if it becomes necessary to leave the land, but that is always the price of love. This is a story that has often been told, perhaps most recently and graphically by Richard Benson (2006). Although twentieth-century farming was, ideologically, individualistic and, experientially, family-based, farmers have also often played a crucial role in fostering local communities. To some extent farmers stepped into the role vacated by landowners when they withdrew from social leadership in the early twentieth century. Demographically and in terms of residential stability, farmers have been the most settled element in many rural communities, and their comparative wealth and possession of resources such as land, buildings and animals has enabled them to act as providers of leisure in many rural communities. Much twentieth-century rural leisure was farm-related or even farm-dependent: from Young Farmers Clubs, agricultural shows, sheep dog trials, point-to-points and gymkhanas, which were so in obvious ways, through to cricket matches and village fetes that took place on farm land. In a study of large East Anglian farms by Newby et al., 60 per cent of

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farmers belonged to local clubs or associations and 36 per cent held office in one or more such organization (Newby et al., 1978: 209–13). Whether farmers’ community leadership role was an unmitigated good has been questioned, for example by Newby, who argues that in many villages encapsulated communities developed in the second half of the twentieth century (Newby, 1985: 169). These consisted of the rump of the agricultural population, a decreasing presence in many villages as counter-urbanization diluted the agricultural component of village England. From Newby’s point of view, encapsulated communities were in a sense false communities, because farm workers had little choice about entering them and forwent their capacity for taking action against their employers by doing so. More certain is the extent to which the distinctiveness of farmers’ lives and their myriad shared concerns (the weather, prices, technological and legislative change to mention only the most obvious) brought farmers close together and created a strong shared sense of identity. This was fostered by the agricultural press – by the later twentieth century Farmers’ Weekly could be found in virtually every farm house in the country – and by the NFU, which, in turn, it helped to strengthen. It was partly the impressive cohesion of the farming community that allowed it to punch so much above its weight politically. This cohesion was expressed not only by membership of the NFU, or, for the young, the Young Farmers Clubs, and by shared collective leisure pursuits but also by common dress codes (the cloth cap, Barbour jacket and green wellingtons) and by friendship and intermarriage patterns indicative of an increasingly distinctive, and closed, social group (Newby et al.: 209–13). All these things, of course, contain within themselves the seeds of their own destruction. They are what farming can be at its best, when everything is working well, and all the forces are aligned. Of course, it is often not so. Family ties can become binds, within which terrible wounds can be inflicted. Precisely because of the rare fusion of work and family, there is often no place to escape if relationships do fail. Whilst working together can reinforce and deepen relationships where those concerned work together effectively and constructively, it can subject relationships to greater strains than they have to bear otherwise. Where a family member is perceived not to be pulling their weight, to be an obstacle to progress or in some other way to be the weak link in a chain, there is scope for almost unlimited hurt and bitterness. The destructiveness with which farm relationships can turn in on themselves is staple fare for novelists of rural life. What is Wuthering Heights but a tale of family life in an isolated upland farmhouse? Constance Holme’s The Lonely Plough (1914) picks up on one of the most potent destructive forces intrinsic to family farming: the generational conflict between the father and the son, often expressed as a conflict between traditional and new methods. The situation is inherently unstable, as the heir apparent waits to step into his father’s shoes. Holme’s Wolf Winnerah wants his son to commit himself to the family farm

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but the son is drawn to wider horizons and ultimately emigrates to Canada. A contemporary novel, Sheila Kaye-Smith’s Sussex Gorse (1916), graphically charts Reuben Backfield’s rise to farming fortune, as he ruthlessly exploits his intellectually deficient brother and incurs the bitter hatred of many of his numerous progeny. Just as the close emotional bonds of family farming can turn to wormwood, so can the independence of the farmer. Standing alone can become isolation and suspicion of strangers. How many farm gates have ‘Beware of the dog’ affixed to them? How many woods are marked ‘Private – keep out. Trespassers will be prosecuted’? Not all tales of farmers with shotguns warding off unwelcome walkers are apocryphal. The infamous case of Tony Martin, jailed for shooting dead a burglar, makes the point. Such was Martin’s fear of burglars that he slept fully clothed, pump-action shotgun by his side, in a house booby-trapped to imperil and deter intruders (Gillan, n.d.). Walking along a well-signposted public right of way in rural Leicestershire a few years ago, I passed in front of a farm house and was greeted by the farmer with the angry, inarticulate words ‘It’s illegal’. The literal meaning was obscure but the message could not have been clearer. Even at its best, farming is a hard life. The integration of work and leisure may correspond to an ideal, but when times are hard it can mean a life of unremitting toil, unrelieved by holidays. Despite mechanization farming remains hard physical work, and most farmers of a certain age bear visible marks of this: weather-beaten faces, broken nails, scars and not infrequently deformities. Farming is more dangerous than most occupations: the rate of accidents and fatalities is higher than for any other occupation apart from mining, quarrying and waste processing. Agriculture’s rate of fatal injury per worker in 2004/5 was 10.4 per 100,000, compared with an all-industries average of just 0.7 (Health and Safety Commission, 2005). Independence and close communities have contributed to as well as been fostered by a growing sense of separation and alienation from the rest of the community, a painful thing in an otherwise increasingly integrated national culture. Nature remains harsh, and living close to nature is so too. Death and killing are almost daily parts of life for most farmers. An inescapable contradiction in the life of the livestock farmer is between caring for animals and sending them to the slaughterhouse. Farmers find various ways of getting round this, from keeping old animals as pets to having nothing to do with the slaughterhouse. The contradiction was seen at its clearest during the Foot and Mouth crisis of 2001. The trauma many farmers suffered when their herds and flocks were compulsorily slaughtered was utterly authentic, yet seemed incomprehensible or even hypocritical to many urban observers who pointed out that the same farmers would have dispatched their animals to the abattoir in a few months or years anyway, and that their livelihoods depended on doing so. Arable farmers escape the contradiction: although they, too, must kill rabbits, pigeons and other pests to survive economically, they do not kill what they care for.

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All this notwithstanding, it can hardly be questioned that farming holds the potential for an unusually integrated, satisfying and deeply-rooted way of life. Why, then, is this argument for agricultural support so rarely heard in Britain? One reason is that, given the UK’s island-nation status, the strategic argument that national security requires food self-sufficiency has always been easy to make, in contrast to the harder but perhaps ultimately more compelling social argument for family farming. Another reason is that England, especially, lacks an authentic peasant tradition. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the politics of agriculture in the industrial state were being formulated, English farming was dominated, probably numerically and certainly representationally, by tenant farmers employing often quite large numbers of workers. The farmers – and landowners – who argued so vigorously for agriculture protection before and after 1846 were not lone individualists living by the sweat of their brows. Arguments for agricultural protection were, accordingly, formulated more in terms of food security and national interest than in terms of the social value of family farming. To some extent family farmers have, perhaps, been poorly served by their leaders. Even in the nineteenth century, it was questionable whether landowners acted as effective and reliable spokesmen for the agricultural interest and at time of strain the cracks showed, as with the development of the anti-League that sought to prevent landowning politicians reneging on their commitment to protectionism, or later in the nineteenth century in the debates over tenant right (LawsonTancred, 1960: 206–12; McQuiston, 1973: 95–113). In the twentieth century farmers found their own voice, but the leadership of the NFU came disproportionately from the ranks of large, labour-employing farmers, many of them ex-gentry, and its arguments often reflected this, emphasizing the economic or latterly environmental rather than social significance of agriculture. The skewed leadership of the NFU strengthened the orientation of most English farmers towards the Conservative Party. But the twentieth-century Conservative Party was fundamentally the party of capital rather than land and by the latter part of the century had long jettisoned any pretensions to agricultural paternalism in favour of a free-market outlook that left little room for arguments based on agriculture as a way of life. Nor was the Labour Party likely to develop more sympathetic policy positions. In the 1930s Labour adopted an emphatically statist model of agricultural progress, predicated on farming in the public interest. Labour was more concerned with promoting efficiency and maximizing food output in the interests of its predominantly urban working class electorate than it was in farmers in their own right (Griffiths, 2006). Nevertheless, in the long run the social argument for family farming is a surer one than any of those that have hitherto overshadowed it. In an increasingly globalized world, where war between the industrial powers becomes more and more impractical, and where the leading nations possess such deadly arsenals that

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the costs of war become unthinkable, the argument that was farming’s trump card for much of the twentieth century is no longer so compelling, although national food self-sufficiency remains an important objective to many, including several of the contributors to this volume (for a recent restatement of the traditional case, see Lord Deedes (2006)). Nor is agriculture’s relevance to the balance of payments what it once was, since following the prediction of Engel’s Law the proportion of expenditure committed to food has declined as the nation has become wealthier. Even the claim that agriculture must be supported because it alone can safeguard the English landscape, the mantra of the Scott Report of 1942, is less compelling than sometimes assumed. It depends upon the curious, and uniquely English, assumption that nature cannot be trusted to look after itself. In the end, all the other arguments are mere justifications. It is because most farmers believe that farming is a good way of life, and want to be able to continue with it, that they seek government support – and what could be more sane and reasonable than that? It is true that to argue on this basis implies a potentially quite drastic challenge to current assumptions about national objectives and decision-making criteria. One of the basic postulates of neoclassical economics is that the market mechanism maximizes utility. Governments since the 1980s have held this as an article of faith but it tends to privilege consumption over production, even though most people of working age spend more of their time and derive more of their satisfaction producing than consuming (Argyle, 2002). It is too late for social arguments of this kind to save the British coal industry. But we must start somewhere, and there is nowhere more obvious or important to do so than farming. How this should best be done, and whether other ways of life deserve support on similar grounds, are questions beyond the scope of this essay. My intention is merely to point out that there are strong grounds for regarding farming as a good way of life, that it is regrettable when farmers are forced to quit agriculture involuntarily, and that this is, ceteris paribus, a reason to support farming.

GF If farming and its future lie at the core of the countryside, the debates about the countryside extend outwards like ripples. The chapters that follow attempt to shed light on some of these debates by setting them in historical perspective and considering how they arose, why they persisted and the effectiveness or otherwise of solutions to them that have been adopted in the past. The scale and complexity of the present-day countryside crisis is such that no book could do justice to all aspects of it, and we are conscious of omissions. Perhaps the most notable of these relates to the issue of access to the land, the conflict between ramblers and

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landowners over it, and the political struggle for the right to roam . This was the subject of a paper by Marion Shoard at the conference from which this book germinated, but unfortunately the author was not in a position to update her paper to take account of the effects of the Countryside and Rights of Way Act (2000) and the editors were unable to find a suitable replacement. Considerations of space prevented us from including chapters on planning, house-building and preservationism, on counterurbanization and its consequences for the rural community and on the role of supermarkets in undermining farm incomes and local food outlets, to mention just some of the more obvious issues we would like to have included (Blythman, 2005; Lawrence, 2004). The emergence of farmers’ markets since the 1990s is an especially interesting and potentially promising development (Holloway and Kneafsey, 2000: 285–99). Gaps notwithstanding, the chapters that follow cover a wide range of perspectives and problems, informed by a shared concern with setting them in their long-term context. In Chapter One, Simon Miller looks at the relationship between farming, land use and leisure provision, through the prism of the life and work of Sir Leslie Scott. Scott’s eponymous report of 1942 probably did more to shape the countryside than any other policy document before or since, and left a legacy of unresolved contradictions with which we are still struggling. Scott’s vision was of a traditional countryside, in which mixed farming would support a healthy agricultural population. Identifying the rural landscape as the nation’s heritage, Scott assumed that the chief threat came from urban and industrial expansion and that farmers were its natural guardians. The 1947 Town and Country Planning Act did much to prevent such encroachment, whilst the Agriculture Act of the same year established farming on a more secure economic basis. Yet in failing to recognize the conflict between maximizing food output and conserving nature, especially in the context of rapid agricultural modernization, the Scott Report and the legislation of the 1940s set the stage for what was to become a bitter conflict between farmers and environmentalists. As Philip Conford shows in the second chapter, this was a conflict that had been anticipated by a group of far-sighted farmers, landowners and agricultural scientists in the 1930s and 1940s, who advocated organic farming as an alternative. Furthermore, these early organicist thinkers offered solutions to problems such as soil erosion and exhaustion, the poor nutritional quality of mass-produced food and the dangers of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, that became major issues in the second half of the twentieth century, solutions that are perhaps even more pertinent now than when they were originally formulated. In the next chapter, Sir John Marsh takes the story forward to the present day, demonstrating how a combination of government and EU policy, an intensifying price squeeze and changing public attitudes put farmers under immense pressure by the end of the twentieth-century. Marsh considers possible ways out of this

Introduction

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crisis of agriculture but his conclusion echoes Miller’s insistence that we now need to face up to the conflict between production and amenity, development and conservation, that the Scott Report’s elision of beauty and use so damagingly evaded. The fourth chapter, by Berkeley Hill, draws attention to one of the major casualties of the direction in which post-war British agriculture developed: the continuing failure to improve, or in some cases even maintain, the incomes of small farmers. Hill argues that to do so will require a substantial re-targeting of farm support measures, away from production incentives towards poverty reduction. Such a shift has long been mooted but, Hill emphasizes, will remain difficult to bring about until more precise statistics on agricultural incomes are collected. Perhaps the most dramatic manifestation of the agricultural crisis in recent years has been the succession of animal diseases that have afflicted British farming since the 1980s, and the often unsatisfactory response of government to them. Paul Brassley takes a longer historical view of the public management of animal disease. Whilst he hesitates to draw lessons from previous outbreaks, since the trajectory of past and present animal diseases may differ, he tentatively suggests that success appears to be associated with widespread agreement on causes and control methods, rapid impact of control methods, and perhaps a feeling of identity between those affected and the rest of the community, whereas failure goes with differing perceptions of what constitutes truth, arguments within professions, especially failure to agree on the causes of disease, argument between professions, and interdepartmental disputes. He points out that BSE had all the attributes that appear to militate towards failure. Apart from the question of how to respond to BSE and FMD, hunting has probably been the most fiercely contested rural controversy of the last few years. Graham Cox examines the history of the Countryside Movement and its successor the Countryside Alliance, demonstrating how it became intertwined with a much broader and only loosely-connected range of issues. The concept of the countryside, which Cox argues is an essentially imagined one, is the only thing that gives unity to these disparate concerns. Imagined communities, however, as Benedict Anderson reminded us, play a crucial role in the life of nations, and Cox suggests that the Countryside Alliance’s reworking of the concept of the countryside as being primarily about people represents a positive development in a nation notable for its landscape without figures (Anderson, 1991). Less promising, however, is the Alliance’s town-versus-country rhetoric. The controversy over hunting and shooting is bound, Cox believes, to end in marginalization and defeat for field sports if they do not succeed in creating a bridge to the urban voters who are, ultimately, their political masters. The passage of the Hunting Act 2004, after Cox’s chapter had been completed, appears to support this, even if experience to date suggests that most hunts have found ways to continue chasing and killing foxes without technically infringing the new law.

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One of the problems of the contemporary countryside to which the Countryside Alliance has given most publicity is the low incomes of some who live there. The Alliance has been concerned to emphasize that it is not just farmers but a much larger, if more diverse, rural constituency that suffers from material deprivation, including many farm and other land workers, the unemployed, the young (often) and the elderly. Paul Milbourne considers the history of academic analysis of rural poverty. His conclusions parallel those of Berkeley Hill on farm incomes: there are frustrating statistical lacunae in the evidence available to us, which hamper both our understanding and effective policy formation. In particular, we need to pay more attention to the geographical dimension of rural poverty and its causes, to individual trajectories into and out of poverty, and, especially, to the relationship between income poverty and other processes of social disadvantage and exclusion. The last chapter, by Alun Howkins, takes a step back and asks how the countryside, in the broadest sense, has become so contested. Howkins traces the emergence of the cultural centrality of the English countryside to the early years of the twentieth century. He demonstrates that, whilst élite and popular, urban and rural and agricultural and non-agricultural versions of this ideal were differently inflected, the significance and value of the countryside to the nation was accepted almost without question across the political, social and intellectual spectrum by the mid-twentieth century. Tensions generated by urban expansion, agricultural intensification, environmental damage and pressure on farm incomes fostered increasingly bitter conflict between agriculturalists and non-agriculturalists. But the irony, Howkins believes, is that the countryside so fiercely fought over no longer really exists. The decline of mixed farming, with its harmony between people, agriculture and landscape, and of farm-based communities, has passed the point of no return. This may seem excessively pessimistic but Howkins is by no means alone in his bleak diagnosis (see Harvey, 1997; O’Hagan, 2001; North, 2001). If we accept this, the lesson a historical perspective teaches is that many of the most hotly-contested conflicts over the modern countryside are no longer worth pursuing, because they draw their energy from assumptions that no longer obtain. This is certainly plausible. Yet farming, food production and the land are too fundamental ever to be entirely free of controversy. It is hoped that this collection has demonstrated that many of the issues currently generating so much debate have been with us at least since the dawn of the industrial era and in some cases much longer. The rising emphasis on the environment, coupled with unprecedented demands on the land for leisure and, globally at least, for food production, look set if anything to intensify the pressures on (and hence contestation of) the countryside. The underlying dilemma, the ur-contest if you like, as Keith Thomas identified many years ago, is the paradoxical revulsion from domination of nature that humanity develops as its practical mastery increases, and the impetus to let nature back in:

Introduction

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The early modern period had thus generated feelings which would make it increasingly hard for men to come to terms with the uncompromising methods by which the domination of their species had been secured. On the one hand they saw an incalculable increase in the comfort and physical well-being or welfare of human beings; on the other they perceived a ruthless exploitation of other forms of animate life. There was thus a growing conflict between the new sensibilities and the material foundations of human life. A mixture of compromise and concealment has so far prevented this conflict from having to be fully resolved. But the issue cannot be completely evaded and it can be relied on to recur. It is one of the contradictions upon which modern civilization may be said to rest (Thomas, 1984: 302–3). Such fundamental conflicts will prove difficult to resolve. Yet not all aspects of our relationship with the land are so intractable, and it is hoped that this book demonstrates that there are under-explored avenues which could ease some of our countryside contests. Recognition of the value of farming as a way of life, the further development of organic farming, better collection of agricultural statistics and evidence about rural poverty and a more unified approach to the management of animal diseases are amongst these. Countryside controversies may be a necessary, even perhaps healthy, part of the modern condition, but a better understanding of their origins and development could help to create a more harmonious relationship between countryside and nation in the future. REFERENCES

Anderson, Benedict (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso Argyle, Michael (2002) The Psychology of Happiness, Hove: Routledge BBC (2006) http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/archers/whos_who/characters/who_ philarcher.shtml [accessed 18 July 2006] Benson, Richard (2006) The Farm: The Story of One Family and the English Countryside, London: Penguin Blythman, Joanna (2005) Shopped: The Shocking Power of British Supermarkets, London: Fourth Estate Brassley, P. (1996) ‘Silage in Britain, 1880–1980: the delayed adoption of an innovation’, AgHR 44, 63–87 Countryside Agency (2001) The State of the Countryside, London Debord, Guy (1987) The Society of the Spectacle, New York: Zone Books (first published in Paris, 1967)

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Deedes, W. F. (2006) ‘A Secure food supply is key to our defence’, Daily Telegraph, 4 August DEFRA (2004) The Rural Strategy, http://www.defra.gov.uk/rural/strategy/annex_ b.htm [accessed 18 July 2006] Fish, R., S. Seymour, and C. Watkins (2003) ‘Conserving English landscapes: land managers and agri-environmental policy’, Environment and Planning 35: 19–41 Gillan, Audrey, ‘Bleak world of the loner who killed’, Guardian Unlimited: http:// www.guardian.co.uk/martin/article/0,,214336,00.html [accessed 25 July 2006] Griffiths, Clare (2006) ‘Farming in the public interest: constructing and reconstructing agriculture on the political left’, in Paul Brassley, Jeremy Burchardt and Lynne Thompson, The English Countryside Between the Wars: Regeneration or Decline? Woodbridge: Boydell Press: 163–74 Hardy, Thomas (1985) Far From the Madding Crowd, Harmondsworth: Penguin (first published, 1874) Harvey, Graham (1997) The Killing of the Countryside, London: Cape Health and Safety Commission (2005) Statistics of Fatal Injuries 2004/5, London Holloway, Lewis and Moyal Kneafsey (2000) ‘Reading the space of the farmers market: a case study from the United Kingdom’, Sociologia Ruralis 40/3: 285–99 Howkins, Alun (2003) The Death of Rural England, London: Routledge Ingold, Tim (2000) The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, London: Routledge Lawrence, Felicity (2004) Not on the Label: What Really Goes into the Food on Your Plate, London: Penguin Lawson-Tancred, Mary (1960) ‘The Anti-League and the Corn Law crisis of 1846’, Historical Journal 3/2: 206–12 McQuiston, J. R. (1973) ‘Tenant Right: farmer against landlord in Victorian England, 1847–1883, Agricultural History 47/2: 95–113 Nash, Roderick Frazier (1967) Wilderness and the American Mind, New Haven: Yale University Press Newby, Howard (1985) Green and Pleasant Land? Social Change in Rural England, Hounslow: Wildwood House Newby, Howard, Colin Bell, David Rose and Peter Saunders (1978) Property, Paternalism and Power: Class and Control in Rural England, London: Hutchinson North, Richard A. E. (2001) The Death of British Agriculture, London: Duckworth O’Hagan, Andrew (2001) The End of British Farming, London: Profile Books Oxfam (2004) Spotlight on Subsidies: Cereal Injustice under the CAP in Britain, Oxfam Briefing Paper 55 Ruggles, Steven (1997) ‘The Rise of separation and divorce in the United States, 1880–1980’, Demography, 34/4 Sennett, Richard (1977) The Fall of Public Man, New York: Knopf Shoard, Marion (1980) The Theft of the Countryside, London: Maurice Temple Smith

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Taylor, Miles (1992) ‘John Bull and the iconography of public opinion in England, c.1712–1929’, Past and Present 134: 93–128 Thomas, Keith (1984) Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800, Harmondsworth: Penguin Thompson, E. P. (1991) ‘Time, work discipline and industrial capitalism’, reprinted in Customs in Common, New York: The New Press, 352–403 Thompson, F. M. L. (1963) English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century, London: Routledge Voice of British Agriculture (n.d.) http://www.voiceofbritishagriculture.com/ documents/meet%20a%20farmer.pdf Williams, W. M. (1963) A Westcountry Village. Ashworthy: Family, Kinship and Land, London: Routledge Women’s Environmental Network (2005) Why Women Matter to the Environment, London: WEN. See also on http://www.wen.org.uk/health/Reports/ whywomen.pdf [accessed 25 July 2006] SUGGESTED FURTHER READING

Anthony Barnett and Roger Scruton (eds) Town and Country, Jonathan Cape, 2001 Richard Benson, The Farm: The Story of One Family and the English Countryside, Penguin, 2006 Countryside Alliance/Various Authors, Liberty and Livelihood: A Portrait of Life in Rural Britain, Travelman Publishing, 2003 Graham Harvey, The Killing of the Countryside, Jonathan Cape, 1997 Alun Howkins, The Death of Rural England: A Social History of the Countryside Since 1900, Routledge, 2003 Richard A. E. North, The Death of British Agriculture: The Wanton Destruction of a Key Industry, Duckworth, 2001 Andrew O’Hagan, The End of British Farming, Profile Books, 2001 Marion Shoard, A Right to Roam, Oxford University Press, 1999 Michael Sissons (ed.) A Countryside for All: The Future of Rural Britain, Vintage, 2001 Joan Thirsk, Alternative Agriculture: A History, Oxford University Press, 1997 Patrick Wright, The Village that Died for England: The Strange Story of Tyneham (revised edition), Faber, 2002

1 LAND USE AND LEISURE: LESLIE SCOTT AND THE CONTESTED COUNTRYSIDE

Simon Miller

CONTESTATION AND THE PUBLIC ARENA

The first half of the twentieth century in England represented a unique break from the past. It was essentially urban and industrial, and it also featured the associated trends of the dissolution of privilege and an explosion in mass communication. The longer-term effect has been that issues are now contested in an increasingly congested space with less and less clear consensus on any subject. The countryside is a case in point. And yet the argument made here is that the English countryside has until recently been largely uncontested, and that what debate and difference there was focused not on what purpose the land should serve (and how), but for whose leisure and diversion. This paper attempts to shed light on contemporary problems by examining the peculiarly English tendency to subordinate the function of production from the land in favour of its function as an amenity. The public arena has developed a vocabulary and cluster of images appropriate to this limited contestation – with the result that land as an amenity has become increasingly public, and its use as a site for leisure and diversion markedly less élitist and exclusive. The paper here deals with the development of this unusual subordination of production to the interests of consumption, and how a congruous set of assumptions and images emerged as a dominant discourse within the public arena. Given the scale of such a project, various synoptic figures will be deployed to illustrate this homogenizing trend. Pride of place in this approach will be given to Sir Leslie Scott. The paper argues the case for the emergence of this discourse within the twentieth century, but it should be noted that this periodization is of course mainly for convenience. In terms of the way in which the trend was a function of an increasingly urban society in England, it is important to pinpoint 1846 as a crucial moment of change – the moment when the Tories, despite Disraeli, adopted the

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Liberal ideology of laissez-faire and repealed the Corn Laws. A century was to pass before the fundamental disposition on the hegemony of free trade and the role of British manufacturing in the global economy was effectively challenged. This same period might also be seen as critical to the forging of a modern national identity around the image of the English countryside. It witnessed the rise and fall of Empire; it saw the gradual eclipse of privilege and the commensurate emergence of ‘the people’ by way of universal suffrage, extended education, trade union rights and mass media; and it was also punctuated by the unprecedented trauma of two world wars fought in the name of shared principles and a coherent national identity. Whereas exhortation to arms in the first war had been fronted by a hero of Empire, the campaign for 1939–45 appealed to a very different and domestic identity. Epitomizing this was the poster put out by the Ministry of Information early in the war with the slogan of ‘This is your Country. Fight for it now’ – plastered against a backcloth of rural serenity, the green essence of Englishness: rolling hills, hedgerows, a copse, a church spire, and the pastoral scene of the shepherd and his flock. This rural idyll formed the centrepiece of state propaganda as the core value of the nation. It also featured as a key part of the image projected over the air waves. Tom Harrisson, founder of Mass Observation, celebrated ornithologist, and ironically an expatriate profoundly at odds with much of English society, slipped directly into this symbolic idiom for a broadcast during the blitz of 1941. In this he drew on the powerful icons of the English countryside as representative of home, familiarity, timelessness and the predictable, all projected as the antitheses to the barbaric abnormality of Nazi air raids. His words constructed precisely the same imagery as the MoI poster. He established the mood as he looked out from his window as: the utterly normal life of a sunny spring landscape of trees and downs; daffodils in the orchard, cows moving slowly across the meadow, the chestnut buds almost breaking, the tap of the village blacksmith’s anvil ringing out in the clear air … just like a thousand peace-time springs, the rural England of legend. Harrisson thus projected the sacred essence of the nation, the timeless normality violated by the ‘utterly abnormal night-time thrum-thrum of Goering’s bombers’. He concluded his broadcast by emphasizing this antithesis – that life in Britain was ‘a mixture of the normal and the abnormal’, and by evoking the prospect that the nation might soon be restored to an existence ruled by the natural pulse of seasonal certainties. In a subsequent broadcast this theme was reiterated by the depiction of the evacuees, forced from their urban homes by Goering’s bombers, but paradoxically offered once again the chance to learn ‘the meaning of the seasons

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and the story of our soil’ and to be brought up on ‘real life instead of the street corner and the cinema queue’ (Mass Observation, 1939–40). Tom Harrisson was hardly ‘representative’ of the nation. The whole idea of such typicality is rife with problems, but nonetheless his views can serve to suggest the presence of a national mood. A mood rendered all the more dominant by the steady accumulation of public articulation previously as routine text and a quotidian visual presence in advertising and the press, and ultimately as wartime propaganda. Given Harrisson’s lifelong enthusiasm for natural history it is highly likely that his view of Englishness, at least as a positive force, derived from the aesthetic qualities of the classic landscape, and to this extent he was speaking with authentic conviction. But his broadcast theme also coincided with findings produced by Mass Observation when investigators had been asked to explore the open question of what Britain ‘meant’ to those interviewed. The research showed how the emotive identification of people was with ‘England’ rather than ‘Britain’ and that their entanglement was largely embedded in images of the countryside. Representative of such responses was the young male government employee who was recorded as saying: ‘I love England, her fields, her woods, her homes, her Wordsworth, I love her soil’. Similarly, a middle-aged female secretary was cited as typical with her views of England as ‘Devonshire chessboard fields and red cliffs, the country back of the Sussex Downs’, and another, simply ‘a city dweller’, responding by saying that the question flooded his mind with ‘Memories of many happy hours spent cycling in all the counties of these islands – the leafy lanes of Warwick and Worcester, the peacefulness of the Cotswold country, the hills and mountains of the Lake District’. These quotes were selected as representative of the flavour of people’s unstructured and spontaneous responses. As a supplement to this part of the survey the Observers also asked people to arrange various constructs of national identity in rank order of their importance and the intensity of feeling they evoked. Each construct was thereby registered with a percentile weighting such that the various components of national identity were listed in ascending order of significance. The results provide an insight into how the MoI poster campaign and Harrisson’s broadcasts were embedded within a wider contemporary discourse on nationality and core values. ‘Religion’ registered 10, ‘music’ 12, ‘sport’ 13, ‘architecture’ and ‘patriotic songs’ both 17, ‘literature’ 18, ‘royalty and flags’ 20, ‘climate’ 22, ‘history’, ‘town scenes’ and ‘freedom’ all 45, ‘home’ 62, ‘people’ 67 and ‘politics’ 70. But finally, irrespective of age, gender, place of residence and occupational/class categorization, ‘country scenes’ was ranked first in every single interview and so registered 100 (Mass Observation, 1941). This pervasive idea of Englishness as a Constable canvas was of course nothing new. Although it had preceded Stanley Baldwin as an élite discourse within the Romantic turn against Victorian industrialism, it is probably fair to say that Baldwin’s unprecedented combination of Tory populism and artful use of the mass

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media played a crucial role in giving the imagery a more inclusive appeal. Baldwin’s genius lay in his ability to refract a subtle change of national emphasis and in doing so, added the idea of One Nation to the Tory lexicon. As chief executive of a multinational engineering company, he was acutely aware of the turbulent forces of second-phase industrial modernization. His primary concern was in the securing of social cohesion in the midst of such far-reaching disruption, and he knew full well that the old national rallying cry of a shared patriotism in the face of a foreign foe had been fatally undermined by the traumatic and inglorious experiences of the Boer War and the First World War. He was convinced of the need to minimize class divisions in part by articulating a unifying solidarity based on a sense of community ‘at home’. ‘Homely’ was a word which was often used to describe his demeanour, and his use of the microphone gave the people a sense of their being drawn into the intimacy of a fireside chat. And so it was that J. C. Squire commented in his Observer review of Baldwin’s collection of essays On England that the work was of ‘a thoroughly representative Englishman: not the common man, but one expressing what the common man feels and cannot say for himself’. The collection was published in 1926 just before the General Strike and included the now famous eulogy he had given at the 1924 Annual Dinner of the Royal Society of St George, plainly titled ‘England’. It was this piece which so accurately anticipated the mood of the people interviewed by Mass Observation in 1941. As so clearly for them, also to Baldwin, ‘England is the country and the country is England’. Equally, not withstanding their clear political differences, Harrisson deliberately alluded to Baldwin’s address by echoing his original references to ‘the tinkle of the hammer on the anvil in the country smithy’ and to the timeless quality of the English landscape. Furthermore, Harrisson also accentuated the wholesome innocence of the rural lifestyle, ‘natural’ as opposed to the artificiality of ‘the street corner and cinema queue’. In Baldwin’s version it was the plough team profiled on the brow of the hill which embodied the one eternal sight of England, and he grieved that it was no longer the inheritance of the majority of English people. In his search for a value which might underwrite a broad national solidarity, Baldwin eulogized the English countryside and its idealized constituents: ‘they ought to be the inheritance of every child born into this country,’ he wrote, … [since] ‘the love of these things is innate and inherited in our people. It makes for that love of home, one of the strongest features of our race’. Harrisson drew directly from this well of established sentiment and he was aware that his audience would appreciate the implicit tribute to Baldwin’s forerunner – after all, On England had run through five impressions in 1926 alone, appeared in a Cheap Edition in 1927, a Popular Edition in 1933, and was then reissued as a 6d. Penguin four times on the eve of the outbreak of war in 1939. Little wonder too that the Director General of the BBC was instructed to bring Baldwin out of retirement so that his

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skill in evoking the core values of the people might be put to use in the campaign to stiffen national resolve for another taxing confrontation with Germany. These emotive themes of Baldwin and Harrisson have withstood the passage of time. The popular appeal of the English landscape as sacred heritage has grown ever more pervasive and axiomatic. England remains the countryside, and so it came as no surprise in the summer of 1996 that all three leaders of the political tradition – Tory, Liberal and Labour – wrote jointly to The Times (as though this newspaper momentarily recaptured its traditional status as semi-official organ of the state) to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England (CPRE) (The Times, 15 June 1996). On this unique subject there could be no disagreement or space for debate. The effect of this assertion of political consensus was to confirm and consolidate the core value of the countryside for the nation, connecting Major, Ashdown and Blair to Stanley Baldwin and beyond in an unbroken tradition of over seventy years. No other aspect of our lives commands such automatic, almost casual, endorsement or enjoys such uncontentious status as foundational to the national interest. The point here is simply that the countryside has not been contested, or at least that it has no recent history of inclusion within the political realm of debate and dissension whether parliamentary or within civil society. Even the significance and political importance of the Revolution to French national identity is more open to discussion and contestation. As a consequence, the sudden arrival of a range of contemporary issues around food safety, rights to roam, hunting with dogs, environmental sustainability, and efficient communication, all of which impinge on the central problem of land use, has created serious difficulties for the political system. To appreciate the complexity of this peculiarly English situation is an exacting task, but it may be eased by approaching it through the biography of the synoptic figure of Sir Leslie Scott. THE SCOTT REPORT AND THE LANGUAGE OF TRADITION: LANDSCAPE AND THE YEOMAN

Leslie Scott was a Lancastrian, born in Wigan in 1869, and looked strikingly similar to John Thaw in the role of television’s Kavanagh QC. He was the author of the Royal Commission enquiry into Land Utilization in Rural Areas, and his findings have carried his name to this day as the Scott Report. It was the third in a cluster of four – Barlow, Uthwatt and Dower being the others – which provided the basis for crucial post-war policies on land use and planning, legislated and implemented in 1947 by the Attlee government. The Report was published in early August 1942 amidst widespread press and official approval. Typical of the reception was the view of Christopher Hussey, author of such works as The Picturesque (1927) and The Fairy Land of England (1924), vigilant guardian of the English landscape, and on the

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staff of Country Life magazine from 1921 and its editor from 1933 to 1940. He wrote privately to Scott on 12 August 1942: I have read the whole report, including the Minority report and the rejoinder to it, and must tell you what a magnificent job I think you have made of it. The country will owe you and your committee a tremendous debt for stating so frankly the fate awaiting it if the economist principles are given their head. It is, incidentally, pleasant to find the extent to which the Report endorses the conclusions of the various series in Country Life which have worked the same fields. (Scott, 1942) Country Life, of course, was a forthright advocate of the Baldwinite view that the English countryside represented the core values of the nation and that this character depended upon the continuity of a traditional way of life centred on the great estate and the pursuit of aristocratic leisure. Hussey and Country Life were, like Baldwin, unequivocally opposed to exposing the countryside to the forces of modernity in any shape or form, although neither had any problem with the idea of progress in the urban and industrial spheres – the stereotypically eternal countryside provided an exact alternative to the thrusting dynamism of the city, the relationship constituting an essentially English equilibrium. And so Hussey and his ilk were right to enthuse about the Report. The brief had been dangerously open and far-reaching – on ‘land utilization in rural areas’ – as originally conceived by Lord Reith as Minister for Reconstruction at the beginning of 1941. Opinion at the time, especially as the nation faced the threat of crossChannel air destruction from Nazi bombers, was focused on the way in which both population and industry had tended to concentrate increasingly in the vulnerable and congested areas of the south-east. The Committee was thus directed: to consider the conditions which should govern building and other constructional development in country areas consistently with the maintenance of agriculture, and in particular the factors affecting the location of industry, having regard to economic operation, part time and seasonal employment, the well-being of rural communities and the preservation of rural amenities. (Scott, 1943: iv) Doctrinaire advocates of rural tradition and the English landscape, such as Christopher Hussey, were acutely aware that his open brief threatened to expose the sacred countryside to the possibility of radical change, the forces of modernization and even the dispersal of industry. These were drastic threats identified in Hussey’s letter by ‘economist principles’. In the event, they were able to join Hussey in August 1942 with a deep sigh of relief that such ‘economist’

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heresies had been marginalized to the same Minority status they held in society as a whole. All such avid readers were reassured at the very beginning of the Report. The fundamental English essence of a balanced reciprocity between Town and Country was given pride of place in the Committee’s findings. Echoing, amongst a multitude of others, Blake, Baldwin and Harrisson, the Report projected the countryside as an indispensable source of spiritual rejuvenation for a population otherwise contracted to the cause of global manufacturing. It pitched this image as a national consensus which transcended other differences in perspective by opening with eulogies on the central importance of the countryside by both the futurist H. G. Wells and the anti-industrial traditionalist G. M. Trevelyan. Their voices rang in concert: There is no countryside like the English countryside – its firm yet gentle lines of hill and dale, its ordered confusion of features, its deer parks and downland, its castles and stately houses, its hamlets and old churches, its farms and ricks and great barns and ancient trees, its pools and ponds and shining threads of rivers, its flower-starred hedgerows, its orchards and woodland patches, its village greens and kindly inns. [Wells] And: Without vision the people perish, and without natural beauty the English people will perish in the spiritual sense. In the old days the English lived in the midst of Nature, subject to its influence at every hour. Thus inspired, our ancestors produced their great creations in religion, in song, and in the arts and crafts – common products of a whole people spiritually alive. Today most of us are banished to the cities, not without deleterious effects on imagination, inspiration and creative power. But some still live in the country, and some still come out on holidays to the country and drink in with the zest of a thirsty man the delights of natural beauty, and return to the town reinvigorated in soul. [Trevelyan] (Scott, 1943: v) By way of these legitimating citations from high-profile members of the English intellectual establishment, Scott founded the Report on the principle that the prime function of the land was as amenity for the city, a kind of spiritually pure hinterland for urban solace – as it had previously been constructed as ‘home’ for the far-flung servants of Empire, and again as healing serenity for the wounded populations returning from the trench carnage of the First World War. The explicit thread to the Report was thus continuity, even though Scott was at pains to distinguish this from nostalgic sentimentalism and asserted that the Committee had ‘tried to avoid the temptation of looking back to the “good old days”’ (Scott, 1943: v). Such

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reassurance was no proof against working with the grain of national mood on the respective significances of landscape and production. The Committee’s reluctance to challenge established certainties in the midst of wartime implied a commitment to the land as amenity, and this in turn embroiled it in a mindset where the parameters for the future of the countryside were very much defined by an idealized Past. On the one hand, there was the need, championed energetically since 1926 by the CPRE, to protect the traditional character of the English countryside from the post-war incursions of jerry-built bungalows and ribbon development. The gravity of this concern came directly from the notion of the countryside as an amenity, the momentum driven by a refined appreciation of the appearance of the landscape for the spiritual benefit and aesthetic pleasure of the onlooker. On the other, as directed by Reith’s brief, the Committee was bound to consider the question of development within the overall context of the ‘maintenance of agriculture’. In this broad responsibility the Committee inevitably encountered dilemmas. Evidence had been heard from producer interests as well as those of consumers and onlookers, and the Committee included members who were well aware of the intricate relationship between function and appearance. To this extent there is much in the Scott Report which anticipates contemporary discussion on the role of farming within a general perspective for the countryside. The Committee was at pains to trace the essential Englishness of the landscape, ‘the old beauty’, to the activities of past generations of producers. It owed: its characteristic features to the fact that it has been used – or in other words it has been farmed. The countryside cannot be ‘preserved’ – though its peculiar value to the nation can be – it must be farmed if it is to retain those features which give it distinctive charm and character. (Scott, 1943: 47) In this crucial regard the Scott Report turned to another romanticized cliché of the English tradition, harking back as far as Henry V and Agincourt – the English ‘yeoman’, heroic spine of the nation. Much has been made of this social type, especially as English society became increasingly urbanized and divorced from the land during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A particularly insistent theme emanated from Richard Jefferies during the Victorian era, and later from the Georgians, and it is possible to appreciate the shape of the rhetoric from the writings of one of their number, Edmund Blunden. In his book on English Villages (1942), he brings together the threads of this pervasive configuration in an explicit search for the most appropriate denomination for the social stalwart of the countryside. Both ‘the rustic’ and ‘peasant’ are considered and dismissed, and Blunden settles unequivocally for ‘the yeoman’:

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without exploring the details further than this, I can say that the word is the nearest I know to expressing the kind of man who keeps our village going. Mr. A. C. has been, ever since I can remember, the very picture of a substantial yeoman in our village. He has never tried to be anything else, but has shown throughout his life of more than seventy years that this may be a masterly kind of achievement, and of deeper importance, stronger influence, fuller variety than many forms of activity which might be supposed more noteworthy in the world. … You remember something like the appearance he makes in the paintings of Teniers, or perhaps it was he who was scanning the fields and plantations of the ‘The Avenue’ of Hobbema. (Blunden, 1942: 22) Blunden’s résumé of this familiar discourse illustrates the way in which the characterization of the ‘English yeoman’ echoes all the main themes of rural idealization to be found in the synoptic rhetoric of Baldwin and Harrisson: a man virtuously rooted in seasonal certainties, naturally immune to the superficial seductions of the street corner, embedded in the traditional world of the organic village, and fundamentally wedded to an unchanging Past. The implicit assumptions of the Scott Report are derived from the same mentalities. The quintessential landscape was thus depicted as a function of the ancient and timeless activities of this social type – ‘the landscape is a yeoman’s and not a peasant’s landscape’ (Scott, 1943: 10) – without any real consideration of the role of the landlord regime and the stately home. It is worth noting here as an aside that very little research has been done into the connection between the vast transfer of landed property from landlords to tenants between 1918–21 (about a third of national terrain) and the post-war spread of unplanned building so deplored by the likes of Baldwin and the founders of the CPRE in 1926. In this way the Scott Report assigned the yeoman a special part in the developments of the national icon, and also charged his modern successor, the farmer, with responsibilities commensurate with that ancient tradition. Unlike the ‘economist’ perspective of the Minority voice, where land was regarded as just one asset subject to market forces, Scott set the land and its users aside as a distinctive category. The Report gave this position a high profile: farmers could not ‘be regarded as simply members of an industry or on the same footing with those in other great industries’. And in anticipation of much of the current debate, it went on to specify the nature of their special position within the national schema: ‘in addition to their producing food from the land, farmers are unconsciously the nation’s landscape gardeners, a privilege which they share with the landowners’ (Scott, 1943: 47). In line with the Baldwinite rhetoric, Scott thus set the seal on the notion of the yeoman farmer, epitomized by the sight of the eternal plough team at work on the hillside, as both the creator of the English countryside and its guardian. Land use

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The Contested Countryside

thereby became a sacred responsibility, a privilege as much of right as of ownership, and to be scrupulously monitored by a sovereign body in the name of the people. In this way the Scott Report reflected the international mood of disillusionment with the invisible hand of the market and a growing confidence instead in the power of the state as a force for directed change. It fed directly into the 1947 Acts for state intervention in Agriculture and Town and Country Planning. The Committee was, however, aware of the problems which had beset agriculture, even if the Report revealed only a superficial grasp of their underlying historical origins from as far back as the 1846 Repeal of the Corn Laws. The interwar years were depicted as times of severe agrarian recession: less arable land was to be seen in the landscape; the number of derelict fields, rank with coarse matted grass, thistles, weeds and brambles, multiplied; hedges became overgrown and straggled over the edges of the fields; gates and fences fell into disrepair; farm roads were left unmade. Signs of decay were to be seen also in many of the buildings. Barns and sheds were not put in order; farmhouses were allowed to deteriorate; agricultural cottages went from bad to worse. Whilst, when seen from afar, it retained the beauty of the old broad pattern, the landscape of 1938 had, in many districts, assumed a neglected and unkempt appearance. (Scott 1943: 15) The main deficiency of the Scott Report lay in its failure to locate these observations in the wider historical context of the agrarian trends since 1846 and of the parallel cultural developments whereby the interests of leisure and landscape began to take precedence over production within the dominant discourse. At the same time it should be appreciated that this failure was in itself a measure of how far such a discourse had become axiomatic within the Establishment. Almost unconsciously, and certainly inexplicably, the Committee had encountered an uncomfortable dilemma: yeomen had apparently created the countryside but they were mired in a severe recession – how could government correct the latter specific problem whilst securing the more general objective of a preserved national heritage? It is important to remember that the Committee’s precise brief was to consider the way in which rural land might be utilized ‘consistently with the maintenance of agriculture’. It is clear from the witnesses called and the drift of the core arguments in the Report that the members struggled valiantly with this tension. It is also clear, however, that their perspective was too confined by the dominant mentalities to even begin to appreciate the intractable contradiction at the root of the problem. Without risking an entry into the dangerous waters of protection in peace time – after all, the Committee members were fully aware of the 1906 election which had seen the demolition of tariff-reforming Tories by the Liberal slogan of ‘Hands

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off the People’s Food’ – the Report acknowledged that agriculture needed ‘as far as possible stability of conditions’ and that government should ‘formulate and adopt a long-term policy for agriculture’. This was the extent to which Scott was prepared to venture into the then-uncontested terrain of state intervention into the agrarian economy. But the fundamental issue of the relationship between production and amenity/heritage demanded far more exacting attention. It did not receive it. Insofar as Scott approached it at all, the emphasis fell on the action of the farmers as custodians of a crucial national asset: ‘agricultural land must be properly farmed and maintained in good heart, and effective control should be exercised over landowners and farmers and a good standard of farming continually enforced’. In this regard, the securing of the sacred heritage of the English countryside, the Committee was far less reticent in anticipating and urging the direction and intervention of the state. At the same time a further observation was added, given the derelict condition of a lot of pre-war agriculture, to the effect that the sector would need ‘a considerable amount of new capital’ if it was to ‘produce more economically and efficiently’ (Scott, 1943: 5). In this way the Scott Report ducked the central issue by both commending producers (carefully constructed as figures of the Past) on the creation of a uniquely beautiful national icon, whilst at the same time charging them with the onerous responsibility of sustaining it for the people’s posterity. The Committee’s myopia was presupposed by the assumption that production and appearance were two sides of the same historical coin, or two reciprocating functions locked into a constant equilibrium, and so it was inevitable that the Report lacked any detailed interrogation of whether (and how) such a relationship might unfold within a changing modernizing context. Instead of such a radical interrogation, Scott slipped backwards, albeit probably in good faith, into a hopeful assertion of principle ‘that the land of Britain should be both useful and beautiful and that the two aims are in no sense incompatible’ (Scott, 1943: 4). Given this supposition, it was not difficult for the Report to resolve the tension between the need to reinvigorate the depressed agrarian economy and the imperative to secure the countryside as a national amenity for future generations of city dwellers. The exactions of development were thus conveniently discounted, and instead the Report was able to identify the key to change in a process of restoration. Interwar recession had jeopardized the fundamental practices which underpinned the quintessentially diverse landscape: the Committee’s considered response to Lord Reith’s brief therefore squared the circle: ‘by the phrase “the maintenance of a healthy and well-balanced agriculture” we understand the continuance and revival of the traditional mixed character of British farming’ (Scott, 1943: 46). This restoration would come about by way of government facilitation of stable conditions and new capitalization, whilst the stronger hand of state intervention would secure for the future a national amenity of unchanging appearance: as the

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Report concluded, ‘in our opinion a radical alteration of the types of farming is not probable and no striking change in the pattern of the open countryside is to be expected’ (Scott, 1943: 46). Both Establishment and the people could, in other words, relax in the knowledge that there was no need to upset the time-honoured English equilibrium between the dynamically modern urban and the serenely traditional rural. Leslie Scott’s contribution to this discourse was thus critical. Assisted by the geographer Professor Dudley Stamp, it was he who gave the Report its tone and emphasis. Just as Baldwin caught the mood of the times in the aftermath of the First World War and the General Strike, so too did Scott embody the popular disposition towards the countryside in the midst of the Second World War. The Report received considerable publicity, was reviewed in almost every conceivable publication, and a summary of it and Uthwatt was put out as a Penguin Special (Young, 1943). The reception it received dovetailed neatly with the MoI poster campaign and Mass Observation’s findings on the prime importance of the countryside to English national identity. They were all of a piece and paved the way for a post-war political consensus which effectively removed the subject from the arena for discussion and debate. It was as though the entire English civil society had been lulled into a state of sleepy complacency by virtue of this pervasive discourse on the rural idyll and its inherently traditional nature. Whilst the rest of the Attlee project promised abrupt departure from the past, such as the erection of the welfare state and radical policies for health and education, the rural issue looked back in time and was pitched within the public discourse as a case of restoration and continuity. Modernity on the land, long postponed and obstructed, was consigned to a conspiratorial course of backdoor agency arranged between the NFU and the Ministry of Agriculture. The depth of popular feeling in favour of such continuity, with the countryside represented as traditional antidote to the dynamism of the city, called for a brand of political leadership lacking in the post-war governments, an absence also manifest in the misplaced hankering after the nation’s continuity as a world power. LESLI E SCOTT AS SYNOPTIC FIGURE: PLANNER AND CONSERVATIONIST

Scott’s own biography reflects this same national drift towards a culture where leisure and lifestyle count for more than land use, and where amenity commands a legitimacy extended to production only at times of national crisis. It is important to note at this point that the commissioning of the Committee to investigate Land Utilization in Rural Areas was not just chaired by Chief Justice Sir Leslie Scott, but was also largely conceived and driven by him. Immediately after New Year in 1941

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Scott lunched with Professor Patrick Abercrombie. Abercrombie had been Professor of Civic Design at the University of Liverpool from 1915 to 1935, when he took the Chair of Town Planning at University College, London. He and Scott were members of the Liverpool intellectual élite when Scott practised there and was MP for Liverpool Exchange from 1910, and they had been together as founding members, indeed leading lights, of the CPRE in 1926. Abercrombie’s strength lay in urban design – he was the moving force behind the formation of the Town Planning Institute, and after the war he was given the responsibility for the reconstruction of many of the war-damaged cities, including London, Edinburgh and Plymouth. There were minor differences of perspective between the two men, but they shared a conviction for the principles of planning and state intervention. At lunch in early January 1941 Scott and Abercrombie discussed the parliamentary business of the War Damage Bill. Scott was concerned with the way in which the legislation vested excessive powers in the Treasury, and reminded his colleague of an earlier instance when the principles of good planning had been sacrificed on the altar of fiscal prudence. The issue referred to the development of the Great West Road – and how a proposal that the Ministry of Transport should purchase a quarter-mile strip on either side of the road was torpedoed by the Treasury. Scott reminded Abercrombie that he had been one of the MPs who regarded it as essential so that the road would pay its way, and ‘at the same time protect amenities and keep it consistent with good planning’ (Scott, 1941a). The discussion prompted Scott to make contact with Lord Reith, who was then Minister of the new department of Works and Buildings, later to become the Ministry for Works and Planning. Scott’s letter to Reith started out with due deference appropriate to the occasion of an unprompted initiative from a citizen to a minister of state, although of course (as Scott is quick to register) the citizen in question was also a Lord Justice of Appeal. But then in the opening sentences he established his credibility in the field of planning and government intervention. I have barely had the pleasure of meeting you and I do not suppose you will remember me, but before I became a Lord Justice of Appeal I took a very active part in connection with Town & Country Planning. I am still a member of the executive of the CPRE and a legal member of the Town Planning Institute, and retain all my interest in that subject. Scott went on to request a meeting with Reith and laid his cards clearly on the table. I think it of paramount national importance that your Ministry should be given seisin of the whole business of Town & Country Planning, with adequate powers to enable you to see that whatever is necessary from the

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The Contested Countryside national point of view shall be done. The 1932 Act was emasculated in Committee by limiting the kind of land to be brought within its purview quite unnecessarily. But it did contain essential powers by which the national interest could to a great extent have been protected.

He continued in this vein and pointed out to Reith that he had pushed for the creation of a Ministry for planning some years earlier when he held a position of responsibility at the Town Planning Institute. At that time, he added, ‘public opinion was not perhaps ripe for so far-reaching a proposal’, and so he was content (along with Abercrombie) ‘in order to get something done and at least get the thin end of the wedge inserted, to propose a statutory body instead of a Ministry’ (Scott, 1941b). A confidential dialogue was thereafter opened between the two men with the explicit focus on the extent and application of state intervention in planning and land use in the national interest. Reith welcomed the chance to hear Scott’s views on work ‘as yet only in its preliminary stages’. Their first meeting, scheduled promptly by Reith for 20 January 1941, was cancelled on account of Scott’s ill health, but he wrote to say that he had ‘utilized some of my enforced leisure to put on paper a memo containing the gist of ideas I had intended to offer you orally’ – this memo he had also passed to Abercrombie for comment (Scott, 1941c). The letter was marked Confidential and contains a revealing section on the way in which Scott pitched the crucial issue of the countryside and the balance between continuity and development. On the question of agricultural land I have preached the gospel of my memo for many years, for England’s imperative need of a really prosperous agriculture – psychological and spiritual as well as physical and material – is now getting into the nation’s mind, and our fiscal policy at last brings the prosperity of our agriculture within our reach, provided that the Nation insists, in return for its help, that farmers should all do their job properly; and this means a good deal of adjustment in the size of farms and the allocation of land, as well as selection of farmers. But I look forward to a deeper understanding by the Nation of the services that agriculture can render to it, and a more definitive insistence by it on the reciprocity due to it from the farmers in the shape of good farming. It is because I thus look forward that I feel it so urgent to legislate now for the reservation for agriculture of all farming land unless a superior National need is proved for some other use. (Scott, 1941c) Reith replied with the consent to read the document carefully and to meet Scott on 11 February with his Principal Private Secretary, Graham Vincent. The

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Confidential Memo was passed between Vincent and his immediate subordinate Under-secretary, Frederick Root. The former commented to the latter that the document was interesting, and went on to write: I don’t think the Minister will want my detailed comments. It generally supports his paper, though Lord Justice Scott would demur to some of our sentences which assume urban expansion though under strict control. He demurs to ‘green belts’ allowing no encroachments on agriculture. We shall want the paper beside us in our examination of the existing legislation and machinery. Vincent added that Scott’s thinking also supported some of his immediate propositions for research, including ‘the possibility of industry and agriculture harmonizing’, whilst wondering aloud whether there were ‘any such cases’ (Vincent, 1941). Scott finally lunched with Reith and Vincent on 11 February 1941. The meeting met with Scott’s enthusiastic approval: ‘I was quite delighted to find myself in so congenial an atmosphere in which, as far as I can tell, there was substantial agreement between us on the broad lines of policy.’ It is, however, possible to detect a slightly different emphasis in the Ministry’s perspective on the role of agriculture. Reith and Vincent had left Scott with a memo to comment upon, and it was on the detail of this that the latter was drawn to comment. Whilst commending Reith on the move towards taking on greater powers of intervention and regulation, Scott was concerned that production from the land was given insufficient profile: From what you have told me I understand your whole-hearted recognition of the primary importance of agriculture. But if I may venture a criticism it is that that position is not quite sufficiently emphasised in paragraph 9 and that agriculture finds no mention in any of the succeeding paragraphs 10 to 17 with the consequent risk that the balance of importance in the subjects considered therein is not on the side of agriculture, where it ought to be. (Scott, 1941d) The final Cabinet discussions on this issue, held a little while before the appointment of Scott to the Chair of the Committee, suggest that his efforts to change the emphasis of the establishment mindset were in vain. At the beginning of August 1941 Reith reported to Cabinet and set down the parameters of the Committee’s brief. Cabinet minuted this as a matter of ‘the planning of reconstruction’. The whole tenor of the meeting revolved around the probable need to disperse industry ‘from congested urban areas’, whilst at the same time

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acknowledging the subject’s ‘particular importance in the post-war period, when problems of extra-urban settlement, suburban, satellite or otherwise, will arise out of the replanning of damaged urban areas’. The minutes of the discussion reveal the extent to which the official mind simply assumed the central importance of ‘amenity’ and its ‘preservation’ (PRO, 1941). The point here is that the preparations of the Scott Committee reflect the way in which the purpose of land use in the English countryside was effectively uncontested, even when the discussions were led by someone as explicitly committed to the cause of agriculture as Scott (and indeed, his assistant Dudley Stamp) was. The senior civil servant involved, Vincent, seemed to doubt that the interests of agriculture could be reconciled to the traditional priorities of industry, and remarked elsewhere in a quizzical and cryptic aside to his subordinate Root that ‘Lord Justice Scott must be assuming a profitable agriculture, depending on agricultural policy’ (Vincent, 1941). There was in any case an implicit and widelyshared assumption, manifest throughout the confidential papers as well as in the Report itself, that ‘amenity’ and ‘preservation’ would (and should) be granted a high priority. It is little wonder, therefore, that the Committee’s recommendations were interpreted widely as a charter for conservation and continuity (or restoration) of tradition. As a result, the key questions dealing with the inherent tensions between use and beauty, and between production and amenity, were never seriously raised within the public realm. The legacies of the 1846 Repeal of the Corn Laws and the effects of the pervasive percolation of Baldwinite discourses on Englishness had so severely restricted the space and vocabulary available for contestation that even someone of Scott’s more agrarian persuasion was eventually more concerned to create powers of intervention for continuity and preservation, rather than for radical change. Agendas for the modernization of land use were thus subdued and reduced to the surreptitious. Thereafter, in the absence of such public exposure, claims for production rather than amenity lacked legitimacy and even a visible public platform. Scott might have appreciated this dilemma better than most. He had experienced the problem of raising the profile of agriculture at first hand, and as a new Conservative Unionist MP at the 1910 General Election, he was acutely aware of the way in which the Liberals had won a landslide in 1906 by appealing to the gut urban instincts for cheap imported food. In the absence of a wide-ranging and open debate on the question of land use there were very few votes to be won by standing on an agrarian platform. Nonetheless Scott took an early interest in the subject whilst at the same time worrying that such a preoccupation would find little favour amongst his constituents in Liverpool Exchange. Small wonder, then, that he decided that discretion and a low profile would serve his purpose better than valour and limelight. As he wrote to Sir Archibald Salvidge: ‘I have given all my

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spare time to this work – I have spoken little in the House as I did not think speechifying there was doing any good’ (Scott, n.d.a). This was in sharp contrast to his legal colleague and close friend F. E. Smith. Even earlier he had been in correspondence with a senior Tory, Walter Runciman, on this same problem of creating political space for the discussion of ‘countryside matters’. Runciman agreed with Scott’s softly-softly strategy and together they effectively threw out a long shadow of collusion – a de facto practice which became so axiomatic as to be echoed eighty years later with the tripartite letter of consensus from Major, Blair and Ashdown. Your letter was welcome to me. … Particularly because you say that nonparty treatment of a very wide range of rural problems is in the opinion of you and your friends both probable and desirable. I am with you in placing as many as possible of these country topics outside the area of party controversy. (Scott, n.d.b) Free trade and the superficial popularity of American wheat and Argentinian corned beef had turned land use for production into a political wilderness where only the foolhardy would tread. War and German U-boats changed this situation temporarily. The nation’s 80 per cent dependence on food imports and a derelict domestic agriculture, both products of government policy since the Repeal of the Corn Laws, concentrated at least some minds in positions of power and influence after the outbreak of war in 1914. Lord Selborne at the Board of Agriculture saw the urgent need to revive the agrarian economy and was particularly impressed by the Middleton Report which showed how backward English agriculture was compared to German. Committees were set in place to examine the problems and also to explore the ways in which demobilized servicemen could be resettled on the land. Above all, the question of land use, either as a base for food production or new housing (a land fit for heroes), underpinned the constitution of Asquith’s Reconstruction Committee. In sharp contrast to the mood for conservation and continuity which dominated official and public minds alike during the Second World War, the period from 1914 was characterized by an energetic readiness to consider all possibilities. The trend towards radicalism was accentuated by Lloyd George’s succession of Asquith at the end of 1915. He moved immediately on the Reconstruction Committee, removing the old group as ‘a mere shadow of Asquith’ except its secretaries Montagu and Hammond, and set about to reconstitute it with ‘representatives of more advanced thinking’. He was above all intent to find ‘a list of persons with ideas’ and that it should include ‘at least one of the Webbs’. Shaw and Wells were considered and rejected, whilst others found the Prime Minister’s favour, including Seebohm Rowntree and Leslie Scott (regarded by Mrs. Webb as a

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‘progressive Conservative’). This core of advanced thinkers soon found common cause against Montagu’s attempt to limit the brief of the Committee and specifically to remove from its responsibility any consideration of the agrarian question. A year later Hammond was able to report that agriculture was engaging the attention of the Committee and that it was fully understood that this did not just entail questions of prices and wages, but that ‘the task before the country [was] nothing less than the reconstruction of village society as a free and living community’ (Selborne, n.d.). Scott became a key member of Lloyd George’s radical nucleus. So much so that he was caught on the wrong foot, along with Austen Chamberlain and his old friend Birkenhead, when Stanley Baldwin precipitated the end of coalition at the Carlton Club meeting in 1922. Leslie Scott was too closely associated with this faction and his parliamentary career never really recovered. This abbreviated story does, however, serve to demonstrate how the national crisis in food supply during the First World War created the conditions for a radical appraisal of the post-1846 agrarian dereliction. Scott, amongst others, was a leading voice in exploring how the state might facilitate a revival in the fortunes of production from the land. He was also somewhat nonchalant on the question of the interests of the landowners and adopted a high profile in the formation of the Agricultural Organization Society (AOS), which was explicitly dedicated to raising English farmers out of the dark practices of the past and into the light of mechanized modernity. In the event, such initiatives were bypassed. The great estate owners decided to cut and run, selling more than a third of the national land to tenants between 1918 and 1921, and the post-war government returned to the old policy of feeding the urban masses with the cheapest (imported) supply of food – a policy reversal known thereafter on the land as the ‘Great Betrayal’. The countryside slumped back into its pre-war state of picturesque dereliction, such that by the time of Baldwin’s 1924 eulogy on English countryside, the quintessential icon of the plough-team on the brow of the hillside was already a rarity. Two years later the CPRE was formed with Scott and Abercrombie as founding members of the Executive, and the AOS was a shadow of its former self except in Scotland and Ulster. The agenda for agrarian modernity had flared all too briefly and the mood of the interwar turned increasingly on the ways in which the solace of the countryside might be democratized without being destroyed. Hardly a voice was raised thereafter to challenge the traditional English equilibrium of urban modernity and the eternal countryside. The exception was significantly free from decades of immersion in the culture of rural nostalgia, being a farm boy from upstate New York. He was travelling through England from Southampton to Harwich to take the boat train to the continent and was impressed by the beauty of the landscape. This much he acknowledged; but he

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was much more impressed by the fact that this was a beauty born of despair and dereliction, and above all, of an economy which was locked in the past. His answer was to buy up one of the estates so characteristic of that past epoch and to sweep away all vestiges of the foundational English hierarchy of landowner– yeoman–labourer. In its place he introduced co-operation and a training school for technological modernization. But in the end Henry Ford had too much pressing business to attend to elsewhere and his experiment slipped quietly out of sight behind the cultural obscurity of the English obsession (Ford, n.d.). What it represented in terms of an attempt to deal with the tension between use and beauty was forgotten. With the help of the Scott Report and the cross-party collusion of post-war governments we have been able to exclude that same tension from the public arena pretty much ever since. It is thus indeed high time that the countryside was contested – and that the tension between use and beauty be finally acknowledged as a conflict between the equally legitimate interests of production and amenity – rather than as an inconvenience which can be resolved by simply disparaging the former. And we might start by interrogating the effects of such a longstanding cultural hegemony and the confusing contestation over élitism and exclusion. REFERENCES

Baldwin, Stanley (1926) On England, London: Allen & Co. Blunden, Edmund (1942) English Villages, London: Collins Ford, Henry (n.d.) PRO HLG 80/8; Henry Ford, misc. correspondence Mass Observation (1939–40) Mass Observation Papers, ‘Inside Britain’ radio series, Box 3/D, University of Sussex (1941) Mass Observation Papers, ‘What does Britain mean to you?’, 878/8, University of Sussex Public Record Office [PRO] (1941) Cabinet Minutes, CAB 117/140, document dated 1 August 1941 Scott, Sir Leslie (n.d.a) Sir Leslie Scott papers, MRC, University of Warwick, 119/3/S/LI/8 (n.d.b) Sir Leslie Scott papers, MRC, University of Warwick, 119/3/S/AG (1941a) Letter to Abercrombie, 15 January 1941, PRO HLG 80/8, misc. correspondence. (1941b) Letter to Reith, 5 January 1941, PRO/HLG 80/8, misc. correspondence (1941c) Letter to Reith, 2 February 1941, PRO/HLG 80/8, misc. correspondence (1941d) Letter to Reith, 16 February 1941, PRO/HLG 80/8, misc. correspondence (1942) Sir Leslie Scott papers, MRC, University of Warwick, 119/3/S/TPR.8

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(1943) Report of the Committee on Land Utilization in Rural Areas, Cmd. 6378, London, HMSO Selborne, Lord (n.d.) Selborne Mss., Bodleian Library 81/22 Vincent (1941) Internal memo, Vincent to Root, PRO HLG 80/8 Young, G. M. (1943) Country and Town, London: Penguin

2 AN ORGANIC COUNTRYSIDE: AGRICULTURE FOR BODY, SOUL AND NATION

Philip Conford

HEALTH, NUTRITION AND ORGANIC FOOD

In the summer of 2000 the Minister for Public Health, Yvette Cooper, writing in the Independent newspaper (3 July), drew attention to the Government’s ‘new approach to the food our children eat’. Health policy should not just be about treating the sick; greater attention must be paid to preventive medicine and to reducing the inequalities in standards of health which are passed down through successive generations. Yet a recent survey had shown that whereas nutritionists recommend eating five portions of fruit or vegetables per day British children were eating on average less than half that amount, with those from poor families more likely to be eating no fruit or vegetables at all. The evidence suggested that people’s chances of a healthy life depend on income, what part of the country they live in, and their parents’ occupations, and that children of low-income parents suffer from being given a poor diet. Cooper concluded that any workable health policy must aim to give every child a healthy start in life. One can only applaud the line of argument and the intentions; but is such an approach actually ‘new’? If contrasted with the attitude of recent Conservative governments then it is; Margaret Thatcher is notorious for having in the early 1970s abolished the right to free school milk, and in 1980 her government did away with nutritional standards in school meals. But to anyone with some knowledge of dietary issues between the two World Wars Yvette Cooper’s ideas have a familiar ring. One wonders whether she is familiar with the work of Sir John Boyd Orr, or whether it is by accident that she has rediscovered the conclusions he reached in his classic survey Food, Health and Income. The health problems she discusses today are largely the same as those Boyd Orr investigated, and the lessons are having to be learnt all over again.

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Food, Health and Income was based on the emerging knowledge of the relationship between diet and health, and of the accentuated effects on children of inadequate nutrition, which included a reduced rate of growth, rickets, anaemia and bad teeth. While agreeing that environment and heredity played their part in affecting health, Boyd Orr adduced evidence from experiments in Scotland that changes in diet rapidly improved the growth, health and vigour of schoolchildren. It was clear, though, that the diets of lower-income groups were generally inadequate and that members of those groups, especially children, suffered from a lower standard of health. Boyd Orr tentatively concluded that ‘a diet completely adequate for health, according to modern standards, is reached at an income level above that of 50 per cent of the population’ (Boyd Orr, 1936a: 5). Although Boyd Orr accepted that ignorance and improvidence were factors, he believed that the main reason for the inadequate diet of the poorer classes was that foodstuffs particularly valuable for maintaining health were generally expensive. Among the poorest, ‘total food consumption is low and includes mainly cheap suppliers of energy and therefore cheap satisfiers of hunger, for example, potatoes, bread, margarine. The consumption of more expensive foodstuffs, e.g., liquid milk, eggs, fruit, vegetables, meat, rises progressively with income’. Here was a situation calling for ‘economic statesmanship’ (Boyd Orr, 1936a: 30, 50): the new knowledge of nutrition had come simultaneously with an increased capacity for food production, yet British farmers had been struggling for fifteen years to survive. The most successful developments in agriculture over the previous decade had been precisely those which could have helped improve the people’s health – dairying, egg production and market gardening – yet half the population were unable to afford what was available. The situation struck many commentators as absurd: poverty in the midst of plenty. There was in fact a very close link between Boyd Orr’s report and the agricultural industry. From 1914 to 1945 he was Director of the Rowett Research Institute near Aberdeen, which had been established to investigate animal nutrition. The Institute was asked by a main branch of the food industry in 1935 to obtain information on consumption, and the recently-established Market Supply Committee co-operated in providing data. The result was Food, Health and Income, of which Boyd Orr had given advance notice in February 1936 during his address to the Farmers’ Club on the subject of ‘Public Health and Agriculture’ (Boyd Orr, 1936b). Three years later Boyd Orr spoke again on this theme at a dinner given in his honour by the Economic Reform Club at the Savoy Hotel in London; the other speakers were the physician Lord Horder and the air pioneer Lord Sempill. Boyd Orr insisted that the problem of malnutrition was essentially economic: medical science knew what was necessary and agriculture knew how to produce it, but the production and sale of goods were kept at levels intended to benefit producers, not consumers, which was against the public interest. ‘We need the food,’ he said. ‘We

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have the land to produce it. We have two million unemployed wanting work. If we say we cannot produce the food which the nation needs because we cannot find the money, what we are really saying is that we cannot produce it under the present economic and financial system’ (ERCI, 1939: 14). He wanted to see a policy which would ‘ensure that a diet fully adequate for health is … made available for every member of the community and that farmers are … offered a price which will induce them to produce the additional food needed’ (ERCI, 1939: 17). On the face of it, none of the above views need imply commitment to organic farming methods; in fact Boyd Orr’s address to the Farmers’ Club identified the use of nitrogenous fertilizers as one of the main reasons for the nation’s increased capacity to produce foodstuffs. Yet the emerging organic movement of the late 1930s much admired Boyd Orr’s work and frequently cited it as evidence for their own views on agriculture and health. This will become less puzzling if we look first at the organicists’ ideas and then at their links with Boyd Orr. In this essay the term ‘the organic movement’ is used to denote that group of people – scientists, farmers, gardeners, doctors, dentists and writers – who during the 1930s and 1940s were concerned about a variety of issues relating to agriculture, health and the state of rural society. They saw an imbalance in Britain between rural and urban, agriculture’s interests having been sacrificed to those of industry. They argued that a thriving agriculture was fundamental to the nation’s survival, and that there must be greater self-sufficiency of food production and less reliance on imports. The drift of the population from the land must be reversed, but the orthodox emphasis on efficiency measured in terms of output per worker was accelerating it, with artificial fertilizers and mechanization being adopted under pressure from an alliance of commercial interests and the State. Consequently, rural culture, with the stability and harmony which it provided as a counterweight to the rootless and mechanistic urban culture, was disappearing, and, along with it, traditions of craftsmanship and a humble awareness of humanity’s dependence on the natural world. The mixed family farm was being replaced by the large-scale commercial unit run on factory lines. This industrial approach to farming would, the organic school argued, bring natural disaster as well as social; indeed, it had already done so in those parts of the world, notably Africa and North America, where the earth had been exploited for quick returns without thought of the future. The spread of soil erosion was a reminder that natural resources could not be taken for granted and that farmers were obliged to replace what they had removed from the soil in obedience to the Rule of Return, following the example of the European peasantry, or of Oriental cultivators, who had maintained fertile soil for 4,000 years (King, 1927; Oyler, 1950). Evidence from Asia and Africa suggested that a soil replenished with waste matter would produce disease-resistant crops and that animals and human beings fed on those crops enjoyed their birthright of health and vitality.

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Underlying all these concerns was a conviction that living processes must be interpreted biologically and ecologically, and that any reductionist approach to agriculture, whether chemical, mechanistic or purely economic, was at best inadequate and at worst destructive. Human beings should seek through science to understand and work with a God-given natural order instead of exploiting the environment in order to satisfy ever-increasing demands. If they did so, health and abundance would follow. It should be clear from this summary why the early organic school valued Boyd Orr’s work. Like them, he opposed the free trade policies which for nearly a century had been largely responsible for the troubles of British agriculture, and he wanted to see farming restored to a central place in the national economy. In addition to this, his notable scientific work had led him to see the connection between diet and health, and his sense of injustice at the way protective foods were denied to so many British people meant that, like the organic school, he wanted to see a new economic system. As for his enthusiasm over the productive benefits of artificial fertilizers, this did not mean that he denied the importance of a fertile soil; in 1948, by which time he was Director of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, he gave the Sanderson-Wells Lecture at the University of London, taking as his theme Soil Fertility: The Wasting Basis of Human Society (Boyd Orr, 1948), and arguing for global collaboration in the task of developing the resources of farm and forest land so that there would be sufficient food for all. True, the following year he advised Nehru to ask the United States for several million tons of nitrogenous fertilizers, but what he had in common with the organic school was more significant than the areas on which they differed (Boyd Orr, 1966: 230). The personal links between Boyd Orr and the organicists can be demonstrated by reference to the three lectures mentioned above. The Sanderson-Wells Lectures were instituted by the medical scientist T. H. Sanderson-Wells, whose interest in the link between organically-grown food and human health was demonstrated in his book Sun Diet (Sanderson-Wells, 1939), and led him to support the Soil Association from its inception in 1946. At the talk to the Farmers’ Club the vote of thanks to Boyd Orr was proposed by Viscount Bledisloe, one of the country’s most distinguished agriculturalists and a supporter of the organic cause; Bledisloe was also one of the Dinner Committee at the Economic Reform Club who arranged the Savoy banquet in Boyd Orr’s honour. Other members of the Committee included two of the central figures in the early organic movement, Viscount Lymington and Lord Northbourne, both of them members of the Kinship in Husbandry (Gardiner, 1972), as well as the Conservative MP for Lowestoft, Pierse Loftus, who shared their outlook and voiced their concerns in the Lower House. One of the other speakers at the Savoy, Lord Sempill, became a member of the first Soil Association Council. The Economic Reform Club can be regarded as in a

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number of respects a branch of the organic movement; its journal Rural Economy, which ran in the 1940s and early 1950s, was edited by Jorian Jenks, who was also the first Editorial Secretary of the Soil Association, and he promoted the organic cause as vigorously in that news sheet as he did in Mother Earth. The organicists parted company with Boyd Orr on the issue of artificials. Using chemical fertilizers could never be a substitute for obeying the rule of return of wastes to the soil, and Sir Albert Howard maintained that they were simply valueless once the soil was rich in humus (Howard, 1945: 233). Fruit, vegetables and crops grown with all the artillery of chemical farming could not be as healthy as those grown purely with humus, and might in fact damage health, since the possible effects of the chemicals on the human or animal system were yet to be discovered. Howard’s work in India led him to conclude that animals fed on the products of humus-rich soil enjoyed a greater resistance to disease (Howard, 1945: 153–6). Another servant of the British Empire in India studied a tribe which provided evidence that humus-based cultivation and a whole-food diet could ensure a remarkably high degree of human health. Major-General Sir Robert McCarrison was unusual for a medical scientist, being less interested in the causes of disease than in the conditions which make for health. Like other observers, he was fascinated by the Hunza tribesmen of the North-West Frontier, who were noted for their remarkable physique, stamina, cheerful temperament and freedom from illness. McCarrison reported that in the seven years he spent among them he saw no heart disease, cancer, appendicitis, peptic ulcer, diabetes or multiple sclerosis, and concluded that their health was the result of their diet and methods of cultivation. The Hunzas consumed wholemeal grains, vegetables, fruit, plenty of milk, butter and little or no meat or alcohol. Not only was human ill-health rare among them, but their farming was notably free of plant disease. They were completely faithful to the rule of return, spreading compost on their fields in the manner of Oriental cultivators, and were noted for their skill at irrigation; the use of aqueducts ensured that the soil was to some extent renewed by the black glacierground sand contained in the water (Wrench, 1938). The region of the Hunzas was in effect a long-term nutritional laboratory, but since it did not fulfil the demands of Western scientific method McCarrison undertook a sequence of experiments with rats and by 1927 had tested nearly 2,500 of them, feeding them on faulty foods and comparing their health, condition and longevity with a control group of well-fed stock rats. One experiment which seemed particularly significant involved feeding one group of rats on a Sikh diet and another on a diet common to the poorer classes in England: white bread, margarine, jam, sweet tea, boiled vegetables and tinned meat. The former group flourished, while the latter became stunted and ill-proportioned; their coats lacked gloss, they were nervous and aggressive, and they suffered greater incidence of

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disease, especially pulmonary and gastro-intestinal, ailments common among the poorer British (McCarrison, 1961: 29–30). In 1935 McCarrison returned to England and the following year – the same year that Food, Health and Income appeared – he gave the Cantor Lectures at the Royal Society of Arts, whose thesis was that ‘the greatest single factor in the acquisition and maintenance of good health is perfectly constituted food’ (McCarrison, 1961: 7). By this time he regarded ill-health as resulting from a lack of something, it being well established that vitamin deficiency caused particular illnesses in animals. It was reasonable to hypothesize that many human illnesses, too, might result from poor nutrition; if this were so, then it followed that the diet of a large proportion of the British people needed to change, but it also followed that methods of food production must change as well and adopt the good practices of the Asians who obeyed the rule of return. A Cheshire GP, Dr Lionel Picton, brought Howard and McCarrison to the somewhat improbable venue of Crewe in March 1939, to launch a document called the Medical Testament, one of the most important texts in the organic movement’s history. He was honorary secretary to the Cheshire Medical Committee, which had been reflecting on its duty under the National Health Insurance Act to prevent sickness, and concluding that it was failing to do so. Having successfully practised McCarrison’s ideas at his child welfare clinic, Picton persuaded his colleagues that illness could be prevented by a diet of fresh, compost-grown food and wholemeal bread, and the committee approached McCarrison for advice. The day conference to launch the Medical Testament, reported in full detail by the local newspaper, was attended by doctors, agriculturalists and educationalists. In his speech McCarrison rejected the current obsession with physical training as futile unless people’s physiological needs were being met by a healthy diet, and he perceived a connection between the improvement of health and the process of rural reconstruction: it was folly to let fields go untilled when there was an urgent need for more abundant production of fresh foodstuffs. Howard suggested that the Ministries of Agriculture and Health should adopt as their motto, ‘A fertile soil mean[s] healthy crops, healthy animals, and … healthy human beings’, and hoped that agriculture would take its rightful place in the national economy ‘as the real foundation of preventive medicine’ (Crewe Chronicle, 25 March 1939). After the meeting the Cheshire doctors waited for the wide public debate which they hoped would follow, but in vain. ‘Only slowly did it dawn on them that nobody, really, was very much interested’, says Barbara Griggs (Griggs, 1986: 139). Of course, advocates of organic husbandry were very interested, and when Lady Eve Balfour wrote The Living Soil in 1943 she subtitled it ‘Evidence of the importance to human health of soil vitality, with special reference to post-war planning’, thereby indicating that she saw the book as a response to the proposals for a national health service contained in the Beveridge Report, which had been

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published at the end of 1942. If it were true, she argued, ‘that the primary factor in the prevention of sickness lay in soil management [the] government … would have to exercise a wide control … over the whole range of subsidiary interests that at present handle the production and distribution of the nation’s food supplies’ (Balfour, 1948: 173). Widespread adoption of organic farming could serve as the most valuable contribution to a post-war health service; it would indeed be a health service and not, as the Beveridge proposals implied, a service for the treatment of sickness. Howard underlined the point a couple of years later. The proposed fabric of social services was being ‘built on the basis of malnutrition and inefficiency’, but if organic farming conferred on Britain’s population the power to resist disease those services would ‘have to be recast to suit a population in good health’ (Howard, 1945: 237). A new medical training would be required: ‘The physician of tomorrow will study mankind in relation to his environment, will prevent disease at the source, and will cease to confine himself to the temporary alleviation of the miseries resulting from malnutrition’(Howard, 1945: 238). We might think that the organicists were taking rather a lot for granted. Apart from certain of the tribes of India – Hunzas, Sikhs and Pathans – what evidence could they offer that eating humus-grown food improved resistance to disease? Some of it was anecdotal: Lady Balfour claimed to have cured her own poor health by changing to a compostgrown, wholefood diet, as did the farmer and racehorse-breeder Friend Sykes (Balfour, 1948: 135–7; Sykes, 1946: 208, 250–1). In New Zealand Dr Guy Chapman encouraged staff and boys at an Auckland school to grow their own fruit and vegetables on humus-rich soil, as a result of which there was a decline in colds and influenza, and increased resistance to measles. Dr J. W. Scharff, Chief Officer of Health at Singapore until the fall of Malaya, reported that the health of Tamil labourers improved dramatically after they adopted a diet of compost-grown food (Balfour, 1948: 132–3). There were other examples of a similar kind, which the organicists felt were sufficiently suggestive to warrant further experiments. They also attached great importance to dental evidence: one of the Soil Association’s earliest members and most distinguished supporters was the dental scientist Sir Norman Bennett, who served the organic movement by the many letters he wrote to medical and dental journals on the topic of soil and health (Mother Earth, Autumn 1947: 7). Bennett’s death in 1947 was a blow to the Association, but other dentists shared his views. Writing in the Association’s journal Mother Earth the same year, Everard Turner argued, after assessing wide-ranging evidence of dental decay, that the incidence of caries could be substantially reduced by a diet of humus-grown food. ‘The inescapable conclusion is that the common denominator of sound teeth is the natural biological cycle’ – that is, obedience to the rule of return in the cultivation of food (Mother Earth, Spring 1947: 16). The most comprehensive evidence, though, was provided by the American dental scientist Weston Price, who travelled the world seeking out communities

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whose diet was untouched by Western trade, or where the traditional diet still existed alongside a newly introduced urban one. Price believed that the quality of the dental arch indicated the quality of a person’s complete constitutional development and that modern diets led to tooth decay and inherited problems with the dental arches. Communities seemed to remain free from many Western physical defects ‘so long as they were sufficiently isolated from our modern civilization and living in accordance with nutritional programs which were directed by the accumulated wisdom of the group’ (Price, 1945: 1). Price’s book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration provided a variation on the theme of how Western materialism destroyed the humility of people who lived by tradition. The communities he visited were ‘spiritual [with] a devout reverence for an all-powerful, all pervading power which not only protects and provides for them, but accepts them as a part of that great encompassing soul if they obey Nature’s laws’ (Price, 1945: 419). In contrast: ‘Practically all of our modern philosophies … fail to recognize the nature of the creative forces … which show how the great Creator made us’ (Price, 1945: 433). ORGANICIST THEOLOGY

Organic cultivation, then, brought not physical benefits only, but spiritual blessing, for through practising it one was working with God’s laws. Lady Balfour is reported to have said, ‘There are no materialists in the Soil Association’ (Heron, 1998), on the face of it a rather paradoxical comment, given the palpably material nature of soil. Yet for some members of the Association working with compost was a mystical experience: Maye Bruce, a follower of Rudolf Steiner’s Bio-Dynamic methods of gardening, regarded her compost heap as a place of miracles, ‘where we have a great co-operation, all parts working together in harmony to the glory of God’ (Mother Earth, 1946: 30). Edgar Saxon’s journal Health and Life, which enthusiastically promulgated organic philosophy and practice, rejected any dualism of Mind and Matter: the earth was God’s gift; composting was a form of ritual; gardening was a means of experiencing the Grace of God, and ‘our relationship to the Infinite’ was itself a source of health (Health and Life, August 1935: 114; July 1944: 15; March 1941: 120; November 1944: 188). Although Saxon had discarded the theology of his Nonconformist upbringing he frequently appealed to Jesus of Nazareth as the supreme example of radiant health, wholeness and creative energy (Health and Life, August 1943: 57; January 1945: 17; March 1946: 94–5), though evidently the Soil Association was not far behind; Saxon waxed lyrical about the spiritual vitality of the Association’s farm at Haughley in Suffolk, claiming that its mealtimes were ‘as festive as the Marriage at Cana’ (Health and Life, July 1947: 7). Today, of course, the conventional wisdom has it that Christianity and environmentalism are incompatible and that only by returning to a pagan or

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pantheistic religious philosophy can we hope to stop exploiting and destroying nature and find our way back to a harmonious relationship with her. It may therefore come as a surprise to many in the contemporary organic movement to learn that in Britain it emerged from a specifically Christian context and that the philosophy of husbandry which provided its intellectual foundation was developed and articulated predominantly by members of the Catholic wing of the Church of England. Perhaps this Christian influence will appear a little less remarkable when it is remembered that adherents of Bio-Dynamic cultivation, a number of whom were prominently involved in the Soil Association, drew their ideas from Rudolf Steiner’s esoteric Christian philosophy (Hemleben, 1975). To draw attention to this Christian matrix is not in any way to imply that all its leading figures were Christians, nor to deny that there was a pagan contribution, though this was less significant than might be imagined. H. J. Massingham expressed it as follows: ‘Neither Howard nor McCarrison … would dream of defining their sciences as expert knowledge of natural processes vindicating the Christian natural law. Nevertheless, they are so without any doubt, and so in new directions we are confronted by its fundamental reality’ (Massingham, 1943b: 171–2). Similarly he praised The Discipline of Peace, an essay in the philosophy of science by the non-Christian medical doctor Kenneth Barlow, for being in effect ‘a reinterpretation in terms of the most advanced science, of the primitive and mediaeval natural law’ (Massingham, 1943b: 171). Like all the leading figures in the early organic movement, Christian or not, Barlow accepted the idea of a natural order (Peck, 1942; Barlow, 1938). Since the natural order was God’s creation, it followed that exploiting the natural world was a form of blasphemy, while accepting its limits demonstrated a reverent wisdom which, being in harmony with the laws of life, would bring material blessings. The eroded soils of Africa and North America clearly demonstrated the nemesis which followed man’s arrogant disregard of the conditions of his earthly existence. There was no gulf between God and His creation, for ‘the law of nature,’ wrote Massingham, ‘expounds the divine law. … It is when man interacts with nature, searching her laws with his brain, gathering their rhythms into his being and translating them into his work, that his spirit can touch the eternal’ (Massingham, 1942: 146–7). If this were the case, then it followed that the decline of rural life consequent upon the dwindling number of those employed in agriculture was spiritually damaging; the organicists were links in a chain of ‘romantic protest’ (Veldman, 1994) which stretched back through the back-to-theland movements of the late nineteenth century, via William Morris and John Ruskin, to the Romantic poets and Rousseau. The agriculturalist and historian Montague Fordham, whom the early organic school much respected, expressed this view in Mother Earth (1908), a book which anticipated most of the ideas and ambiguities of the organic movement, as well as

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the title of the Soil Association journal. Ambitiously subtitled ‘A Proposal for the Permanent Reconstruction of our Country Life’, Mother Earth argued for state intervention to give security to English producers and revitalize the countryside by overcoming poverty. Fordham’s proposals included the establishment of model farms in the care of agricultural advisors, and of Land Clubs as local co-operative unions which would organize loan-banks, provide machinery, transport produce and defend the interests of smallholders. But the task ahead was educational as well as technical. There existed among the younger generation a distaste for the earth, fostered not just by the facts of rural poverty but by an urban bias to the educational system. Fordham wanted an education ‘specially directed to make [the rising generation] aware of the charm and mystery of nature, and to implant in them a devotion to the soil and all that belongs to it’, for nature’s ‘inexplicable force and perpetual mystery … gives an intuitive understanding of things essential; and those who learn thus become a people apart’. Ideally Fordham would have liked to see a political party representing agricultural interests, in order to ‘put the State on a broader basis. Thus … we should bring back her children to Mother Earth and effect a spiritual and material revolution’ (Fordham, 1908: 13, 121, 168). Thirty years later in his pamphlet Christianity and the Countryside, which had a foreword by his friend William Temple, the Archbishop of York, he was still arguing for the spiritual benefits of a rural revival and referred to St Francis de Sales as authority for his views; the saint’s story of how a cherry tree in full blossom gave him spiritual understanding seemed to Fordham ‘to provide a picture of the value of rural life in relation to spiritual inspiration’ (Fordham, 1938: 4). Unfortunately though, many country parsons were ignorant of farm life and the problems of cultivating the land, and Fordham wished that they would familiarize themselves with agricultural issues so that the Church could help to place the rural economy on a sound footing. One way in which farm and Church could be brought closer was by a revival of festivals. The link between them still existed at harvest time, but Fordham would have liked to see a festival of the sowing as well, such as still existed in Central Europe. ‘If one wants to bring religion into relation with practical life, surely such festivals are a good way to do it’ (Fordham, 1938: 13). Within just a few years there was founded an organization which shared Fordham’s concern for the Church’s closer involvement with agricultural issues; this was the Council for the Church and Countryside (CCC), and it was in effect a front for the organic movement, being the brainchild of one of the movement’s most important, energetic and controversial figures, the Dorset landowner Rolf Gardiner. Gardiner shared Fordham’s belief that ritual and festival must be restored to rural life, and, being a dedicated folk and morris dancer, he had made them integral to the work of his estate (Boyes, 1993: 154–63). As a Christian – albeit one with a strong pagan tinge – Gardiner felt that the Church had become too detached from its rural origins and had lost vigour as a result, a view shared by

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his neighbour the organic farmer Ralph Coward and by Coward’s friend David Peck, a clergyman whose experience of poverty in his country parish near Hungerford had spurred him into working for rural revival. They approached the Bishop of Salisbury, Neville Lovett, who said that if Gardiner would tell him ‘the pagan bits’ of a proposed Plough Sunday service he would christen them (Gardiner, 1972: 176). Lovett later wrote a booklet, Village Faith and Village Fellowship, in which he examined the link between religion and village life. In one passage he looked at the relation of God to farm and garden, stressing the need for an ecological perspective, since ‘God uses everything in its right place’ (Salisbury, 1945: 11). Gardiner, Peck, Coward and Lovett were the driving forces in establishing the CCC, but its wider context was ‘the association of a number of Christian social thinkers whose concern for many years has been with the Christian concept of man in society, with a number of farmers, landowners, countrymen and men of letters whose concern is for the cultural and spiritual values enshrined in the life of the countryside’ (CCC, 1946a: inside front cover). In other words, its context was the organic movement, and in the CCC’s publications one finds many of the movement’s most important names. In its Occasional Paper of Rogationtide 1945, a report on the previous Autumn Meeting referred to Kenneth Barlow, Philip Mairet, Innes Pearse and Lord Portsmouth as involved in the Council’s activities (Conford, 2001: 201–4; Pearse and Crocker, 1943; Portsmouth, 1965). The Book Section, ‘Understanding the soil’, was unashamedly biased, recommending several of the classic texts of the organic canon. Books offering an opposing view were disparaged in subsequent publications (CCC, 1946b: 23–4). The Council held discussions on controversial farming issues: Rolf Gardiner, Sir Albert Howard, Philip Mairet and H. J. Massingham participated in one on artificial insemination of animals (CCC, 1945), and the organic school faced their opponents in an ‘Encounter’ between ‘Agri-Culture’ and ‘Agri-Industry’, a debate chaired by Lord Justice Scott, who had also chaired the wartime committee on land use (CCC, 1946c). The speakers for ‘Agri-Culture’ were Gardiner, Portsmouth and J. E. Hosking, all of them members of the Kinhip in Husbandry. Jorian Jenks, in addition to editing Mother Earth and Rural Economy, edited several of the CCC’s Occasional Papers and wrote a lengthy leading article on the theme of what Christianity’s response should be to the agricultural revolution which was taking place (CCC, 1948). One of the Council’s most interesting publications was David Peck’s booklet Earth and Heaven. In it he argued that since man participated in the realms of both Nature and Spirit any fulfilling social order had both to respect the physical conditions of his bodily life and to acknowledge the priority of his spiritual destiny. According to this view, despoliation of the natural world followed inevitably from elevating economic issues into ends in themselves when they were only means to a

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greater end. Modern Western life, in pursuit of purely financial economic purposes, had divorced itself ‘from the natural rhythm and pattern to which human life must conform. … In the malaise of the modern social order, the life and work of the countryside occupies a highly significant place. “The land” has become the dominant illustration of the thesis that man must live in obedience to a certain law or pattern – or not at all’ (Peck, 1947: 4). What, then, were the conditions under which humanity must live, according to the organic movement’s religious philosophy? The answer might best be summarized as ‘conscious co-operation with the natural order’. The organicists sought a balance between nature and spirit, wanting to heal the rift between Earth and Heaven by showing that care for the earth was a spiritual discipline. There could be no return to some pagan participation mystique with natural cycles, but neither could man afford to forget, through technological arrogance, that he depended on nature for his survival. To use more distinctively theological language, they held that God is both immanent and transcendent: present in nature, His creation, but not to be identified with it, as in pantheism (McFague, 1993). They did not deny that human beings are in certain respects separate from nature, being able to study it, learn its laws and to some extent reduce their dependence on it. Peck distinguished between two forms of human transcendence of nature. The former involved accepting humanity’s place in the God-given scheme of things; it was part of the natural order that man should use and change the environment, but ‘the change he makes will not disrupt the natural symbiosis of creation. … He will understand … the laws of ecology’ (Peck, 1947: 14). Denial of these limitations was ‘demonic’ transcendence, in which man claimed absolute freedom for his manipulative power. Such a misconceived attitude to nature was implicitly a wrong attitude to God, a form of sin, and would bring chaos into the cosmos He had created. Demonic transcendence would destroy the land, thereby proving the existence of natural law, since man would be destroying the basis of his own survival. There was thus a close link between farming and theology: through farming man could become aware of the natural order. The CCC’s members were attempting to steer between pagan pantheism on the one hand and Gnostic or Barthian disparagement of the physical world on the other. The Revd. Patrick McLaughlin believed that there was ‘all the difference in the world between looking at nature as if it were God … and looking at nature as if it were God’s creation’ (CCC, 1948: 9). Jorian Jenks did not want the organic movement to turn into ‘a mere Nature-cult’ (CCC, 1950: 16), but he was in no doubt that spiritual significance could be discerned in the natural order. Many of the organic movement’s members were ‘devout Christians and to some at least the miracle of the constant renewal of physical life through natural processes is symbolical of that eternal spiritual life which was promised us through Christ’s Resurrection’ (CCC, 1950: 16).

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The CCC’s attempts to sketch an environmental theology take on particular significance when it is recalled that they anticipate by twenty years the influential diatribe in which the American historian of science – and churchman – Lynn White Jr blamed the ecological crisis entirely on the Judaeo–Christian tradition (White, 1967). Not long before that article appeared Philip Mairet produced a 37page paper for the CCC, Bailiff for God’s Estate on Earth (Mairet, 1964) which in far greater detail and with considerably more subtlety and care than White drew a different conclusion: that Western civilization’s exploitation of nature stemmed from the steady loss of a sense of the sacred which went hand in hand with loss of belief in God. This is not to say that Mairet defended institutional Christianity’s attitude to the natural world; he was uncomfortably aware that the Church had little to say about how humanity should behave towards nature. But he believed that the mediaeval doctrine of a natural order must be rescued and articulated again, for its environmental implications were of prime importance to industrial society. Mairet traced the loss of a sense of the sacred to the individualism which marked the Renaissance and was fundamental to the direction taken by philosophy from Descartes onwards. As man’s ‘vision of God and a spiritual world faded, something also happened to his conception of his natural environment’ (Mairet, 1964: 7). The conception of Man in Nature became radically different from that found in the Scriptures, with the three terms: God, Man and Nature, being reduced to two: Man and Nature. There was now no ‘invisible realm of conscious being higher than the human’, and man was ‘without any supra-human criterion for the control of himself’ (Mairet, 1964: 8–9). Technology reduced man’s sense of dependence on God and distorted his relation to nature, giving him the illusion that he could treat it as he pleased. The scientific investigations of the organic movement in the twentieth century, though, had begun to challenge the arrogance of the technological approach to nature, and Mairet regretted that theologians did not pay more attention to the significance of ecology and of organic thought and practice. Humanity’s reconciliation with the natural world implied reconciliation with God and an end to the human fears and hatreds which polluted the atmosphere with atomic fallout. The transfiguration of the realm of Nature will be … the outward aspect of the restoration by grace of our human nature. If there is to be any goal of collective salvation on earth for us to work for, it must include the perfecting of all the other life upon which Man’s life depends and by which it is enriched. … And a people is seen to be on the road toward this goal if and when its powers are directed more and more to such things as the reclamation of wastes and deserts, the beautifying of landscapes, purifying of waters, perfecting of species of plants and animals. And last, but not least, when it employs … as many as possible of its people in this sanest,

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healthiest and happiest of all human occupations – that of improving, ordering and beautifying the surface of this planet, the Earth, which is the particular garden of God entrusted to our care. Here is infinite scope for all the analytical lore and technical mastery acquired since the scientific revolution. To what other end could they be sensibly employed? (Mairet, 1964: 35–6) THE SOCIAL ORGANISM

It will be evident from what has been said so far that organic farming’s putative benefits for body and soul carried wider social implications, and it is now time to make them explicit. The organicists’ concern for health, to return to our startingpoint, was not just a desire that all individuals should enjoy the pleasures of vitality and full exercise of their physical potential, though this was certainly an important aspect of their campaign; they envisaged improved nutrition as the means by which further ‘physical degeneration’, to use Weston Price’s phrase, could be prevented. The Medical Testament complained that half the work of doctors was wasted, ‘since our patients are so fed from the cradle, indeed, before the cradle, that they are certain contributors to a C3 nation. Even our country people share the white bread, tinned salmon, dried milk regime’ (Picton, 1946: 29). Howard, referring to the work being undertaken by Drs George Scott Williamson and Innes Pearse at the Pioneer Health Centre in Peckham, South London, described how they had found that ‘83 per cent of apparently normal people had something the matter with them, ranging from some minor maladjustment to incipient disease. One of the most important contributions of these Peckham pioneers has been to unearth the beginnings of a C3 population’ (Howard, 1940: 178). Apart from anything else, the economic cost of poor health was enormous: Lady Balfour quoted a PEP report on ‘The British Health Services’ which assessed it at £300 million per year; something like 31 million weeks of work were lost annually through illness (Balfour, 1948: 20, 23). If there were a prima facie case that the nation’s health could be improved through organically-grown food, then there was a clear economic argument for investigating the organic school’s claims. But some organicists saw the significance of improved health as more than purely economic. Sanderson-Wells’s book Sun Diet supported the government’s attempts to create an A1 nation from the C3 population revealed by army recruiting and said that correct nutrition, by which he meant foods produced organically, was the key to success in this task. The British had been denied such a diet by free trade policies and as a result had lost their health, sturdiness and vigour. They had ‘gone soft’; British supremacy had been challenged and the nation was showing ‘a streak of deficiency’. Sanderson-Wells underlined his thesis by pointing to the large sums spent annually on dentistry. The situation posed a threat

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to national survival, since ‘Natural laws are set for the elimination of the unfit, the foolish and the unthinking’. By neglecting basic truths about diet and health the British were in danger of becoming all three, since ‘Inherited racial characteristics are helpless to reproduce their potencies without suitable foodstuffs’. ‘The rewards of a National return to a living diet would be: Tasty foods, hearty meals, less kitchen work, happier home lives, a revived countryside and resuscitated agricultural industries and pursuits. The present drift towards town life would be stemmed’ (Sanderson-Wells, 1939: 86, 84, 96, 93). Organically-grown foods were essential for ‘The Revival of England’, to quote the title of an article which Sanderson-Wells co-authored with Jorian Jenks (Sanderson-Wells and Jenks, 1947). The emphasis on efficiency measured by output per worker, enshrined in that year’s Agriculture Act, would substantially reduce the rural population and destabilize national life, but a policy of organic farming, building up soil fertility through careful husbandry rather than extracting output regardless of consequences, would require at least another half million workers on the land. Food grown from humus-rich soil would be biologically the best for Britain, raising the population’s vitality so that the nation could meet the challenge of survival; it would be economically best, too, reducing the cost of imports during a period of financial stringency. While Sanderson-Wells was concerned about the British population’s lack of vitality, Lionel Picton wondered whether it was any longer capable of reproducing itself; though Sanderson-Wells may have implied by ‘vitality’ what Picton expressed more bluntly in referring to ‘the virile people of this land’ (Picton, 1946: 160). The problem was, though, that they were no longer sufficiently virile or fertile: since the late 1870s the birthrate had been declining steeply (apart from during the Second World War and in the immediate aftermath of the First). To Picton the explanation was very clear: the British population had been denied the presence of Vitamin E in their bread since 1872, when the introduction of steel roller-mills meant that wheat-germ was now removed from flour. This was one of the dietary issues about which the organicists felt most strongly, and they campaigned consistently for wholemeal bread, preferably made from organically-grown wheat. During World War II Picton chivvied the Minister of Food, Lord Woolton, about ensuring that the National Loaf contained wheatgerm flour, and various noble supporters of the organic cause – Bledisloe, Geddes, Glentanar, Portsmouth, Sempill and Teviot – pressed their case in Lords debates on soil fertility and bread. Yet government policy on milling was, in Picton’s view, ‘not only fostering sterility, but ensuring it’ (Picton, 1946: 168). How was the nation to survive when it was approaching a ratio of one person under 20 years old to one of 60? Audacity and attack, vision and adventure, endurance till achievement – it is to the young of our race that we look for these. But they are few and grow

54

The Contested Countryside fewer. … My submission is that every peg which we can drive in to check and hold this slide downhill is called for now and urgently. Fresh complete food with the normal content of the E vitamins is such a peg and will conduce to our regeneration. … A full cradle is the salvation of the people’. (Picton, 1946: 169).

The organicists were generally opposed to the National Health Service, partly because it did not attach enough importance to preventive medicine and partly because they feared it would be costly and bureaucratic. They believed that it would have been more sensible, and less expensive, to create institutions along the lines of the Pioneer Health Centre, an ambitious experiment in social medicine which looked at people in their family and community relationships, and which, when it reopened in 1946, attracted worldwide interest (Barlow, 1988; Comerford, 1947). As well as regular medical overhauls the Centre offered a variety of social and physical activities, and its cafeteria provided a diet of organically-grown food as part of the drive to promote ‘the biology of positive health’ (Barlow, 1988: 104). A farm a few miles away, at Bromley Common in Kent, supplied this food, but Kenneth Barlow, a GP in Coventry, wanted to see closer links between agriculture and social medicine and set about establishing on the city’s outskirts a family health club and housing association of which a farm was to be an integral part. Despite enormous effort Barlow was unable to achieve his ambition, and the Pioneer Health Centre which had inspired him was to close in 1951, unable to survive financially under the NHS, which would not support it (Barlow, n.d.; Scott Williamson and Pearse, 1951). The organic movement considered this a tragic error. If society were conceived of as an organism, then its health depended on the health of its constituent cells in their various combinations as part of families, work-groups and communities. National well-being depended on the well-being of localities, and initiatives like Peckham might ensure the gradual permeation of a community by the example of physically healthy, contented and confident families. (If this seems too idealistic, one might reflect that the purpose-built, modernist architecture of the Pioneer Health Centre still stands in a Peckham side-street, now converted to luxury flats, while just down the road is one of the most dysfunctional housing estates in Europe.) The Pioneer Health Centre was a bold and original attempt to tackle the problems of urban living, but the organic movement felt, as do writers on rural issues today, that the problems of town and city were inseparable from those of the countryside (Barnett and Scruton, 1998). The national organism was not in a state of equilibrium; it lacked a sufficient ‘coefficient of ruralicity’, in Sir George Stapledon’s rather cumbersome phrase (Stapledon, 1942: 4). People had lost touch with nature and the land, and this meant that their animal, vegetable and primitive sides were being neglected. ‘Unless we are nourished all round,’ Stapledon wrote,

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‘we as a species or as a race must either perish ingloriously, or become completely perverted’ (Stapledon, 1942: 3). It was vital for the nation to have a populated countryside and vigorous agriculture, since ‘the man who is the greatest asset is without a doubt he who ploughs, and he who conducts all manner of operations designed primarily to create and to maintain fertility’ (Stapledon, 1942: 13). The relationship between the cultivator and the land was reciprocal: the good farmer ensured that the soil was productive, enabling the nation to survive the threat of war; but the soil produced the stock from which the farmer came, or, as Stapledon expressed it: ‘The most valuable product of the land … is the human being’ (Stapledon, 1942: 226). He rejected the stereotype of the dim-witted countryman, so beloved of urban snobbery, and the idea that those who left rural life for the city were automatically superior to those who remained. The supposed stagnancy of rural districts, Stapledon believed, was the result of national neglect, not of genetic inferiority. Country stock was purer and therefore ‘in its national aspects … the sounder of the two stocks’ (Stapledon, 1942: 227). Also, the supposedly less enterprising scion of a farming family who stayed in his locality was likely to have more children than his urbanized counterpart. Stapledon admired the countryman’s self-reliance, adaptability and wisdom, and believed those qualities had in fact been concentrated by the drift to the towns, so that those who remained in the country did so because they valued the life there. If this were so, it followed that the ‘diminished country stock is a much-to-be-treasured asset to the nation, of immense value genetically’, providing ‘an essential reservoir upon which to draw in the improvement and development of a race’ (Stapledon, 1942: 231). But how was the reservoir of pure stocks to be increased? Stapledon wanted a policy of increased opportunities for land settlement – as against the ideas of influential agriculturalists like C. S. Orwin, who favoured an industrial criterion of efficiency which aimed at reducing the number of agricultural workers – because he was optimistic that such a policy would attract those urban dwellers whose ancestry was the purest English, Scottish and Welsh. ‘The British countryside in short carries in its population the genes, unsullied and uncontaminated, that maintain and perpetuate our national vigour and our national characteristics’ (Stapledon, 1942: 231). H. J. Massingham advanced similar arguments, though with little emphasis on genetics, in his symposium The Small Farmer. The small, mixed, family farmer traditionally combined sturdy individualism with mutual aid in a way which made for a ‘stable orderly highly productive self-governing and self-disciplined community [lack of commas sic]’, and through these qualities had been ‘the bedrock of every historical civilisation’ (Massingham, 1947: 49). The organicists believed that through local co-operative groups of yeomen and smallholders the life of the market towns could be reinvigorated, a development preferable to the ‘new towns’ which planners in their arbitrary and abstract way

56

The Contested Countryside

were proposing (Massingham, 1943a: 133). The old market towns had developed ‘organically’ from the life of the surrounding countryside; the new towns were rootless impositions created by a government caring little for regional characteristics, traditions and landscapes. As the power of centralized bureaucracy grew during and after the war, the organic school argued instead for ‘decentralization as the first of all needs, and the nursing of regional centres and nuclei from a foundation of local practice, soil conditions and human intercourse’. Only in this way could ‘authentic national character’ be preserved (Massingham 1943a: 132; 131). Regionalism was a common theme in organic writings, but it was not just yeomen and smallholders who would play their part in a flourishing regional economy and culture: large estates, like Rolf Gardiner’s at Fontmell Magna, would have a central role. To think about rural problems in terms of the village, as Gardiner’s near-neighbour Ralph Coward did, was too narrow; one needed to think in terms of regions, their history, culture and resources (New English Weekly [NEW], 27 May 1943: 49–50). These regions would require their own aristocracy: men like Gardiner himself, but ‘Dukes Not Gauleiters’, he explained in case anyone should jump to the wrong conclusion (NEW, 15 July 1943: 115–16). Gardiner’s views drew predictable support from his friend and fellow landowner the Earl of Portsmouth, who believed that a balance of urban and rural was feasible only with a restricted national population (a view in which he was presumably at odds with Picton) and that the surplus should be packed off to the Dominions (NEW, 10 June 1943: 69). Less drastically, Kenneth Barlow wanted to see a form of ‘regional socialism’, and thought that the conflict between the demands of industrialism and the Mass Market on the one hand, and the needs of ecology and rural custom on the other, would ‘form the ground work of the experience of the post-war world’ (NEW, 3 June 1943: 58). Edgar Saxon’s journal Health and Life expressed the choice facing Britain in characteristically dramatic fashion. Although maintaining that its politics were ‘Not Right nor Left, but Straight’ (Health and Life [HL], June 1942: 258–9), Health and Life nevertheless exhibited at times a touch of distinctly right-wing ‘blood and soil’ nationalism, calling for ‘a virile, eager and rooted nation – virile because its roots [are] deep in a faithfully husbanded and fertile soil’ (HL, July 1941: 17). Saxon was open about his fear of a post-war leftwards swing, with power concentrated in the hands of a bureaucratic slave-order. The nation was required to choose, not between Red and Blue but between Red and Green. Ultimately Green was more important; the redness of blood could not exist without the primordial greenness of the leaf to feed it. The song ‘Greensleeves’ expressed the ‘wholesome core of the English people,’ Saxon declared. ‘Merlin or Marx: which is it to be?’ (HL, January 1947: 15).

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57 THE ISSUES TODAY

In the end, of course, it was neither. Ten years after Saxon issued this rallying cry another ‘M’, Macmillan, was presiding over the newly-dawned Age of Affluence, Left and Right were apparently sinking their differences in the compromise of Butskellism, and the pre-echo of the Green movement could scarcely be heard. Saxon himself was dead, as were Fordham, Howard, Loftus, Massingham, Picton, Weston Price and Scott Williamson. Farm machinery was rapidly reducing the rural population, while continuing liberal application of artificial fertilizers was augmenting the nation’s degree of agricultural self-sufficiency. From the National Health Service patients could obtain ‘a pill for every ill’, and the Church of England had lost any increase in spiritual authority which the war, and William Temple’s brief tenure at Canterbury, had bestowed upon it. In short, the organic movement appeared irrelevant. Looking back from a more distant perspective we can see that this was not in fact the case and that the issues it grappled with are still live ones for us in Britain today: many of them have been taken up in the volume of essays on Town and Country edited by Anthony Barnett and Roger Scruton (1998). Various food scares have made consumers reflect on the relationship between methods of food production and health, and have helped boost the sale of organic products. The popularity of farmers’ markets, selling locally-grown and often organic foodstuffs, is another development which would surely have delighted Massingham and his allies. The religious dimension to the organic outlook is still important and much debated; John Seymour, long-term advocate of organic cultivation and guru of selfsufficiency, went so far as to say that if the Church did not address environmental issues it would cease to have any justification for its existence (Echlin, 1999). We have seen that certain churchmen addressed those issues back in the 1940s and that their work has been forgotten; it could prove valuable to those contemporary theologians who are beginning to explore rural and ecological questions (Echlin, 1999). In the meantime, environmental spirituality has been appropriated by Western Buddhists and neo-pagans, but the question of how humanity should relate to the natural world remains as central to the organic movement now as it was for its founders more than half a century ago. To what extent are we identified with nature, and to what extent do we transcend it? Is the organic metaphor adequate to our understanding of ourselves and our society, or does it lead us down the road towards nationalism and the ‘blood and soil’ ideas with which a number of the organic pioneers flirted? Is it true that a nation needs to have a large ‘coefficient of ruralicity’, as Stapledon maintained, or could we dispense altogether with our much-dwindled rural population and rely on imported food? The early organicists strongly opposed laissez-faire in the same way that environmentalists today oppose the policies of the World Trade Organization.

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Whatever we may think of the early organic movement’s response to the various issues discussed in this essay, there can be no doubt that their attempts to establish organic agriculture as the basis of Britain’s physical, spiritual and social well-being offer a stimulating point of departure for contemporary discussion of our countryside’s future. REFERENCES

Balfour, E. B. (1948) The Living Soil (8th edn.), London: Faber Barlow, K. E. (n.d.) Unpublished typescript on the Coventry family health club (1938) ‘The Priest and human experience’, Christendom, December 1938, 284–7 (1988) Recognising Health, London: Kenneth Barlow Barnett, Anthony and Roger Scruton (eds) (1998) Town and Country, London: Cape Boyd Orr, John (1936a) Food, Health and Income, London: Macmillan (1936b) ‘Public health and agriculture’, in Journal of the Farmers’ Club (1948) Soil Fertility: The Wasting Basis of Human Society, London: Pilot Press (1966) As I Recall, London: Macgibbon and Kee Boyes, Georgina (1993) The Imagined Village, Manchester: Manchester University Press CCC (Council for the Church and Countryside) (1945) Occasional Paper: Harvest 1945, London: CCC (1946a) Church and Countryside Associations, London: CCC (1946b) Occasional Paper: Rogationtide, London: CCC (1946c) Encounter: Agri-culture or Agri-industry, London: CCC (1948) Christianity and the Agricultural Revolution, London: CCC (1950) Man and Nature, London: CCC Comerford, John (1947) Health the Unknown, London: Hamish Hamilton Conford, Philip (2001) The Origins of the Organic Movement, Edinburgh: Floris Books Echlin, Edward (1999) Earth Spirituality, New Alresford: John Hunt ERCI (Economic Reform Club and Institute) (1939) Health, Agriculture and the Standard of Living, London: ERCI Fordham, Montague (1908) Mother Earth, London: Chiswick Press (1938) Christianity and the Countryside, London: Industrial Christian Fellowship Gardiner, Rolf (1972) Water Springing From the Ground, Fontmell Magna: Springhead Griggs, Barbara (1986) The Food Factor, Harmondsworth: Penguin Hemleben, J. (1975) Rudolf Steiner: A Documentary Biography, East Grinstead: Henry Goulden Heron, Mary (1998) Interview with the author, February 1998 Howard, Sir Albert (1940) An Agricultural Testament, London: Oxford University Press (1945) Farming and Gardening for Health or Disease, London: Faber

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King, F. H. (1927) Farmers of Forty Centuries, London: Cape McCarrison, Sir Robert (1961) Nutrition and Health, London: Faber McFague, Sallie (1993) The Body of God, London: SCM Press Mairet, Philip (1964) Bailiff for God’s Estate on Earth, London: CCC Massingham, H. J. (1942) Remembrance, London: Batsford (1943a) The English Countryman, London: Batsford (1943b) The Tree of Life, London: Chapman and Hall (1947) The Small Farmer, London: Collins Moore-Colyer, Richard and Philip Conford (2004) ‘A “secret society”? The internal and external relations of the kinship in husbandry, 1941–52’, Rural History 15, 189–206 Oyler, Philip (1950) The Generous Earth, London: Hodder and Stoughton Pearse, I. H. and L. H. Crocker (1943) The Peckham Experiment, London: Allen and Unwin Peck, David G. (1947) Earth and Heaven: The Theology of the Countryside, London: CCC Peck, William G. (1942) Review of K. E. Barlow’s The Discipline of Peace in Christendom, June 1942, 123–27 Picton, L. J. (1946) Thoughts on Feeding, London: Faber Portsmouth, Earl of (1965) A Knot of Roots, London: Bles Price, Weston A. (1945) Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, Redlands, Ca.: W. A. Price Salisbury, Neville, Bishop of (1945) Village Faith and Village Fellowship, London: SPCK Sanderson-Wells, T. H. (1939) Sun Diet, London: John Bale Sanderson-Wells, T. H. and Jorian Jenks (1947) ‘The Revival of England’, Medical Press and Circular, 30 July 1947; subsequently issued as a pamphlet Scott Williamson, G. and I. H. Pearse (1951) The Passing of Peckham, London: Pioneer Health Centre Stapledon, Sir George (1942) The Land: Now and To-Morrow, London: Faber Sykes, Friend (1946) Humus and the Farmer, London: Faber Veldman, Meredith (1994) Fantasy, the Bomb and the Greening of Britain: Romantic Protest, 1945−80, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press White, Lynn Jr (1967) ‘The historic roots of our ecologic crisis’, Science 155, 1203–7 Wrench, G. T. (1938) The Wheel of Health, London: C. W. Daniel

3 AGRICULTURE’S ROLE WITHIN THE UK

Sir John Marsh

THE ROLE OF MYTH IN THE ‘CONTEST’

For many people television and radio provide their vision of the countryside and their understanding of British agriculture. The media view of the world comprises that which is newsworthy, frightening, exciting or scandalous. It makes up a picture of the countryside far from that which most farmers would recognize. It is characterized by a number of myths that are firmly believed but certainly misleading. For example: The dominant market for UK agriculture is the production of organic food. In fact only 4.3 per cent of the UK agricultural area is used for organic farming, and of this the largest part is in permanent pasture (DEFRA, 2003: 95) Modern farming technology leaves dangerously high levels of pesticide in human food. In practice pesticide approval and use are tightly controlled by extensive regulation. Systematic monitoring reveals very few cases in which the maximum level laid down to ensure food is safe is exceeded. (The legislation can be accessed from http:www.pesticides.gov.uk). The presence of pesticides in water and their impact on wildlife is also monitored. Veterinary medicines are used to cover up poor animal husbandry and threats to human health. The use of veterinary medicines is controlled under EU and national law. An independent Veterinary Residues Committee publishes the results of surveillance of both domestic and imported supplies. Again very few examples are found where residues exceed the maximum recommended level (Veterinary Residues Committee, 2004). Modern intensive farming has destroyed the British landscape and turned

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the countryside into a wildlife desert. In fact English Nature’s annual report shows that there has been a continuing improvement in the state of its Sites of Special Scientific Interest since March 2000. Improvement has also taken place in the condition of National Nature Reserves. Farmers are wealthy parasites on the public who live comfortable lives as ‘subsidy junkies’. The average household income in the UK in 2003 was £20,592. The income for each farmer was £15,537 (DEFRA, 2003). We shall revisit some of these myths as we explore the forces that dominate farming practice and the changed role of farming in the countryside. THE ‘CONTEST’ ON THE GROUND

About half a million people, less than 2 per cent of the working population, work on farms. More employment is generated in the industries that supply farmers, fertilizer, machinery, medicines etc. and in the businesses that process and transport food to the final consumer. Sector

Employment, 000s

% of food chain

Agriculture Agricultural Inputs Food and Drink Inputs Food and Drink Manufacture Food and Drink Wholesale Catering Grocery Distribution

550 25 12 450 189 1400 1151

14.6 0.6 0.3 11.9 5.0 37.0 30.6

Total

3777

100

The primary output of farming is food. Most of this is ‘raw material’ requiring further inputs before it enters into consumption. Traditionally this was mainly a question of taking goods to local markets. Today, in urban, affluent countries such as the UK, national and international distribution, packaging, processing and preservation fill the gap between the farm gate and consumers. As a result the share of the pound spent on food by consumers that reaches farmers has declined. It was only 47 per cent in 1988 but by 2003 had fallen to 34 per cent. The share is lowest for commodity products such as wheat, 14 per cent, and potatoes, 17 per cent. For lamb, it remains at some 51 per cent but this was 65 per cent in 1988 (DEFRA, 2003: Table

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63

2.3). Food and drink amounts to about 21 per cent of all spending, so farmers’ receipts represent only 7 per cent of total consumer expenditure (Euro PA, 1995). In the early 1970s the contribution of farming to the gross domestic product was around 2.8 per cent. Now it is only 0.8 per cent. It has fallen continuously since the war and continues to fall. In the macro economy of the UK farming now carries little weight. The same pattern has affected trade in agricultural goods. In the mid-1970s some 15.4 per cent of imports and 6.7 per cent of exports were agricultural. By 2003 only 8.4 per cent of imports and 4.8 per cent of exports were agricultural. Whilst import saving once figured strongly as an argument for the support of farming, it no longer registers as an important issue (Body, 1982: 72ff.). The explanation is not that the amount of food consumed, produced or traded has fallen but that the rest of the economy has grown. In a rich society extra income is not spent on an equivalent increase in the amount of food consumed but on other goods, such as houses, electronics and transport. Even within the food sector additional spending is not on raw material food, but on variety, quality, convenience and the comfort of assurances about safety; values that are largely added after the goods have left the farm. For farmers growing affluence means that there is a continuing cost/price squeeze (Tracey, 1993: 128ff.). They have to compete with more rapidly growing sectors for the resources they control. They must pay a price for labour, machinery and chemicals determined by what these assets can earn in other activities. Thus wages needed to retain workers rise. If farmers seek to sustain incomes by increased productivity, the market will only accept added volume at lower real prices. Policies that have shielded farmers from external competition and underpinned domestic prices have partially attenuated this effect. However, the evidence shows a continuing tendency for the prices farmers receive to decline relative to the prices they pay for other inputs. To maintain real income the individual farmer must seek to reduce unit costs and, if possible, increase the volume produced. This has led to radical changes within the industry. Variable costs can be cut by improvements in management, by the more careful use of purchased inputs and by introducing new technology. In terms of cultivation, pest control, the management of livestock and the ability to harvest crops rapidly and with minimal labour, new methods enable farmers to produce more from their land and to do so at lower unit costs. This provides a powerful incentive for innovation, simplification and tighter control of farming operations. The existence of a wide range of profitability among farms with similar resources, suggests that there is still substantial scope for further cost cutting through better management. However, there are limits to which variable costs can be curtailed without damaging production. To reduce costs on a lasting basis overheads have to be reduced. This implies adjustments not just in farming practice but also in the

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structure of farming (Mansholt, 1968). For most farmers the key is increased scale of operation. By spreading fixed costs over a larger volume of output, economies of scale can be realized. Initially this may be secured by more specialization on the farm. With fewer enterprises herd sizes can grow and larger numbers of animals be kept with no extra labour. Similarly, larger areas of individual crops enable farmers to afford more specialist equipment that can cut labour costs, use fertilizers and cropprotection chemicals more efficiently and achieve higher standards of husbandry. Such developments can only take place to a limited extent within existing farm boundaries. Greater scale has been facilitated by new technology. This increases the pressure towards larger farm enterprises in order to secure lowest costs. Farmers may respond by co-operative arrangements with neighbours. This can be specific to particular activities, such as dairying, or lead to the merger of holdings. The goal is to reduce overhead costs. For many farmers, however, the most attractive route has been to acquire neighbouring farmland when it comes to the market for rent or for sale. By extending their operations to cover the larger area with little additional equipment, they can afford to offer higher prices or rents than competitors who seek to acquire the vacated farm as a stand-alone business. This process has driven structural change in all Northern European countries. The chart below shows that the number of holdings (broadly farms) has been falling but the number of livestock per farm has increased (European Union). Changes in Holding Numbers and Livestock Enterprises

UK Netherlands Luxembourg France Germany Denmark Belgium 0

50

100

150

200

% 1995 compared with 1975 LUs per Holding 95 as % 75

Holding Numbers 95 as % 75

250

Agriculture’s Role Within the UK

65

Despite structural adjustment the total income from farming – the amount left to reward farmers, partners and directors for their input of capital and labour – has tended to decline. There are substantial variations in profitability over time. The downward trend has encouraged some people to leave the industry. And this effect has been particularly marked in periods of sharp income decline. Since 1999 the total income from farming, which represents the reward for the labour and capital farmers provide and the risks they bear, has been significantly lower than the average level of income in other economic sectors. Despite this farmers have been leaving the industry more slowly than hired farm workers. Although the number of whole-time farmers has declined there has been an increase in the number of part-time farmers. The explanation is complex. Farming is not only a source of income but also an activity to which many farmers feel committed and from which they derive important non-monetary benefits. It provides a residence and a recognized place in the community. There is a strong demand for farms by wealthy non-farmers. One result has been that the price of farmland has continued to rise despite its low and falling earning capacity in farming. The fact that land prices have remained firm encourages owner-occupier farmers to remain in the industry. In essence they anticipate increases in the capital value of their land that will more than offset the poor returns farming offers. Because farmers have such good security, banks and others have been prepared to lend, enabling many farmers to live on capital and sustain the living standards to which they have become accustomed. (In a recent unpublished paper to the British Institute of Agricultural Consultants, John Barker, Senior Agricultural Manager for HSBC, stressed the continuing commitment of the bank to farmers, despite low incomes and the prospect of turbulence associated with the reform of the CAP.) Labour in UK Farming

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The chart above (based on various ‘Annual Review Whitepapers’ and successive versions of Agriculture in the UK, published by MAFF and more recently by DEFRA) demonstrates the long-term nature of these changes in the labour force. Aggregated statistics cannot reflect the diversity of farming that exists within the UK. The situation varies hugely between the productive arable lands of East Anglia, the rich grasslands of the west and the rugged, difficult terrains of hills and mountains in Scotland, Wales and Northern England. The Share of Regions in UK Agriculture 12000 10000 8000 6000 4000 2000 0

England

Scotland

Wales

Gross Output £ Million Gross value added at basic prices £ million

Northern Ireland

Intermediate consumption £ Million Total Income from Farming £ million

By far the larger share of total farm output is produced in England. However, in the devolved regions, agriculture makes a much larger contribution both to gross value added and to employment. Given changes in policy about to take place these differences may become of much greater importance for the future of farming within the UK. There are large differences within the various countries. In Eastern England, and some parts of Eastern Scotland, arable production takes place on large farms, in relatively flat country. In many parts of Northern England and in much of Wales and in the Southern Scottish Uplands and the Highlands, livestock production is the only possible form of farming. In such areas sporting activities and forestry play a role in sustaining economic activity. THE CONTEST IN THE POLICY ARENA: A CHANGING AGENDA FOR FARMING

This brief account of some of the main features of agriculture in the UK needs to be complemented by an account of how the industry has been affected by the actions of government. At the end of the Second World War anxieties about food supplies and the heavy, and inescapable, cost of food imports to maintain supplies

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for UK consumers, encouraged the government to stimulate more domestic production. This intention was given legal flesh in the form of the Agriculture Act of 1947. This included the memorable phrase that domestic agriculture should produce, ‘such part of the national food supply as it was in the national interest to produce at home’: a rather elastic promise. The UK joined the European Common Market in 1973. Agriculture had been a sticking point in the negotiations that led to the Rome Treaty and the creation of the European Economic Community. Part of the deal struck then was that there should be a common policy for agriculture, enabling farm goods to move freely within the Community and to be protected from external competition by a common set of rules. The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) provided support primarily through maintaining prices at levels judged appropriate by the Council of Ministers. These prices were generally well above those ruling in world markets. They were also higher than those within the UK. However, as a new member of the EEC the UK had to apply policies that had already been negotiated, including the CAP. In continental Europe memories of food scarcity underpinned a continuing concern to ensure a secure food supply. In the UK emphasis had already switched to anxiety about the cost of farm support. The higher prices required by the CAP were unwelcome to the government and the consumer. Accession meant that the real costs of imported food to the UK rose from lower world to higher EEC levels. This represented a transfer of real income to other member countries. This could be diminished by additional production at home. The CAP provided an incentive to farmers to produce more and improvements in technology enabled them to do so. At end of the 1970s the government produced a paper called ‘Food From Our Own Resources’; an encouragement to produce more. Output grew in all member countries. The outcome was a growing embarrassment for the Community as the cost of disposing of surpluses increased. The notorious ‘mountains’ of grain and butter and the ‘wine lake’ and international pressures from GATT made reform inevitable. Reform was long delayed. In the 1980s attempts were made to limit production through quotas on milk and set aside requirements for cereals. However, it was not until the 1990s under pressure from negotiations in GATT that the first steps were taken towards a radical change in the system. The Commissioner for Agriculture at the time, Ray MacSharry, sought to contain production by allowing internal prices to fall in response to market pressures. Farmers were compensated by direct payments and some support provided for a range of environmental and rural development activities. The immediate impact of these reforms on farmers was modest. The settlement of the Uruguay Round of GATT negotiations (1992) required a review within the framework of the new World Trade Organisation (WTO) to take place in 2000.

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Other members of WTO sought a further and much larger reduction in export subsidies and a greatly increased access to the Community market. Their concerns were intensified by the prospect that the EU of 15 would be greatly extended by the admission of new members from Eastern and Southern Europe. In preparation for this review the Community made some further, modest changes, reducing some prices further, increasing the environmental element in policy and opening a discussion on the reform of the milk regime. This was supposed to enable the CAP to continue to 2006. However, part of the agreement was that there should be a ‘Mid-Term Review’ (MTR) examining how adequately the changes made in 2000 had dealt with the actual situation of agriculture in the Community. The outcome of the MTR appeared in June 2003 (Commission, 2003). It represented a much more radical change in the CAP than any of the previous reforms. At its heart was a decision to de-couple direct payments to farmers. The amount paid is to be calculated on the basis of past amounts received, aggregated for all the various commodities into a Single Farm Payment (SFP). This will be paid to qualifying farmers provided they meet conditions designed to maintain the land they farm in good order, (cross-compliance conditions) whether they produce or not. This provides no incentive to produce beyond the rewards available in the market. Farmers will still receive the SFP even if they sell nothing (DEFRA, n.d.). Individual member countries have been given considerable freedom in determining how the system is to be operated. Governments are allowed to decide whether the payments to individual farmers should be based on their historic receipts or should be regionalized. Within the UK, Scotland and Wales have opted for the historic basis. In England a hybrid approach has been adopted. This starts as historic but is gradually redistributed on a regional basis, allowing for subregions that pay reduced amounts per hectare in less favoured and more remote areas. This transfers single farm payments away from the major arable and dairying regions (as announced by the Secretary of State for Environment and Rural Affairs in February 2003), where most of the entitlements to direct payments have been generated. In other countries governments have decided, at least at the outset, to retain a link with production. UK farmers fear that this will lead to unfair competition in the market place. The system is still in transition. The Commission is proceeding with plans to bring into the system products not so far included: hops, tobacco and sugar. Pressure groups and some governments are keen to direct more, or even all, of the budget payments towards explicitly environmental ends (UK, 2002–4). This could be achieved by modulation, reducing the amount individual farmers receive and transferring it to fund environmental programmes. In contrast with the rest of the EU, the British government has opted for a higher rate of modulation than the EU regulation requires. In the view of farmers this weakens their position compared to farmers elsewhere in the EU.

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The full effects of this policy change will take several years to become clear but already it is apparent that it represents a watershed so far as much traditional farming in the UK is concerned. In 2003 total subsidies to UK farmers amounted to some £2.8 billion of which £2.1 billion related to production. This accounted for some 13 per cent of the value of output and 69 per cent of the total income from farming (DEFRA, 2003). The farmer has been, for some 87 per cent of his revenue, dependent upon the whims of the market, but market prices have been protected through the CAP. This protection is likely to be greatly reduced if not to disappear. The current round of WTO trade negotiations is likely to lead to further cuts in export subsidies and in freer access to EU markets. Prices under the reformed CAP seem likely to be more volatile and lower. Past policy has built higher costs into the industry. It encouraged investments that are profitable only at price levels no longer likely to be reached. It increased the price paid for farmland whether as rents or for purchase. Many supply and processing businesses will find it difficult to survive if farm output falls considerably. Initially farmers may treat the SFP as a replacement for traditional payments, but if the cost/price squeeze continues it is likely that for many it will become increasingly attractive to farm only to the extent needed to comply with cross-compliance. Such farmers can seek supplementary income from non-farming activity and avoid the costs and risks associated with commercial production. Policy has thus set a scene in which a relationship, based on production, between the community and farming is being redefined. Society wants different things from the land. Some of these are traditionally by-products of farming. Farmers have no choice but to obey the imperatives of the market; if they do not, in the long term they must cease to farm. If the non-market goods that vocal groups increasingly demand do not occur as by-products then, unless the taxpayer foots the bill, they will not arrive. The next section explores the new relationship between farmers and the community. THE CHANGING AGENDA OF POLICY FOR THE COUNTRYSIDE

Political analysts have long regarded the level of support given to farming as the result of the power of the farm lobby, with Self and Storing (1971) providing an early exposition of this view. Analysts interpret the current situation as one in which that lobby has become weaker and other pressure groups assert different priorities with increased success. There is some measure of truth in this but it oversimplifies reality. The level of support has been determined not by farmers but by politicians. Initially it was driven by fears of food shortage and hunger in the postwar world. Farmers were paid more to encourage them to produce more and to encourage them to adopt new, more productive methods. They were provided with

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an array of advisory services designed to help them identify and apply improved technology. This policy succeeded. It brought what the public wanted, assurance of food security. The public got what they wanted, but as fears of hunger disappeared the costs of the policy were no longer acceptable. What resulted was not the withdrawal of government intervention from farming but a change in the goals. Policies enable communities to achieve outcomes they want but which markets cannot deliver. It is clear that a new agenda of public demands on farming and the countryside has already emerged. The post-war policies were concerned with the output of farming. When this ceased to be an issue, concern centred on farm incomes and, particularly within the EU, on the incomes of small farms. Today there is much more concern with the value of the resources farmers use. Anxiety about the impact of farming on resources stems from a belief that the true cost of farming activity is not reflected in the price farmers pay for resources. New regulatory or financial mechanisms are needed that make these resource costs reflect social values. To understand the contest in the countryside, it is necessary to look more closely at some of these changes. Although the justification for support of production became weaker, the social consequences of removing subsidies still had great weight for those members of the Community that had much larger farming populations. Policy was justified not on the need to produce more, but to sustain rural communities and small family farms. In fact price support is an inefficient and ultimately ineffective way of dealing with income problems, but agricultural ministers were unwilling to change. The structure of decision-taking within the EEC made it very easy for those who currently benefited from the CAP to protect their position. The pressures for change eventually became irresistible. To the problems associated with rising budget cost and pressures from GATT partners were added concerns about the safety of food, in the wake of BSE, and the impact of modern farming systems on the environment and animal welfare. The new policy has made it increasingly necessary to show that in return for income payments farmers deliver additional goals that are regarded as of social value. A key driving force is concern about the environment. Modern farming has become much more productive by using much more powerful tools to control pests and diseases, to cultivate and harvest and to manage farm livestock. The consequences have been far-reaching. Firstly, substantial changes in field boundaries, the removal of some hedges and stone walls, the drainage of wet land and the introduction of many single-purpose buildings of an ‘industrial’ character have changed the appearance of the landscape. Secondly, there is the fact that farm machinery is much larger. It can transform fields rapidly and drastically. It impacts on road traffic, sometimes leaving mud on roads and increasing the risk of accidents. Mechanical operations may generate noise and at some times of year continue into the night when crucial operations have to capture a weather

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opportunity. Large-scale livestock production, too, can result in noise and smell and involve the movement of large lorries through country lanes as stock are taken to market or milk to processing plants. For the predominantly non-farming population of the countryside farming is not seen as a ‘good neighbour’. Thirdly, fewer people are employed and the share of farming and farm workers in village communities has declined. Rising incomes in other sectors have enabled people to live in the countryside and travel to urban work. TV programmes proclaim the attractions of country life and illustrate the complex and interesting nature of unfarmed habitats. They do not give a good press to modern farming. A fourth factor is the inevitable tension between those who seek an unchanged natural environment and those engaged in agriculture. The purpose of farming is to give priority to crops and animals of economic importance. Inevitably the more successful it is the more limited are the opportunities for wild plants and animals to survive in the same area. Further, as food supplies increase the value of extra production decreases and as wildlife becomes scarcer the cost of losses grows. There is an increased interest, within an affluent and mobile community, in both wild life and landscape (Bowers and Cheshire, 1983). Thus in policy terms there is a perceived need to shift incentives from food production towards environmental and animal welfare goals. These concerns have defined a new agenda, for a ‘rural’ and ‘food’ and not just an ‘agricultural’ policy. This has been recognised not just in shifts in farm policy but through the creation and development of institutional arrangements. For example: ‰

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Food safety is no longer left to an Agricultural Ministry but has become the responsibility of the Food Standards Agency, established in 2000 to act as an independent food safety watchdog. It has an independent status, reporting to Parliament rather than through a minister. It sees itself as putting the consumer first and has set targets to reduce food borne illness, to help people eat more healthily, to promote informative labelling and promote best practice within the food industry. An important part of the work of the Environment Agency relates to agriculture. It regulates water use and waste disposal. It promotes best farming practices to safeguard the environment. It seeks to protect habitats and conducts surveys of animal species. For instance, recent work has shown that otters have become more widespread (English Nature, 2004: 17). It publishes an annual report on Conservation, Access and Recreation. English Nature is the custodian of a substantial amount of legislation concerned with conservation of both biological and geological resources, including the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act, 1949; the Countryside Act of 1968; the Nature Conservancy Council Act of 1973; the Wildlife and Countryside Act, 1981 (amended 1985); the Environmental

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‰

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Protection Act, 1990, and the Countryside and Rights of Way Act, 2000. Its administration of Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs), Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONBs), etc., impacts directly on farming, restricting the use farmers can make of some assets within their farm boundaries (English Nature, 2004). The Countryside Agency created in 1999 has been concerned with rural communities, the landscape and the quality of life for rural people. In future part of its role will be undertaken by Regional Development Authorities and part by a new Integrated Agency that will include aspects of the work of English Nature. It has been the lead organisation dealing with the social impacts of change in the countryside, including the reduction in farm employment. Government has also been active in support of industry-led initiatives to enable farming to come terms with its changing role in society. It has given active support to FWAG (Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group), and to LEAF (Linking the Environment and Farming). Both these organizations foster farming practices and farming systems that protect the environment whilst operating within the pressures faced by commercial farms.

Policy for the countryside now involves much more than agricultural policy. However, farming remains the largest land user and the realization of other policy goals still depends on farmers’ actions. THE CONTEST FOR COUNTRYSIDE AND THE FUTURE OF FARMING

Many of the pressures on the countryside affect but do not originate in farming. Within the UK, planning policy has played a major role. One of its important consequences has been to limit the growth of housing in many rural areas. Another is to create a large gap between the value of land ‘with’ and ‘without’ planning permission. Even land that lacks planning permission but is adjacent to existing development may attract a ‘hope’ value. In rural communities within commuting distance of larger towns, there is a strong demand for residential property. This drives the price of houses beyond the reach of most traditional rural workers (Countryside Agency, 2002). For some landlords and farmers economic growth offers an opportunity to sell or let redundant farm cottages and to convert traditional farm buildings for use as small-scale factories, shops or offices. For tenant farmers and farm workers, no similar windfall gains arise and retirement or redundancy means leaving the homes in which they may have lived most of their lives. Not only has farming become a much smaller share of the economic activity of

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the countryside; it no longer dominates the local political agenda. At the local level the contest for the countryside is increasingly determined by non-farming considerations. Although they value farmed land as a backcloth to their lifestyle, some wealthy residents who acquire local property may contribute little to the local economy or community. They shop at urban shopping centres. They make little use of public transport and, if they have children may send them away to be educated. This can lead to challenges between so-called NIMBYs (not in my back yard!) and traditional businesses, including farming, aspects of whose business activities they find unwelcome. There are characteristic complaints: ‘They bring traffic through the village’; ‘They create noise, smells and start work at very early hours in the morning – some even work all night’. Some newcomers may seek legal remedies. Country people find themselves bewildered to be in court because their cockerels make too much noise in the morning. Not all these relationships are negative. In many places newcomers and established residents join in activities that enhance the life of the village and support local initiatives. Despite this it is clear that a new social balance is emerging in the countryside and this will affect how farming can operate in the future. The discussion earlier in this chapter indicated how underlying economic and political forces have shaped the role of farmers in the countryside. The frontier of relationships between the rest of the community has moved. Movement results from both market forces and political action. A further period of relatively rapid change seems inescapable as agriculture adapts to the new CAP. The final section of this chapter takes a more speculative view about how the industry may respond to both market pressures and new policies. Ultimately this will define the shape of the contested countryside. RESPONSES TO MARKET FORCES

The cost/price squeeze will continue. The economy will continue to grow but the demand for food in the UK will not keep pace. Farmers will no longer earn subsidies for producing. Their production decisions will have to be based on what the market will pay. A lower level of output may cause market prices to rise but as EU markets become more open to international trade, it is unlikely that any increase will offset the loss of subsidy. At the same time, costs will be driven upwards by economic growth, both in the EU and in the world as a whole. This will affect direct labour costs and the prices of all those inputs that farmers buy from other sectors. Further, it is probable that prices within the EU will become much more volatile. In effect prospective profits are lower and the risks greater. The rational response is to invest less. Markets are also changing. Most farm production is raw material. Other businesses buy, process, transport and present it to consumers in shops and

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restaurants. Whilst there are still many more small shops and modest-sized food processors, overwhelmingly the bulk of food now reaches the consumer through large organizations. The largest of these are world-scale businesses. Such businesses, processors or retailers, define their requirements with rigour. Their most precious asset is their image and they must minimize risks to their reputation. A single, branded product that makes some people ill can do multi-million pounds of damage. To defend themselves such businesses define the standards they require. Those who wish to provide their raw materials have to meet these requirements. The profile food companies seek reflects much more than safety. They prosper by anticipating what consumers want both in the product and in the way in which it is produced. Thus supermarket chains and food service companies offer very large numbers of new products but they have refused to handle genetically modified foods. Similarly, they have made a feature of selling ‘organic’ or ‘welfare friendly’ food, although there are no good reasons to believe it is in any way more healthy or safer. Again they respond to what their analysis suggests are public perceptions. UK farmers, if they are to supply these companies, not only have to meet these standards but to do so at levels of cost that are competitive and using systems of production that are acceptable. This suggests that in future there will be a need for stronger links throughout the food chain. This can offer security relating to supply, quality and production methods. There is a diversity of possible linkages, from arms-length negotiations between sizable farming co-operatives and business customers, to contracts with individual farmers specifying what is to be produced, when and in what volumes and involving some sharing of the risk of price movement. Whether via a co-operative or through direct specifications by customers, the decisions farmers make on the farm are likely to become increasingly determined by the businesses to which they sell. (In 2001, the government appointed a Policy Commission on the Future of Farming and Food, widely known, after its Chairman, as the Curry Commission. Its report, published in January 2002, stressed the importance of connecting farmers with their markets.) Responding to these market pressures is likely to demand increased scale. On the farm, larger enterprises offer a means of achieving lower unit cost. This is a continuation of existing trends. Already most of the total output of UK farming comes from a relatively small number of large farms. It seems likely that their share will grow. Higher-cost producers will find it even more difficult to make a profit. They will still receive the SFP even if they do not produce. Farming activities will be limited to the minimum needed to secure the payment. Even large producers in areas of low productivity may take this route. Smaller farms, even in favourable areas, will be under pressure to cut overhead costs. They will be under pressure to combine with neighbours to create larger units that can capture scale economies. The pattern that emerges is of

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a commercial agriculture where most output comes from larger producers and is targeted with increasing precision to defined market outlets. This process represents the completion of the ‘industrialization’ of farming, with most production taking place in organizations that are part of much larger chains of business organization capable of competing on a world scale. However, by no means all farming activity will fit into this model. There may soon be more part-time than full-time farms. Owner-occupiers will seek to retain the farmland both for ‘family’ reasons and in the hope of capital gain. Farm families who receive the SFP but cannot earn sufficient from farming alone are likely to seek sources of income that enable them to continue to live in the farm house. The potential range of ‘other sources of income’ is huge. For some it may amount to a day job working for someone else, farming their own holding in evenings and weekends. In some households, the adult members may pool external earnings. Non-farming activities on the farm can bring in revenue. Bed and breakfast, caravan and camping sites, fishing and providing land for activities such as war games or moto-cross can all add to income. Converted buildings, barns or cottages can generate revenue as residences, offices or small-scale factories provided planning rules allow. As city dwellers seek farms for residential, recreational and tax planning purposes, they will provide a new source of revenue for some established farmers as part-time managers. Essentially the viability of such farms will continue to be dependent on transfers of income from other activities. Not all small farms will be part-time. Niche markets can offer profitable outlets for many small businesses. These may include local markets. There can be opportunities in producing for groups that have specific dietary or religious food requirements. Some farmers may succeed in selling minority products such as goats’ milk or duck eggs. Others may build up an elite market for a home-produced processed product for customers who are prepared to pay high prices. Niche markets share some characteristics with fashion goods; they prosper only as long as they are perceived as ‘new’ or ‘different’. They can also suffer from success. If a particular activity is seen as more than usually profitable, other farmers will seek to supply it, resulting in a price collapse and disappointment all round. THE NEW POLICY AGENDA FOR THE COUNTRYSIDE

The developments discussed above stem from autonomous market pressures. The contest in the countryside, however, is also about changes from shifts in policy. These reflect the new concerns about food and agriculture and a new political balance within the UK. Although these changes are interrelated it is convenient to discuss them under three main headings: those that originate in shifts in political power, those that concern the food industry and the way food is produced and

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those that form part of a diverse concern about the environment.

A new political balance For more than a hundred years, legislation has diminished the rights of property owners. Changes in the law relating to farm tenancy have shifted power away from landlords. Planning regulations have constrained the ability of property owners to do what they like with their land. In areas designated as SSSIs farming practices have to conform to regulators’ requirements. Farms in National Parks or in AONBs operate under a different but binding set of rules about what may or may not be done. In this decade, government has legislated for the ‘right to roam’, allowing the public access to much private land, and has banned hunting with dogs. The picture of farming as a desert of monoculture is far from the truth. Within the UK farming provides a great diversity of habitat and underpins many treasured landscapes. It is not true that modern intensive farming has to be destructive of nature. Indeed several of the winners of the Silver Lapwing Award, given to farmers who have made an especial contribution to combining farming with wildlife enhancement, have been large modern farms. Farmers are under increased constraints in relation to the management of wildlife and habitats. Already there are restrictions relating to the control of badgers and of wild birds, and to the removal of hedges. More limitation on freedom of action must be expected as part of the cross-compliance conditions. Problems arise where policy prohibits traditional wild life management and populations grow without restraint. Already the management of the badger population has become a major political issue as a result of the association of the growth in the number of badgers and increased incidence of tuberculosis in cattle. There are no signs that this erosion of the rights of landowners and land users will slacken. As competing interests vie to control the use of land for their own interests farmers are likely to face growing interference with their way of life. The movement of livestock and farm machinery on public roads is likely to become more regulated. The lack of tolerance of the community for noise from animals or from farm operations may lead to increased regulation. Organizations devoted to the protection of heritage may limit the ability of farmers to remove obsolete structures that have no economic use. (Proposals for cross-compliance conditions include a prohibition on the removal of stone walls.) Animal welfare groups and organizations concerned with the protection of birds already carry great political clout. They will seek to use this to compel farmers to deliver their objectives. Farmers increasingly feel themselves to be a beleaguered community, confronted by people who have ‘rights’ but no matching ‘responsibilities’. This adds costs to their business. The impact of this on farming activity will depend on market conditions, but higher costs reinforce market-driven forces, leading to structural change. In economically fragile farming environments they could rapidly

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result in the disappearance of aspects of the countryside that have been taken for granted. The continuing decline of the farming population, the abandonment of land and the loss of any rationale to maintain hedges and ditches could lead to radical changes in the landscape. If the state wishes to avoid this on the grounds of the non-market benefits of existing farming systems, it will have to pay the costs of the regulatory regime it wishes to enforce. If it does not the public goods it seeks will not be delivered.

New anxieties about food Policy changes for the food industry stem less from a shift in political power than from concerns about the safety of food. There are several reasons for this. Food consumption is very distant from farm production. The retailing and processing sectors operate on a huge scale so that any food product that contains a pathogen may affect large numbers of people. The history of BSE in cattle sparked concerns. A disease that was analogous to Scrapie found in sheep was initially thought to present little likelihood of hazard to humans. In practice, after considerable research a link was found to nvCJD, a particularly distressing human disease. Although compared, for example, to heart disease or cancer nvCJD remains a very small contributor to population mortality, it undermined the confidence of people in arrangements to ensure the safety of food. Improvements in analytical techniques now enable minute pesticide residues to be identified in food products. These are below the level at which there is any perceived impact on human health, but they are represented as risks by pressure groups that demand reduced use or even the elimination of pesticides in farming. In 2000 the Government established the Independent Food Standards Agency (FSA), ‘to protect the public’s health and consumer interests in relation to food’. This was a response to anxieties about the extent to which MAFF had given proper priority to the interests of consumers compared to that given to farmers. But the 2001 outbreak of Foot and Mouth Disease further undermined confidence in existing government regulations. There is a permanent probability that farm plants or animals will be affected by outbreaks of old or new epidemic diseases, and the public need to be assured that the industry and government have in place effective contingency plans. In 2001, MAFF was replaced by the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), a move seen as a response to concerns about the efficiency of MAFF and also a strong indicator of the diminished role of agriculture in the government’s agenda. Policy in relation to food is made more difficult by misleading press coverage. Although, as noted above, surveys show that the pesticide residues very seldom reach the Maximum Recommended Level (MRL), any that do are presented in a way that suggests that they are dangerous, despite the fact that the MRL is set far below any detectable risk to human health. (MRL is fixed at a level at which a

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person would need to ingest 100 times the amount specified before being at serious risk.) Press coverage has resulted in the paradox that ‘e-numbers’ given by the Community to identify additives that have been shown to be safe, are treated as signals for alarm. The industry has responded by producing ‘e-number’-free products even though these shorten shelf life and lead to food wastage. Ionising radiation, a method of preventing bacteriological damage to food, has been vilified as a means of covering up ‘bad’ food. As a result people are exposed to greater hazards from foodborne pathogens and buy products with a shorter shelf life. Policies are based on the politicians’ view of what the public want. Thus despite the risk to health and prosperity involved in ignoring science, the industry is under pressure to eliminate the use of pesticides and not to irradiate food products. This rejection of rational analysis provides a platform for assertions about food that escape objective evaluation. As a result farmers and consumers have been prevented from using genetically modified plants, the idea has been promoted that organic food is safer and more nutritious, and there has developed a market for fashionable diets and for dietary supplements. There are no good grounds for believing that the regulation of the food industry will become more rational. In future regulations may expand from issues of food safety to questions relating to diet. By reducing the content of some types of fat, of sugar and of salt a significant reduction could be achieved in the incidence of heart disease, diabetes and some cancers. Initially the approach of government is to pressure the food-processing sector to modify its products. When this has gained public acceptability, the probability is that food composition regulations will become compulsory.

The environment and the contest in the countryside Anxieties about the environment relate to issues ranging from climate change and biodiversity that are essentially global, to concerns about pollution of water, soils and air that have both local and national implications to site-specific concerns such as landscape and the development of airports, roads and railways. The UK government has taken a very active role in relation to climate change and biodiversity. Its ability to affect the rate of change by action within this country is very limited, but as a party to international agreements it has made commitments to reduce carbon emissions and has created local biodiversity plans. More directly within its control are actions to reduce pollution. Much environmental legislation stems from decisions by the European Union that have to be implemented by the British government. The impact on the countryside is complex. Stricter regulation of water use and controls on the pollution of water will affect, for example, fields adjacent to watercourses and farm enterprises that rely on irrigation. At the same time, other industries such as tourism and angling may reap substantial benefits, while the water companies enjoy reduced costs.

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If, in order to meet targets for the reduction of carbon emissions, the bio fuel industry were supported, this could require the use of land to grow crops for conversion into liquid fuel or electricity, or for direct combustion as a source of heat for homes and offices. If this were to make a substantial contribution to total energy use, the farmed landscape in regions where the crops are grown would change. In the countryside a new infrastructure of communications would be needed and new businesses concerned with transforming crops into useable forms of energy would develop. Policy is already deeply embedded in decisions about the development of new towns, roads and communication systems. Plans have to include an environmental impact assessment and there are well-organized, articulate lobbies vigilant to oppose any development of which they do not approve. This has slowed infrastructural development so that businesses, including rural businesses, face heavy costs arising from congested roads and airports. There is a risk that this will encourage production to move to other parts of the world. In terms of external economic cost – the costs a business activity imposes on other people but which do not figure in its own accounts – the calculation is less straightforward. It is apparent that many people are anxious to avoid the noise, dirt and disruption caused by major roads and airports – for them the creation of such infrastructure represents a real cost in terms of lost welfare. Unfortunately, although the concept of external costs is well understood, there is no satisfactory method of measuring the non-material costs that dominate much of the environmental debate. The outcome is an asymmetrical process of decision. Many developments affect adversely, and sometimes intensely, local communities or specific pressure groups. The benefits of change are diffused among millions of people none of whom experience a substantial change in their fortune. Understandably, those who perceive a loss establish politically active protest movements. No equivalent political action is taken on behalf of those who gain. The economic costs of inaction, when analysis makes it clear that in the long run some development must take place, are large, but the political risks of action are much greater than those of procrastination. For the countryside, and especially for remoter areas, preventing development may seem protective. Existing businesses face less competition and the traditional population is under less pressure from newcomers. No immediate consequences flow for land use. However, if the prosperity of traditional businesses is in decline, as suggested earlier in this paper, the lack of development will make it more difficult to find new jobs and to develop new businesses that can provide a livelihood for existing members of the community. Those who on this frontier of the contest for the countryside believe they have won by frustrating development, may find quite quickly that they have sacrificed the possibility of creating an alternative rural economy that is capable of sustaining the population and the

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80 landscape about which they care so much. REFERENCES

Body, Richard (1982) Agriculture: The Triumph and the Shame, London: Temple Smith Bowers, J. K. and P. Cheshire (1983) Agriculture, the Countryside and Land Use, London: Methuen Commission of the European Communities (2003) Reform of the Common Agricultural Policy: A Long-Term Perspective for Sustainable Agriculture, Brussels Countryside Agency (2002) Support and Housing in the Countryside: Innovation and Choice DEFRA (n.d.) Conference papers published at: http://statistics.defra.gov.uk/ esg/reports/decoupling/default.asp (2003) Agriculture in the United Kingdom 2003 English Nature (2004) Review of the Year Euro PA and Associates (1995) The UK Food and Drink Industry: A Sector by Sector Analysis, Northborough, Cambs. European Union (n.d.) Agricultural Situation in the Community and in the European Union, Brussels Mansholt (1968) Le Plan Mansholt, Brussels, Commission Communautés Européeannes Self, Peter and H. J. Storing (1971) The State and the Farmer, London: Allen and Unwin Tracey, M. (1993) Food and Agriculture in a Market Economy, APS UK (2002–4) UK Seventh Report of Session Veterinary Residues Committee (2004) Annual Report

4 AG R I C U LT U R A L I N C O M E S : A DA M AG I N G H I S T O RY O F DISJUNCTION BETWEEN POLICY CONCERN AND EVIDENCE

Berkeley Hill

INTRODUCTION

The depressed state of agricultural commodity prices and profitability in the UK at the start of the twenty-first century has highlighted what is probably the central driving issue in the agricultural policy of the European Union (EU) and most other developed countries – concern with the incomes and living standards of farmers and their families. Yet the performance of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in achieving this central aim appears to have been poor, managing to combine low transfer efficiency of policy spending in reaching those with lessthan-fair living standards with damaging side effects (environmental, social, trade distorting etc.) resulting from misallocated support. Much of this poor policy performance can be attributed to a history of confusion in the minds of politicians and bureaucrats between, on the one hand, support for agricultural production and, on the other, support for the people engaged in production. This confusion has been exacerbated by the ways in which agricultural incomes are measured in official statistics, the methodologies of which were set at the time of the Second World War and have remained fundamentally unchanged. The income indicators used to steer agricultural policy decisions are confined to the rewards from farming activities alone. The implied view of the industry is one that is only concerned with the production of agricultural commodities and that farm operators have no other economic activities. However, the historical evidence is that farm households have also frequently been involved in other forms of self-employment. Members have often sold their labour as employees and they have received income from

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property and other sources (Gasson, 1988; Hallberg et al., 1991). The promotion of diversified income sources in recent EU policy reform (the rural development pillar of Agenda 2000) is appealing to an aspect of the agricultural community that is already firmly established. Important in light of the aims of the CAP, these other activities can have a major impact on the level and stability of household income and hence on farm families’ potential living standards; knowledge of the income from farming is not a reliable guide to their overall incomes. Ignoring the presence of non-farm income also hampers explanations of the way in which land is used, of responses to price signals, levels of investment and environmental conservation. Crucial to the concept of sustainability, other income is often important to farm viability, and many smaller units can only continue to exist if agriculture is combined with some other income-generating activity. Until very recently the system of official statistics in the EU has been incapable of revealing anything about the overall income of households that run farms, and the current situation is still one of weakness. The EU Court of Auditors has called attention to the unsatisfactory nature of the situation (Court of Auditors, 2003). Among Member States, the UK has been one of the countries least well provided with information. This lack of statistics has been a brake on reform because claims of the negative implications of policy changes on the incomes and living standards of farmers could not be assessed or challenged. The explanation for this information lacuna seems to lie less with a conspiracy of silence and more with the fact that it has not been in the interests of important policy actors to pursue better information. For many of these, including representatives of large farmers and government agriculture departments (including the European Commission’s Directorate-General for agriculture – DG-AGRI) a dislocated statistical system might be preferable to one better suited to declared policy aims, despite the larger costs to society. The rest of this chapter fleshes out the origins of this mismatch between policy requirement and statistical provision and suggests reasons for its persistence. AG R I C U LT U R E ’ S ‘ I N C O M E P RO B L E M ’

Three components of the ‘income problem’ faced by farmers in OECD countries are usually identified (Gardner, 1992; Hill, 2000). First, there is the instability issue: fluctuations resulting from the inherent conditions under which agricultural production takes place. Secondly, there is the poverty issue: the problem of low incomes, particularly among some types and sizes of farms, that results in hardship. (However, it must be recognised that low incomes form only one element in the multi-dimensional nature of poverty. The OECD discussed the various indicators of the low income problem in OECD, 2000, drawing on

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OECD, 1994.) Thirdly, there is the comparability issue: relatively low rewards compared with what is achievable in other parts of the economy. The fundamental cause of these issues lies with the economic conditions of supply and demand for farm commodities, in particular the treadmill of technological advance that expands supply in face of sluggish demand (thereby lowering real prices for agricultural commodities), the immobility of factors (especially labour) in responding to necessary structural change and, in the short run, unplanned variation of output caused by natural forces. Conceptually these three strands are independent, though in reality they are often linked. Low returns to capital and land (market signals to relocate) will not necessarily put the farmer in poverty; if the farm is big enough the resource base can generate a level of personal income that could enable the household to enjoy a standard of living that is satisfactory or even lavish. This is not, however, the case with small farms; these will need to draw on non-agricultural ways of using their resources and on social transfers, though this is often a highly successful strategy. INCOME SUPPORT AS AN AIM OF AGRICULTURAL POLICY

Concern with incomes has proved to be a durable strand among the evolving issues tackled by agricultural policy in the UK and most industrialized countries over the last century or so. However, statements about the aims of policy and the manner of their implementation have frequently confused the factor rewards and personal income issues. In tracing the income aims of agricultural policy for the UK, three main periods can be identified. The first is the laissez-faire policy era that ended just prior to the Second World War. This need not concern us greatly as the seeds of the present malaise were not yet sown. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that the concerns expressed about the condition of agriculture were largely to do with the situation of the people who worked in this industry rather than with the adequacy of factor rewards. A foretaste of some later issues was given by the Royal Commission appointed to examine the hardship caused to certain large sections of British agriculture in the depression of 1879–96. This encountered part-time farming, and noted that the attraction of combining farming with another occupation was chiefly for the resulting security, but it was not uncommon for the arrangement to be ‘extremely profitable’. As a Mr Channing (1897) remarked: ‘Further, there have been, and still are, all over England and notably in Scotland, considerable numbers of men, some of whom know nothing of farming, others next to nothing, who have made money in other callings, and deliberately take farms because they prefer a country life, and without much anxiety as to commercial results.’

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The second period covers the Second World War and the following two decades. The critical wartime need to expand production was met, in part, by a system of market intervention and financial incentives, that had a profound effect on the incomes derived from farming, more than doubling the level of 1937−38. In such an output-dominated climate, farmers who were less than full-time on their land were seen as an impediment (Gasson, 1988). The 1947 Agriculture Act set out policy aims for post-war agriculture that implied both a concern with the rewards from the resources used in farming and with the standard of living of those engaged in it, not only farmers but hired workers too. The Act’s pertinent section states the aim of promoting and maintaining … a stable and efficient agricultural industry capable of producing such part of the nation’s food and other agricultural produce as in the national interest it is desirable to produce in the United Kingdom, and of producing it at minimum prices consistently with proper remuneration and living conditions for farmers and workers in agriculture and an adequate return on capital invested in the industry (emphasis added) (Agriculture Act of 1947, quoted in Winnifrith, 1962: 14). However, it is clear from the way that this objective of concerning ‘remuneration and living conditions’ was discussed that an assumption was made that the income from farming corresponded closely with the (total) income of farmers (for example Winnifrith, 1962). Even academics were happy to accept this close correspondence. Bellerby (1956), in his classic study Agriculture and Industry Relative Income, makes it clear in his introduction that its genesis was at least in part the low personal incomes endured by some sectors of the farming community in many nations at the time his work started. While his analysis concentrated on factor rewards and the ‘supply price’ of agricultural enterprise, nevertheless at times Bellerby provides an interpretation that verges on assuming that the incentive income was identical with the personal incomes of farmers (Bellerby, 1953, 1954, 1955). In reality, no UK data source existed during this period by which the overall income of agricultural households could be assessed, the share coming from farming measured, or comparisons drawn with the incomes of other occupation groups, either at sector or individual levels. This is despite a claim that the annual review of agriculture included ‘a comparison between farm incomes and other classes of income’ (Winnifrith, 1962: 50). The third period is that following UK accession to the (then) European Economic Community and its adoption of the CAP (1972 onwards). The objectives, set out in Article 39 of the Treaty of Rome 1957, refer, firstly, to the improvement of productivity and, secondly ‘Thus to ensure a fair standard of living for the agricultural community, in particular by the increasing of the individual earnings of persons

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engaged in agriculture’ (European Communities, 1978 – emphasis added). No official expansion of what is implied by a ‘fair standard of living’ or who comprised the ‘agricultural community’ has ever been given. Fennell (1997), reviewing a wide range of working papers and reports from the EU institutions in its early years, presents evidence that fairness was frequently taken to imply in relation to incomes earned by comparable groups of workers, but that this was commonly linked with a size of farm that was ‘modern’, in the sense that it was large enough to be capable of generating such an income. With the passage of time, the great expansion of output and consequent problems of market surpluses for many major agricultural commodities, this ‘income aim’ became, soon after UK entry, the most important policy objective. Its supremacy is underlined by statements from policymakers; for example, in 1980 the Commission described the CAP as follows: ‘The Common Agricultural Policy may be characterised as a system of support of farmers’ incomes mainly through support of market prices with certain direct aids to incomes’ (Commission of the EC, 1980: 3). Official statements of objectives do not necessarily turn out to be those that actually drive policy. However, independent observers of the way that policy has been implemented also agree that this objective has been highly important, particularly when used to retard the pace of reform. For example, a statistical survey of European agricultural economists showed a clear-cut predominant view that the CAP was mainly aimed at supporting farm incomes and that the other objectives of the Treaty of Rome received little attention (Herrmann, 1985). The ‘Larsen’ report of external experts to the European Commission on EU agricultural policy for the 21st century left no doubt as to their interpretation of the thrust of policy: ‘Governments in most developed countries have therefore set out to secure a satisfactory and equitable standard of living for farmers and to stabilise agricultural markets and farmers’ incomes’ (Commission of the EC, 1994: 5); and it goes on to show that this was also the stance of the EU. Similarly, a retired Permanent Secretary of the UK’s Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, when contemplating how the CAP should be revised to fit the future, referred repeatedly to the central importance of the income support to farmers as a determining factor in past policy, and stressed that, where reforms to the CAP bring lower prices and reduced income from farming, this issue would have to be addressed if any programme to bring reform about was to have the slightest chance of being taken seriously (Ockenden and Franklin, 1995). This list of comments on the central importance of farmer incomes to policy could be greatly extended. More recently, the Agenda 2000 package, agreed in 1999, has reaffirmed the policy objectives of the CAP (Commission of the EC, 1997). These are updated (compared with the 1957 Treaty of Rome objectives) to reflect changing aims and

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external conditions by including references to the competitiveness of EU producers, the integration of environment goals and sustainability. However, they also repeat the objective of ‘ensuring a fair standard of living for the agricultural community, and contributing to the stability of farm incomes’ and broaden this by ‘The creation of alternative job and income opportunities for farmers and their families’ (Commission of the EC, 1997: 8). While the prominence of the ‘standard of living’ aim in the rhetoric of policy is hard to dispute, the implementation of policy has rarely, if ever, targeted those households whose incomes were inadequate to provide them with a ‘fair’ living standard or fell below some socially-determined minimum acceptable level. Rather, the bulk of support has been given to operators of the larger farms that accounted for the bulk of production and whose household incomes were, probably, more than adequate judged by the norms of society. As will be described below, the way in which incomes have been measured to provide information to service this support has traditionally been restricted to only that coming from agricultural production, not to the broader flow of resources on which material living standards depend. WA Y S O F M E A S U R I N G I N C O M E I N A G R I C U L T U R E : ACTIVITY AND INSTITUTIONS

As a preliminary to describing the historical development of income measures, a brief review of the methodologies involved is necessary. The internationally agreed system of national accounts, of which the latest manifestation is the United Nations System of National Accounts 1993 (UN, 1993), provides a theoretical framework that allows for accounts for agriculture to be drawn up on bases that are appropriate to both the concerns with production and with the resources of producers and their households. The first is activity-based accounts. When applied to agriculture the aggregate production account covers the economy-wide production of commodities that are (by international agreement) classified as agricultural and the inputs used to generate this output (Eurostat, 1997; Hill, 1998). The balancing item is Gross Value Added (GVA), or Net Value Added (NVA) after the deduction of an estimate of capital consumption. Other forms of production found on farms (food processing, tourism on a commercial scale, provision of housing services, forestry etc.) and the inputs they use are excluded. In view of policy interest in the differing experiences of the various farming types and sizes of farm, at microeconomic level activity accounts are possible for individual agricultural producing units (the ‘holding’ or ‘farm business’) that can be grouped according to the need for information. Again, these accounts only cover the farm’s agricultural activities and exclude non-agricultural production. Thus the

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individual ‘farm business’ or ‘holding’ is a rather fictional statistical unit, in many cases separating off other activities that are important to the behaviour and viability of the farm as a whole. Ranges of ‘income indicators’ can be developed at both levels by deducting costs associated with the ‘fixed factors’ (described below). The second approach is to base accounts on real institutional units. In agriculture the predominant form of production is the unincorporated business – sole proprietorship and partnership – in which the underlying institutional unit is the household; even allowing for a growth in corporate farming over recent decades, these still accounted for 95 per cent of UK holding numbers in 2000 (Eurostat, 2002a). (UK farms arranged as family companies were formally recorded as unincorporated in the EU’s Structure Surveys of Agricultural Holdings.) Using this approach, the full range of economic activities of the household are covered in the accounts – all their sources of income and deductions. It is possible to carry the sequence of accounts right down to the level of calculating the disposable income of households and, ultimately if data are available, to consumption spending and savings. Only minor differences between accounting practices need to be overcome to bring the data for individual households together to form accounts for the entire households sector. This facilitates integration of macro and micro statistics, a problem with activity accounting (Hill, 1998). The main methodological issue in drawing up a sequence of accounts for agricultural households is which households are to be included. In effect this boils down to defining which are ‘agricultural households’. A range of approaches is possible. At one extreme is a ‘broad’ approach that includes all households that are engaged in farming, however minor that might be to the household’s total activity. The other is to be more selective, such as including only those households where farming is the main source of income (implying a dependency on farming for a livelihood) or (more practically) where the head of the household has farming as the main income source or the person’s main occupation, or to apply criteria to the farm (such as a minimum size threshold). ACTUAL STATISTICAL SYSTEMS THAT GENERATE THE EVIDENCE USED TO STEER POLICY

When looking at the economic information actually used to steer agricultural policy, one must be mindful that two closely related but separate statistical systems are in place. Firstly, there is the national system, in the UK very largely in the care of government agriculture departments (unlike some other countries where the leading role may be taken by a national statistical office). Secondly, there is the statistical system of the EU, mainly but not entirely supervised by Eurostat (the

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statistical office of the European Communities, based in Luxembourg). Both systems measure income at two levels – the industry and the individual unit. On many topics national statistics predated those of the EU and formed a model for them; this is true in income measurement. A review of the historical roots of the current dislocation between policy concern and statistical evidence must cover both systems and their two levels.

Evidence used to steer policy: rewards to agricultural activity at the aggregate level Tentative estimates of the value of Britain’s national agricultural output were first made in 1908 and 1925 (Snowdon and Roberts, 1973; Whetham, 1981), though the practice of drawing up an aggregate activity account for UK agriculture, showing its residual income, did not start until 1941 or 1942. (Snowdon [1973] in his Appendix 1 claims that an estimate for 1937–39 of what became ‘Farming Net Income’ was presented by Kendall in a paper to the Royal Statistical Society in 1941 [Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Vol. CIV, Pt.II, 1941. However, Kirk [1958] implies that his calculations, in 1942, were the first.) This was contemporary with the first White Paper on national income and expenditure, produced by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Kingsley Wood, in 1941. According to one of the staff closely involved at the time (Kirk, 1964), a major factor behind the agricultural calculation, made by the Ministry of Agriculture under the prompting of Lord Robbins (in the Treasury), was interest in the effect that wartime product price increases, made ad hoc on purely commodity considerations, were having in raising farmers’ incomes. Potential tax revenue was an important underlying motive. The estimates could only be undertaken at the time by using a macroeconomic approach to the construction of an account for national agricultural activity (for example, estimating values of crop output by multiplying together data on crop areas, yields and market prices taken from various censuses and surveys and calculating the cost of hired labour by multiplying numbers of workers by known wage rates). Surveys of farm accounts were, by their nature, always rather out-of-date (a national system of such surveys had been set up in 1936 – see below) and, at the time, could not provide adequate data on all aspects of production (see the comment in an EU context by Snowdon, 1984). No other usable microeconomic data source (such as tax returns) then existed. The UK industry-level calculations found that aggregate income from farming had indeed increased sharply since 1938. In subsequent years this aggregate figure produced by the Departmental Net Income Calculation (later known as the Economic Accounts for Agriculture) became an integral and closely watched item in the Annual Review and Determination of Guarantees procedure, rises being interpreted as an increase in the welfare of the agricultural community. Its ‘activity’ approach persisted despite an early statement of preference by the

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United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) that aggregate accounts should relate to a sector comprising agricultural ‘establishments’ (holdings where the major part of the gross revenue was attributable to agricultural goods and services) and include other subsidiary forms of production, such as forestry (FAO, 1956, citing United Nations, 1949). Integral with this methodology from the outset were the concepts of the agriculture ‘branch’ and the ‘national farm’. The ‘branch’ meant that the account covered the value of the entire national output of agricultural commodities, including production from all sorts of commercial and hobby farms, gardens, institutions etc., and set it against the inputs purchased from other industries. The ‘national farm’ concept implied that farm-to-farm sales and purchases were ignored; only transactions with other economic sectors being counted. The UK methodology remained little changed for some fifty years until, in the late 1990s, it was revised to fall in line with a new basis of national accounting being adopted by the European Union (ESA95). The concept of the ‘national farm’ was abandoned (so that farm-to-farm sales were measured both as output and input) and the ‘branch’ was replaced by the ‘industry’, which extended coverage to nonagricultural production that was inseparable in the data sources (such as small-scale farm-gate retailing) but excluded hobby production from gardens (Hill, 1998; MAFF, 1998). However, the basic approach continued to be one of accounting for agricultural activity rather than for complete household-firms deemed to be agricultural. Flexibility in the treatment of items, especially among the imputed ones for the ‘fixed factors’ owned by farm households, permitted a variety of income indicators to be considered and developed (Lund and Watson, 1981). By far the longest established activity indicator, and the one historically given the greatest political attention in the UK, was Farming Income (formerly termed Farming Net Income). This was the residue from NVA after deducting costs of interest on loans for current farming purposes (but not those specifically for land purchase), agricultural rent payments for tenanted land and costs of hired labour (see Table 1 for comparisons of some of the main income concepts cited in this chapter). Farming Income was described by Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) in 1989 as ‘an estimate of the return to farmers and spouses for their labour, management skills and own capital invested after providing for depreciation, though (given its method of derivation) it will also include the profits, from farming, of companies engaged in agriculture (many of which are family companies)’ (MAFF, 1989: 15). By convention, it was assumed that each farm had a single entrepreneurial household consisting of farmer and spouse (increasingly challenged as unrealistic) and costs were imputed for the labour input of other unpaid members of the family of farmers (it was assumed that no-one but family would work unpaid) and for other partners and directors.

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Farming (Net) Income underwent methodological modifications over its period of use (Outlaw and Croft, 1981). Principally these were: (a) revising the initial convention of treating all land as if it were tenanted and charging a rent for all land, whether actually rented or owner-occupied (an acceptable simplification when land was predominantly tenanted, but not in the fourth quarter of the twentieth century, when owner-occupation was dominant); (b) adjusting the accounting period to a calendar year rather than a harvest year, and (c) adjustments to bring in line with EU methodology, such as small extensions of coverage (to include statistically insignificant holdings, stud farms and agricultural contractors), and a change in treatment of breeding livestocks. Bearing this in mind, and that some discontinuity is involved before 1972, estimates of the aggregate Farming Income in the UK are available from just before the Second World War to 1997 – it was discontinued in 1998 (MAFF, 1984a; MAFF, 1984b; MAFF, annual-a). The data sources are discussed in Brassley (2000) and the series 1938–87 can also be found in Marks and Britton (1989). (For an explanation of why the series of Farming Income was terminated, see the annex in Agriculture in the United Kingdom 1998 [MAFF, 1998].) Appendix 1 contains an analysis of developments in Farming Income over this period. Estimates of output, deductions and aggregate income for earlier years (annual averages for short runs of years) extending back to 1867–9 have been estimated by Ojala (1952)(but see Brassley, 2000, for comments about the values of output that form part of the income calculation). Indicators of income from agricultural activity: the main conceptual differences in terms of items deducted from net value added Indicator Net Value Added (Net product)/FNVA Aggregate measures UK: Farming Income UK: Total Income from Farming (TIFF) EU: Net income from agricultural activity of family labour input Farm-level measures FBS: Net Farm Income FBS: Occupier’s Net Income FADN: Family Farm Income

A

B

C

* * *

*

* * *

* (net) * (net)

* *

* * *

D

*

E

F

* * *

*

* * *

* *

A = Interest paid for farming purposes; B = Interest paid for land purchase; C = Rent paid; D = Imputed rental value; E = Cost of hired labour; F = Non-hired ‘family’ labour but not farmer and spouse

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In the late 1990s emphasis shifted to another aggregate measure, Total Income from Farming (TIFF), and from 1998 this became the main UK indicator. The distinguishing difference between the FI and TIFF concepts is their treatments of unpaid labour other than that of the principal farmer and spouse. In FI an imputed cost was deducted for this labour (typically family but also including other partners and directors and their spouses) on the basis of hired workers’ average earnings (a yardstick that was increasingly seen as unsatisfactory), so that the residual contained the return to only the farmer and spouse labour. In TIFF no such imputing takes place, TIFF thus being the reward to all the non-hired labour and the assets they own. Eurostat has published aggregate activity accounts for agriculture in the European Union since 1964, and from 1969 onwards the six original Member States adopted common definitions and procedures. The methodology of these Economic Accounts for Agriculture (EAA) for the UK and other Member States has been very similar to that employed by the UK agricultural departments and uses the same data. (An example of a difference is that the interest-paid item in the EU EAA includes that on loans for land purchase, but this was excluded from the UK calculations of TIFF until after 2001–02.) The principal ‘income’ indicator has been Net Value Added per Annual Work Unit (expressed in real terms and index form); this appeared for the first time in January 1977 and compared results for 1975 with those of 1976, though there were reservations about the quality of the labour force figures. In response to the criticism that NVA/AWU was a poor reflection of the profits from farming, as neither labour costs, rent nor interest changes were deducted, two additional indicators were developed and published for the first time in December 1985, backdated on a consistent basis from 1972 onwards. Of the three, ‘Net income from agricultural activity of family labour input, per unit of family labour input’ was conceptually close to the UK’s TIFF expressed per unit of unpaid labour. Following the revision of the EAA methodology in 1997, the concept behind this indicator was re-titled Entrepreneurial Income and results have been expressed both in total and per unit of unpaid labour. Of course, it does not correspond to the complete income of agricultural households. However, NVA (measured at factor cost) per unit of (total) labour input remains the EU’s most prominent aggregate measure of reward from agricultural activity.

Evidence used to steer policy: rewards from agricultural activity at the farm level From its establishment in 1936 the official annual survey of farm businesses in England and Wales was called from the Farm Management Survey (FMS), but it was re-titled the Farm Business Survey (FBS) in 1986, its fiftieth anniversary. Parallel surveys, slightly predating the England and Wales FMS, are carried out in Scotland (Farm Accounts Survey) and Northern Ireland. Although the surveys are

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conducted independently in the four countries of the UK, there is co-ordination and the methodologies are similar (Barnett, 1987). For practical purposes the surveys can be considered as parts of a single large survey, co-ordinated by MAFF and its successor the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), involving farm businesses that co-operate on a voluntary basis; results for 1998/99 related to 3458 cases (MAFF, 2000). Publication has taken a variety of forms; summary data appear in the annual Agriculture in the United Kingdom and from 1986 more detailed figures have appeared in an official annual income report, from 2000 being available only electronically (MAFF, 2000). It is worth noting that in Great Britain data collection is not undertaken by the civil service but by universities and colleges as contractors for the relevant agricultural departments. This arrangement is in large part a product of the historical development of agricultural economics in the UK (Colman, 1987; Peters, 1988; Whetham, 1981). The FMS, which began as primarily a collection of data on costs of production, arose from proposals by Dr C. S. Orwin in 1922 as an extension of the Ministry’s existing organization for research and advisory work, which was then based in eight universities and four agricultural colleges. In 1923 advisory economists were appointed at the University College of Reading and at the South-Eastern Agricultural College (Wye) and Cambridge (Giles, 1973). However, this arrangement has also been legally convenient as, under the then British legislation, official agricultural censuses and sample surveys, to which occupiers must respond, were not empowered to collect both physical and financial details. The problem was neatly circumvented by the use of the academic institutions as agents who then passed the data to government departments in an anonymous block. The universities and colleges (eight in England, one in Wales and the sections of the Scottish Agricultural College) have had autonomy on operational procedures, within the bounds required by the need for consistency (Sturgess, 1984) and publish independent reports on the farm businesses in their provinces. According to the preface of the first FMS report, covering 1936 and 1937 (quoted in Giles and Crawley, 1993), the Survey was intended: ‰ ‰

‰ ‰

To be of service to agriculture and to the State in the framing of public policy in regard to the industry. To supplement official statistics by collecting information annually of the capital, equipment and labour employed, purchases of requisites and sale of produce. To ensure that an adequate picture will be secured of the economic conditions of farming, of changes in output, costs, organization and equipment. To enable co-operating farmers and others to increase their efficiency and to organize their farms on a more profitable basis.

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To supply the means for local and national research into the main economic problems of the industry.

Early in the life of the FMS four main objectives emerged, based on the above. Through the detailed monitoring of events the FMS was to assist in: (a) the framing of national policy; (b) improving efficiency of individual farms; (c) the conduct of local and national research, and (d) teaching (a later addition perhaps implicit at the outset). These aims have been repeatedly affirmed by internal reviews, with the amplification that the Survey should be capable, as far as it is possible, of providing the data bank on which answers to the policy questions of tomorrow can be based. Notwithstanding the potential breadth of these aims and objectives, the FBS has been fundamentally a study of farm businesses and the business income they generate, not one which attempted an assessment of the overall business activities of farmers and their families or their household incomes. This is because, according to Sturgess (1984), the FBS was designed primarily to monitor year-toyear changes in the incomes of farm businesses classified by type and size, the emphasis falling on comparing accounts in adjacent years using an identical sample. Up to 1988/89 no questions were asked on the income which the farm households received from off-farm sources, despite the influence that such income may have on the management or investment behaviour of the farm. Such data that are now collected are far less precise than that on the farming activities (respondents are asked to indicate the band into which various categories of other income falls). The concern of the FBS with monitoring the income from the activity of farming rather than the income of farmers as people is reflected in the nature of the sample and, most important, in the income indicators used. The FBS was intended to represent only those holdings above a size threshold estimated as being capable of providing full-time employment for one man. However, in 1975 an official sample survey in England and Wales found that nearly half the occupiers below the threshold (then defined in terms of standard man-days, 275 constituting a full-time farm size) claimed that they worked on their farms for not less than 40 hours per week and for not less than 47 weeks per year (MAFF, 1977). Another official survey of 1983, enquiring into the numbers of farmers (and spouses) with additional sources of earned income, found that about 60 per cent of farm occupiers below the FBS threshold did not have another gainful activity, and three-quarters of spouses did not (Eurostat, 1986). Income from investments or pensions must help explain how the occupiers of these very small farms got a livelihood. The income concept that has been used since the outset of the FBS as its main microeconomic indicator of year-on-year change in farming conditions is

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Net Farm Income. In view of the attention given to the results by politicians, administrators and the media, it is worth mentioning the conventions adopted in its calculation. These assume, firstly, that all land is rented (an imputed rental value being charged for land which is owner-occupied); secondly, that there is no borrowing (so all interest payments are excluded), and thirdly, that all labour, apart from that of the farmer and spouse, is paid (an imputed figure for any unpaid family labour being made). NFI is described officially as ‘the return to the (principal) farmer and spouse for their manual and managerial labour and on the tenant-type capital of the business such as permanent crops, livestock and machinery (but not land and buildings)’ (MAFF, 2000, para 28). The conventions on tenure and interest were initially adopted in order to allow rented and owned farms, and indebted and non-indebted farms, to be grouped together on a comparable basis. For the narrow purpose of indicating short-term changes in profitability, NFI may be a workable concept. But it is patently inappropriate for indicating the level of personal income which operators receive, even that part which comes from their farm business. Additional indicators were introduced into the 1987 FBS report, comprising Occupier’s Net Income and two cash flow measures. When calculating Occupier’s Net Income, in contrast with NFI, notional rental values are not deducted for owned land but interest on farming loans is subtracted (net of any interest receipts). This puts the account on a basis closer to what might be regarded as profit from the business. A charge is also made for unpaid labour, other than the farmer and spouse. At EU level the EU’s Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN or RICA, the French acronym) covers some 60,000 holdings and forms a valuable management tool for the European Commission’s agricultural DirectorateGeneral (DG-AGRI). Data from the FBS form the UK’s contribution to the FADN; the obligation for all Member States to supply data is contained in legislation, as is the list of questions to which the data relate (the Farm Return). The FADN was established in 1965 ‘with the specific objective of obtaining data enabling income changes in the various classes of agricultural holding to be properly monitored’ (Commission of the EC, 1982: 6). The justification for FADN was rooted in policy, in that ‘the development of the Common Agricultural Policy requires that there should be available objective and relevant information on incomes in the various categories of agricultural holdings and on the business operation of holdings coming within categories which call for special attention at Community level’ (EEC Regulation 79/65, preamble: 2). FADN is therefore not a single survey but is an amalgamation of national surveys carried out by Member States. In some countries these predated RICA, as in the UK, but in others they were started from scratch. The nature of FADN

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is in part a reflection of the approaches inherited from these pre-existing surveys. Ways of collecting the data vary from country to country, but there is a fundamental harmonized methodology which applies to the concepts of income employed and, increasingly, to the selection of the sample (Commission of the EC, 1989). Selection of the FADN sample was originally limited to holdings on which the day-to-day management was in the hands of a single farmer or manager, which had a labour input equivalent to at least one Annual Work Unit (with some national exceptions) and whose main activity was agricultural production for sale (Commission of the EC, 1985). The sample was therefore intended to consist of commercially-operated farms where the holding contributed the main source of living; this implies a discrimination against part-time farmers in the sample, but this was justified by the belief that ‘main-living’ farms constituted the most important target for agricultural policy measures, an interpretation which should not go unnoticed. However there seems to have been a revision of this thinking, and from 1982/3 selection thresholds have been made only in terms of size in Economic Size Units (which are based on Standard Gross Margin). There is a minimum size threshold that varies between Member States, reflecting their different farm size structures as shown in the periodic EU Farm Structure Survey. Though numerically important, holdings below the threshold contribute very little in terms of agricultural activity. Consequently, while the overwhelming majority of farming activity falls within the FADN field of observation, only about half the Community’s agricultural holdings are represented (Hill and Brookes, 1993). The data collected relate only to farming activity on the holding; everything else has to be excluded, even building construction that the farm labour may undertake on the farm. A small exception applies to farm-based tourism and forestry, but these are included within FADN only where they are connected with the farm business. FADN’s main income measures are Farm Net Value Added, expressed per farm or per Annual Work Unit (FNVA/AWU) (that is, per full-time person equivalents working on the farm) and Family Farm Income (FFI), per farm or per Family Work Unit (FFI/FWU). FFI is similar to UK’s ‘Occupier’s Net Income’ but with different treatments of the imputed cost of unpaid labour (not deducted by FFI) and breeding livestock stock appreciation (included by FFI). Of course, there may be other income sources which contribute to this spending and saving, but they are not derived from farming the holding and are therefore outside the coverage of FADN. Capital gains (and losses) on land and other assets do not form part of FFI, though they too might be considered as elements in the long-term rewards from farming and might form the basis of borrowing for consumption and investment purposes.

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Evidence used to steer policy: incomes of agricultural households In contrast with the plentiful supply of information on the economic situation of agricultural production in the UK since the 1930s, for most of this time statistics about the overall incomes of farmers and their households have been sparse, to the extent of almost non-existence. Improvements from the late 1980s have not substantially altered the very unsatisfactory situation. Some EU countries have a history of generating economic statistics about their agricultural households, including estimates of their disposable incomes. Aggregate accounts for the agricultural household sector, drawn up within the framework of national accounts have existed in France since 1956 and in Germany since 1982 (with figures on a consistent basis going back to 1972)(Hill, 1988). Taking these as a model, from the late 1980s Eurostat encouraged other Member States to generate similar sector-level results for their agricultural households, using a harmonized set of definitions specially developed for this purpose but leaving countries flexibility to use whatever data sets they have. The published Income of the Agricultural Households Sector (IAHS) statistics now contain results at sector level for all EU–15 countries other than the UK, though there is a wide variation between countries in the degree of detail and length of run of years (Eurostat, 2000, 2002b). At microeconomic level the situation is far less good; no usable harmonized EU-wide system of statistics about farm households exists. A few Member States (Germany, the Scandinavian countries, Ireland and the Netherlands) have data adequate to explore distributional issues such as the incidence of low-income households, but many (the UK included) have little or nothing (Hill, 2000). This lack of household-level statistics has been deplored since at least the early 1960s (OECD, 1964). The UK’s particular problem lies in the fact that there is no satisfactory microeconomic data source, either to act as a primary basis of calculating results or to provide distribution agents by which the economic aggregates of the households sector accounts might be broken down and shown separately for agricultural households. The UK’s household budget survey (the Family Expenditure Survey) sample contains only about 60 cases of households headed by self-employed persons working in agriculture, forestry and fishing – far too small to give statistically reliable results (Eurostat, 2000b). The Family Resources Survey, also covering all household types and first mounted in 1994/95, has similarly produced insufficient agricultural cases despite steps having been taken to boost the agricultural component. The only two regular data sources containing numbers of cases approaching the adequate are taxation statistics (Survey of Personal Incomes – SPI) and the official farm business survey (the FBS, mentioned above), though the suitability of both for use within a policy context is acknowledged as unsatisfactory. The annual SPI is drawn from taxation records held by the Inland Revenue.

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Tax cases (individuals) are allotted to the agriculture or horticulture trade group if they have a main or principal additional source of self-employment income derived from this activity, defined according to the Inland Revenue’s Trade Classification. It should be noted that the classification system does not make use of a comparison of the income coming from independent activity in agriculture with total income, but only with that part coming from independent activity in all industries. Some discretion is used by tax authorities in allowing for fluctuations in the income from farming before a taxpayer is reclassified. The SPI contains about 1 per cent of agricultural cases. Information from this source was first published by the Ministry of Agriculture in the 1986 edition of its Farm Incomes in the United Kingdom, with figures going back to 1977–78. The SPI has also been the subject of attention of researchers both inside and outside the government service (Lund and Watson, 1981; Hill, 1984, 1987). The main advantage is that taxable income in all forms is covered, even that which is taxed at source such as interest on building society deposits, and the amounts coming from a range of sources can be identified separately. The disadvantages arise mainly from technicalities associated with the data source; tax records are not designed primarily for studies of income. At present the drawbacks are that: ‰

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The sample does not include farmers whose businesses trade as companies and who technically are employees of their own companies, although they could possibly be selected if they have other self-employment income from agriculture. These are important in the UK context. According to MAFF sources, in 1990 just under one quarter (23 per cent) of the Net Operating Surplus of UK agriculture was estimated to have been generated on corporate farms; the proportion had been very similar in 1984 (Eurostat, 1992, 1995). Evidence from a range of sources points to these farms as tending to be found disproportionately frequently among the larger sizegroups but, despite their size, the overwhelming majority would also be owned and managed by families. The omission of the households associated with these farms is a significant gap in the SPI coverage which, probably, means that the operators of high-income farms are insufficiently represented in the results. The unit over which measurement is taken is the tax unit, not the entire household. In the earlier part of the series couples were treated as single units, but the change to independent taxation has reduced the usefulness of this source. Figures for 1990–91 and subsequently are therefore not comparable with earlier years. Technical problems preclude the aggregation of the returns of individuals living at the same address.

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Comparison of the taxable incomes of farmers with other members of UK society has been complicated by the different timings of the assessment of selfemployment and employment earnings. However, one attempt for the late 1970s using SPI data (Hill, 1984) found that farmers formed a rising proportion of cases as the higher income bands were reached. The other source of data in the United Kingdom, the Farm Business Survey, has already been described in some detail above. Its sample is not necessarily representative of households that operate farms, or even those whose main incomes come from farming, because of the imposition of a minimum economic size threshold designed to restrict coverage to ‘commercial’ farms. Only since the accounting year 1988/89 has the FBS included questions on income from employment and self-employment away from the farm and unearned income from investments, pensions and social security payments (including child benefit, family credit and other cash welfare payments); in 1997/98 about 2,700 of the 3,500 farms in the UK sample supplied this data. Scrutiny of the results, including comparison with the taxation statistics and other concerns with the sample of respondents, suggests that the FBS findings on income other than that coming from farming should be treated with caution. D I S C U S S I O N : E X P L A I N I N G T H E G A P B E T WE E N D E C L A R E D AIMS AND AVAILABLE STATISTICS

A policy analyst is left with little doubt that there is a severe disjunction between the apparent need of policy for information on incomes in agriculture and the available statistics by which policy is steered. Given that policy throughout the post-war period, and especially since the CAP became the framework within which the UK operates, has purported to be concerned with ensuring a fair standard of living for the agricultural community, it is reasonable to expect that official statistics would provide indicators of living standards, of which the incomes of agricultural households would be a valuable proxy. Information should be available not only on the absolute levels of disposable income of agricultural households and how these are changing over time, but also on the components of that income. Additionally, in view of the ‘fairness’ of the income target, comparisons should be available with incomes of other socio-professional groups, which implies a need to take care over income in kind, especially consumption items produced on the farm. And because poverty is a key policy consideration, the measurement of income should be capable of revealing information about distributions. Various theoretical indicators exist of the severity of the low income problem, including the shares below a poverty line (that may be set in a number of ways) and other measures of income inequality which might have a use within agricultural policy (OECD, 1994; 2000). There will be particular interest in how low household incomes are spread among farms of different sizes, types, and

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regions, the extent to which low incomes from agriculture are countered by incomes from other sources, and changes in these characteristics over time. In view of the interest in sustainable agriculture, there will be concern to have information that would enable an assessment of the extent to which a fall in farming profits could put the livelihood of households in peril. Many of these issues require good quality data at the microeconomic level. In practice, available statistics are predominantly concerned with the rewards from agricultural production, with almost nothing usable in the UK to show the overall income situation of agricultural households. The picture for the EU as a whole is slightly better at sector level, though there is a major lacuna in the area of microeconomic data and statistics based on them. Explaining the absence of something is, by its nature, rather more difficult than tracing why something has come into existence. However, a number of factors seem to be involved that are largely common to the UK and EU circumstances. They can be broadly divided into those on the demand and supply sides of the statistical system.

Demand pressures for statistics (a) Lack of political demand: Historically, there has been no demand by British ministers (of agriculture) for such information either for national purposes or for use within the CAP (though there is some indication of an awakening interest following the sharp fall in the prosperity of UK farming in the late 1990s and the agreement of the Agenda 2000 package). The UK has never tried to apply the notion of poverty to its farmers, in the sense of establishing a poverty line and assessing incomes and numbers of cases with respect to it; this is in contrast with the USA (Ahearn et al., 1993; USDA, 1997). Isolated attempts to focus on the personal income (and wealth) of UK farmers (such as Parliamentary Questions notably by Austin Mitchell in the 1980s) have not been enough to stimulate other politicians whose interests lie elsewhere. This lack of concern is perhaps a reflection of the relatively high proportions of MPs, peers and ministers who have been farmers or landowners, or have had strong links with the industry (Howarth, 1985, 1990). Ministers do not seem to have demanded more, even when negotiating for Britain within the CAP. What has been required in such circumstances is a fairly small number of indicators that could be used to maximum national advantage. The aggregate income information on production rewards, supplemented by farm or enterprise estimates, has proved sufficient. The lack of political will was illustrated when the then Minister of Agriculture (John Gummer) appeared before a House of Lords’ Select Committee enquiring into EC rural development policy (House of Lords, 1990). In response to a question on whether adequate data were available about the nature and scale of economic problems affecting farm households to provide a proper basis for policymaking the Minister replied:

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At EU level, the Council (of agriculture ministers) has not requested this sort of information, perhaps reflecting their departmental responsibilities and personal sensibilities. Indeed, political pressure has been used (specifically by France and Luxembourg) to block statistical developments (personal communication). Other manifestations of the Council dealing with social and economic policy have chosen not to become involved. In contrast, parts of the European Parliament have been vocal critics of the present system of income measurement (European Parliament, 1983) though in practice this has not influenced the general approach of the CAP to income issues; recently a report for the Parliament on evaluating the CAP concluded that information on living standards was needed, both average and distributional information and that the present production-centred measures contained well-known deficiencies (Tangermann, 1999). (b) Administrative interpretation of policy aims: Allied to the lack of ministerial interest is the interpretation that the agencies which administer policy have put on the aims of policy. This has been done in ways that make information on living standards superfluous. In the UK and for the EU as a whole the social aims of policy seem to have been little more than rhetoric that enabled other, narrower objectives to be pursued. Kirk (a senior civil servant), when describing MAFF’s interpretation of the aims of policy as set out in the 1947 Agricultural Act and their implementation in the 1950s, commented that the social aspects (‘proper remuneration and living conditions’) had been important in securing the widespread political acceptance of support that was, in practice, very largely directed to the production of agricultural commodities (Kirk, 1962). However, the MAFF certainly did not see it as a commitment to a system of payment according to the income needs of individual farmers, though it conceded that such an

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interpretation of the 1947 Act was possible (though it would require modification to the 1957 Agriculture Act). In practice the legislation’s social aim was taken as the basis for justifying special payments to certain groups as a whole, for example hill farmers. Though even this limited approach would seem to require statistics that were capable of revealing the overall income situation of farmers and their households, not just their earnings from farming, in practice this was not a handicap to the implementation of such programmes. After the UK came under the influence of the CAP, the attitude of MAFF to its more explicit and oft repeated and recently reconfirmed aim of ‘ensuring a fair standard of living for the agricultural community’ was one of ambiguity. Therefore the need to know about the overall income of farm households was also equivocal. On the one hand, the social aspects of the CAP were accepted by the UK as part of the Treaty of Rome and Agenda 2000. For example, Sir Michael Franklin, a MAFF Permanent Secretary writing on the prospects for CAP reform, referred repeatedly to the central importance of the income support to farmers as a determining factor in past policy (Ockenden and Franklin, 1995). On the other hand, another MAFF Permanent Secretary, in answer to questions of a Commons Select Committee on the necessity of having information on which farmers were most in need of support, commented that this would be the case if the government wished to differentiate between one type of farm rather than another on income criteria, but that in general this was not a characteristic of the existing support system, so the need for information did not arise (Commons, 1987). Within the administration of the CAP, though there has long been an awareness in the Commission of the importance of other sources of income to agricultural households (see, for example, Commission of the EC, 1982), the Directorate-General for agriculture has no single and consistent view of the beneficiaries of the CAP or of the way in which incomes should be assessed for policy purposes. While the debate that surrounded the Perspectives Green Paper of 1985 caused one senior official to call the need for household income information urgent (Avery, 1985), there was a rather obvious split between this view and that of the parts of the Commission primarily concerned with commodity markets and price support mechanisms. At about the same time the Commission came close to advocating selective support for ‘social problem’ farmers linked to a view that ‘Community action would be all the more effective and consistent if it were also supported by instruments allowing direct and selective support of incomes’ (Commission of the EC, 1987: para 7). Community aid was considered appropriate for assistance to ‘main occupation’ farms, ultimately viable but facing difficulty in coping with policy reforms and for groups facing income problems because of structural handicaps (such as operators in hill and mountain regions). However, payments that were granted

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on the basis of the level of overall income of each beneficiary were thought by the Commission more suitable for national aids operated within a Community framework. National aid granted under the Community framework was proposed to be available to part-time farmers as well as full-time ones. The proposed framework restricted aid; it could ‘not bring each beneficiary’s income level to a point beyond the average agricultural income of the region plus any national corrective’ (Commission of the EC, 1987). The ambiguous nature of this yardstick is worth noting. (c) Lack of need for the data for administrative purposes: No specific income aids within UK post-war agricultural policy have ever required the rigorous measurement of the total incomes of farmers. Though these were implied in the aims of certain forms of payment under the Guidance part of the agricultural budget of the CAP (headage payments on stock in LFAs, eligibility tests under Structural Policy measures), the UK managed to avoid the issue on individual farms or only collected data on a confidential basis, not even to be released to other parts of the same agriculture department. Were such data accessible, its secondary use for policy analysis might be expected (much as IACS forms have been considered as an alternative to censuses for some aspects of cropping statistics). (d) Precedent: Expedience lay behind the initial methodology chosen in the UK to assess aggregate income changes in the 1940s. When coupled with the prevalent view of what a ‘farmer’ did in the period when expanded output was a vital necessity, this activity-based way of measuring income soon became firmly embedded in the institutional system; MAFF exhibited satisfying behaviour in developing its income statistics. Though not appropriate, the aggregate branch income indicator became interpreted as a proxy for the welfare of farmers as a group. A similar view has been taken of the Farm Business Survey’s income measures, particularly its concept of Net Farm Income, commonly misinterpreted as being personal income. Once a perception has been established and the estimates built into the annual review process, there is a tendency to keep to the system, even to the extent of encountering obvious statistical obsolescence. Similarly, in the EU, the early establishment of indicators based on measurements of agricultural activity has given them a secure place in the minds of users (mainly DG-AGRI) and the annual programmes of Eurostat, with relatively little interest in displacing them (Commission of the EC, 1982). (e) Pro-farmer stance of the agriculture departments and Commission DG-AGRI: A characteristic noted by many writers on UK agricultural policy is that MAFF acted predominantly as a ministry for farmers rather than of agriculture, but not all types of farmer carried the same weight in its attentions. Reflecting its history as an

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agent for stimulating production and productivity, MAFF was a ministry that was preoccupied with output and commodities and with a tendency to concentrate on the large commercial farmers. Small output (and by implication low income) farmers were a minor part of its interest. Similar arguments apply at EU level to the Commission’s DG-AGRI. (f) National interest: evidence from other countries suggests that, as a group, farmers are not a low income sector of society, and are typically in a superior wealth position (Eurostat, 2000; Hill, 2000). If statistics for the UK were to show that the personal incomes of UK farmers compared very satisfactorily on average with those of other UK occupational groups and, more critically, when stood against other farmers in the EU, this information might lead to a reduced ability to draw on the EU’s budget. This was reflected in the agreement by the then MAFF Permanent Secretary with the view of one member of the Select Committee that the UK has to go carefully with the way that it presents its income figures, in the interests of its farmers (Commons, 1987). There are plenty of examples in the history of the CAP of national interest defeating sensible Community decisions.

Supply of statistics (g) Bureaucratic self-interest: Change in the presentation of income information, with less emphasis on production and more on the welfare of producers, would make the social function of agricultural policy more transparent, perhaps to the extent of raising questions about the need for government (or European Commission) departments for agriculture at all. Low incomes in agriculture are just one example of poverty, which might be better handled by general welfare policy and by a ministry responsible for social security. The rationale of this approach was supported in the ‘Larsen’ report, an influential independent review of the CAP (EC, 1994). However, such changes are potential threats to organizations, the size of their budgets and their staff; consequently opposition could be expected from risk-averse agencies to statistical developments that might be the precursors and facilitators to wider policy reform. (h) Sectoral control over funding of statistics: The supply of agricultural income statistics in the UK has traditionally been organized by agricultural departments and funded very largely out of their budgets. This contrasts with another model in which statistics are under the control of an independent statistical authority that is capable of assessing competing information needs across all policies in relation to a central budget. In UK agricultural statistics, the main user has also been the supplier. While in the EU Eurostat is nominally an independent service within the Commission, it has become increasingly dependent on funding

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transfers from DG-AGRI for its agricultural work and therefore sensitive to the view of its main customer (who may have institutional interests for not wanting more income information about farm households). Of course, FADN is under the direct supervision of DG-AGRI, which co-finances the survey costs at national levels. (i) Opposition from agencies that provide data: In Great Britain farm income data are collected by universities and colleges; steps to gather additional information involve negotiations about the work and the resource provided. Extending the FBS to non-farm income has been resisted by some field staff, reflecting a mix of concern with the impact of such questions on response rates to other questions and a feeling that such questions were improper. In the EU extending the questions in the FADN requires a change in Community legislation, which has proved impossible to achieve because of opposition by farmers’ representatives to such data being collected in some countries (Robson, 1996). (j) Issues of statistical quality: Unlike measures of income that are restricted to agricultural activity, where common methodologies and data sources have been in place for many years, countries differ widely in the extent and reliability of their data on household incomes (OECD, 2003). Some central conceptual points remain less than fully resolved (such as the appropriate household definition). Thus the incomplete coverage and questionable quality of statistics can be a basis for marginalizing such statistics that exist as a way of keeping them off the political and administrative agenda. CONCLUSION

The present system of using indicators that relate solely to the rewards from agricultural productive activity for steering policy risks presenting figures that grossly misrepresent the real economic situation of the agricultural community. This particular problem of misuse has been identified since at least the 1930s (Peterson, 1933). Evidence in countries that are furnished with appropriate data (reviewed in Hill, 2000) shows that knowing the income from the holding is no reliable guide to the total income of the household that operates it. Movements in agricultural income over time do not even imply that household income necessarily changes in the same direction; for many households what happens in the rest of the economy will be the main determinant. Of course, much will depend on which households that occupy farms are included within the agricultural community for measurement purposes. The factors put forward to explain the present information gap, many of

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which have deep historical roots, do not amount in this author’s view to a conspiracy of silence. Rather they combine to constitute a substantial inertia against change. Hitherto, actors in the policy process who might bring pressure to bear for a more transparent income situation (including consumers and advocates of other policies that are currently hampered by the resources consumed by a production-orientated CAP) have lacked sufficient impetus to persuade managers of statistical systems to make the investment. Yet the impediments to better statistics should not be allowed to perpetuate the present information lacuna, since from society’s wider perspective there are major benefits to be gained from a clearer picture of the economic situation of farm operators and a more targeted policy of assistance. The transfer efficiency of support provided by agricultural policy is very poor (OECD, 1999), with some writers suggesting that that only about 10 per cent of support reaches the small low-income farmer (Gardner, 1996). At the same time this support generates unwanted levels of production that bring in their train a burden on society in terms of the wasteful use of resources, budgetary problems within the EU and likely social and environmental costs. Many commentators take the view that a reorientation of policy involving the identification of low incomes in agriculture and the adoption of measures that aim at alleviation without stimulating aggregate supply has long been overdue (see, for example, Commission, 1994; Ockenden and Franklin, 1995; Hill, 2000; OECD, 2000). Much of the present support may prove to be unnecessary if, with more complete information, the overall economic situation of farm households can be established as satisfactory. However, moves in that direction are difficult unless statistics of good quality on the overall income situation of farmers and their families are to hand. After more than a half-century, there are signs that pressure is mounting for the information gap to be filled. Among users, the Court of Auditors of the European Communities has recently criticized the weakness of official statistics that would allow the standard of living of the agricultural community to be assessed (Court of Auditors, 2003). The OECD has analysed what statistics exist and in doing so has drawn international attention to the lack of data generally and to the problems of countries such as the UK in particular (OECD, 2003; LEI, 2004). In the UK government ministers have been asking how farms survived the financial crisis of the early 2000s and what information exists on other incomes (DEFRA, personal correspondence). Since the implementation of Agenda 2000 and its associated Rural Development Programmes (including the four applied in the UK) an aim of policy has been the creation of diversified employment opportunities for farm households, on the holding or elsewhere in the local economy; data about the various sources of income flowing to farm families is needed to monitor and assess the performance of this policy. The

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formation of DEFRA in 2001 (by expanding the responsibilities of MAFF to include rural affairs) widened the sphere of interest of the main UK agricultural government department. This helped towards recognition in policy that agriculture is only one part of the economy of rural areas and that farmers and their families are already engaged with other sectors within it, requiring a broader approach to monitoring their use of resources and multiple income sources. All these factors have increased demands among politicians and policy administrators for household-level statistics. Among suppliers of statistics, agricultural household incomes have risen in prominence recently, appearing as major topic at the second and third World Conferences of Agricultural Statisticians (at Rome in 2001 and Cancun in 2005) and on the agendas of meetings of European agricultural statisticians since the late 1990s. The UN Economic Commission for Europe is developing a handbook of methodological guidelines on income measurement for agricultural households, building on the experience of inter alia Eurostat, the OECD and countries that have good national statistics on agricultural household incomes, such as the United States (UNECE, 2005). The European Commission has launched a feasibility study (2005) on collecting non-farm income as part of the FADN/RICA in Member States and in the UK DEFRA has already revised the coverage of the FBS questionnaire to achieve better information on the other sources of income accruing to farm operators (from the 2004/5 accounting year). In part these advances reflect the self-interest of statistical institutions, seeing the direction in which policy issues are developing and providing a suitable and timely response. In short, some of the main factors that help explain the lack of statistics on the income situation of farmers and their households have at last been on the move. Though problems remain, these are largely technical in nature (such as developing an adequate dataset for the UK) and can be overcome once the political will exists. It appears that the long period of disjunction between policy and statistics may be slowly drawing to a close. REFERENCES

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(1987) ‘Multiple sources of income: implications for farm incomes and farm income support’, Journal of Agricultural Economics 38, 182–9 (1988) Total Income of Agricultural Households, Theme 5 Series D, Luxembourg: Eurostat (1998) ‘The Implications for agricultural statistics of changes in the system of national Accounts’, Journal of Agricultural Economics 49, 359–77 (2000) Farm Incomes, Wealth and Agricultural Policy (3rd edition) Aldershot: Ashgate Hill, B. and B. Brookes (1993) Farm Incomes in the European Community in the 1980s, Document Series, Brussels: Commission of the European Communities House of Lords (1990) The Future of Rural Society, Select Committee on the European Communities, Session 1989–90, 24th Report, London: HMSO Howarth, R. W. (1985) Farming for Farmers? Hobart Paperback 20, London: Institute of Economic Affairs (1990) Farming for Farmers? A Critique of Agricultural Support Policy (2nd edition) London: Institute of Economic Affairs Kirk, J. H. (1958) ‘Some objectives of agricultural support policy’, Journal of Agricultural Economics, 13, 134–51 (1964) ‘The Economic activities of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food’, Journal of Agricultural Economics, 16/2, 164–84 LEI (2004) Proceedings of the OECD/PACIOLI Workshop on Information Needs for the Analysis of Farm Household Income Issues, C. Moreddu and K. J. Poppe (eds) The Hague Agricultural Research Institute Lund, P. J. and J. M. Watson (1981) ‘Agricultural incomes: a review of the data and recent trends’, Economic Trends, vol. 338, 103–21 MAFF (1977) The Changing Structure of Agriculture, London: HMSO (1984a) Departmental Net Income Calculation: Sources and Methods, London: MAFF Statistics Division 1 (1984b) Departmental Net Income Calculation: Historical Series 1937/38 to 1974/75, Statistics Division 1, London: MAFF (1989) Farm Incomes in the United Kingdom 1989 edition, London: HMSO (1994) Farm Incomes in the United Kingdom 1992/93, London: HMSO (1998) Agriculture in the United Kingdom 1998, London: HMSO (1999) Farm Incomes in the United Kingdom 1997/98, London: HMSO (2000) Farm Incomes in the United Kingdom 1998/99, London: HMSO (annual-a) Agriculture in the United Kingdom, London: HMSO (annual-b) Annual Review of Agriculture, London: HMSO Marks, H. F. and D. K. Britton (1989) A Hundred Years of British Food and Farming: A Statistical Survey, London: Taylor and Francis Ockenden, J. and M. Franklin (1995) European Agriculture: Making the CAP Fit the Future, London: The Royal Institute of International Affairs Chatham House Papers

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OECD (1964) Low Incomes in Agriculture: Problems and Policies, Paris: Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (1994) Measurement of Low Incomes and Poverty in a Perspective of International Comparisons, Labour market and social policy occasional papers No 14, Paris: Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, Paris (1999) Distributional Effects of Agricultural Support in OECD Countries, Rep. No. AGR/CA (99) 8/FINAL, Paris: Directorate for Food, Agriculture and Fisheries, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (2000) Low Incomes in Agriculture in OECD Countries (draft report AGR/CA/APM) Paris: Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (2003) Farm Household Income: Issues and Policy Responses, Paris: Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development Ojala, E. M. (1952) Agriculture and Economic Progress, Oxford: Agricultural Economics Research Institute, University of Oxford Outlaw, J. E. and G. Croft (1981) ‘Recent developments in economic accounts for agriculture’, Economic Trends 335, 95–103 Peters, G. H. (ed.) (1988) Agriculture: Review of United Kingdom Statistical Sources, XXIII, London: Royal Statistical Society and The Economic and Social Research Council/Chapman and Hall Peterson, G. M. (1933) ‘Wealth, income and living’, Journal of Farm Economics, 15, 421–51 Robson, N. (1996) ‘Practical and legal challenges of developing pluri-activity and non-farm incomes data using the EU’s farm accountancy data network’, in B. Hill (ed.) Income Statistics for the Agricultural Households Sector, 69–77, Luxembourg: Eurostat Snowdon, E. (1984) ‘Agricultural data and economic analysis: estimating farming income within the EEC’, in A. Dubgaard, B. Grassmugg and K. J. Munk (eds) Agricultural Data and Economic Analysis: Databases, Forecasting and Policy Analyses in the Context of Public Administration, Maastricht/Copenhagen: European Institute of Public Administration/Danish Institute of Agricultural Economics Snowdon, E. L. and W. N. T. Roberts (1973) ‘Economic accounts for agriculture’, Economic Trends 235, iv–ix Sturgess, I. G. (1984) Collection and Analysis of Economic Data Through Farm Surveys by British Universities, Occasional Paper 35, Cambridge: Agricultural Economics Unit, Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge Tangermann, S. and A. Buckwell (1999) The Purpose and Methodology of Evaluation in Regard to EU Agricultural Expenditure, Budgetary Series, BUDG–102 EN, Luxembourg: European Parliament United Nations, Statistical Office (1949) International Standard Industrial Classification of All Economic Activities (ISIC), Statistical Papers, Series M. No. 4, New York: United Nations

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UN (1993) System of National Accounts 1993, Brussels/Luxembourg/New York/ Paris/Washington DC: Commission of the European Communities – Eurostat/ International Monetary Fund/Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development/United Nations/World Bank UNECE (2005) Handbook on Rural Household Livelihood and Well-being: Statistics on Rural Development and Agricultural Household Income, Geneva: United Nations Economic Commission for Europe USDA (1997) ‘Farm household income and wealth’, Rural Conditions and Trends, 8, 79–85 Whetham, E. H. (1981) Agricultural Economists in Britain 1900-1940, Oxford: Institute of Agricultural Economics, University of Oxford Winnifrith, J. (1962) The Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, London: George Allen and Unwin

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ANNEX: MOVEMENT IN FARMING INCOME IN THE UK, 1937−97 ( A D A P T E D F R O M H I L L , 2000) Figures taken from the annual official publication Agriculture in the United Kingdom, its predecessor, The Annual Review of Agriculture White Paper, and MAFF’s Departmental Net Income Calculation – Historical Series 1937/38 to 1974/75 demonstrate the evolution of aggregate Farming Income. In the following analysis monetary values have been taken after allowing for inflation (using the GDP implicit deflator). Some stitching together of series based in different years has been employed to create a time series extending about 60 years. The methodological changes over this period cause wrinkles; in particular this applies to incomes before and after 1970. Nevertheless, broad patterns are revealed that are not sensitive to such statistical refinements. Figures A1 and A2 show the aggregate economic account for the branch agriculture in graph form for the period from 1937 to 1997 (when the basis of the calculation shifted to new methodology). Gross Output of UK agriculture is represented by the total height of the stacked lines in Figure A1. This is the aggregate value of production including that output which is sold off farms and subsequently repurchased as inputs (for example, cereals for feed sold to an intermediary merchant that, in other words, never really leaves the “national farm”). While the volume of Gross Output from the UK agriculture showed a markedly consistent rise over the post-war period up to the mid-1980s, with the output at the end of this period being almost double that of the early 1950s, the value of this output in real terms did not keep pace. Gross Output value was about the same in 1986 as it had been in 1952; this implies that the real prices received by farmers approximately halved over the period. The pattern is not uniform. Up to 1971 there was a slightly rising trend in the value of the industry’s output; the early 1970s saw a substantial jump through increased prices (physical output hardly changed) brought about by a combination of UK entry to the European Economic Community, with the adoption of the CAP’s higher market prices, and an international boom in the prices of primary commodities which had an impact on the domestic prices received by farmers. After the peak in 1973 the value of agricultural output was in sharp decline, though with some reversal in 1993 to 1996, associated with the higher prices that UK farmers received as a by-product of the decision that Sterling should leave the EU Exchange Rate Mechanism in September 1992 and a short-lived surge in commodity prices on international markets. This happened despite a substantial displacement of imported food supply, with a consequent rise in the level of selfsufficiency, most notably from the later 1970s. The decline in output value was also despite the action of the CAP in supporting product prices.

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Gross inputs. It is evident that the large increase in the Gross Output from UK agriculture in the period of post-war recovery up to 1955 was accompanied by an even more rapid growth in the value of Gross Inputs used (presumably largely explained in terms of more inputs purchased from other branches of the economy, such as fertilizers, fuel and machinery, animal feeds and others). From the mid1950s to the early 1970s these inputs increased broadly in line with output but a jump occurred in 1972–73. Subsequently the value of inputs bought from other parts of the economy was on a declining trend, not as rapidly downward as the value of output but also mirroring its short-term deviations. In terms of the other inputs, labour costs were the single largest charge; as shown here these include an estimated figure for family workers who did not have a contract of employment and for partners and directors other than the principal farmer (but not his/her spouse) based on the pay of hired workers. The total labour bill peaked in the late 1940s and was on a falling trend until the early 1970s when a temporary plateau seems to have been reached. However, in the 1980s and 1990s a continuing downward trend in the labour bill in real terms was apparent. Interest charges were a minor claim on Net Product up to 1970 but then rose, although they fall in real terms after 1990. Rent costs appear to fall, but this was largely the result of the change in the methodology which resulted in the national farm being treated according to its actual tenure rather than the previous convention which assumed it to be all tenanted. Notwithstanding the fall in the real costs faced by agriculture from the early 1970s, the even faster decline in Gross Output meant that aggregate Farming Income, the reward to producers for their own resources, declined substantially over the post-war period. The level in 1970 was little different from its real value in the late 1940s and early 1950s, though over these two decades there was first a small downward movement followed by a rise. The unusual circumstances of 1973 saw a peak in income, but from then on a rapid decline set in which was only temporarily reversed by the events of 1992. After a short-lived boom, by 1997 Farming Income was back to the level of the late 1980s. Estimates for 1998 (not shown) suggested a further fall of 46 per cent from the year before, to an income in real terms smaller even than in 1937/38. However it must be borne in mind that changes also took place over this period in the numbers of farms, farmers and farm households which will have had an impact on the average income per unit, something that the EU Indicators allow for. This decline is also reflected in the proportion of the value of output that remains to farmers as Farming Income; Figure A3 shows that after 1940 farmers retained a declining share of the value of agriculture’s Gross Output. Discounting the unusual conditions immediately before and during the War years, in the early 1950s almost 30 per cent of the value of output remained as Farming Income, but by the 1980s this had fallen to only about 10–15 per cent. The short-lived

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conditions of 1993–96 took it somewhat higher, but by 1997 it was back within this range. A large part of the explanation lies with the tendency to purchase more inputs from other industries, either to substitute for inputs from farm origins (fuel for tractors in place of horses bred and fed within agriculture) or as an addition to them. This is also reflected in the persistent decline in Net Product (NVA) as a percentage of Gross Output, from over 50 per cent in the early 1950s to about 40 per cent in the 1980s. The large jump in the share of output retained as income in 1993 and 1994 was again the result of short-term events. A1 UK: Composition of Gross Output in Real Terms, 1937−97, Stacked Presentation Figure 25,000

20,000

Farming Income

£ mio

15,000

10,000 Gross Inputs

5,000 Depreciation Interest

Rent

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97

94

19

91

19

88

19

85

19

82

19

79

19

76

19

73

19

70

19

67

19

64

19

61

19

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52

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49

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46

19

43

19

40

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19

19

37

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A2 UK: Composition of Gross Output in Real Terms, 1937−97, Non-Stacked Presentation 12,000

10,000

8,000 Farming Income £ mio

Gross Inputs Total labour

6,000

Interest Rent Depreciation

4,000

2,000

19 46 19 49 19 52 19 55 19 58 19 61 19 64 19 67 19 70 19 73 19 76 19 79 19 82 19 85 19 88 19 91 19 94 19 97

0

3

19 4

19 4

19 3

7

0

A3 UK: Percentage of Gross Output Remaining as Farming Income, 1937−97 40

35

30

20

15

10

5

1997

1994

1991

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1985

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1979

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1973

1970

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1961

1958

1955

1952

1949

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1943

1940

0 1937

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25

5 MURRAINS TO MAD COWS: A VERY SHORT HISTORY OF GOVERNMENTS, PEOPLE AND ANIMAL DISEASES

Paul Brassley

INTRODUCTION

An outbreak of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) caused by the H5N1 strain of the virus began between January and July 2003, probably in China. It infected chickens, and by January 2004 it had spread to Hong Kong, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, and possibly Pakistan. It also infected people. On 24 March 2004 the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that there had been 34 confirmed human cases of avian influenza in Thailand and Vietnam, resulting in 23 deaths. By this time it was a worldwide news story, known as ‘bird flu’ rather than HPAI, and there were also reports of outbreaks in the United States of America and Canada, although these involved a different strain of the virus. Klaus Stöhr, a senior virologist at the WHO, warned that the virulence of this outbreak of the disease was unprecedented and that it could hybridize with human influenza to cause a global pandemic (New Scientist, 26 and 28 January 2004; World Health Organization, 2004). It is not the purpose of this paper to tell the story of bird flu. It is simply the most recent example, at the time of writing, of a zoonosis – a disease that affects people as well as other animals – that has created problems for health and agricultural policymakers. In the context of the contested countryside in Britain, there are clearly other diseases of greater local significance: Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) became a problem in the 1990s, Salmonella in eggs in the 1980s, and even rabies might be included, although the last outbreak was in 1970 (The Royal Society, 2002: 18). Bovine tuberculosis (TB), once thought to have been ‘virtually eradicated’ from Britain in 1960, remains a problem (West, 1982: 825). Perhaps the most dramatic of recent disease episodes concerned foot-and-

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mouth disease (FMD) in 2001. Since it rarely infects people, FMD should not be seen as one of the zoonoses; nevertheless, it has clearly had major socio-economic and environmental impacts. The purpose of this book is to place current controversies in historical perspective, and therefore this particular chapter is about the response – both individual and collective – to animal disease, and the way in which it has changed over time. It is divided into two main parts: the first is concerned with the legislative response to disease, and the second to the ways of looking at the world that led to the legislation. There is no shortage of veterinary or medical histories, and even guides to recent food legislation all begin with a brief historical account to set their main contents in context. The following account therefore makes no claims to originality, except perhaps in attempting to combine the findings of veterinary, medical and food historians into a single account. Whether or not it is successful in that is for the reader to judge; previous writers seem to have stuck to their veterinary or medical specialisms, and perhaps only the courage born of ignorance would allow any attempt to combine their findings. Nevertheless, it seems worthwhile to try, if only because it seems impossible to make sense of what has happened from one perspective only. And if, as Gibbon suggests, history is ‘little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind’, then what follows might appear to be the epitome of history (Gibbon, 1963: 44). BEFORE THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Humans have probably always shared diseases with other animals. Even Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers could have been susceptible to anthrax, rabies and various kinds of worms picked up from the animals they hunted, and the development of agriculture increased the proximity of people and animals and thus the possibility of disease transference. Milk was an effective way of transmitting disease from animals to humans, and so was dung, and signs of TB have been found in an Egyptian mummy dated to about 1000 BC. It has been suggested that one of the biblical plagues of Egypt was caused by anthrax (Exodus ix, 3), and the Jewish prohibition of pigmeat would at least prevent infection by the nematode Trichinella spiralis. Humans share many diseases with domestic animals (Porter gives a figure of 65 for dogs alone): measles is related to the cattle disease rinderpest, pigs and ducks are susceptible to influenzas, and rhinoviruses, the source of the common cold, come from horses. Chicken pox and mumps were also originally zoonotic conditions. Horse dung is a source of tetanus, E. Coli O157 is part of the gut flora of cows, and people can suffer from the same liver flukes as sheep and catch ringworm from cattle. Parasitic roundworms in humans may well have evolved from those found in pigs. In addition, domestic animals can carry bacteria such as Salmonella, and water polluted by their faeces acts as a source of infection

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(Swabe, 1999: 51–64; Porter, 1997: 18–22). Written evidence of veterinary medicine is obviously not available for these early times, but the Kahun papyrus (c.1800 BC) provides evidence of veterinary practices, and, perhaps not surprisingly, it is followed relatively quickly by mention of the vet’s fee in the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi (c.1700 BC). There were veterinary hospitals in India by 300 BC, and the Greek city states employed an animal doctor or hippiatros by 500 BC. The Judeo–Christian emphasis on the uniqueness of humans, as opposed to other animals, helped to reinforce the distinction between human and veterinary medicine by the end of the classical period (Schwabe, 1969: 35–40). There is also early evidence of epidemic disease in animals: Aristotle’s Historia Animalium discusses epidemics in cattle and identifies what may be either contagious pleuropneumonia or foot and mouth disease. Such epidemics were often associated with war, as for example the rinderpest outbreak following the Hun invasions in the fifth and sixth centuries AD and the wars of Charlemagne between 800 and 830 (Dunlop and Williams, 1996: 150, 209) Establishing the early existence of disease and medicine, both human and animal, is therefore not difficult. Continuing the story, between, say, the fifth and sixteenth centuries, is more challenging. Disease clearly continued to affect the human population, but the sort of epidemiological information which is available today, and for the last few centuries, is largely absent for the medieval period, with an obvious exception in the case of plague (McNeill, 1977). (And in the context of this paper, it is worth remembering that the spread of bubonic plague is associated with rats and fleas, although whether they should be counted as domestic animals depends upon the arrangements of the individual household). The preservation of classical medical knowledge through the combined efforts of monastic and Arabic scholars is well known, and by the thirteenth century both hospitals and university medical teaching had been established. From this period onwards in northern Europe three professions emerged: university-trained physicians, surgeons, and barbers, who could carry out minor procedures such as bleeding. Both of the latter two were trained through apprenticeship, and had their professional organizations by the end of the fourteenth century (the Company of Barbers was chartered in London in 1376). The College of Physicians was not established in London until 1518. By this time civic authorities throughout Europe (although not to the same extent in England) were appointing their own medical practitioners in the major cities, and enacting public health legislation regulating slaughterhouses, food markets, sewerage in some cases, and water pollution by such trades as tanning. Cities faced with the threats of leprosy and plague enacted a range of public health measures. Isolation was the main response to leprosy, and several cities – Marseilles, Genoa, and Venice, for example – imposed quarantine regulations in times of plague. Venice had a Commission of Public Health by 1486 (Porter, 1997: 106, 119–20, 126). Food legislation at this time was concerned more with the quantity of goods sold rather than their quality (for

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example in England, the Assize of Bread and Ale of 1266), although town guilds did attempt to exercise some control over the practices of their members with regard to adulteration (Blaisdell, 1997; Fallows, 1988: 29). Medieval veterinary medicine, oxymoronic though the phrase might have seemed to some later commentators (see Swabe, 1999: 78), retained some contact with classical authors. Hildegard of Bingen (1099–1179) produced two works on animal disease combining information from Aristotle with herbal remedies. An Anglo-Saxon leechbook of the early tenth century also specified the use of herbs, together with charms and incantations. Arab veterinary authors too relied heavily on herbs and spices (Dunlop and Williams, 1996: 196–7, 213–15). Veterinary studies as such were largely absent from the universities, although the University of Padua had a veterinary theatre and a chair of veterinary anatomy for comparative anatomy purposes in the medical school (Schwabe, 1969: 41). Medieval veterinary medicine was, however, a practical more than an academic discipline. Horse marshalls, employed by medieval armies and royal courts, had veterinary knowledge, and so did the farriers who treated most of the animals that farmers could or would not treat themselves (Swabe, 1999: 77). Farriers have had a reputation for incompetence, but a study of eighteenth-century farriers suggests that this may have arisen from the need for nineteenth-century vets to emphasize their professional status by distancing themselves from their apprenticeship-trained predecessors (Lane, 1993: 99). According to Trow-Smith’s discussion of medieval cattle diseases, ‘The word “murrain” covered every source of loss except theft and deliberate slaughter’, but he also admitted that there were more precise identifications of disease, such as measles and pox of pigs (erysipelas and swine fever), and farcy in horses, and pox, rot, scab and ‘red death’ in sheep (Trow-Smith, 1957: 129, 154–6). A medieval farming glossary based on Essex records also mentions ‘Straungeloun’ (strangles), and ‘Trenches’ (colic) of horses, and ‘mal de lange’, which may be foot and mouth disease (Fisher, 1968: 22, 35, 37). The later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries seem to have seen extensive disease outbreaks: a murrain – probably rinderpest – affected much of the country in 1319–20, during which Hexham Abbey lost all its oxen and dairy cattle, and there were also outbreaks of sheep scab and pox (Campbell, 1995: 77; Hallam, 1988: 727; Miller, 1991: 35, 208–35, 396–400; Stephenson, 1988: 381). For most people, animal disease was one of life’s risks. It was not a complete mystery, for the naming of individual diseases suggests some knowledge of their characteristics, but it was to be dealt with, if at all, by the use of local knowledge and resources. CATTLE PLAGUE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

In dealing with the history of disease, the historian has to take care over Whig

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interpretations: much of the evidence for veterinary and medical history has been written by the winners, the professionals, whose views came to dominate the decisions of the policymakers and, through them, the patients and the livestock owners, over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Consequently the temptation to look for predecessors and precursors of current legislation and forms of treatment is always present, even though their importance in the events of their time may not have been so great as they appear in hindsight. On the other hand, since it is one of the purposes of this paper to trace the history of government responses to animal disease, a search for some early examples of those responses is presumably justifiable. In England one of the earliest examples of this came in the early eighteenth century, with another outbreak of the cattle plague. According to John Gamgee, writing at the time of the great nineteenth century pandemic, cattle plague was one of the great threats that periodically descended on the west from the east (Gamgee, 1866: 288–9; quoted in Wilkinson, 1984: 130). It was also called ‘The Russian Disease’ or ‘Steppe murrain’. Its precise identification was difficult, and whether it was rinderpest, bovine pleuropneumonia, or even foot and mouth or anthrax was not always certain. Moreover, the early eighteenth century outbreak was not necessarily the first since that of the early fourteenth century noted above. Lady Wilkinson (1984: 131) argues that there had been sporadic outbreaks in the seventeenth century, but that such was the impact of plagues in man at the time that cattle plague attracted less attention. However, the importance of the 1711–14 outbreak was that it produced government action. By 1711 rinderpest was rampant in northern Italy, and the Venetian Senate asked the medical faculty of the University of Padua, one of the foremost medical schools of the time, for help. Bernardino Ramazzini, principal professor of medicine in the faculty, made a study of the problem and concluded, inter alia, that since contagion appeared to be the means of transmission, isolation of affected animals should restrict the spread of the disease. His proposals do not seem to have been adopted, and by 1713 infected oxen reached a market in Rome. The Pope put control measures in the hands of his personal physician, Giovanni Maria Lancisi, who advised a policy of quarantine, isolation and slaughter of infected animals, and this was quickly successful (Swabe, 1999: 83–4; Wilkinson, 1984: 131–40). The details of the measures taken are perhaps less important than the establishment of the principle of government action, and the implicit legitimation of the study of animal disease among leading members of the medical profession. When cattle plague reached England in 1714, George I’s court surgeon, Thomas Bates, advised the government on control measures. He suggested the adoption of Lancisi’s methods (although whether or not he copied them is unknown, since Lancisi’s book, in which they were described, was not published until 1715), and with equally successful results. John Broad has analysed the history of cattle plague in England throughout the eighteenth century, and points out that

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there were three major outbreaks, in 1714–15, 1745–58, and 1768. In the first and last of these, central government, acting through Orders in Council applied at local level through the Justices of the Peace, applied quarantine and slaughter with compensation policies, and the problem was contained at relatively little cost. In 1745 the government’s attention was distracted, perhaps not surprisingly, by the Jacobite rebellion; it took little action for six months, and the disease became so well established that it was not contained until 1758. Broad concludes that the national control policies were accepted when they were seen to be successful, and widely evaded when they were not (Broad, 1983: 104–6, 115). THE ROLE OF THE STATE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

All this, however, was crisis management, or ‘disaster management’ in Eric Jones’s phrase (see Broad, 1983: n.1). There appears to have been no assumption that the state or the local community had a routine and ongoing role in human or animal health until the nineteenth century. In 1800 public intervention was local and ad hoc; by 1900 national bureaucracies and legislation to deal with human and animal health, and food quality, were in place in most western European countries and in North America. Nineteenth-century industrialization and urban growth produced just the right conditions in which disease could flourish: crowded poor people with imperfect sanitation and impure water. The resulting great epidemics – TB, cholera, which hit London in 1832, diphtheria, typhus, and typhoid (which carried off Prince Albert in 1861) – and the consequent great legislative changes have formed the subject material of numerous works of medical and social history over many years, of which Porter (1997: 401–27) and Duffin (1999: 139–67) are just the more recent, and Kriple (1993) among the more encyclopedic on the medical side. In order to set the animal disease story in context, a brief rehearsal of the medical and sanitary legislation story is appropriate at this point. The replacement of laissez-faire and voluntarist principles by public action can be seen from the point at which the 1834 New Poor Law appeared to Edwin Chadwick, Secretary to the Poor Law Commission, to be failing to decrease pauperism. He made a connection between poverty and disease, and in 1842 published his Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain. His findings were supported by the subsequent Royal Commission on the Health of Towns (1843–5) and thus led to the 1848 Public Health Act, which created the General Board of Health and permitted the creation of local boards, 103 of which were in existence by 1853. At about the same time, the demonstration that cholera was a water-borne disease, coupled with the smell of the Thames in the hot summer of 1858, led to Bazalgette’s main drainage scheme for London. The 1860s and 1870s saw a further series of measures: Sanitary, Vaccination, Public Health (the 1875 Public Health Act required the appointment of district Medical Officers of Health) and Notifiable

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Diseases Acts. TB was one of the notifiable diseases, and by the 1890s there were campaigns to end spitting in public places and for the compulsory detention of TB cases. By 1910 there were 40 public sanatoria in England, and the 1911 National Insurance Act provided for the payment of sanatorium benefit for the families of sufferers. Typhus, TB, scarlet fever, whooping cough and a host of other infectious diseases were in full retreat by the beginning of the twentieth century. Whether or not this was a result of public health legislation, medical advance, or increasing personal incomes, is a matter of continuing debate among medical historians (see Duffin, 1999; Porter, 1997); what is not in doubt is that public intervention in health matters was firmly established. Similarly, ‘the basic principles of modern food law were firmly established’ between 1875 and 1928, according to a modern standard work on the topic (Rowell, 2000: A3). The story as told by food scientists and lawyers usually begins with the publication in 1820 of Frederick Accum’s Treatise on the Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons. Accum was an analytical chemist who had begun as an assistant to Sir Humphrey Davy at the Royal Institution. His twenty-year career as an expert on food adulteration in Britain came to an end shortly after this major work was published, for in 1821 he was accused of mutilating books in the library of the Royal Institution, and fled to a chair in Berlin, leaving behind the suspicion that he had fallen victim to a conspiracy by those he accused to discredit him (Burnett, 1968: 101–5). Adulteration had been brought to public attention, and subsequent books provided further evidence of it, but little happened until the 1850s, when The Lancet published a series of reports on the problem, and it was investigated by a Parliamentary Select Committee. The resultant legislation, the Adulteration of Food and Drink Act, 1860, was a failure, because it only enabled (rather than required) local authorities to appoint analysts, and trade opposition successfully prevented its widespread application (Burnett, 1968: 257–8). The 1872 Adulteration of Food and Drugs Act required the appointment of analysts, and shortly afterwards the 1875 Sale of Food and Drugs Act established the principle that it was illegal to sell ‘to the prejudice of the purchaser anything which is not of the nature, substance or quality demanded by such purchaser’ (Fallows, 1988: 32). Subsequent piecemeal legislation was consolidated, with the 1875 Act, into the Food and Drugs Act of 1938. By this time the basic principles of local authority responsibility were established: power to take samples; appointment of public analysts, and inclusion of quality, labelling and public health matters, in addition to adulteration (Rowell, 2000: A4). The problems of adulteration had largely been solved by the successful working of the 1875 Act, but there were further concerns: legitimate additives, such as colourants and preservatives, might also have health implications, and new technologies, principally canning, added to the potential for bacterial contamination which already existed in milk and meat. Nevertheless, there was an improvement in food safety. This is customarily attributed to the combined forces of science (for example improve-

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ments in analytical chemistry and the development of bacteriology) and the law; irresistible as these often may be, Professor Collins has argued convincingly that changes in the structure of the food industry may have been as influential, if not more so (Collins, 1993: 104–9). Whatever the case, the important point, as with medical developments, is that the second half of the nineteenth century saw the establishment of public intervention to produce a supply of public goods. And as with human medicine and food safety, so it was with veterinary medicine: the second half of the nineteenth century saw a response to a crisis producing the beginnings of a system of government intervention that is directly linked to the regime in force today. There is widespread agreement in the literature on the significance of the 1865 rinderpest outbreak for subsequent legislation (MAFF, 1965; Worboys, 1991; Swabe, 1999; Brassley, 2000: 587–93). There were indeed disease problems before this – an outbreak of foot and mouth disease in 1839, cases of bovine pleuropneumonia in 1840, and an epidemic of sheep pox in the 1840s, for example – and there was legislative action too. A bill to prevent the spread of rabies failed to reach the statute book in 1831, but acts to prevent the importation of sheep and cattle were introduced in 1848, apparently in response to the sheep pox outbreak (Carter, 1996: 25–6; MAFF, 1965: 11). Nevertheless, the cattle plague of 1865 required new legislation, because there was, to begin with, controversy over the cause of the problem and the best way of treating it. The Cattle Diseases Prevention Act of 1866 was successful in controlling the plague, and, moreover, introduced several new and influential principles into UK animal disease control legislation, principally compulsory slaughter, compensation, movement control, and import control. These principles were subsequently incorporated into a series of Contagious Diseases (Animals) Acts, which also applied the concept of notifiable diseases to animals in the same way that they were applied to humans at about the same time (see above). The list of such diseases was gradually expanded over a series of Acts, until the 1894 Act, which subsumed them all, dealt with bovine pleuropneumonia, swine fever, glanders, foot and mouth disease, sheep scab, anthrax, and rabies. The Cattle Plague Department, established in the Home Office in 1865, was transferred to the Privy Council and eventually formed the Veterinary Department of the Board of Agriculture on the establishment of the latter body in 1889. That there were no major disease outbreaks in the last two decades of the nineteenth century was a tribute to the success of these exclusionary policies, and that such policies could be implemented in an era of free trade has been described by John Fisher as ‘The one major political achievement of the British Agricultural interest in the late 19th century’ (Fisher, 1980: 292). Government decisions in the late nineteenth century therefore made an impact on animal health through legislation and the establishment of a permanent civil service department. Other factors were at work too. Vets were increasingly pro-

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fessionalized, and the development of the science of bacteriology enabled medical and veterinary practitioners to provide better explanations for, and sometimes even treatments of, a range of diseases. The idea that diseases could be shared between humans and animals – Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902) coined the term ‘zoonoses’ in this period – and problems with the sale of meat from diseased animals, led to the provision for meat inspection and the seizure of unsound meat under the terms of the 1875 Public Health Act, which thus brought together animal and human health issues (arguably) for the first time (Schwabe, 1969: 39; Swabe, 1999: 114). Historians have interpreted this in different ways. Schwabe (1969: 42) suggests that ‘In the development of public health, human medicine and veterinary medicine have come to experience a common herd basis’. Worboys has pointed out, however, that although veterinary and medical theory explained disease in similar ways – it was the result of contagion or germs – the impact on practice was very different. Human medicine, he argues, was – and is – concerned with the individual, with experimental work to discover the cause and treatment of disease; vets were – and in the case of farm animals, still are – more concerned with the herd, and with stamping out the disease, often by legislative means. The table below summarizes the differences as seen by Worboys (1991: 326–7). Worboys (1992) also discusses the impact of these differences on research. Legislation applying to pet or companion animals, which obviously do not fall neatly into one or the other side of this dichotomy, might therefore be expected to create controversy, and this is indeed what happened, as Harriet Ritvo’s detailed study of the treatment of rabies in the nineteenth century demonstrates (Ritvo, 1990: 167–202).

Agent System Process Control policy Professional legitimization Heroes

Human Disease

Animal Disease

germs body infection treatment (inoculation) association with science discoverers of pathogens

diseased animals livestock economy importation legislative control (slaughter) association with the state Acts, Orders and Regulations

C O N T I N U I T Y A N D C H A N G E I N T H E T WE N T I E T H C E N T U R Y

Although twentieth-century veterinary medicine has been transformed by the disappearance of the farm horse, which transferred the profession’s priorities to other farm animals and pets, and what has been called the ‘therapeutic revolution’, which gave the practitioner a wider and more effective range of drugs (Andrews, 1982: 599), the principles of notifiability, isolation, and slaughter used to combat the cattle plague in the nineteenth century remained in force, and were used in two of the major anti-zoonosis campaigns of the century: those against tuberculosis and

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brucellosis. Tuberculosis produced controversy at both the beginning and end of the twentieth century: over public health at the beginning, and wildlife (i.e. badger) conservation at the end. The details of the early twentieth century microbiology and politics of TB are well known (see MAFF, 1965: 214–28; Atkins and Brassley, 1996), and it is significant (and stands in interesting comparison to cattle plague) that it took until 1935 to introduce an effective eradication scheme. The whole country was declared attested in 1960. The brucellosis eradication campaign lasted from 1967 to 1981. These two diseases were endemic; in the case of epidemics, such as foot-and-mouth disease (FMD), swine fever, swine vesicular disease, and fowl pest, the isolation and slaughter policy was immediately applied when outbreaks occurred, under, latterly, the provisions of the Animal Health Act, 1981 (Rees, 1982: 607; Fincham, 1982: 447). The slaughter policy appears, at first sight, to have been uncontroversial before the 2001 FMD outbreak. In fact, each of the serious FMD outbreaks of the twentieth century (except that of 1942) was followed by a committee of enquiry that discussed the desirability of inoculation as an alternative to slaughter. They all concluded that slaughter remained the best policy, and on average between 1929 and 1953 over 15,000 animals were slaughtered each year. High though these figures may appear to be, they are put into perspective by the contemporary figures for continental European countries, most of which did not have a slaughter policy. There the disease often affected thousands of herds and sometimes millions of animals (Brassley, 2001; Woods, 2002: 182, 241). The other legacy of the nineteenth century was the state veterinary service. We have seen already that the Cattle Plague Department of the Home Office formed the nucleus from which the veterinary department of the Board, and later the Ministry, of Agriculture developed. In 1917 the need for a laboratory to support its work was recognized, and what became the Central Veterinary Laboratory (CVL) at Weybridge was established, both to carry out research and to confirm diagnoses of notifiable diseases. In 1922 the first of the Veterinary Investigation Service (VIS) centres was opened in Cardiff, to provide laboratory facilities which local vets could use for diagnosis and investigation. These were initially associated with agricultural colleges or universities, but in 1946 they came under the control of MAFF and the director of the CVL. In 1995 the CVL and the VIS merged to form the Veterinary Laboratories Agency (MAFF, 1965: 311; Rees, 1982: 609–10; Swabe, 1999: 145–7). This image of continuity is accurate up to a point, but the rapid post-Second World War changes in agriculture, and especially the concentration of livestock businesses and the emergence of large intensive livestock units, have had major implications for disease, both human and animal. While many traditionally acute animal diseases may have been controlled by vaccines, drug therapy, and improved husbandry, there were viral, metabolic, respiratory and enteric conditions which attained increasing significance in intensive units (Sainsbury, 1988: 466–7). Animal welfare also became an issue as a result of intensification, resulting in the

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publication of the Brambell Report in 1965 and subsequent legislation and guidelines (Brambell, 1965). A little later, entry to the EU, and later still the provisions of the Uruguay Round Agreement, meant that it was no longer so easy to impose unilateral national animal import restrictions, although intra-EU trade requires a veterinary health certificate (Swabe, 1999: 148). Antibiotics, which began as part of the therapeutic armoury, became a regular part of animal diets (Bud, 2000). Some diseases, such as TB and sheep scab, which had apparently been conquered by the 1960s, re-emerged as problems by the 1990s, this time with environmental (in the case of TB and badgers) or human health (in the case of dips for sheep scab) complications added (House of Commons, Agriculture Committee, 1998–99). And it was no longer simply a matter of curing a diseased animal or eradicating an epidemic; by the 1990s MAFF was funding research on the costs and benefits of endemic disease control (Bennett et al., 1999; McInerney, 1996). But in public health and political terms, food-borne diseases were the major problem. Between 1949 and 1960 the number of food poisoning incidents reported annually varied from a minimum of about 2,500 cases to a maximum of nearly 9,000 cases. The bulk of these were due to various strains of Salmonella, but other bacteria such as Staphylococcus aureus and Clostridium perfringens were also involved (Cockburn, 1962: 4–7). These were not usually fatal. Rarer, but more serious for the victims, were epidemics such as the Aberdeen typhoid outbreak in 1964 (North and Gorman, 1990: 1). By the 1990s Salmonella was still important, and it had been joined by other organisms associated with intensive livestock, such as Listeria, Campylobacter, and E.coli, and the numbers affected had increased markedly. One public health service scientist estimated that there might be as many as 500,000 Campylobacter cases annually in the UK, together with over 50,000 cases of Salmonella. Although there were only about 1,000 cases caused by the O157 strain of E.coli, they were politically significant because they were more likely than the other organisms to cause fatal illness, and they were the commonest cause of renal failure in children under five (Humphrey, 2000). On 3 December 1988 the junior Health Minister, Edwina Currie, said on television: ‘We do warn people now that most of the egg production in this country, sadly, is now infected with Salmonella’. Within a few days egg consumption halved – in schools and hospitals it virtually ceased – and by August 1989 income losses were estimated at £70 million (North and Gorman, 1990: 1–2). Given major incidents like this, and a steady drip of less publicized cases (Wall and Ward, 1999; Sockett, 1993), it is perhaps not surprising that the head of the MAFF Animal Health group, speaking in 1999, put BSE at the top of the Ministry’s list of priorities, TB next, and other zoonoses such as rabies, brucellosis, Salmonella and E.coli 0157 third, ahead of animal welfare, notifiable diseases, and endemic diseases (Dickinson, 1999: 53–4). The impact of this prioritization remains to be seen; perhaps more significant, as far as the food consumer is concerned, is the 1990 Food Safety Act.

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The development of food legislation up to the Second World War has been reviewed above. The pre-war legislation was updated in the 1955 Food and Drugs Act. Subsequent piecemeal legislation was consolidated in the 1984 Food Act. The Food and Environmental Protection Act 1985 provided for emergency orders to prohibit the sale of contaminated food, and at the same time the government announced a review of food law. How long this would have taken without the food scares of the late 1980s is a matter for fruitless speculation; in the event, the Food Safety Act received the Royal Assent in 1990. It extended controls back along the food supply chain and increased the powers of enforcement officers, but it also provided a defence of due diligence and taking reasonable precautions (Jukes, 1993: 133–4; Rowell, 2000: A5–6). On 1 April 2000, the Food Standards Agency was established, to run the Meat Hygiene Service, set standards for environmental health inspectors, give advice to ministers, and, it was hoped, get round the perceived conflict of interest in MAFF as a sponsor of the food and agriculture industries and at the same time the ministry responsible for consumer protection (Ferry, 2000: 4). After nearly two hundred years of animal health problems, food scares, and public health crises, it seemed to be accepted that there was an interrelationship between these issues which should be recognized in legislation and by civil servants. DISEASE AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

This brief account – and to bring together the history of livestock disease with its associated food law and public health issues it has had to omit much fascinating detail – attempts to cover the problems that have arisen and the consequent actions (and some inactions) of governments. So far the two diseases that have recently attracted considerable attention, foot-and-mouth disease and BSE, have been largely omitted from the discussion. Of these, FMD was conceptually the most straightforward, in that it fitted into an existing policy framework. Admittedly, the 2001 outbreak exhibited some significant differences from previous episodes, not only in its scale, but also in the level of controversy it generated and in the way it was subsequently analysed (Scott et al., 2004). But it was the BSE story that first provoked this sort of controversy and analysis. The public reaction to BSE in the UK, and the political reaction to it in other countries, was greater than the response to many other zoonoses. This was reflected to some degree in the size of the official report, which extended to 16 large volumes (Phillips et al., 2000). Unusually for an animal disease, it was the subject of a play (Meat by John O. Davies, presented at the Theatre Royal, Plymouth, in October 2000), and, academically, it has attracted the attention not only of scientists and science historians, but of social scientists too. One of the most interesting compilations, edited by Scott Ratzan (1998), begins with four papers on the

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science of BSE and other TSEs (Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies), but is largely made up of papers on the bureaucratic, political and professional problems created by it and the way in which they can be explained or understood in the light of discourse, narrative and communications analyses. This approach locates the BSE problem in the larger set of threats to people or their environments produced by or in spite of modern technical change, a set which includes a wide range of problems such as nuclear radiation, environmental pollution, resource depletion, the impact of genetic modification, and antibiotic resistance, and is often recalled in terms of its most egregious examples, such as Chernobyl, Bhopal, Exxon Valdez, AIDS, and so on. Although the discussion of these issues is commonly seen as something for scientists and economists, it is worth remembering that the anthropologist Mary Douglas (1966), writing about Purity and Danger, argued that ‘there is no such thing as absolute dirt’. Rather, dirt is perceived as an offence against a specific organization of the environment which is agreed upon by a specific society (Douglas, 1966: 2). A few years later, she explained the increasing concern about pollution in western societies in terms of perceived risk, the perception being initially constructed by groups on the margin of society. If risks are a matter of purity and danger, or ritual pollution, then ideas about them start from who is to blame: locate the untrustworthy and you identify the risk (Douglas and Wildavsky, 1983: 10; Lash, 2000: 48–51). More recently, sociologists have responded extensively to Ulrich Beck’s contention that ‘the gain in power from techno-economic “progress” is being increasingly overshadowed by the production of risks’, and that even the most objectivist account of risk implications involves hidden political, ethical and moral judgements: ‘the access to reality and truth which was imputed to science at first is replaced by decisions, rules and conventions which could just as well have turned out differently’ (Beck, 1992: 13, 156; Wynne, 1996: 41; Adam et al., 2000: 1). Irwin (1997: 221–6) specifically discusses BSE in this context. Similarly, science historians, building on Kuhn’s work (1962), have developed a sociology of scientific knowledge which challenges the traditional view of science as a gradual revelation of truth and views science as another product of human culture. In short, there seems to be general agreement among social scientists that, as with other scientific questions, there is much about disease and the other environmental issues mentioned above which is socially constructed (Golinski, 1998: 27–46). Whether or not biophysical scientists share this view is debatable. If, pace the biophysical scientists, we accept that knowledge of disease is socially constructed, can we examine the way in which it was constructed in the past? The standard veterinary histories (for example Dunlop and Wiliams, 1996), as Joanna Swabe has observed, tend to concentrate on successful science, so the narrative involves the conquest of ignorance and prejudice by the heroes of the discipline or profession (Swabe, 1999: 11–12). As she admits, there are certainly examples of

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work in the periodical literature for which this accusation would be false, and it is certainly less true of the more recent medical histories and accounts of the development of food consumption (for example Porter, 1997; Fine et al., 1996). Swabe (1999: 14) locates her own theoretical influences in process sociology, derived from the work of Norbert Elias (1994), and so concentrates on changes over time in the relationships between humans and other animals. This is clearly no narrow perspective, but the net might usefully be cast over a still wider area. Thus the following survey briefly examines changes in both the perceptions of individuals, as revealed by discourse analysis, anthropology and epistemology, and the collective actions of the community, looking at economic, political, bureaucratic and professional changes. At the same time, it would be dangerous to neglect science. The difficulties which have arisen (and, with BSE/vCJD, are still arising) when scientists have disagreed demonstrate the importance of science as a source of credible explanations of disease and useful suggestions on how to combat it. For example, there is currently discussion over whether it is better to control Salmonella in poultrymeat and eggs by establishing protective bacteria in each bird (known as competitive exclusion), by use of antibiotics, or by vaccination. Each method has its advantages and limitations (Evans et al., 1999: 319–21). Current arguments over badgers and bovine TB again reveal disagreements over desirable control methods (House of Commons Agriculture Committee, 1998–99). To some extent (but only to some extent) these controversies are bound up with arguments over the causes of the diseases in question, and so are reminiscent of the cattle plague and TB controversies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the case of cattle plague, the arguments between Professor Gamgee and Professor Simonds over who was the first to diagnose cattle plague in July 1865 have carried over into the historical literature (compare MAFF, 1965: 17; Perren, 1978: 108; and Pattison, 1983: 59, 62). Similarly, in the case of TB, the unwillingness of Robert Koch, the leading bacteriologist of the time, to accept that there was a connection between the human and bovine forms of the disease, held up the introduction of control measures for some time (Atkins and Brassley, 1996: 15). INDIVIDUAL PERCEPTIONS OF DISEASE IN HISTORY

This issue of explanation is crucial to the history of disease. The cause of most of the life-threatening diseases of both humans and animals is not obvious. ‘If you prick us, do we not bleed?’ asks Shylock in The Merchant of Venice (Act 3, scene 1), in which case the link between the injury and the result is clear; but Richard Crookback, ‘cheated of feature by dissembling nature’ (Richard III Act 1, scene 1), claims that his arm was withered by witchcraft in punishment for his mother’s adultery (Act 3, scene 4): a source of some interesting dramatic ambiguity for

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Shakespeare, perhaps, but hardly an acceptable diagnosis for the annual conference of the British Medical Association. Thus the generally accepted explanation for any phenomenon may change over time. The dominant discourse used by those interested in disease and its causes may now be scientific, but it was not always so. ‘Nature … was mysterious, fickle and vengeful’, and ‘a world in which people had no control over their environment could scarcely seem benign … common pagan customs reveal a combination of fear and fatalism before the forces of the natural world’, writes Fumagalli (1994: 6–8) of the late first millennium AD. Medieval bestiaries, and the cabinets of curiosities found in the seventeenth century, reveal ways of looking at the natural world which are far removed from the post-enlightenment scientific method of investigation, hypothesis and experiment (George and Yapp, 1991; Ashworth, 1990: 307–11; Daston and Park, 1998: 271; Thomas, 1984). Similarly, explanations of disease, both human and animal, ranged from those of the classical authors like Galen to the supernatural in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Although natural causes, such as a pestilential atmosphere, or contact with the breath of sufferers, or the poisoning of the air by the Jews, might be invoked to explain the plague, it was equally likely to be seen as the result of planetary conjunctions, or as God’s response to human sin (Porter, 1997: 124; Tillyard, 1972). Providence – divine intervention in human life – was ‘central to political [and] medical … thought … it was also an ingrained parochial response to chaos and crisis, a practical source of consolation’ (Walsham, 1999: 3). Fire, flood and tempest were seen as evidence of God’s wrath, and a seventeenth-century broadside ballad told the story of ‘The Rich Farmer’s Ruine’: a farmer who refuses to sell grain to the poor at a reasonable price is punished by disease in his corn and death in his cattle (Holloway, 1971: 487). After Galen’s works were translated into Latin and published in the 1520s, humours and temperamental imbalances were also part of the medical professional’s armoury. Translating such explanations into remedies produced a range of treatments: God’s wrath might be averted by prayer, fasting, flagellation, and persecuting scapegoats such as Jews, lepers, heretics, dogs, cats, or pigs; infection might be prevented by nosegays of strong-smelling herbs and public health measures such as burial regulations, movement restrictions and quarantine (Porter, 1997: 125, 171; Jenner, 1997: 48). Many treatments were based on herbs, often assisted by magic. Thus a cure for skin disease involved applying herbs in goose grease while allowing blood to flow into running water, saying ‘take this disease and depart with it’. The healing power of the herbs was thus increased by magic, in the sense that drugs were prepared observing taboos, or attention was paid to the effects of heavenly bodies, or arcane language was used to suggest mystery. Religious methods, such as blending with holy water, had the same effect (Kieckhefer, 1989: 64–8). Such methods might be recommended in

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almanacs in the seventeenth century: about one third of a sample of over one thousand such almanacs were found to contain veterinary advice (Curth, 2000). These ways of looking at the world were changed by the rise of science in the second half of the seventeenth century. Experience and evidence took over from classical authors and traditional remedies. Hooke’s Micrographia, revealing ‘a new visible World’ of creatures previously too small to see, was published in 1665. Robert Plot produced his Natural History of Oxfordshire in 1677, and of Staffordshire in 1686, the same year in which the first volume of John Ray’s Historia Plantarum Generalis appeared. Karen Edwards argues that ‘Knowing how to know and represent the natural world was a highly complex undertaking in the middle decades of the seventeenth century … the old philosophy was beginning to give way to the new, though raggedly and reluctantly’ and that Milton’s Paradise Lost (written between 1658 and 1663, although not published until 1667) ‘precisely registers the complex historical moment of its making’ (Edwards, 1999: 2–8; Jardine, 1999: 387–8). By 1735 Linnaeus had produced his new method of systematically classifying the natural world, and at about the same time Lancisi was arguing for something very like a germ theory to explain the spread of cattle plague (Ritvo, 1997: 15; Wilkinson, 1992: 44). But what might now seem to be the inevitable takeover of the dominant discourse of the late twentieth century was not necessarily so inevitable in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What Harriet Ritvo has termed ‘vernacular taxonomies’ remained alive and influential, and even those with a formal education continued to dispute the desirable systems of classification well into the nineteenth century (Ritvo, 1997: 188). Some clung to still older methods. In September 1865, during the cattle plague, a Form of Prayer was issued for use in churches, and the clergy explained that the plague was God’s punishment for the sins of the people. In January 1866 the unabated continuation of the plague appeared to the Archbishop of Canterbury to call for a ‘Day of National Humiliation’. The suggestion was not accepted by the government (Brassley, 2000: 589). Those without much formal education also clung to tradition. Farm servants in the Lincolnshire marshes set up wicken crosses to ward off the cattle plague in 1865: ‘Not a single cowshed in Marshland but had its wicken cross over the door’; and on one farm in the wolds a calf was killed and buried feet upwards facing the door of the cowshed. Not that it did any good. The plague came anyway. The problem, it was explained, was that the calf was already sickly when it was killed. A healthy calf would, of course, have worked (Brassley, 2000: 589; Obelkevich, 1976: 281). This story recalls the case studied in detail by Sabean (1984: 174–9): in 1796 the villagers of Beutelsbach in Wurttemburg, faced with an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, buried the village bull alive under a crossroads outside the village. They were responding to reports of an epidemic among pigs in a nearby village being halted by burying one alive, but officials in

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Stuttgart saw their actions as cruel and superstitious, and sent a lawyer to investigate; his detailed report survives. The management of horses in East Anglia was often associated with magical practices too, although these might in fact have been the use of herbal recipes, kept secret from employers as a barrier to competition. Nevertheless, hagstones, horseshoes and hares’ feet could still be seen hanging up outside farm buildings in mid-twentieth-century Suffolk as charms against witchcraft (Ewart Evans, 1960: 275). Sabean concludes that knowledge: always came in the form of generally received notions, rumour, tradition, report, opinion … knowledge in this sense is social knowledge, worked out in the give-and-take of discussion between neighbours, friends and family members. It is emphatically not a single ‘truth’, a coherent story with only one version, but rather a continuing discussion around a single theme, a reckoning of the probabilities, a fluctuating judgement … this kind of knowledge is always tied to power, and as ‘discourse’ is not composed of a discrete set of ideas. (Sabean 1984: 195) In the nineteenth century too, science might be the dominant discourse, but it was not unchallenged. And neither was it unchallenged in the late twentieth century. As Appleby et al. (1994: 160–97) have argued, the heroic model of science as the disinterested pursuit of truth for the benefit of all humanity has suffered in the face of such science-based human triumphs as nuclear weapons, biological warfare, thalidomide, and chemical pollution. The reaction of the Danish government to the news that an American nuclear weapon may have been rusting away in the sea off Greenland since 1968 (Marshall, 2000) illustrates the continued sensitivity of nuclear issues, even after 1989, and demonstrates that for most people issues of risk and blame are more complex than a scientific calculation of the odds might suggest (Douglas, 1992: 11–13; Prior et al., 2000: 106–9). The late Susan Sontag explored some of these complexities in a medical context, revealing the use of illness as a metaphor for the condition of society as a whole, and showing how ‘The most terrifying illnesses are those perceived not just as lethal but as dehumanizing’, citing the nineteeth-century reaction to rabies and cholera in support of her contention (Sontag, 1991: 73, 124–5). (The relevance of this to a disease like CJD which robs its victims of their mental capacity is almost too obvious to mention). Medical fashions/explanations change over time, as Duffin (1999) illustrates at the beginning of her history of medicine: the cure for an earache in the prehistoric period might have involved a plant preparation, in the medieval period a prayer, in the late twentieth century an antibiotic, and in the present, with increasing problems of antibiotic resistance, could reveal increasing interests in plant preparations or other forms

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of complementary medicine. Such changes could be seen as epistemological discontinuities, or, as Karen Edwards argues, the idea of lag, ‘when old and new ways of knowing promiscuously mingle’, may be more useful (Edwards, 1999: 3; these ideas are explored further in Brassley, 2004). Fowler (2000: 4) puts the same idea even more plainly: ‘heterogeneity simply continued to change historically into a different heterogeneity.’ Given the current state of the argument over BSE it would be unwise to claim that science has lost all claim to authority; equally, things have changed since the late 1960s when, as Hilary Rose points out, the government faced with the Torrey Canyon disaster turned to the Royal Society for help, on the assumption that ‘the élite of British science was the ultimate repository of the Truth about Nature, and as such the culturally authorized group to speak to Power’. Since then, the various impacts of environmentalism, feminism, postmodernism and the sociology of scientific knowledge have challenged ‘the epistemological claims of natural science and its asocial concept of rationality’ (Rose, 2000: 64, 67). Science-based industries are similarly susceptible to scepticism. Robert Bud has produced an interesting list of the problems affecting one such industry: agriculture (which when science was in vogue was seen as traditional, and when tradition was fashionable was seen as scientific – it would be interesting to identify the point in time at which the transition occurred). His list includes antibiotics and strontium90 in milk, DDT, and growth promoters (Bud, 2000), and to it we might add Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), organophosphate sheep dips, and Bovine Somatotrophin (BST), as well as the BSE, Salmonella, E.coli O157, and other bugs mentioned above. As Bud points out, the pharmaceutical industry has tried to create an antibiotic iconography which emphasises their usefulness for human health and ignores the fact that half of the antibiotics produced go into animals, 80 per cent of which are for growth promotion rather than for curing disease. In 1955 the US Food and Drug Agency (FDA) discovered that 10 per cent of US milk supplies were contaminated by penicillin, and the FDA Director suggested that antibiotics should be reserved for human treatment. In 1969 the UK government set up the Swann Committee on the use of antibiotics in animal husbandry and veterinary medicine. It produced some detailed figures on antibiotic use: in 1967, it found, 41 per cent of antibiotics were used for animal treatment, of which about half were used in feed additives. The committee concluded that the use of antibiotics as feed additives should be restricted to those having ‘little or no application as therapeutic agents in man or animals’ (Swann, 1969: 61–6). This, coupled with the Brambell Report on animal welfare in 1965, suggests that by the late 1960s the effect of high-technology agriculture was already a cause for public concern. More recently, public scepticism over the claims of science in the debate over genetically modified organisms, coupled with their willingness to believe the microbiologists’ assessment of the dangers of Salmonella in eggs etc., also suggest

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that we may be in a period of epistemological lag. What is interesting to historians, therefore, is that for individual people explanations of what is not perfectly obvious may vary over time. Consequently, (1) élite and mass explanations may differ at the same time, (2) some explanations – usually those accepted by élites – will be dominant or exercise greater power at any one time, and (3) changing the dominant explanation may produce confusion. Confused individual perceptions, we might argue, are likely to affect collective actions, simply because the institutions in which we collectively act are composed of individuals. Thus we should also examine the history of the political, economic, bureaucratic and professional response to disease. COLLECTIVE RESPONSES TO DISEASE IN HISTORY

In recent years there has been considerable academic interest in the economics of livestock disease problems (Harvey, 2001; McInerney, 1999). This goes back to 1973, when Power and Harris (1973) were among the first to attempt to evaluate the costs and benefits of alternative control policies for foot-and-mouth disease. This academic attention is hardly surprising, given the cost of disease treatment, and the economic importance of the pharmaceutical industry. Changes in the structure of the livestock industry, involving the concentration of animals into larger herds and flocks, have also affected the costs of a slaughter policy. The initial response to the 1988 Salmonella crisis, for example, which was to slaughter the affected flocks, failed because they formed too great a proportion of the national total (Humphrey, 2000). This concentration into larger herds obviously affected the cost of BSE control, although in this case it did not form a barrier to slaughter. However, there are historical parallels going back much further. The Gowland Hopkins Committee, reporting on Bovine TB in 1934, found that so many animals were infected that a slaughter policy was out of the question: ‘Not only would its immediate cost be prohibitive, but it would also seriously contract the supply of milk’ (Atkins and Brassley, 1996: 16). Abigail Woods argues that control costs were one of the factors which transformed foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) from a minor disease to a major plague in twenty years. She contends that the clinical effects of FMD are mild (not all vets agree) but the disease is easily spread. Consequently the argument is about the costs of control rather than the effects of the disease. Slaughter is cheapest in the long run, but to justify slaughter to farmers who might have invested their working lives in the creation of an infected herd, the disease must be made to seem serious. By the 1880s it was associated with a loss of that symbol of national affluence, meat, from the working class table, and it was also seen as one of the few controllable aspects of the agricultural depression. All these factors combined to produce the policy

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which is still used for FMD and for Swine Vesicular Disease, which is difficult to distinguish from it (Woods, 2000). Politically, disease is associated with blame. If apportioning blame is a way to make disease comprehensible and so possibly controllable, as Nelkin and Gilman argue (see Fisher, 1998: 221), then sufferers will search for a scapegoat. In the case of BSE it appeared that there were several, and of the 13 ‘key conclusions’ of the Phillips report, seven were concerned with blame: was it the fault of the government in general (yes, to some degree); of MAFF, because they favoured producers over consumers (no); of officials (up to a point); of bureaucratic processes (at times); and did the government lie to the public (no)? (Phillips et al., 2000: xvii–xviii). Many voters seemed to view the failure of the Conservative government to solve the BSE problem in the year before the 1997 election as further evidence that it was ‘past its sell-by date’, and to that extent there are parallels between BSE and the cattle plague of 1865, in which the Liberal administration was blamed for the resultant losses. John Fisher suggests that in the case of cattle plague the criticism was unwarranted (Fisher, 1998: 221). Questions of blame were also raised after the 2001 FMD outbreak. Dr Iain Anderson, in his introduction to the Lessons to be Learned Inquiry tried to deflect them (‘The nation will not be best served by seeking to blame individuals’) but he did discuss a related issue, ‘the breakdown of trust between many of those affected … and their Government’ (Anderson, 2002: 7; see also Scott et al., 2004: 11). In parallel to this, it is interesting to note John Broad’s identification of public confidence as one of the crucial success factors in the eighteenth-century cattle plague outbreak (Broad, 1983: 115). It was often alleged that MAFF was productivist, or that it had a cosy relationship with the agricultural industry and its pressure groups. Consequently, it was said, the Ministry took its responsibilities to the agricultural industry more seriously than its responsibilities to the food consumer. Although the Phillips Inquiry denied that this was a contributory factor in the spread of BSE, it is certainly true that it was a junior minister at the Department of Health, not MAFF, who drew attention to the problem of Salmonella in eggs and poultrymeat in 1988. An earlier example of this conflict was the Aberdeen typhoid outbreak of 1964. Diack et al.’s (2000) very detailed analysis of the subsequent committee of enquiry report and civil service reactions to it reveal tensions between both MAFF and the then Ministry of Health, and between the medical and veterinary professions. If Worboys (see above) is correct in his analysis of the difference in approach between the two professions in the late nineteenth century, this is hardly surprising (Worboys, 1991; Worboys, 1992). It might also be observed that this interprofessional rivalry is a good example of the struggle for jurisdictional control which Abbot (1988) claims is central to professional identity. There are also, of course, parallels in intra-professional rivalry, such as

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the conflicting views of various BSE researchers and the arguments over the human-bovine TB link and its implications for public health between Koch and his contemporaries at the beginning of the twentieth century. In both cases relatively small numbers of people with uncommon skills were involved. CONCLUSIONS

The first conclusion to be drawn from this all-too-brief history is that simply examining the development of diseases and the reaction to them by professionals and policymakers is not enough. It provides only a partial account of a story in which perceptions changed as much as pathogens and policies. If, as is argued above, we are living in a time of epistemological change, or ‘episteme lag’, the perceptions may have more effect than the pathogens on the policies. The work of David Sabean, Louise Curth, and others has provided a glimpse of different ways of knowing, but there is no doubt much more to be discovered. As Joanna Swabe has argued, the traditional or triumphalist school of veterinary history has provided much necessary evidence but too few satisfactory explanations of change. Any other conclusions should be drawn tentatively and advanced hesitantly. It is extremely difficult to decide whether or not the provision of some historical perspective is likely to assist in solving or even illuminating the present problems of the contested countryside; the context of past debates is never quite precisely replicated in the present, and consequently the capacity of the historian to shed direct illumination on current problems always seems to be limited. Explaining what happened in the past is difficult enough without trying to construct predictive models. For example, in the past, success appears to have been associated with widespread agreement on causes and control methods, rapid impact of control methods, and perhaps a feeling of identity between those affected and the rest of the community, whereas failure went with differing perceptions of what constituted truth, arguments within professions, especially failure to agree on the causes of disease, arguments between professions, and interdepartmental disputes. If these generalizations have any value at all, it would seem that, in historical perspective, BSE had all the attributes necessary to produce failure of government policy, further evidence that neither scientists nor civil servants are infallible, and another problem for the agricultural image makers. FMD, on the other hand, was clearly understood, and an outbreak should have seen controls rapidly and effectively implemented. There are now at least seven reports seeking to explain why they were not (Scott et al., 2004: 11). A C KN O WL E D G E M E N T S

The author would like to thank Angela Potter, Sue Blackburn, Karen Edwards,

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Tom Humphrey, Anne Maddocks, Derek Shepherd, David Stone, Alex Walsham, and Abigail Woods, without whose help this paper could not have been written. REFERENCES

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6 T O U S !’ C O U N T R Y S P O R T S AND THE MOBILIZATION OF A MARGINALIZED CONSTITUENCY

‘LISTEN

Graham Cox

Eighty per cent of people think of you as murderers, and they’re not going to go away. … This is your wake-up call. (Eric Bettelheim, founder and secretary of Countryside Business Group, speaking at the Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester, 23 January 1996) INTRODUCTION: LANGUAGE AND POLITICS

When, on 17 November 1995, The Times devoted a substantial leader article to ‘Rural Rights’, it addressed the challenge facing the Countryside Movement which had been launched the previous day with Sir David Steel as its Executive Chairman. The Countryside Movement’s stated aims were ‘to protect country life from its detractors and to promote good practice in all aspects of countryside management’, and The Times suggested that, given the range of issues which could usefully be addressed, it was capable of being much more than a single-issue lobby group. The single issue alluded to, of course, was ‘the wish to defend blood sports’ which, it commented almost disingenuously, had ‘played an important part in this venture.’ Noting the almost overwhelming moral ascendancy of animal rights campaigning it expressed the hope that clamour and moral hysteria might be supplanted by reasoned debate. Were that to happen, it suggested, the launch of the Countryside Movement might be ‘as good for democracy as it promises to be for rural people.’ My concern here is both to account for, and assess, the sorts of claims advanced in that Times leader article. My title appropriates the slogan which the Countryside Alliance, successor to the Countryside Movement, took as its theme for the Countryside Rally which it organized and which attracted 100,000 people to Hyde Park on 10 July 1997. My subtitle is not, of course, a quotation. But it will, equally obviously, be thought contentious by some for reasons which the language

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of the Times leader makes readily apparent. To those who take part in ‘country sports’ the term is unexceptional. Whereas for those disposed to be critical it is equally clearly a bromide term deployed to seek legitimation by yoking a broad range of activities, both acceptable and unacceptable, together under one heading. For such people even the more specific term ‘field sports’ fails to ‘tell it like it is’: only the term ‘blood sports’ will do. For even if many of those opposed to such activities are reluctant to acknowledge that nature is ‘red in tooth and claw’, they are, for the most part, convinced that those reprehensible humans who take part have, literally as well as metaphorically, ‘blood on their hands.’ It is as well to recognize at the outset, therefore, that my arguments are played out on a terrain which is, whatever else, inescapably a moral terrain. My own involvement in gundog trialling therefore needs to be acknowledged, as does my albeit brief membership of a Countryside Alliance policy committee which no longer meets. This is, to that extent, something of an insider’s account and the attendant advantages, if there are any, necessarily come with ‘health warnings’ attached. I can, perhaps, capture the essence of a complex set of considerations by emphasizing both that being a native is not quite the same as ‘going native’ and that the effort to comprehend does not necessarily have to be accompanied by the suspension of critical faculties. MARGINAL MORALS AND ‘FORMS OF LIFE’

Though it is not dependent upon it, interpretive effort is facilitated by an ability to empathize. Faced with what seems a wall of ignorance and incomprehension it is hardly surprising that the minorities who engage in field sports should see the opposition to activities that they consider morally acceptable as, above all, a failure to understand. An exasperated ‘they haven’t a clue’ drives the sentiment, which sees itself as suffering from the sort of intolerance and arrogance which is often visited upon strange ‘forms of life’. Certainly, there is no questioning the morally marginal status of field sports sympathizers. Putting numbers to shifting centres of moral gravity is a notoriously fraught activity. The League Against Cruel Sports and others in the anti-hunt lobby were remarkably successful in focusing arguments on issues of animal rights and cruelty, so that far less attention was paid, for instance, to the implications of hunting and other field sports for the rural landscape. They have long felt able to claim that an overwhelming majority of the British population wishes to see hunting stopped and they asserted in 1993, for instance, that ‘public opinion opposing all forms of hunting with hounds is at an all time high’ (League Against Cruel Sports, 1993). The 1992 British Social Attitudes Survey, meanwhile, had reported that, in response to a question asking whether foxhunting should be banned by law, 45 per cent agreed, 26 per cent disagreed and some 27 per cent had

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no view (Clark et al., 1994). But, early in 1995, following the publicity in the run up to John McFall’s Private Member’s Bill seeking to make it illegal to cause a dog to kill, injure, pursue or attack a mammal, a Mail on Sunday/MORI poll showed 70 per cent to be in favour of banning foxhunting and hare coursing, 82 per cent opposed to staghunting and even 53 per cent favouring the banning of shooting (Guardian, 3 March 1995). ‘One half of the world’, commented Jane Austen’s Emma, ‘cannot understand the pleasures of the other.’ Field sports enthusiasts would, doubtless, applaud the insight whilst envying the parity of proportions envisaged. It is evident, moreover, that even within this general context of opprobrium some activities – notably staghunting – are considered especially unacceptable (Cox and Winter, 1997). What such figures readily demonstrate, however, is that although a phrase like ‘Listen To Us!’ can easily be seen as presuming a single countryside identity which is spurious, the notion that the various field sports together form a ‘seamless web’ is certainly not a fiction. It may well, at one level, be a political aspiration, but in relation to prevailing moral argument it is effectively a ‘given’ which, within the sporting ‘form of life’, is widely recognized as such. Minds are, moreover, concentrated by legislative threats in ways which favour such conclusions. The all-encompassing character of the form of life, meanwhile, for many who live their lives principally within its confines, accentuates the sense of being hopelessly and unfairly misunderstood. Wittgenstein’s concept of a ‘form of life’ was, after all, intended to capture the sense in which taken-for-granted realities structure perception within relatively distinct ‘language games’ (Wittgenstein, 1968). In relation to field sports such distinctness is pronounced (Cox, Hallett and Winter, 1994). What dialogue there is, therefore, between those who take part in field sports and those who consider the activities beyond the moral pale has been for the most part, and perhaps inevitably, a dialogue of the deaf. THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY

The paradox, of course, is that those who are sympathetic to field sports find themselves in this position despite the fact that all field sports, but especially hunting, have been amongst the most emblematic of the elements which have together made up an anglo-centric and essentially anti-urban dominant culture in Britain (Lowe, Murdoch and Cox, 1995). The countryside lies at the heart of dominant conceptions of British identity, not least because in the era of industrialization and nation-building it presented an attractive domain to those disenchanted with the city. The significance of the rural as a cultural ‘reservoir’ is usually in complete contrast to its importance as an economic space (Williams, 1975). The economic and cultural functions of the countryside have, in the main, derived from Britain’s distinctive global economic position and class structure. The most notable of these, in the age of Empire for instance, was as the ‘home land’ of

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those members of the upper and middle classes who ventured abroad to administer the colonies. The countryside came increasingly to be seen as the repository of a way of life that must be protected, and that involved keeping the urban at bay and viewing it, at best, with suspicion. For so long at the core of this tradition, field sports most obviously exemplify the reinvention of tradition attendant upon fundamental change (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983). Both foxhunting and shooting had seemed irretrievably threatened by the coming of the railways, for instance, but each proved more than resilient. The former transformed itself from the private, informal recreation of country squires to a highly organized and influential public institution: a social transformation which enabled it increasingly to be presented as both embodying and engendering stability and harmony. It might indeed have been, to borrow the title of one of the better histories of the sport (Itzkowitz, 1977), a ‘peculiar privilege’, but images of it were to furnish an enduring mythology. Shooting, similarly, was revolutionized by improvements in transport and more especially by the development from the mid-nineteenth century onwards of the centre-fire breechloader which fired cartridges and made driven shooting possible. Such examples are only the most momentous of many transformations which field sports have accommodated. CHANGING COUNTRYSIDE AGENDAS

They cannot, however, adapt so readily to the present attrition of legitimacy which threatens to compromise their very existence. It is in this sense that, irrespective of their association with dominant interests, field sports and their participants have become morally marginal. Hunting, in particular, has found itself profoundly recast: no longer a peculiar privilege it is now very much a beleaguered privilege. That long process has, moreover, been paralleled over the past two decades and more by a profound shift in the ideological resources associated with the politics of the countryside more generally. During that period farming and landowning interests, for instance, have moved from being on an assured and exclusive inside track, conferred by a long consolidated and unique corporatist relationship (Cox and Lowe, 1984; Cox, Lowe and Winter, 1985, 1986) with government, to a position where they find themselves jostling for attention in a crowded policy arena. Many factors combined to transform the agenda of policy making in agriculture and countryside politics. Heightened debate associated with the passage of the Wildlife and Countryside Act in 1981 was critical. Surpluses, budgetary crises and the environmental damage associated with the excesses of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) were successively joined by concerns over water quality, food safety and nutritional standards, animal welfare and the viability of rural communities.

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In broad terms the agenda of countryside politics shifted during the 1980s from an emphasis on nature conservation and landscape protection to pollution regulation. And no surer indication of changed relationships could be found than the experience of Food and Farming Year in 1989 which, instead of being the laudatory indulgence envisaged, became the occasion for relentless criticism of the damaging impacts of modern agriculture. What should have been a celebratory year became a year when discrepancies between rhetoric and reality were exposed as never before. The era of corporatism, a closed policy community and a presumption in favour of goodwill and voluntary co-operation as a policy style, were close to being fatally compromised. The replacement in June 2001, in the wake of the foot and mouth crisis, of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) by the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) affirmed, by its very name at least, a recasting of priorities which most considered long overdue. The post-war verities which presumed a relationship of identity between the countryside, farming and food production gave way to a recognition of the need to integrate a diversity of objectives. We are now as conscious of the consumption functions of the countryside as we are of the need to produce food in a safe and welfare-friendly way and the simple identities of that post-war equation have been transformed into a complex set of relationships between the rural economy, rural communities and the rural environment. In a post-productivist countryside the Europeanization of policy is at the same time a process of transforming a sectoral agricultural policy into a more regionally attentive rural policy. Institutional changes, the setting up of a Food Standards Agency, Regional Development Agencies and so on, are a critical part of such processes. The redefinitions of rural space associated with the diminution of the agricultural productive function of the countryside (Marsden et al., 1993) have helped make ‘the rural’ an ever more elusive analytic category. One prominent theorist, noting the ways in which local spaces are increasingly understood, not in terms of their constituent elements, but in terms of the possible combinations of external forces which are able to confer value on them, has concluded, not surprisingly, that ‘the rural is a category of thought’ (Mormont, 1990: 9). It is a category which can, moreover, be deployed in ways which can only seem capricious to those who cling on to more traditional understandings. Many areas which might conventionally be thought of as rural now have a preponderance of residents who have no connection with farming and they have, for instance, been ‘recruited’ as local ‘eyes and ears’ by regulatory agencies in the fight against farmbased pollution (Lowe et al., 1997). After two decades in which the self-styled stewards of the countryside have been subjected relentlessly to well-informed and often strident criticism they find themselves in a world which is utterly transformed. Agriculture now only accounts

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for 1 per cent of GDP and in England it only employs 2 per cent of the workforce. Even in predominantly rural areas that figure only rises to 4 per cent. The number of full-time agricultural workers had declined by 70 per cent between 1950 and 1980: a loss of nearly 600,000 workers in all, with the rate of decline reaching a peak in the 1960s. But the processes of concentration and intensification which have seen the largest 10 per cent of farms accounting for half of Britain’s food production are still apparent despite all the attention presently being devoted to more extensive methods of production and, according to the Countryside Agency created in April 1999 by an amalgamation of the Countryside Commission and the Rural Development Commission, some 60,000 agricultural jobs disappeared between 1990 and the new millennium. The structural change which produces such figures has many dimensions, of course, and it is notable that between 1991 and 1996 alone the number of jobs in rural districts increased by more than 8 per cent compared with 3.7 per cent nationally. MOBILIZING THE ‘RURAL’

What such an overview clearly indicates is the seemingly profound paradox entailed by the Countryside Alliance’s behaving ‘as if’ it has a rural constituency with a single rural agenda to which it can appeal. It has appeared to be resurrecting – and mobilizing itself in terms of – a category which circumstances over the past two decades and more have radically deconstructed. It seems, in short, to be flying in the face of received academic wisdom on the matter of social and economic change in rural areas. It must be impossible, in the face of such evidence, to claim to speak for a united countryside. And yet, in many respects, the Countryside Alliance was more sophisticated than many of its pronouncements which sought to trade in town and country polarities would seem to indicate. Mormont’s observations about the nature of rurality are, after all, entirely consistent with the Countryside Movement’s ambition to amass supporters’ names to be used as a ‘live constituency’ to be called on in times of need. It set out, knowingly, to be a model of coalition politics. The ‘live constituency’ has responded impressively on many occasions. The exceptionally well-timed 1997 Rally in Hyde Park, held shortly after a Labour government with a huge majority had been elected, was followed in 1998 by a Countryside March culminating on 1 March in London, which attracted numbers, agreed by organizers and police alike, to be about 250,000. Across the countryside, along with marchers who set out from all quarters for London, some 7000 beacons were lit. During 1999 rallies were held in Birmingham, Newcastle, Norwich, Exeter, Reading and Cardiff with those attending, often in appalling weather, never fewer than 10,000 and, in Newcastle, approaching 20,000. A rally and march in Bournemouth on the occasion of the Labour Party’s Conference at the end of

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September, meanwhile, was limited to 16,000 participants. That number was chosen by the Countryside Alliance to represent the number of rural jobs which they claimed would be lost if hunting were to be banned, as had been reaffirmed by the Prime Minister during an appearance on BBC Television’s ‘Question Time’ in July. More recently, in September 2002 over 400,000 marched in London under the banner headline ‘Liberty and Livelihood’ which, paradoxically, flagged up two comparatively weak arguments. For sceptics the event was, of course, ‘hypocrisy on the march’, and certainly, despite the coherence of the focus, a bewildering array of concerns were paraded on the day. But even those disposed to regard any talk of tension between town and country as an entirely ‘phoney war’ could not deny the potency of the day as street theatre. Indeed, the Prime Minister wrote to John Jackson, the chairman of the Countryside Alliance, saying that whilst he could not agree with some of the views expressed during the march, the numbers involved and the way they behaved were a credit to the organization. The dramaturgic significance of this attempt to foreground a ‘politics of the rural’ was apparent in the extensive coverage which ran to some 782 column inches in the Daily Telegraph, 485 in The Times, 395 in the Daily Mail and even 143 in the Daily Mirror. Indeed, although it may be argued that the media has exaggerated the importance of rural issues through the scale of its reportage (Woods, 2003: 314) that would be to miss the significance of what was an exceptional manifestation of the ‘moral force’ approach to making democratic politics: a tradition with a long, and invariably radical, history. To understand how such sustained demonstrations of commitment have been possible we need to consider enabling factors which go beyond the immediate threats which were posed, for instance, by MP Michael Foster’s Private Member’s Bill in 1989 and Tony Blair’s unexpected promise after being returned to office to ‘get a vote to ban as soon as we possibly can’. Such external threats may concentrate minds wonderfully, but resolve is by no means an automatic response to calls to action. The readiness to respond has to be prepared and built. It is, above all, processual and, in working at just those things, the precursors of the Countryside Alliance were critical to the events of 1997 and after. AMBITIONS AND FRUSTRATIONS: THE COUNTRYSIDE BUSINESS GROUP

Visions of the countryside in Britain have typically taken rather particular forms. A fundamentally aesthetic appreciation of landscape and a primarily scientific understanding of nature conservation predominated and found institutional expression in the post-war period (Cox, 1988). Interest in the economic basis of life in the countryside has been, at best, fitful. These and other considerations have

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meant that much of the discussion of country sports, certainly on the part of those not opposed on moral grounds, has concentrated attention on the contribution which they severally make to the distinctive character of the landscape and the environment more generally (Suggett, 1999). In some instances the contribution is particularly marked, as with the very strong association between shooting, tree planting and woodland management (Cox, Watkins and Winter, 1996). Active management, which depends ultimately on the sporting impulse, is the key to the claim that country sports make a significant contribution to conservation and The Game Conservancy Trust in particular, through its research and advice, has sought to promulgate an ethic of ‘conservation through wise use’ (Tapper, 1999). The claim, in short, is substantially justified. The insertion of a strong socio-economic strand into debate about country sports owed much to the impact of an organization which was started by a former member of the fund raising committee of the British Field Sports Society. Midway through 1994 he approached Holland and Holland, the celebrated London gunmakers, and started to work with other like-minded business interests and, in April the following year, the formation of the Country Sports Business Group was announced. In little over a month it had become the Countryside Business Group (CBG) with its founder Eric Bettelheim, an American lawyer working in London, as its secretary. Its self-declared mission was to ‘raise significant funds to defend the interests of countryside businesses against the threats of inappropriate legislation and regulation and to do so by supporting professional political, public relations and media campaigns in support of the countryside economy, conservation of the British countryside and traditional country pursuits’ (Newsletter, July 1996). It achieved over 250 members and raised £1,200,000 in its first year either directly for the CBG or indirectly for organizations and initiatives supported by it. Born of the frustration and anger felt by many at the unanswered onslaught of single-issue pressure groups, it organized the first National Angling Conference and consolidated that strategically astute development by helping to create a Campaign for Shooting. With matching funds from the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food it established a game-marketing initiative and it commissioned a comprehensive survey of the countryside economy. More important, however, was its involvement in the launch in November 1995 of the Countryside Movement, for which it helped raise £400,000 as well as making a grant of £150,000, although by the time of the CBG’s first AGM ten months later formal liaison with the Countryside Movement had been ended. Disappointment with the level of financial support and a desire to remove the ambiguities in some minds created by similar names were the reasons offered as each organization, somewhat ritualistically, wished the other well. The ambition to bring a professional approach to bear on the problem of

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turning public and political opinion round was allied to the conviction, certainly on the part of the Secretary, that in many instances the existing country sports organizations had been ‘punching below their weight’. He, in particular, accounted for the greater proportion of the 170 and more presentations on the work of the CBG, whose cumulative impact was considerable. Eric Bettelheim combined a disarming modesty regarding his knowledge of the countryside with all the fervour of the convert. And he made no concessions to British reticence, telling his audiences that ultimately only two things threatened them, their apathy and their stinginess. If they were to lose what they held dear, they were told, they would never get it back. And in a phrase which captured the transatlantic quality of the exhortations audiences were told that if they did not respond they were ‘history’ or, on occasion, more graphically, ‘dead meat’. Such presentations did much to galvanize support and, more importantly perhaps, predispose people to be responsive to subsequent calls for action. A coherent analysis of the way in which the presuppositions of the animal rights philosophy had come to dominate public discourse was allied to the conviction that effective campaigning could reverse any sense of inevitability about the process. The experience of France in the 1980s provided a logistic role model. CBG Committee Member Alain Drach, Chairman of Holland and Holland and a Master of Hounds in France, was familiar with the way in which sporting interests had thwarted attacks on their activities by engaging a noted advertising agency and ‘turning the issue around’. Eighteen months after a study was conducted into the French public’s attitude to country sports a countryside party which had not even existed when the study was conducted gained 5 per cent of the vote in European parliamentary elections. The same techniques, it was suggested, would work just as well in the British context where the threat to be confronted was substantially similar. S P E A K I N G U P F O R T H E ‘ C O U N T R Y W A Y O F L I F E ’: THE COUNTRYSIDE MOVEMENT

The Countryside Movement was launched in November 1995 with a £3.5 million spend on advertising which did not overtly express the pessimism said to be felt by those who live and work in the countryside because an urban majority had no appreciation of their way of life. Rather, they sought primarily to educate and drew on the findings of a survey which revealed startling levels of ignorance about the countryside and its workings. One of the seven advertisements created by the award-winning Bartle Bogle Hegarty agency, for instance, showed a chicken looking at an egg some distance from it and carried the strapline ‘Never mind which came first, many children can’t even see the connection’. Each advertisement carried, in addition, a substantial body of copy and a coupon to enable supporters, who could be added to the ‘live constituency’ data base, to register.

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Its recruiting leaflet posed the question ‘Why do we need a countryside movement?’ and answered it by suggesting that the attrition of services taken for granted in urban areas was threatening the ‘country way of life’. Schools, shops and public transport were all disappearing and, whereas in times past support from ‘our neighbours in towns’ could be relied upon, ignorance of the countryside and ‘lack of sympathy for its traditions’ meant this was no longer true. Hence, it suggested, the need for a ‘unified voice’ for the countryside. Continuing themes signalled in CBG documents, it also suggested that those calling for a right to roam freely would not take responsibility for the land and bemoaned the particularly high rises in house prices in rural areas which made it difficult for ‘indigenous country folk’ to afford to live ‘where they were born’. These strong socio-economic strands in the recruitment literature, which had been integral to CBG documents, were barely apparent in the eight stated objectives of the no subscription, no fee, Countryside Movement. A determined voice for the countryside in every forum, allied to the fostering and promoting of every kind of understanding, account for the majority of them, whilst the last of them expresses the hope that the countryside might look forward to a healthy future, ‘confident that its activities are properly understood and valued and that its contribution to the economic, environmental and social fabric of Britain is truly valued.’ As the accompanying letter (no date, received 3 January 1996) from Executive Chairman Sir David Steel emphasized, mounting campaigns is costly and Eric Bettelheim’s typically robust characterization of the situation when speaking at the Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester on 23 January 1996 was that ‘£500,000 per month is the burn rate for the Countryside Movement.’ The CBG’s ambition to be raising between three and five million pounds a year proved to be overly ambitious, not least in respect of the funds that might be raised by means of the national game levy envisaged. Extravagant levels of expenditure and faltering funding could not be sustained and the haemorrhaging of resources was only staunched by a reported unsecured loan of £1 million from the Duke of Westminster, one of the members of the Countryside Movement’s fourteen-strong board. Though issues such as rural infrastructure had featured only minimally in the Movement’s proposal document the Chairman’s declared principal aim became to focus attention on the decline in rural services, rural unemployment and continued environmental destruction. But only very fleetingly did the hope of becoming a high-profile lobby group look realistic. It supported the Campaign for Shooting and made a submission to the Cullen inquiry in the wake of the Dunblane massacre, and the Chairman made a successful representation to the Charity Commissioners for them to exercise control over the RSPCA’s animal rights campaign. Otherwise it did not make a significant impact as a lobby group, but the 100,000 and more supporters recruited to the ‘live constituency’ data base constituted yet another building block which remained

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relevant beyond the point late in 1996 when financial uncertainty proved terminal for the Countryside Movement.

‘ C A T C H I N G A V O I C E ’: T H E C O U N T R Y S I D E A L L I A N C E The Countryside Alliance (CA), which was formally established at a board meeting of the British Field Sports Society (BFSS) in March 1997, represented a merger between the BFSS, the defunct CM and the CBG. There had been, within the BFSS, interests who had argued that the campaign for field sports should encompass a wider range of rural issues (Macfarlane, 1998). For sporting press consumption, however, the message from the BFSS was that, building on the progress already made in putting the case for fieldsports across, the merger would ‘provide a strong and unified base to lobby in defence of all countrysports’ (Shooting Times, 13 March 1997). The British Association for Shooting and Conservation (BASC), mindful of longstanding and often contentious arguments that a single voice for fieldsports was needed, offered only lukewarm endorsement. The prospect of having to compete directly for subscriptions, particularly with the political conjuncture so favouring the Alliance, was not relished, and in timehonoured fashion the merger was perceived more as threat than opportunity. In its own publication Country Sports (Issue 7, Summer 1997: 4) the BFSS presented the merger in the form of a short news item in which the Chairman of the new Board Dr Goodson-Wickes extolled the new ‘one stop shop’ for cash and campaigning as one that would be dedicated to ensuring ‘the future of the living countryside, country sports and the businesses and jobs they support.’ Chief Executive Robin Hanbury-Tenison, meanwhile, in one of his regular ‘Round Robin’ letters to all members, explained that the imminence of the General Election had been a strong motivating factor in creating the new name which would ‘increasingly be used as the overall name for the three constituent bodies.’ That Election had, of course, delivered a substantial majority for Labour and the rapid promotion of a private member’s bill on foxhunting was expected. The Fighting Fund, established well before the Election, continued to grow and preparations for the planned Countryside Rally on 10 July were well under way. Robin Hanbury-Tenison’s letters to the BFSS membership and his tour of the country were the most obvious features of a considerable contribution which did much to enhance the credibility of the country sports case. As well as an engaging and effective manner with the media Robin Hanbury-Tenison brought to his role impeccable credentials as, inter alia, a noted explorer, campaigner for the conservation of tropical rain forests and president and founder of Survival International, the worldwide movement to support tribal people. He provided charismatic leadership as well as the organizational skills which helped make the Rally a logistic triumph.

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Indeed, it exceeded the best expectations of its organizers. The Guardian, in a leader article over two years later, whose main purpose was to warn the Prime Minister that there was no case for addressing the countryside as if there were a single rural agenda, nonetheless referred back to that 1997 Rally as ‘a formidable propaganda success’ (22 September 1999). The warning, however, was deemed necessary despite the fact that the Prime Minister had contributed an article to The Daily Telegraph just two days before in which he sought both to link the Countryside Alliance specifically to hunting rather than the countryside more generally and to reassure shooting and fishing interests that their activities were safe. That paper’s leader article on the same day, meanwhile, drew attention to what it considered the moral incoherence of his reassurance (20 September 1999). The 1997 Rally was billed as ‘our first and best opportunity to show a new government with an urban outlook that the countryside is an integral part of Britain, and that we have our own needs, our own rights and our own voice.’ Representatives from Ireland, France and the USA would join marchers from all over the country, the CLA, the NFU and members of other organizations, to advance the claim that ‘the countryside needs country sports’, and a massive show of numbers was seen as buttressing arguments which were already effectively showing the contribution that country sports make to the economy, conservation and the welfare of animal species. Strong support now would ensure the future of country sports, ‘farming and the country way of life’: all things which were ‘now at risk from the same, small faction with its moral megaphone.’ With its detailed attention to standards of conduct the organizers sought to make their impression through ‘a very dignified weight of numbers.’ Held less than a month after Michael Foster, the new MP for Worcester City who drew first place in the ballot for Private Member’s Bills, announced that he would introduce a bill to ban hunting with hounds, the preparations were accompanied by an urgency which made success more rather than less likely. And success, at least in relation to the Rally’s proximate aim, was almost immediate, with the Government indicating that it would not force a vote if the bill proved controversial. Wider concerns were voiced and that aspect of the Rally was endorsed in a Guardian leader the following day (11 July 1997) which characterized it as ‘the right march for the wrong reason.’ ‘Country dwellers’, it continued, ‘feel under threat and let down by metropolitan politicians. Much more thought needs to be given to the future of the countryside during a period when the CAP is likely to be changed radically and when over 4 million dwellings are scheduled to be built.’ The Rally, which had brought together ‘an unusual mix of people from all political parties and all classes’ (Guardian, 11 July 1997), prompted a broad range of commentators and analysts to consider the principles involved. Hugo Young (Guardian, 10 July 1997) claimed to discern in ‘this rally of rural outsiders’

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something more than a concern with the rights and wrongs of hunting. People who live in the country were the most conspicuous victims of ‘this homogenizing juggernaut’ and they were railing against ‘the hideous blight of centralized uniformity.’ And this observation echoed, in many ways, an assessment the day before from John Vidal who had been accompanying some of the marchers. ‘Underpinning the rally’, he wrote, ‘is a genuine sense of resentment at the betrayal of the countryside by policy makers and a sense that there is a nasty streak of moralising intolerance abroad in the new Establishment’ (Guardian, 9 July 1997). As an affirmation of identity and a stiffening of resolve the 1997 Rally was as effective as the organizers could have hoped. Moreover, the strategy of nesting the case for hunting within a broader set of distinctively rural issues had been furthered, not least because the agenda of ‘chattering class’ debate was increasingly couched in such terms. Even as fragmentation, diversification and fundamental structural change were rendering old identities increasingly problematic, the Rally had shown that substantial numbers of people could be mobilized by drawing on just those categories that the best informed academic research had shown to be elusive. The countryside is less ‘rural’ than it has ever been and now, as always, the membership base of the organizations which are representative of those who take part in field sports is largely ‘urban’. Counterposing town and country is simplistic in the extreme, and yet the cultural resonance of ‘the country’ in particular makes ‘retrospective regret’ a compelling mobilizing gambit. Hunting, always emblematic, had become a touchstone for the concerns of rural people. Or, at least, and more importantly, that notion had now become a plausible claim. The presentation of hunting as a test-case for the future of the countryside was even more blatant in the Countryside March in London on 1 March 1998. Features already strongly evident in the 1997 Rally were here accentuated and a placard on Nelson’s Column proclaiming the legend ‘Country truths, not urban myths’ found a politically more barbed counterpart in the magazine Horse and Hound, ‘Say No to the Urban Jackboot’. An extraordinarily well-managed – more than 2,000 coaches and 29 special trains brought marchers from every part of the country – and well behaved turnout of over 250,000 (the Alliance claimed 284,500) meant that the event gave the appearance of accommodating every kind of concern. It was as easy to collect a leaflet extolling the virtues of British weights and measures as anything relating to the raft of rural concerns which swelled the ranks. The success of the Alliance in presenting an apparently united rural front was, by its own admission, in great part a matter of timing (Macfarlane, 1998: 91). The catalogue of rural woes was extensive at the time of the march and banners and placards carried certainly reflected that fact. Aside from the underlying impacts of the previous two decades of almost relentless criticism of the agricultural industry farmers were now reeling from a 45 per cent reduction in income the previous year, principally because of the strength of the pound and the associated slump in

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the ‘green pound’. Falling farm incomes were joined by concerns about – and this is by no means an exhaustive list – Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), the beef on the bone ban, rural schools, shops, buses and other services, the cost of rural transport generally, health policy, housebuilding and homelessness, public access and rural crime. They were all there. Neither could they easily be dismissed as special pleading. After all, a Rural Development Commission report in 1994 had found that in nine out of twelve areas studied at least a fifth of households were living in or on the margins of poverty. In most districts house prices are between 10 per cent and 50 per cent above the national average yet services are often meagre. Most villages, 93 per cent, do not have a rail service and 71 per cent have no daily bus service. 80 per cent do not have a GP and just over half have no school. According to the Countryside Agency four hundred sub-post offices closed in 1999 and many of the remaining 9000 are uncertain of surviving in the wake of plans to pay pension and benefit payments through banks from 2003. All rural parishes suffer from a chronic shortage of affordable homes since the stock of council and housing association dwellings was cut by a third after 100,000 rural homes were sold by the previous government. The sense of an uncaring government presiding over the attrition of services which are taken for granted in urban areas was a strong one. The sense of grievance, quite aside from field sports considerations, was real enough therefore, although 47 per cent of the marchers were in the AB class group and only 5 per cent were from the DE group (Margetts, 2000: 191). But so comprehensive was the list of rural woes that some expressed the concern that in being all things to all people the Countryside March courted the risk of ceasing to have a clear point. In the words of a leader in The Observer on the day of the march ‘it makes for a nonsensical rag-bag of concerns, so denying the campaign focus and long term political leverage.’ With no speeches at the finishing point and many marchers taking five hours to leave the starting point the event had, most obviously, a dramaturgic quality: an element of the political process whose importance should never be underestimated. A rural event of considerable significance in generating performative obligation (Connerton, 1989) it was, self-evidently, a key episode in an ongoing process of making: its scope and scale powerfully affirming the plausibility of using a term like ‘rural’, with all its ambiguities and paradoxes, as a rallying cry. Certainly London had seen nothing like it since the CND rallies in the early days of the Thatcher government: and certainly nothing so orderly on such a scale. The Countryside Alliance, on the back of such success, felt able to claim that ‘the rural lobby is alive and a force in politics’, describing itself as ‘a grand coalition’. It is never an easy matter to assess expansive claims of that nature. Anyone determined to adopt a nominalist position is bound to find the politics of identity lacking in the neatness and tidiness which they demand in their definitions. But

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such demands are inappropriate and notions of ‘family resemblances’ (Wittgenstein, 1968: 32) better enable us to understand the politics of coalitionbuilding with its inevitable incoherences. The findings of a MORI poll of 1128 marchers conducted for the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), for instance, revealed that ‘barely’ 57 per cent of those who travelled claim to live in the ‘middle of the countryside’ and that 15 per cent ‘admitted’ that they lived in towns or cities. But such findings should surprise no one. Ministers made it clear shortly afterwards that the Foster bill would not be given sufficient parliamentary time and before the march other decisions relating to road safety in rural areas, the decline of bus services, the lack of affordable housing, jobs in rural areas and the protection of rural schools, which were welcomed by the countryside lobby, had been taken. The government had, in the words of a recent analyst, ‘in general trimmed to the demands of the Countryside Alliance’ (Gamble, 2000: 302). But on many matters of concern to marchers, agricultural policy and the ban on British beef for instance, their scope for action was very limited. The Foster bill finally fell on 2 July 1998, but in the immediate aftermath of the Countryside March’s extraordinary success the CA proved to be less than fully effective. The first attempt to find a successor to Robin Hanbury-Tenison went so badly wrong as to lead Horse and Hound to declare in August 1998 that ‘our quest to be taken seriously is in tatters.’ Janet George, the popular BFSS Press Officer who was sacked (George, 1999) on 24 June, was particularly scathing in her criticisms. The damaging episode was resolved with the appointment, after Edward Duke’s departure, of Richard Burge as Chief Executive. He headed an organization which had as its manifesto and mission statement: ‘To champion the countryside, country sports and the rural way of life’. Shortly after, these words prefaced the announcement by the Chairman of new political research, education and policy units (Country Sports, Winter 1998/9: 3). Formerly the Director General of the Zoological Society of London, and responsible for London Zoo, Whipsnade Wild Animal Park, the Institute of Zoology and a field operations unit, Burge brought to the CA credentials which were both impeccable and not associated with country sports and, additionally, considerable administrative and organizational experience. The Alliance is, of course, primarily a campaigning organization and such organizations are not judged solely in terms of their ability to mobilize members and win sympathizers. They must aim also to respond effectively to developments in the policy process and, preferably, be able to intervene in and help shape that process. Differing combinations of different kinds of resources are relevant to contrasting stages of the policy process, but the ability to contribute effectively to insider politics depends on being perceived as both credible and responsible. The 1997 Rally and the 1998 Countryside March conferred on the Alliance a

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substantial resource of a particular kind. A large constituency, albeit as diverse in one sense as it was uniform in another, had been identified and the CA could plausibly claim to make statements on its behalf. But its strategy of clothing hunting in the wider rural fabric, which had given a platform to a host of rural discontents, had also created an obligation to develop policy positions relating to a wide raft of issues. Different resources, not least those associated with competing time-frames, were needed to achieve this self-imposed ambition. The Government’s programme of legislation in relation to the countryside, access and related matters, and its professed concern for social exclusion, ensured that demands would, quite aside from developments relating to hunting, be extensive and continuing. In April 1999 the CA issued a response to the rural and urban white paper processes and titled its 35-page booklet Choose Livelihood. Richard Burge began his introductory address with the claim that the English countryside is in serious trouble. ‘Economically, environmentally and – crucially – culturally’, he continued, ‘they are suffering due to ignorance, neglect and inaction.’ The theme of a way of life chronically misunderstood is strongly evident, as is the claim that through its main resource, its people, the countryside is ready to give a lead. The countryside is working for positive changes, and waiting for the Government to join in. Confusion on food regulation policy, the abandonment of the partnership approach to access for walkers and high fuel tax rates have caused dismay. There is still uncertainty over how far the authorities will yield to animal rights pressure groups. The rural jury is still out. If the notion of a ‘rural jury’ was, inevitably, a reification it was, nonetheless, being deployed with considerable effect. The Alliance, moreover, worked to create and sustain the very entity to which it was continually appealing. Internet and email technology (Pickerill, 2000) has, for instance, been used to good effect. ‘The Grass e-Route’ information highway has been created to ensure that ‘through effective communication and motivation, rural opinion is universally heard’. Through that rural communication network the CA is now better placed to respond to local newspaper and radio station polls and there is a frequently updated dialogue relating to news items and developments in Alliance policy. With names and addresses held only at parish level there is a real attempt to enhance rural democracy by helping rural people with information and campaigning knowhow. An electronic newsletter is now delivered to over 40,000 ‘subscribers’ every week. Early in its development the CA identified Farmers’ Markets, which began in Bath in December 1997 and which by the new millennium numbered over 300, as a key development and an important model for a wider direct-produce industry. They saw them as increasing self-reliance and developing marketing skills in

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agriculture and they created a Farmers’ Markets web page and worked to achieve an appropriate degree of regulation which would sustain a rapidly expanding movement. The thoroughness of the response to the White Papers and the example of the early advocacy of Farmers’ Markets give substance to the Alliance claim to be an effective coalition with a legitimate claim on the dynamics of the policy process. With no ambition to put candidates in the field it did, nevertheless, begin to acquire some of the appurtenances of party status. In October 1999 a Countryside Conference was held in London with the theme ‘Rural Britain Deserves Better’. The first ever national conference dedicated to the countryside began by considering rural employment and enterprise before moving on to management of the rural landscape, conservation and wildlife management and a debate titled ‘Town and Country – The Great Divide?’. Afternoon sessions consisted of a country sports forum and presentations from sporting and related trade representatives. The order of business indicated priorities and Richard Burge began his address with a key observation. ‘We’re not an organization with a blueprint’, he said. ‘We’ve caught a voice.’ Whether such a voice is heard at the critical phases of policy formulation depends crucially on the credentials of the Alliance, the quality of its advocacy and above all whether it can plausibly claim to have behind it a substantial body of opinion. Shortly after the Conference, on 9 December, the Government announced the setting up under Lord Burns of a Committee of Inquiry Into Hunting With Dogs In England & Wales with what seemed an impossibly demanding timetable. The Alliance, involved throughout, presented substantial bodies of evidence, both written and oral. Burns dominated concerns for the next six months and when his committee presented their report in June 2000 Richard Burge found himself having, at about that time, to write an open letter to the Chief Executive of the Countryside Agency, Ewen Cameron, protesting that the Agency’s ‘State of the Countryside 2000’ report was compromised by extraordinary distortions such that ‘in key areas the report purports to paint a factual picture of life in the countryside which vast numbers of rural people simply will not recognise’ (Country Illustrated, June 2000: 19). Amongst other concerns the expurgation of country sports from the ‘politically-correct and urban-biased portrait of rural life’ was particularly galling. A key player in one forum, the CA gave every appearance of having been sidelined in another. CONCLUSION: SHAPING AGENDAS

Just one month later the Alliance’s Chief Executive was announcing major new policy initiatives at the CLA Game Fair at Blenheim Palace. A momentum had been sustained. The fact that four national newspapers contacted the Alliance for its comments and printed them after an episode of BBC’s The Archers had featured

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an exchange about Mr Blair’s ‘action’ on the rural crisis, was hailed by Richard Burge as an indication that the Alliance had arrived as a campaigning movement (Country Sports, Spring 2000: 3). The CA has orchestrated three remarkable events and proved, notably at the Labour Conference in Bournemouth in 1999, that orderly and good-humoured protest by large numbers of people is possible. To have mobilized a section of society traditionally less given to political protest (Margetts, 2000: 190) so effectively and to have forced the issue of ‘the countryside’ on to the government’s agenda (Gamble, 2000: 303) in a way it had not envisaged when it took office has been a considerable achievement. It is one which has, moreover, been consolidated by carefully considered representations to the policy process and informed and responsible advocacy at a public inquiry. The relentless demands of campaigning, particularly in the context of another bill on hunting with dogs which was introduced to the House of Commons on 3 December 2002, have, by its own admission, exhausted reserves and steps were initiated in 2002 to allow the Alliance to become a Company Limited by Guarantee. In October 2003 Simon Hart succeeded Richard Burge as Chief Executive and, shortly after, a Rural Regeneration Unit was established as a separate organization and the non-campaigning elements of the Alliance’s activities became a part of it. Other reforms to enable more effective budgetary control were put in train and the CA looked carefully at its relationship with complementary organizations so that the ‘turf wars’ which have, on occasion, threatened to compromise effectiveness in the past might be mitigated. Because it speaks with increasing authority on the viability of the rural ‘way of life’, the CA feels it is better able to argue that hunting and other country sports are indivisible elements of it. It would be surprising if there were not paradoxes, ambiguities and inconsistencies apparent in the constituency which is being constructed. When, in 1997, I concluded an assessment of hunt followers in the countryside (Cox and Winter, 1997) I suggested that at the level of ideology the battle lines, which could never be said to have been obscure, were now drawn with a clarity which demonstrates just how pivotal they are to the still emergent conception of a post-productivist countryside. In such a context simplistic contrasts between the urban and the rural are likely to carry less and less conviction. So, whilst the ‘countryman’ card may be an obvious one to play, if the hunting community is to add a greater ideological and political security to its manifest economic and social strengths, alliances with those who cannot, or perhaps do not wish, to identify themselves with that ever more elusive category, will have to be forged. The supporters of hunting need to return their sport to the category of a peculiar, as opposed to a beleaguered, privilege. The sense of being misunderstood in a very general sense has coincided, in the present conjuncture, with a catalogue of quite particular and distinctively rural

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woes. It is a conjunction which lends itself readily to just the sort of counterposing of town and country which can only be simplistic. For the most part it is at the level of placard and banner, for it is stated at the outset in Choose Livelihood, for instance, that the Alliance regards ‘town and country as complementary and interdependent’. Slippage between rhetoric and reality is never surprising, however, and circumstances have meant that it has been neither necessary nor possible to make the effort which sustained ideological regeneration typically requires. The activities of the Alliance have certainly raised the profile of rural and countryside issues. Moreover the manner of their doing so has involved mass participation. Efforts to build a constituency have enhanced discussion at the local level. The questions posed in The Times leader with which I began can be answered in the affirmative. Insofar as such Sellar and Yeatmanesque (1930) questions can be answered at all, it might be said that the efforts of the Countryside Alliance, successor to the Countryside Movement, have been ‘a good thing’ for democracy as well as for ‘rural people’. The ‘wake-up call’ has been answered. Moral marginalization is being increasingly challenged (Scruton, 1996; Cox, 1999; Page, 2000; Cox, 2001). Debate is keener. What is at issue appears in progressively sharper relief. Civil society is, arguably, more vibrant. Speaking at the 1999 Bournemouth Labour Party Conference rally, Richard Burge began his address to the marchers by saying ‘The countryside is not landscape, or wildlife, or heritage. It’s you, the people.’ That emphasis, in a country notorious for its ‘landscape without figures’ relationship with the countryside, is importantly new. Never mind that numbers of those concerned about its future live in towns and cities. Those who would say that the Countryside Alliance is chasing a chimera cannot have heeded Marc Mormont’s insight. ‘Nature’, said William Blake, ‘is imagination itself’ and, as the Countryside Alliance is discovering, that can be equally true of politics. In the present conjuncture their grand coalition, necessarily an imaginative enterprise, is much more than a figment of their imagination. REFERENCES

Clark, G., J. Durrall, R. Grove-White, P. Macnaghten and J. Urry (1994) Leisure Landscapes, London: CPRE Connerton, P. (1989) How Societies Remember, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Cox, G. (1983) ‘A Sporting chance for conservation’, ECOS, 4/3, 2–9 (1988) ‘“Reading” nature: reflections on ideological persistence and the politics of the countryside’, Landscape Research, 13/3, 24–34 (1999) ‘Pride in our hunting history’, The Field, December 1999, 104–8 (2001) ‘The Right way for animal welfare: just how should we relate to animals?’ in Michael Sissons (ed.) A Countryside for All, London: Vintage, 137–48

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Cox, G., J. Hallett and M. Winter (1994) ‘Hunting the wild red deer: the social organization and ritual of a “rural” institution’, Sociologia Ruralis, 34/2–3, 190–205 Cox, G. and P. Lowe (1984) ‘Agricultural corporatism and conservation politics’, in Bradley, T. and Lowe, P. (eds) Locality and Rurality, Norwich: Geo Books, 147–68 Cox, G., P. Lowe and M. Winter (1985) ‘Changing directions in agricultural policy: corporatist arrangements in production and conservation policies’, Sociologia Ruralis, 25/2, 130–53 (1986) ‘From state direction to self regulation: the historical development of corporatism in British agriculture’, Policy and Politics, 14/4, 475–90 Cox, G., C. Watkins and M. Winter (1996) Game Management in England: Implications for Public Access, the Rural Economy and the Environment, Rural Research Monograph Series No. 3, Cheltenham: The Countryside and Community Press Cox, G. and Winter, M. (1997) ‘The Beleaguered “other”: hunt followers in the countryside’, in Paul Milbourne (ed.) Revealing Rural ‘Others’, London: Pinter, 75–89 Gamble, A. (2000) ‘Policy agendas in a multi-level polity’, in P. Dunleavy, A. Gamble, I. Holliday and G. Peele (eds) Developments in British Politics, 6, London: Macmillan Press, 290–308 George, J. (1999) A Rural Uprising: The Battle to Save Hunting with Hounds, London: J. A. Allen Hobsbawm E. and T. Ranger (eds) (1983) The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Itzkowitz, D. (1977) Peculiar Privilege: A Social History of English Foxhunting, 1753– 1885, London: Harvester Press League against Cruel Sports (1993) Before the Hunt, London: LACS Lowe, P., J. Murdoch and G. Cox (1995) ‘A Civilised retreat? Anti-urbanism, rurality and the making of an Anglo-centric culture’, in P., Healey, S. Camerson, S. Davoudi, S. Graham and A. Madani-Pour (eds) Managing Cities: The New Urban Context, Chichester: John Wiley, 63–83 Lowe, P., J. Clark, S. Seymour and N. Ward (1997) Moralizing the Environment: Countryside Change, Farming and Pollution, London: UCL Press Macfarlane, R. (1998) ‘One rally and a march, but whose countryside?’ ECOS, 19/1, 87–96 Margetts, H. (2000) ‘Political participation and protest’ in P. Dunleavy, A. Gamble, I. Holliday and G. Peele (eds) Developments in British Politics, 6, London: Macmillan Press Marsden, T., J. Murdoch, P. Lowe, R. Munton and A. Flynn (1993) Constructing the Countryside, London: UCL Press Mormont, M. (1990) ‘Who is rural? Or, how to be rural. Towards a sociology of the rural’, in T. Marsden, P. Lowe and S. Whatmore (eds) Labour and Locality: Uneven Development and the Labour Process, London: Fulton, 21–45

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Page, R. (2000) The Hunting Gene, Barton: Bird’s Farm Books Pickerill, J. (2000) ‘Spreading the green word? Using the Internet for environmental campaigning’, ECOS, 21/1, 14–24 Sellar, W.C. and R.J. Yeatman (1930) 1066 and All That, London: Methuen Scruton, R. (1996) Animal Rights and Wrongs, London: Demos Suggett, R. H. G. (1999) Countryside Sports and the UK Biodiversity Action Plan, Report compiled for the Standing Conference on Countryside Sports, Reading: College of Estate Management Tapper, S. (ed.) (1999) A Question of Balance, Fordingbridge: The Game Conservancy Trust Williams, R. (1975) The Country and the City, London: Paladin Wittgenstein, L. (1968) Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Basil Blackwell Woods, M. (2003) ‘Deconstructing rural protest: the emergence of a new social movement’, Journal of Rural Studies, 19, 309–25

7 FROM AGRICULTURAL POVERTY TO SOCIAL EXCLUSION: SHIFTING APPROACHES TO RURAL POVERTY IN ENGLAND

Paul Milbourne

INTRODUCTION

Poverty has long been recognized as a feature of rural life in England. Historical studies of social and economic life in the countryside have highlighted the impoverished state of the agricultural workforce in previous centuries and the periodic displacements of sections of the rural population – linked to land clearances and enclosures, the mechanization of agricultural production, and the more general processes of industrialization and urbanization. Clearly, any attempt to reveal the nature of rural poverty needs to take account of these broader historical contexts. As the rural sociologist Howard Newby argued more than 20 years ago, in order to understand the historical development of life and work in rural England we need to consider the unequal power relations that underpinned rural life. Moving beyond dominant idyllic constructions of past forms of rural living, he suggests that the nineteenth-century English village was structured around an agricultural economy characterized by ‘poverty, exploitation, and the constraints that stem from dependence on the locally powerful’ (1985: 24). For Newby, though, these ideas of rural poverty and exploitation have been conveniently forgotten by those groups that have an interest in promoting the notion of a ‘green and pleasant land’: Behind the façade of a happy ‘organic community’ this darker image always lurks, but to bring it to the forefront would threaten the idyllic conception of rural life. The rural idyll, as an escape from urban squalor, cannot be allowed to be squalid itself. The homeward ploughman may be poor, but his is, in Gray’s words, a ‘happy poverty’. (Newby, 1985: 24)

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It is these types of cultural and political denials of rural poverty that have hampered academic and policy attempts to take more seriously the issue of poverty in rural areas over the last quarter of a century. Unlike the situation in the United States, where research and policy interventions in relation to rural poverty have a long history (see Fitchen, 1991; Duncan, 1992, 1999; Rural Sociological Task Force, 1993), academic and policy attention concerning the subject in Britain can be traced back only to the late 1970s. This is not to say that all elements of rural poverty were ignored prior to this period. Certainly, we can point to policy efforts to improve poor housing conditions, provide additional units of council housing and improve essential infrastructures (such as mains water and electricity) in rural areas in the inter-war period and immediate post-war period. However, rural poverty in its broader sense did not really start to be treated seriously by researchers and policy-makers until the later years of the 1970s. Since then we have witnessed periodic ‘rediscoveries’ of rural poverty, through significant programmes of research and through policy interventions. But still the topic of poverty in rural England remains neglected in comparison to urban and metropolitan poverty, and also in relation to work that has been undertaken in the United States. In this chapter I want to provide a critical review of the development of academic approaches to rural poverty in England in the period since the 1970s. I will focus on three broad phases of work on rural poverty and set out the types of approach adopted by researchers and the evidence on the nature and scale of poverty revealed by these studies. In the final section of the chapter I will then discuss some gaps that remain in academic understandings of rural poverty and indicate new research agendas that could usefully be adopted to fill these gaps. THE EARLY POLITICIZATION OF RURAL POVERTY

At around the same time that Newby was writing about the social history of rural life in East Anglia, efforts began to be made to publicize and politicize issues of rural poverty in England. In the late 1970s, two books emerged, each of which was concerned with the problematic aspects of rural living. The first was published by the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) in 1978 under the title of Rural Poverty: Poverty, Deprivation and Planning in Rural Areas and consisted of a collection of essays. While edited by an academic – Alan Walker – the book was concerned much more to raise the profile of the rural aspects of poverty amongst policy communities. As Walker states in his introduction, the aim of the book was to: counter the predominantly urban image of poverty and deprivation, by highlighting some of the problems facing poor people in rural areas and so to encourage the formation of policies which tackle the key factors under-

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lying the problems of poverty and deprivation in both rural and urban areas. In short, the authors are seeking to remind planners and policy-makers that deprivation is not solely an urban phenomenon. (Walker, 1978: 1) Also evident from this introductory quotation is the reference to deprivation alongside that of poverty. In fact, the book is focused much more on the different elements of rural deprivation than on the narrower construct of poverty. While limited attention is given to low pay and agricultural workers, the bulk of the book is concerned with the impacts of low levels of provision in relation to social services, health, education, transport, recreation and welfare rights on poor people in rural areas. Connections are also made between rural poverty, levels of service provision and changing rural social structures, with the claim made that the movement of middle-class groups to the countryside is reducing the physical visibility and statistical significance of the rural poor, lowering levels of need for welfare services, and producing local power structures that may be less sympathetic to issues of poverty (see also Newby et al. (1978) and Milbourne (2004a) for accounts of the influence of changing local political structures on local policy constructions of and responses to rural poverty). Various contributors to the book point to the structure of the rural economy as a key cause of poverty in rural areas, with the low rates of pay and insecurities associated with agriculture being replaced by equally precarious forms of employment in the manufacturing and services sectors. Individual authors also point to the neglect of the rural poor amongst those policy-makers and planners charged with providing public transport, housing and welfare services in rural areas. Consequently, it is argued that the creation of successful rural anti-poverty policies depends not just on raising incomes and providing state benefits but also on addressing the difficulties of access to public and welfare services in areas of limited provision. Indeed, Walker warns against making too much of the distinction between rural and urban forms of poverty, arguing that ‘in both types of area the same group of people are affected disproportionately: those not in work, the elderly, sick, disabled and unemployed. Of these, those in the lowest socioeconomic groups are most likely to be poor’ (Walker, 1978: 108). What is different, he suggests, is the ‘manifestation of poverty’ in (remote) rural and urban areas: The exact forms that social relationships assume may differ between the two areas, and particularly between industries. … The key problem for rural people, which distinguishes remote rural from urban areas and the main factor to be tackled by policy-makers and planners, is access to services and other resources. (Walker, 1978: 109)

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A year after Rural Poverty was published, a second text addressing rural problematics appeared. Entitled Rural Deprivation and Planning and edited by Martin Shaw (1979), this book was even more focused on the linkages between deprivation and service provision in rural areas. Again, attention is given to the different facets of service-based rural deprivation. While Walker (1978) provides a broader social and spatial contextualization of rural poverty and deprivation, Shaw’s account of rural deprivation downplays the significance of social and economic inequalities in creating deprivation, ignores rural – urban comparisons of deprivation, and emphasizes the role of the planning system as the key causal factor. Shaw’s (1979) approach of rural deprivation, however, did attempt to weave together the different components of deprivation in a more sophisticated way to make sense of how particular rural places, groups and households are subjected to multiple forms of deprivation. Three components of rural deprivation were proposed: first, household deprivation, which is mainly concerned with income levels, housing conditions and poverty; second, opportunity deprivation, bound up with the decline of employment opportunities and essential services from particular rural areas; and third, mobility deprivation, related to the difficulties experienced by certain groups in accessing work and services that have relocated from rural areas. The emphasis within Shaw’s approach is thus placed on the ways in which the absence of particular services results in multiple forms of deprivation for certain groups and individuals living in particular rural places. Consequently, the solutions to rural deprivation are viewed as bound up with a more equitable distribution of services through the planning system. Relatively little attention is directed to the broader role of social and economic processes in causing and, potentially, alleviating poverty and deprivation in rural areas. As Cloke et al. suggest: far from being a springboard to further investigations of who were the ‘deprived’, what exactly their problems were, and why these problems were occurring, Shaw’s categories were used as a focus of investigations into rural deprivation which became bogged down by the notion that it was service provision which was paramount in rural areas, and that poor levels of provision reflected an urban bias in allocations of expenditure to local authorities. (Cloke et al., 1994: 12–13) RESEARCHING POVERTY AND DEPRIVATION IN RURAL AREAS: NATIONAL PERSPECTIVES

The texts produced by Walker (1978) and Shaw (1979) did much to raise the policy and political profile of rural poverty and deprivation in the late 1970s. Unfortunately, these two books were based on rather limited evidence, as there had

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been only a small number of empirical studies of rural poverty conducted up to this period, and most of the contributors to these books were from policy communities. Shortly after their publication, though, central government commissioned the first major study of rural deprivation in England. Funded by the Department of the Environment and the Rural Development Commission and undertaken by Brian McLaughlin, the study examined the nature and scale of deprivation in five areas of rural England in 1980–81 (McLaughlin, 1985). The study was, though, firmly embedded in on-going policy debates concerning the allocation of central government resources to urban and rural local authorities (McLaughlin, 1986). Notwithstanding these policy constraints, McLaughlin’s research was able to provide the first reliable evidence on poverty and deprivation in rural areas. In contrast to previous approaches, which were focused on individual case-studies of different forms of rural deprivation, deprived groups and deprived spaces, this study was able to investigate the impacts of multiple components of deprivation on different households in different rural areas. McLaughlin’s research was based on surveys of 876 households in five rural areas – North Yorkshire, Northumberland, Shropshire, Suffolk and Essex – that were selected as indicative of the different geographies of rural England. The survey collected household information on a range of topics, including income and expenditure, housing, employment, education, and access to key services. An important component of this research was the construction of a poverty threshold based on the methodology developed by the British poverty researcher, Peter Townsend (1979). This involved expressing a household’s income as a percentage of its entitlement to state benefit (the McLaughlin study used Supplementary Benefit entitlements) and using a poverty threshold of 140 per cent of this entitlement. McLaughlin’s utilization of this poverty threshold revealed that 25 per cent of households in his survey were living in, or on the margins of poverty. This average level of poverty showed relatively little variation across the study areas, with North Yorkshire recording the lowest levels of households living in situations of poverty (at 21 per cent) and Northumberland the highest (27 per cent). The elderly emerged as the most significant group of the poor population in these five areas. In fact, the majority of the rural poor comprised elderly households reliant on state pensions as their only source of income. While unemployment levels were relatively low in each of the study areas, low incomes were identified as a contributory factor to non-elderly poverty, with around one quarter of male manual workers and more than three-quarters of female manual workers earning below the low-pay threshold. In addition, high levels of income polarization were revealed, indicating the juxtaposition of high and low paid workers in the same localities. As well as focusing on income and material poverty, McLaughlin (1986) considers three facets of deprivation in rural areas. First, he points to the

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significance of housing as a component of rural deprivation, with inadequate housing conditions and broader problems associated with access to housing revealed as particularly associated with poor households. Access to rural services is identified as a second facet of deprivation. McLaughlin suggests that poor households are reliant on local retail facilities, which increases the cost of essential shopping and levels of vulnerability amongst the poor if local shops closed. Third, poor households are characterized by restricted personal mobility. Inadequate levels of public transport provision, together with limited access to a private vehicle, mean that many poor households experience severe difficulties in travelling to facilities and services – including employment and health and welfare services – that are located beyond their locality. While the research report (McLaughlin, 1985) was never published by government, headline statistics did filter into the policy arena. In particular, the finding that one-quarter of households in the study areas were living in poverty was picked up by a broad range of rural agencies as an indication of the widespread occurrence of poverty in rural England. Academic outputs from the study also emerged during the late 1980s. McLaughlin (1986) provides a broad range of research material on the key components of deprivation in the five study areas. He also sets out a wide-ranging discussion of the socio-spatial nature of rural deprivation, arguing that rural deprivation should be conceptualized as a social rather than a spatial issue. As such, policy agencies need to question ‘just how far we are dealing with rural problems per se and how far we are dealing with more general problems which have a particular manifestation in the rural context’ (McLaughlin, 1986: 307). This point is similar to that made earlier by Walker (1978) who claims that a distinction needs to be made between the causes and manifestations of poverty in rural areas. It is one that was also made more powerfully by Tony Bradley, who worked with McLaughlin on the research project. Bradley argues that while findings from the study clearly indicate that ‘crude poverty is almost as endemic in village England as elsewhere in Britain’, the processes that lead to deprivation in rural and urban spaces are quite different (Bradley, 1986: 170; Moseley, 1980). He shows how dominant cultural constructions of rurality become intermeshed with broader processes of socioeconomic restructuring and reduced levels of service provision to produce particular forms of relative rural poverty. For Bradley, the rural poor represent a largely hidden and forgotten group within rural society: the old and white in village England cannot even claim political recognition. Fragmented, weak and deprived of social networks, their fate is to serve-out their final years in loneliness and isolation, their silent poverty disrupted only be the occasional disappearance of further services and the social landmarks of their lives. (Bradley, 1986: 171)

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RURAL LIFESTYLES AND POVERTY

A period of ten years elapsed between McLaughlin’s study of deprivation in rural areas and the next significant research on rural disadvantage conducted by Cloke et al. (1994). Not only was this latter study part-funded by the same government department, the Department of the Environment, that funded McLaughlin’s project, but it aimed to examine the changing nature of rural living and deprivation in McLaughlin’s five study areas. The longitudinal element of the project soon became a less significant component of the project as additional funding allowed for the inclusion of seven more study areas in England. A total of 3,000 households were surveyed in these 16 areas of the English and Welsh countryside between 1990 and 1992. In order to allow comparisons to be made between the five areas included within both studies, the survey formats were the same as those utilized by McLaughlin in the early 1980s. The focus of the programme of research undertaken by Cloke et al. was on rural lifestyles rather than just deprivation, with a serious attempt made to position rural problems within a broader framework of economic restructuring, sociocultural recomposition and changing systems of governance in rural areas. The research team also included different approaches to rural deprivation within their work. As with McLaughlin’s study, normative definitions of rural problems were utilized, including the same statistical definition of poverty. In addition, Cloke et al. (1994, 1997b) explored the ways that rural problems are experienced differently by different groups and in different places. It is Cloke et al.’s statistical indications of low income and poverty in rural areas that have been most cited by academics and policy-makers interested in rural welfare issues. The English study points to the continued significance of low incomes amongst the rural workforce, with an average of 44 per cent of working adults in the survey earning gross salaries of less than £8000 per annum in 1990– 91. The study also reveals a distinctive geography to low income in the English countryside, with the more remote study areas recording significantly higher proportions of low-income workers than the other areas. For example, in North Yorkshire and Northumberland, approximately half of all workers had annual incomes of under £8000. Rates of poverty in these twelve areas were calculated based on the index of relative deprivation utilized by McLaughlin, which measures poverty relative to a household’s entitlement to state benefits. Across the twelve areas 23.4 per cent of households were living in or on the margins of poverty in 1990–91 according to this indicator. The fact that this figure is only slightly lower than the level of rural poverty uncovered ten years earlier has been viewed as an important sign of the persistence of poverty in rural England. Furthermore, if we isolate McLaughlin’s five areas and compare these across the two studies, an identical level of poverty –

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25 per cent of households – is revealed. It should be noted, however, that it is difficult to make any further assumptions about the persistence of this poverty at the household level, as the 1990–91 surveys did not set out to interview the same households included in the previous study. It is also the case that the 23.4 per cent average figure of poverty for the twelve areas masks a great deal of geographical variation in poverty levels. For example, the poverty rate in the highest scoring study area, Nottinghamshire (39.2 per cent) is more than six times as high as that in West Sussex, which recorded the lowest rate at 6.4 per cent. PROFILING RURAL POVERTY

As well as supplying valuable statistical information on the scale of rural poverty in England, the Rural Lifestyles research programme provides a detailed picture of the social profile of poverty in rural areas. Table 1 provides a summary of some of the key features of this poverty based on an analysis of household survey data for England and Wales. (The research also involved a survey of 1,000 households in four areas of rural Wales, Cloke et al., 1997a.) What is apparent from this table is that rural poverty continues to be associated with elderly groups. In fact, the elderly account for almost seven out of ten households in poverty and 42 per cent of all poor households are single elderly person households. However, it is also the case that 31 per cent of poor households are below the retirement age, and almost all of this group are in paid work located in low-income, poor quality and insecure sectors of the rural labour market. The Household and Housing Profile of Rural Poverty in England and Wales, 1990–91* Household type

% of poor households

Elderly single Elderly couple Non-elderly single Non-elderly couple Household tenure fully owned Owned on mortgage Social rented Private rented Presence of housing defects

41.8 27.4 10.3 20.5 34.1 7.1 47.1 11.2 16.5

*

Based on aggregate findings from 16 rural study areas in England and Wales. Source: Milbourne (1997)

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There are important linkages between rural housing structures and poverty. The majority of poor households live in rented accommodation, most notably the social rental sector (which accounts for 47 per cent of households in poverty). That said, a significant minority of the rural poor (41 per cent) are property owners, with most of these households owning their properties outright. In addition, while the link between poverty and inadequate housing conditions has largely been broken by the growth of the social housing sector, it remains the case that 17 per cent of poor households in the survey report defects with their properties – a figure that is much higher than that recorded amongst the non-poor. More recently, Cloke and Milbourne (2001) have provided a more detailed picture of the profile of poverty in the 16 Rural Lifestyles study areas based on a re-analysis of the questionnaires completed by poor households in their surveys. They set out information on five key dimensions of rural poverty – consumption, employment, income, savings and social networks. Each of these dimensions of poverty will be considered in turn. Consumption is considered in terms of the presence or otherwise of particular household amenities and possessions within households. Almost all poor households have exclusive use of key amenities such as a flush toilet (98 per cent), running hot water (98 per cent), a cooker (99 per cent), and a bath or shower (96 per cent). When attention shifts to other types of household possessions, though, it is clear that a lower proportion of poor than non-poor households contain items that have been identified as ‘essential’ within previous households surveys (Townsend, 1979; Mack and Lansley, 1985; Gordon et al., 2000). For example, 33 per cent of poor households are without central heating in their properties, a rate double that recorded for all households included within the surveys. A telephone was absent from 23 per cent of poor households (but from 7 per cent of all households), and 21 per cent of the rural poor lack a washing machine, compared with just 6 per cent of the overall sample. This gap between poor and non-poor households is also apparent in terms of a broader range of possessions, some of which can be seen as ‘taken for granted’ items within contemporary society, such as a television, microwave oven, video recorder and fridge freezer. Cloke and Milbourne (2001) also consider the consumption of holidays and social outings by poor households. Two-thirds of poor households did not take a holiday away from home over the 12 months period prior to the survey, compared with 37 per cent of all households. A similar proportion of the rural poor (61 per cent) had not had an ‘afternoon or evening out which cost money’ over the previous two weeks. The corresponding figure for the overall sample was 44 per cent. In relation to economic activity, only 21 per cent of adult respondents in poor households are located in the formal labour market. This low number reflects the fact that poverty is concentrated amongst the elderly in these rural areas. Indeed,

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examining reasons for economic inactivity, retirement is by far the largest category cited by the poor, accounting for 69 per cent of responses. Less significant are unemployment (5 per cent), caring for household members (15 per cent) and being sick or disabled (8 per cent). Of those people who are in work, 11 per cent have a second job and 80 per cent are not members of a trade union or professional association. As might be expected, the income levels of the rural poor are particularly low. In fact, 88 per cent of workers in poor households earned a gross salary of less than £8000 per annum in 1991–92, a proportion that is almost double that recorded for the overall population in these areas. In relation to household incomes, 86 per cent of poor households have net incomes of less than £10,000 per annum compared with only 23 per cent of all households and almost nine out of ten of the retired poor are solely reliant on the state pension as a source of income. As well as being associated with low levels of incomes rural poverty is bound up with limited amounts of savings. An average of 45 per cent of poor households have less than £10,000 worth of savings (including the estimated value of owner-occupiers’ properties), with 19 per cent having under £1000. The figures for the total sample are 13 per cent and 3 per cent respectively. Cloke and Milbourne’s (2001) analysis also reveals that the rural poor are included within some local social networks but excluded from others. For example, approximately two-thirds of poor respondents have close relatives living locally and 47 per cent had been visited on at least five occasions over the two weeks prior to the survey. However, 9 per cent of those people living in poverty had not received a visit to their home and a further 8 per cent had been visited only once over this two-week period. It is also the case that a higher proportion of poor than non-poor respondents point to a sense of belonging to a local community, although the poor are much less likely to be involved in the organization of local community activities. DISADVANTAGE AND SOCIAL EXCLUSION: NEW DISCOURSES OF RURAL POVERTY?

It is clear from the material presented in the preceding section that a large volume of research evidence on the nature and scale of rural poverty has been generated by surveys of rural households conducted in the 1980s and 1990s. These surveys also provided a limited amount of qualitative material on respondents’ understandings and experiences of rural living and poverty in study areas (see Cloke et al., 1997b; Milbourne, 1997). However, it was recognized by Cloke et al., (1997b) that the survey methodology did not allow for any in-depth exploration of the experiences of poverty in rural areas. Woodward (1995) – one of the members of the Rural Lifestyles research team – went further, arguing that rural researchers need to be

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more critical of the concept of deprivation given that most residents in the surveys denied its presence in their areas. A different criticism of rural poverty research came from Shucksmith et al. (1996a), who argued that studies of rural poverty and deprivation are concerned mainly with individual situations of hardship and thus neglect broader structural causal processes. While this is a valid criticism, it is also the case that rural researchers had employed the concept of deprivation in a critical manner. Cloke et al., (1997a), for example, examined a range of (material and non-material) problems experienced by poor people in rural areas, as well as the broader structural problems associated with rural living that impact on the poor and non-poor in rural areas. Shucksmith et al. propose that the concept of disadvantage is better able to capture the structural underpinnings of problems. Disadvantage is defined in relation to ‘economic and social restructuring and by the exercise of power in society’ (Shucksmith et al., 1996a: 8), which act to create situations of systematic disadvantage for particular individuals, households and groups in rural areas. They adopt Brown’s (1983) distinction between deprivation and disadvantage. For Brown, while deprivation is concerned with ‘personal failings, the accidents of birth or sheer bad luck’, disadvantage represents: ‘the outcome of the systematic applications of handicaps in access to life chances … the disadvantaged are those who are consistently exposed to the highest risk of being deprived. … Disadvantage is demonstrably a consequence of the structure of society’ (Brown, 1983: 5). Shucksmith and his colleagues use the concept of disadvantage as a framework to examine rural living in different parts of Scotland. It is debatable, however, whether the disadvantage approach to understanding the problematics of rural living differs substantially from that adopted within the Rural Lifestyles research. Both studies emphasize the structural components of rural problems, in terms of work, housing and essential services; the nature and incidence of low-income and poverty; and the differential experiences of rural problems. It was the notion of disadvantage, though, that came to be favoured by important rural policy actors in England, and particularly the Rural Development Commission (which now operates as part of the Countryside Agency). While the Rural Development Commission (RDC) co-funded the McLaughlin (1985) and Cloke et al., (1994) research projects on rural poverty and deprivation, by the mid-1990s it had largely reconfigured its research concerns around the concept of rural disadvantage, which it defined as: ‘a set of economic and social conditions which have the potential to cause problems for individuals or particular social groups within rural areas, or a lack of resources (material, cultural, social) which excludes people from the styles of life open to the majority in the countryside’ (quoted in Shucksmith et al., 1996b: 5). The RDC commissioned three reports from academic researchers to investigate the nature and scale of disadvantage in rural England. The first was a literature

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review on rural disadvantage, undertaken by Shucksmith et al. (1996b). The ensuing report focuses on current understandings of disadvantage in rural England, gaps in existing knowledge on the subject, and future avenues of rural disadvantage research. Shucksmith et al. provide a useful overview of existing knowledge of rural disadvantage by bringing together evidence from the two household surveys discussed earlier, official statistics on employment, housing and service provision in rural areas, and an eclectic mix of localized studies undertaken in different parts of the English countryside. While focused on the notion of disadvantage, the key components of disadvantage explored within the report remain similar to those discussed previously in relation to rural deprivation. Moreover, it is apparent that Shucksmith et al. dedicate less space in their report to discussing disadvantage than they do to discussing ideas of social exclusion, a concept which was becoming increasingly important within European and UK social policy discourses at about this time (Room, 1995). It is claimed that social exclusion represents a broader and more critical way to understand the problematics of rural living and working. Again, the emphasis is placed on the processes that result in people becoming detached from mainstream economic, social and political systems. Proponents of the social exclusion approach also make an important distinction between poverty and social exclusion studies. Poverty research, according to Room is narrowly focused on providing snapshots of income/expenditure at the individual/household level, whereas the social exclusion studies consider the multi-dimensional, dynamic and processual nature of exclusion, as well as its outcomes. For Curtin et al. (1996) and Cloke and Milbourne (2001), this distinction between poverty and social exclusion approaches is too simplistic. Poverty research, they argue, is as much concerned with exploring the structural processes that lead to individuals and groups living in situations of poverty as it is with examining situations (or outcomes) of poverty. Where the distinction between poverty and social exclusion research is more relevant is in relation to the methods employed by researchers. As Shucksmith et al. (1996b) state, the two previous studies of rural poverty and deprivation (McLaughlin, 1986; Cloke et al., 1994) adopted research strategies that were dominated by the single-use household survey and so were unable to explore the dynamics of rural poverty: the focus of the latest research on social exclusion is on dynamic processes, and the identification of ‘pathways’ to exclusion and integration. In rural areas … we have no knowledge of whether those individuals identified by McLaughlin as experiencing poverty in 1980 were still experiencing poverty when Cloke undertook his survey in 1990. Are we dealing with short spells of poverty experienced by many people in rural society, or long spells of poverty experienced by only a small minority? (Shucksmith et al., 1996b: 67)

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A second project funded by the RDC sought to develop methodologies that could capture the processes of rural disadvantage (Policy Studies Institute, 1998). The published report provides a useful overview of recent research on disadvantage and social exclusion; it also considers the rural components of disadvantage, including the groups most likely to experience rural disadvantage, the frequency of duration of periods of disadvantage, the factors that trigger movements into and out of disadvantage, and the distinctiveness of rural forms of disadvantage. The study of rural disadvantage is approached from two contrasting methodological positions. The first is concerned with utilizing existing national databases to examine the features of disadvantage in rural areas. Particular attention is given to the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) – a national survey of approximately 5,500 households conducted annually by central government since 1990. Using data for 1994–95 the authors examine movements of adults into and out of poverty between these two years in rural and urban areas. Perhaps the main finding to emerge from this analysis is that there exists a great deal of similarity between rural and urban forms of poverty. Consequently, it is suggested that there is little to be gained from further rural/urban analyses of this dataset. Work that the authors do consider to be potentially useful is an examination of the dynamics of rural disadvantage; this is based on analyses of rural data contained within national datasets of income dynamics and qualitative studies of the experiences of rural disadvantage amongst different social groups and in particular rural places. MEASURING DISADVANTAGE AND SOCIAL EXCLUSION IN RURAL AREAS

While the Policy Studies Institute called for additional quantitative and qualitative studies of rural disadvantage, it has been the former approach that has dominated research on this topic over the last few years. The RDC and its successor, the Countryside Agency, commissioned two significant studies, and another piece of statistical research was funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Each of these studies sought to develop a range of indicators of rural disadvantage/social exclusion from existing national datasets. A study by Dunn et al. (1998) identifies three criteria by which meaningful indicators of rural disadvantage can be developed: they must be conceptually coherent in terms of particular problems and rural policy objectives; data needs to be available at an appropriate spatial and temporal scale; indicators should be accessible in relation to the costs of data acquisition and capable of being widely understood. In addition, the authors argue that the best way of capturing the multi-faceted nature of rural disadvantage is by combining different indicators through what they term a ‘bundles approach’, which is concerned to measure multiple facets of disadvantage. Based mainly on Census

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data, Dunn et al. bring together different indicators of disadvantage within eight ‘bundles’: access to employment; quality of employment; the vulnerability of employment in the local economy; housing access and affordability; housing quality; low incomes; access to services; physical isolation. This approach was then piloted in three rural counties and extended to the whole of rural England in a subsequent (unpublished) report to the RDC. A different approach to measuring rural disadvantage is followed by Chapman et al. (1998), who examine the dynamics of poverty and social exclusion in rural Britain using British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) data for the period 1991–95. While they point to a series of methodological difficulties associated with defining rural and urban spaces using this dataset, they examine the overall profile of income, the dynamics of low-income and key components of disadvantage in rural and non-rural areas. The study reveals that 18 per cent of rural households had gross incomes of less than half the national mean income in 1995, although this figure is lower than that recorded for the non-rural sample (24 per cent). The analysis points to some interesting findings on the dynamics of rural poverty. Between 1991 and 1995, 34 per cent of rural households had experienced a period of low income (compared with 41 per cent of the non-rural sample), with the average time spent on low income being shorter for those people within the rural group. The report confirms the findings from other studies that rural poverty is particularly associated with elderly groups – defined as persons aged over 60 years – although the elderly poor appear to represent a less significant group in rural areas (accounting for 47 per cent of rural poor households but 59 per cent of those in non-rural areas). Chapman et al. (1998) also explore the broader dimensions of social exclusion. Reflecting the nature of the BHPS dataset, their focus is mainly on employment and income, although some coverage is given to housing costs, material possessions and perceptions of local environments. A range of interesting data is presented within their report that shed new light on the nature of social exclusion in rural and non-rural areas. However, the authors do admit that the BHPS dataset is not suited to examining these broader dimensions of poverty and exclusion. More recently, a statistical study of the nature and scale of social exclusion in rural areas was undertaken by Harrop and Palmer (2002). Funded by the Countryside Agency, this work provides a broad spatial analysis of a range of indicators of poverty and social exclusion based on data contained within national databases. The study reveals that in 2000–1 2.6 million people in rural districts were living in low-income households (low-income being defined as 60 per cent of the median British income after deducting tax, National Insurance contributions and housing costs). This figure represents 18 per cent of the rural population and onequarter of the low-income population in England, although the incidence of low income is lower than that recorded by urban areas (24 per cent). Confirming

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findings from the Rural Lifestyles survey, the BHPS analysis highlights that low income is more pronounced in remote rural areas – where 21 per cent of the population is in low-income households – than accessible areas (which record a rate of 17 per cent). In relation to low income, Harrop and Palmer make an important distinction between the risk of low income amongst different population groups and the numerical significance of these groups. The unemployed and other workless households are considered to be at the highest risk of low income. Medium risk groups include households containing elderly people, the self-employed and parttime workers, while those considered at a low risk of low income consist of households with a full-time worker. However, the profile of low-income households in rural areas does not reflect these levels of risk. The unemployed account for the smallest proportion of low-income households in rural areas (7 per cent), households containing persons out of work but who are not seeking employment make up 20 per cent, and households with elderly persons comprise the largest proportion of the low-income population (27 per cent). Attention is also given to the persistence of poverty in rural areas. An average of 36 per cent of households who experienced low income between 1997–99 were living on low incomes in all three years. This figure compares with 33 per cent of low-income households in urban areas. Again, the level of persistent low income is greatest in remote rural areas, where 43 per cent of low-income households remained on low incomes over this period. The corresponding figure for accessible rural areas was 29 per cent. Another interesting aspect of this study is its attempt to move away from low income to incorporate indicators of social exclusion. Attention is given to levels of involvement with a range of civic organizations, based on data collected by the BHPS. Unsurprisingly, these data reveal that lower-income households in rural areas are less likely to be involved with a range of organizations than those on higher incomes, with this situation being similar to that reported for the urban sample. Harrop and Palmer (2002) also focus on the perception of the local area utilizing data from the Survey of English Housing and reveal that while relatively few low-income rural households (3 per cent) are ‘very dissatisfied’ with their local area, this figure is double that recorded by the corresponding group in urban areas and the average for the rural sample as a whole. CONCLUSION: DEVELOPING NEW ACCOUNTS OF RURAL POVERTY

It is clear from the material presented in this chapter that academic studies undertaken over the last three decades have done much to advance knowledge of the nature and scale of poverty in rural England. Extensive household surveys and

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spatial analyses of national datasets have pointed to the changing incidence, social composition and geographies of rural poverty, with the latter analyses also supplying interesting information about the dynamics and persistence of this poverty. The availability of such evidence would seem to make it difficult to deny the significance of rural poverty. Whether we use the figures of 25 and 23 per cent of rural households living in, or on the margins of, poverty from the McLaughlin (1986) and Cloke et al. (1994) studies or the finding that 18 per cent of rural households are on low income from the Chapman et al. (1998) and Harrop and Palmer (2002) analyses, it cannot be disputed that a significant minority of the rural population are living on low incomes and in poverty. It is also the case that these studies point to several key features of low income and poverty in rural areas. It is useful to highlight three of these elements of rural poverty. First, there is a persistence to rural poverty in relation to place-based poverty – with Cloke et al. (1994) finding the same proportion of households living in poverty in McLaughlin’s five study areas ten years later – and particular households experiencing poverty over extended periods. Second, rural poverty would seem to impact differently on different social groups. The elderly emerge as the most numerically significant poor group in rural areas, although unemployed and other workless households are shown to be at greatest risk of experiencing poverty. Third, there is a clear geography to rural poverty, with data from both the household surveys and national government surveys indicating that it is the remoter rural areas that contain the highest levels of poverty. As well as focusing on low income and poverty, attention has been directed to the broader structures and processes that act to disadvantage particular groups within rural society. While the focus may have switched from deprivation to disadvantage to social exclusion, the approach adopted by researchers has remained remarkably similar in that efforts have been made to examine the impacts of labour and housing markets, different levels of service provision, and shifting social structures, on impoverished groups within rural areas. However, relatively little attention has been given to the structural processes bound up with rural disadvantage, nor has much work considered the experiences of poverty, disadvantage or exclusion from the perspectives of those people who experience these conditions in rural areas (although see Cloke et al., 2002, on the experiences of homelessness in rural England). Perhaps one of the reasons for this lack of engagement with some of the more interesting (and also challenging) aspects of poverty and social exclusion research relates to the funding mechanisms linked to recent studies of rural disadvantage. With the bulk of funding provided by the Countryside Agency, projects have engaged with policy discourses of social exclusion, based around statistical analyses of national datasets and broad rural–urban spatial categorizations. This approach has meant that analyses have been constrained by the (limited) availability of

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particular indicators of poverty and exclusion. It has also meant that much more attention has been directed towards ‘rural’ and ‘non-rural’ differences than the spatial complexities of poverty and social exclusion within rural areas. It is clear, then, that there remain some gaps in our knowledge of rural poverty in England. While we now possess a reasonable understanding of the overall nature and scale of rural poverty, this evidence base needs to be extended in different ways. Quantitative analyses of meta-datasets need to be made more sensitive to the different components of social exclusion and to the geographies of poverty and exclusion in rural areas. There is also an urgent need for more indepth place-based research on rural poverty and social exclusion. Such research in the United States has played a valuable contribution to advancing understandings of rural poverty, including the structural processes that underpin rural poverty and the differential experiences of being poor in particular rural places (see, for example, Duncan, 1992, 1999; Fitchen, 1991). In England, by contrast, we know little about the structural processes and experiences associated with poverty in different rural spaces. In-depth research is required to explore the coping strategies employed by poor people in dealing with poverty and the factors that trigger movements into and out of poverty. Multi-method approaches are also needed to examine the rather complex relations between material poverty and broader forms of disadvantage and social exclusion in rural areas. REFERENCES

Bradley, T. (1986) ‘Poverty and dependency in village England’ in P. Lowe, T. Bradley and S. Wright (eds) Deprivation and Welfare in Rural England, Norwich: GeoBooks Brown, M. (1983) The Structure of Disadvantage, London: Heinemann Chapman, P., E. Phimister, M. Shucksmith, R. Upward and E. Vera-Toscano (1998) Poverty and Exclusion in Rural Britain: The Dynamics of Low Income and Employment, York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation Cloke, P. and Milbourne, P. (2001) ‘Poverty, social exclusion and rural space: making connections’, paper presented to the Association of American Geographers annual meeting, New York Cloke, P., M. Goodwin and P. Milbourne (1997a) Rural Wales: Community and Marginalization, Cardiff: University of Wales Press Cloke, P., P. Milbourne and C. Thomas (1994) Lifestyles in Rural England, London: Rural Development Commission Cloke, P., P. Milbourne and C. Thomas (1997b) ‘Living lives in different ways? Deprivation, marginalisation and changing lifestyles in rural England’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 22/3, 210–30

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Cloke, P., Milbourne, P. and Widdowfield, R. (2002) Rural Homelessness: Issues, Experiences and Policy Responses, Bristol: The Policy Press Curtin, C., T. Haase and H. Tovey (1996) Poverty in Rural Ireland, Dublin: Oak Tree Press Duncan, C. (ed.) (1992) Rural Poverty in America, Westport: Auburn (1999) Worlds Apart: Why Poverty Persists in Rural America, New Haven: Yale University Press Dunn, J., I. Hodge, S. Monk and C. Kiddle (1998) Developing Indicators of Rural Disadvantage, London: Rural Development Commission Fitchen, J. (1991) Endangered Spaces, Enduring Spaces: Change, Identity and Survival in Rural America, Boulder: Westview Press Gordon, D., L. Adelman, K. Ashworth, J. Bradshaw, R. Levitas, S. Middleton, C. Pantazis, D. Patsios, S. Payne, P. Townsend and J. Williams (2000) Poverty and Social Exclusion in Britain, York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation Harrop, A. and G. Palmer (2002) Indicators of Poverty and Social Exclusion in England: 2002, London: New Policy Institute Mack, J. and S. Lansley (1985) Poor Britain, London: Allen and Unwin McLaughlin, B. (1985) Deprivation in Rural Areas, London: Department of the Environment (1986) ‘The rhetoric and reality of rural deprivation’, Journal of Rural Studies, 2, 291–307 Milbourne, P. (1997) ‘Hidden from view: poverty and marginalisation in the British countryside’, in P. Milbourne (ed.) Revealing Rural ‘Others’: Representation, Power and Identity in the British Countryside, London: Pinter (2004a) Rural Poverty: Marginalization and Exclusion in Britain and the United States, London: Routledge Milbourne, P. (2004b) ‘The local geographies of poverty: a rural case-study’, Geoforum, 35/5, 559–75 Moseley, M. (1980) Rural Development and its Relevance to the Inner-City Debate, London: Social Science Research Council. Newby, H. (1985) Green and Pleasant Land? London: Wildwood House Newby, H., C. Bell, D. Rose and P. Saunders (1978) Property, Paternalism and Power, London: Hutchinson Policy Studies Institute (1998) Rural Disadvantage: Understanding the Processes, London: RDC Room, G. (1995) (ed.) Beyond the Threshold: The Measurement and Analysis of Social Exclusion, Bristol: The Policy Press Rural Sociological Task Force on Persistent Rural Poverty (1993) Persistent Poverty in Rural America, Boulder: Westview Press Scott, D., N. Shenton and B. Healy (1991) Hidden Deprivation in the Countryside, Glossop: Peak Park Trust

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Shaw, J. M. (1979) Rural Deprivation and Planning, Norwich: GeoBooks Shucksmith, M., P. Chapman, G. Clark with S. Black and E. Conway (1996a) Rural Scotland Today: The Best of Both Worlds, Aldershot: Avebury Shucksmith, M., D. Roberts, D. Scott, P. Chapman and E. Conway (1996b) Disadvantage in Rural Areas, London: Rural Development Commission Townsend, P. (1979) Poverty in the United Kingdom, Harmondsworth: Penguin Walker, A. (ed.) (1978) Rural Poverty, London: CPAG Woodward, R. (1995) ‘“Deprivation” and “the rural”: an investigation into contradictory discourses’, Journal of Rural Studies, 12, 55–67

8 L A N D O F L O S T C O N T E N T ’: RURALISM, ENGLISHNESS AND HISTORICAL CHANGE IN THE COUNTRYSIDE, 1890−1990

‘THE

Alun Howkins

On Thursday 10 July 1997, a rally of upwards of 100,000 people took place in Hyde Park in London. The purpose of the rally, according to the advertisements placed by the organizers in all the ‘quality’ newspapers, was ‘to fight for the future of the countryside’ (Guardian, 25 July 1997: 17). However, as the press reports leading up to, and following on from, the rally and demonstration show, the main focus of this ‘defence’ was the fear that the new Labour government might ban some field sports, especially hunting with dogs. For whatever reason, and by whatever means, support for the rally was organized in rural areas, it was the urban response, and especially the response of the normally unsympathetic left and liberal press, which was so striking. To a person these papers declared, along with John Vidal in The Guardian, that the time had come to ‘reassess’ the issue of fox hunting, not because it had suddenly become less barbaric, but because it had become a symbol for the rural part of Britain which felt ‘genuine sense of resentment and betrayal’ by government and ‘the left/green consensus’ which was represented in part by the Labour victory in the election of 1 May 1997 (Guardian, 25 July 1997: 17). While the sudden concern for the social conditions in rural areas was entirely laudable, and certainly in Vidal’s case genuine, an historical account of the relationship between the ‘rural’ and the ‘national’ in this century points to a more complex origin and history to the great sighs of liberal conscience which greeted the arrival in London of the Countryside Alliance demonstrators. At its core is a tension, constantly reworked and evolving, between a recognition of the urban nature of England and English society on the one hand; and the wish to preserve what is essentially a cultural fiction, that England retains its ‘rural’ character and that a rural essence is at the heart of some ‘real’ England, on the other.

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This tension, and its variations, are a key part of the cultural history of England in the twentieth century and have made the countryside, the land and the rural a site of constant conflict. England was, as generations of school children once learned, the ‘first industrial nation’. It was also, by most definitions, the first truly urban nation. In 1851 a narrow majority of the population lived in towns. Continued rural depopulation meant that by 1901 77 per cent of the population lived in urban districts. During the same period the contribution of agriculture, the main rural industry, to the Gross National Income fell from around 20 per cent to about 6 per cent. Similarly, the numbers employed in the industry fell from just over 2 million men and women to 1.4 million, a decline of about 30 per cent at a time when the population of England and Wales grew by 45 per cent (Mitchell and Deane, 1962: 60–6, 363). What is interesting is that as the twentieth century progresses these trends start to diverge. The contribution of agriculture to the national product continued to fall to only just above 2 per cent in 1980. The numbers employed in the industry fell likewise: by 1980–1 there were only 222,100 men and women employed in agriculture (Holderness, 1985: 170–2). However, from 1911 onwards the decline in the population of the rural districts ceased. This has meant that the proportion of the population living in rural areas was at first stable and then increasing. Between 1971 and 1991 the population of the rural areas increased by nearly 2 million or 17 per cent (Department of the Environment, 1995: 13). This means that in the near future, and if present trends continue, we shall have the same distribution of population between the urban and rural in 2001 as we had in 1901, which will make Britain unusual, and probably unique, in Northern Europe. That this is likely to occur is supported by a Henley Centre for Forecasting survey carried out in 1995, which showed that 48 per cent of urban dwellers wanted to move into the countryside (Guardian, 27 September 1995: 7). What this shows is a continuing and growing desire on the part of British, but especially English, men and women to live in the countryside. At its simplest one could argue that this represents a recognition of a reality – country life is better in quality than urban. As Nicci Gerrard the novelist wrote early in 1999: My version of [London] has undergone a dramatic transformation since having children. I don’t think about the quality of night life, but the quality of air. … I don’t want to live near pubs, but near parks. I worry about schools, lorries, syringes in the sandpit, asthma. Health and safety overrule fine food and adult fun. (Guardian Review, 31 January 1999: 1) Yet this is by no means clear to much of the population of Europe, where the urban population continues to grow at the expense of the rural. What this then

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suggests is that ‘country life’, or a kind of ruralism, has a particular place within recent English history and culture. The version of the countryside and of country life which lies at the core of this vision stems, as I have argued elsewhere, from a class fraction of the artistic/ intellectual élite in the years before the Great War (Howkins, 1986). This ideal found its expression in a wide range of cultural practices: for example, ‘English’ music; the revival of vernacular architecture; interest in rural crafts and industries, and the writing of rural poems and novels. Above all it meant leaving the city and living in the countryside, for at least part of the time. If we can identify the origins of modern ruralist ideology in the years before the Great War and within particular cultural forms, what have they in common? Firstly, they remain essentially the possession of a section of the élite. However, the role of that élite in shaping the cultural concerns of the immediate pre-Great War world was fundamental. More importantly, aspects of their ideas were spreading. The early socialist movement had a profoundly anti-urban streak, and as a result these ideas gained currency among sections of the working-class movement, where they married neatly with an older tradition of radical agrarianism. Further, the quasisocialist Clarion movement with its cycling and rambling clubs and the Independent Labour Party’s parallel Leader Scouts, predate the interwar hiking craze by twenty years and in many cases formed the basis of working-class rambling and cycling clubs in those years. Secondly, there was a commonalty of cultural vision associated with these movements which was essentially ‘southern’. This in turn produced a model of an ideal landscape type. It is rolling or dotted with woodlands, and divided into fields by hedgerows. Its hills are smooth and bare, but not wild or rocky. Its streams and rivers flow rather than rush or tumble. Centrally, it was a worked landscape since people had a place in the ideal (Howkins, 1996). Even more importantly its ideal social structure is the village with its green, pub and church clustered together, its ideal architecture stone or half-timbered topped with thatch. What is central here is that, even before the First World War this ideal landscape had ceased to be an exact geographical location and had become instead a set of features by which rural beauty was defined. Hence parts of Shropshire, Suffolk or even the East Midlands could be included but other parts not. Thirdly, as a result of this, agriculture had, and has, retained a key place in England’s cultural self-image, although its economic contribution to Britain’s economy is now minute. We can see this beginning at the moment of the industry’s nineteenth-century decline. The evidence presented by farmers and many landowners to the two great Royal Commissions on the depression in agriculture in the 1880s and 1890s shows a tendency to special pleading in the defence of agriculture as a national ‘necessity’, both in economic and cultural terms. This was to become more and more clear especially in the years after 1930, and reached its

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current apogee in the Countryside Alliance demonstrations. The fact that the ‘agriculture’ being defended was increasingly industrial and commercial in character made (or makes) little difference to those who argued for its essential continuity. A Norfolk farmer of 2,000 acres, by definition an industrial unit, said in the mid1970s: ‘My family have farmed this area for over 300 years. … Basically I am a churchman, and I have a feeling of stewardship. One is conscious of the need to discharge adequately one’s duty. One has been given a great deal to be responsible for. So I must do things well’ (Newby et al., 1978: 333). In this kind of account the practice of agriculture becomes an essential part of the cultural construction of England. The first line of the 1995 government White Paper, Rural England: A Nation Committed to a Living Countryside, reads: ‘The enduring character of England is most clearly to be found in the countryside.’ Three paragraphs later it continues: ‘much of what we most value in the natural scene is the product of farming – hillsides whose beauty is dependent upon grazing, water meadows which need to be used for cattle if they are to be preserved, dry stone walls, hedges and traditional buildings.’ Here the ‘natural’ world becomes not the wild and untamed nature of moorland or fen but the farmed landscape of order; thus the ‘enduring character of England’ rests with her farmers (Department of the Environment, 1995: 6). Nevertheless this imagery and the ‘Englishness’ drawn from it were contested. In Scotland, Ireland and Wales there was no consensual countryside, and the notion of ‘Englishness’ was seen as an alien imposition. However, even in England there were problems. If we look very briefly at the history of English socialism in the years before the Great War we can see some of these conflicts. The notion of the land as the source of all wealth, inherited from Chartism and the transitional popular culture of the 1830s and 1840s, died slowly among rank-and-file socialists (Chase, 1988). Added to that, the ‘Great Depression’ in agriculture from the late 1870s until the mid-1890s, rural depopulation and the perceived ‘waste’ of agricultural land gave added urgency to the rural question. A few literally went back to the land – and with some success. Even the derided ‘communes’ of Tolstoyans and anarchists were often broken by internal dissension rather than economic failure. The Clousden Hill Communist and Co-operative Colony on the outskirts of Newcastle sold their produce to the Newcastle and Sunderland Co-ops as well as local ‘capitalist’ traders. Nor did the founders have the fuzzy ideas all too often associated with ‘back to the landers’ by their critics. Its founding statement read: ‘The work, whether agricultural, gardening or industrial, to be done on the most advanced principles of scientific research and instruction; machinery to be used wherever possible so soon as the funds of the Society permit such to be done’ (Todd, 1986: 26). Under scientific principles they built four glasshouses and cold frames where they grew tomatoes and cucumbers. They fattened geese and turkeys for the Christmas market; kept chickens to sell for meat

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and produce eggs, and grew chrysanthemums, orchids and above all roses (Todd, 1986: 23, 38). What we see here is in fact a perfect example of ‘convertible husbandry’ of the kind that some agrarian historians point to as the most successful outcome of agricultural depression (Thirsk, 1997: 165–98). Yet, as William Morris had recognized, attractive as these little havens of peace were they were no answer to the larger problems of agriculture, nor did they address the crucial antagonism between country and town. In News from Nowhere, ‘old Hammond’ describes how in the aftermath of the revolution, ‘people flung themselves on the freed land like a wild beast on his prey.’ However, it took other changes before the new society could work: ‘the differences between town and country grew less and less; and it was indeed this world of the country vivified by the thought and briskness of town bred folk which has produced the happy and leisurely but eager life of which you have had a first taste’ (Morris, 1891: 61). Here we see the crucial distinction between Morris’s ruralism and the nostalgia of many ruralist writers and critics of the years before the Great War. The ‘rural’ is not superior by nature, to go ‘back to the land’ is not enough. Again Old Hammond compares the situation immediately after the revolution precisely with the fourteenth century so beloved of radical mediaevalists, but sees that period as one of failure. Against this a new relationship between town and country, sketched in much of Morris’s writing, needs to be established, drawing on the virtues of the country – especially the environment and perhaps its ‘traditions’ – and the liveliness of the town. This point was often picked up in the labour press in the years before the Great War where ‘back-to-the-land’ colonies were criticized for failing to recognize the contradictions of their short-term position. In 1900, for example, Robert Williams wrote in the Labour Leader that ‘the ideal colonist does not escape from reality, so far he cannot; he is bound being mortal and a Briton, in these islands, to have resort to the system, evil though it is, in order that he might live’ (Labour Leader, 6 January 1900: 3). Moving on from this criticism, the idea of a new country and new town was picked up by socialist land reformers as the essential end to be achieved by land nationalization. In 1908, in a series of articles under the title ‘Towards Socialism’, Bruce Glaisier wrote in conventional enough vein, ‘the land calls the people, and the people, unbound, hasten to the land’. However, he separates himself from a simple idyllicist notion by going on that this ‘will not destroy, but recreate and greatly sweeten and ennoble the towns … (while) … village life will be restored, invigorated and enriched’ (Labour Leader, 14 August 1908: 513). Nor was it only socialists. The Liberal, David Lloyd George, drawing on the vast reservoirs of Welsh bitterness against English landlordism made the land a key political issue. At Limehouse, in July 1909, he directed this anger at the landlords of

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the great English estates whose ‘natural’ and ‘organic’ social structures were so admired by the peddlers of rural harmony: The landlord is a gentleman – I have not a word to say about him in his personal capacity – the landlord is a gentleman who does not earn his wealth. He does not even trouble to receive his wealth. … He does not even trouble to spend his wealth. … His sole function, his chief pride, is the stately consumption of wealth produced by others. (Lloyd George, 1910: 156–7) In Tysoe in Warwickshire the young A. W. Ashby, still a farm worker and far away from the great agriculturist he was to become, ‘stuck a copy of Lloyd George’s Limehouse speech on the frame of the mahogany and gilt mirror, laughing for the terseness of the attack on wealth and privilege. … That feudal business must be finished now!’ (Ashby, 1961: 251–2). Indeed Ashby took from Lloyd George and from his father’s heroic fight for a bit of land of his own, a lifelong commitment to small farms and what the French would call worker/ peasants which fits uneasily with the development of British agriculture since the nineteenth century. Nor was the young Ashby alone. By 1914 both the Liberal and Labour Parties had made land reform a major part of their electoral platform, while even the Conservative Party was cautiously moving towards some version of peasant proprietorship. In all this the land of Britain, and especially England, was a deeply contested asset. To the young socialists and radical Liberals the land was a national treasury, but one which had been stolen by the élite and wasted. For example, time and again in the 1900s, the connection was made between land not used, or used for game preserving or the pleasure of the élite, and unemployment. ‘Idle Land Means Idle Men’ says a poster showing unemployed farm workers looking over a gate marked ‘Game Preserve. Trespassers will be prosecuted.’ What these radicals drew from ruralism and, in many cases, a deep love of the countryside, was not Englishness but revolution. The Great War, with its use of the imagery of the rural in propaganda, as well as within the literary and artistic representations of conflict, strengthened the popularity of the idealized view of the country as holding some essential Englishness. Indeed, the war seems to have speeded up this process. Paul Fussell has argued eloquently for the importance of the ‘pastoral’ form not only in the writing about the war but in shaping the sensibilities of those who fought (Fussell, 1975: 57–69). The most eloquent testimony comes, of course, from the élite in the writing of Brooke, Sassoon and Blunden most obviously. In Blunden’s Undertones of War particularly, the horror and waste of the Flanders landscape are constantly set against a soothing and restoring land of England, and in the ‘simple’ life of the East Anglian family of his first wife (Webb, 1990: 84–5).

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Sassoon pictured the ultimate escape for his men in a pastoral (or perhaps picture postcard) reworking of his Kent childhood. ‘I wish’, he wrote in 1917, ‘ I could write a book of Consolations for Homesick Soldiers in the field.’ Not surprisingly his landscape is a stereotype of the ‘South Country’, with grey church, village green and ultimately the ‘rose grown porch of some discreet little house’ with ‘ a girl in a print dress … waiting, waiting for the returning footsteps along the twilight lane, while the last blackbird warbles from the maytree’ (Sassoon, 1983: 147). However, although the evidence is hard to find, there is no reason to think these feelings were restricted only to the élite. The antithesis of battlefield and home was just as great for many ‘ordinary’ soldiers as for their officers. Postcards from the front as often show soldiers dreaming of a ‘rural’ home as they show patriotic motifs. Further, as George L. Mosse has argued, the rural was a necessary part of the immediate post-war world. For many who had fought on all sides nature ‘healed’ the dead land by restoring it, in the same way as the ex-soldier protagonists of J. L. Carr’s powerful novel A Month in the Country search for healing in rural England (Carr, 1980: 15; Mosse, 1990: chs 5 and 6). However, it was to be in the inter-war era that the ‘long, long trail’ found its resting place in a rural Britain. As Hardy and Ward write in the study of the plotland settlements of the immediate post war period: After the First World War, many a survivor suffering from the effects of gas was urged to get out of London, while there were others, terribly disfigured, who wanted to avoid the daily encounters of city living. And there were yet more who, counting themselves fortunate to have survived, resolved not to go back to the life of the urban toiler, but to invest the gratuity paid to demobilised soldiers in a new life in the country. … Dreams of chicken farming or market gardening may have been easily shattered, but the patch of land and the owner built house on it remained. (Hardy and Ward, 1984: 190) Most of all, the towns themselves came to the countryside. As the 1921 Census noted, rural population appeared to have fallen since 1911 but in fact it had grown because of ‘the gradual extension of the urban at the expense of the rural districts’ (Census, 1923: 23). The suburb was coming of age: ‘gradually’, writes Peter Mandler, ‘the cities flowed out into the country’ and the ‘countryside’ was under siege in a way it had never been even at the height of industrial and urban expansion in the middle years of the nineteenth century (Mandler, 1997: 229). But it was as a site of recreation that the greatest changes came to the country districts – the countryside became a desirable place to play as well as to live. The growth of rambling and cycling clubs in many working class areas of London and the south, as well as in the more ‘classic’ proletarian communities of the north,

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brought tens of thousands of working men and women into the countryside each weekend. The growth of motorcycle and car ownership among the middle class, especially in the south, created an industry of guidebooks and magazines. The monthly Morris Owner took the proud possessor of a new Morris Minor on tours through (especially) southern England, and guide books like John Prioleau’s Car and Country called itself ‘a book written for lovers of the open road, and of England, written by one’ (Prioleau, 1929: v). In an age of literary modernism the distinctly un-modernist writings of Kipling (Sussex), Hardy (‘Wessex’), Brett Young (Worcestershire), Mary Webb (Worcestershire/Shropshire), Housman (Shropshire) and Shelia Kaye Smith (Sussex), not only continued to be published but were enormously successful in breeding a tourist industry of their own within their own invented countrysides of the south lands. However, it was not always the same rural or the same invented countryside. In the inter-war period, as in the pre-Great War years, different and competing versions of the rural appear based on class lines or on other criteria. From the 1920s onwards, to some – usually middle-class – defenders of the country ‘ideal’, the new popular interest in the rural areas was the cuckoo in their nest. Organizations like the impeccably correct (in some ways) Surrey Anti-Litter League fulminated against trippers by car, bike or on foot who despoiled the countryside not only with their litter, but also with their loud songs and coarse manners (Jeans, 1990; Brace, 2000). To many in this group, the desire of the working-class family to build a wooden hut on a tiny piece of rural England, or the wish of the bank clerk to recreate Tudor life in the ‘Tudor Bars’ of Slough, was as great a threat to ‘their’ rural England as electric pylons or arterial roads. As in the First World War, the Second World War was marked by a mobilization of the identification between Englishness and ruralism in both élite and popular culture. The examples are legion – from the huge importance of Englishness to the neo-romantic movement in both painting and literature (Mellor, 1987); through Frank Newbould’s famous series of ABCA posters of (mainly) rural and southern England with the slogan, ‘Your Britain; Fight for it Now’; to the lyrics of two of the war’s most popular songs: ‘There’ll Always Be an England’, with its evocation of ‘a cottage small/Beside a field of grain’: and ‘Blue Birds Over the White Cliffs of Dover’ with its Downland shepherd ‘tending his sheep’ and the ‘valleys blooming again’ once peace came. In the post-Second World War period the interwar tensions re-emerged with the apparent triumph of the urban. Raphael Samuel gives some support to this view in his extraordinary Theatres of Memory, where he points out that much popular as well as élite culture in the immediate post-Second World War period was marked by a high degree of ‘modernism’ and ‘urbanism’. It was only really in the late 1960s that what he calls ‘neo-vernacular’ appeared (or reappeared) as a major cultural force (Samuel, 1994: 59–67). However, again there are problems. Modernism and

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urbanism did not lead to any desire to stop leaving cities. The ‘new’ rural housing of the 1950s and 1960s also remains as studiedly ‘traditional’ as in the 1930s. Even the new towns, taking their cue from the writing of Patrick Abercrombie (who was himself a product of the Englishness of the 1920s), although they contained some blocks of flats were in general created around the notions of a collection of ‘villages’, as in Harlow in Essex or Crawley in Sussex. Culturally, the 1950s and 1960s, although fiercely urban in many respects, retain, as in the 1930s, a popular ruralism which found its expression in the enormous popularity of the radio programme The Archers (Laing, 1992) and a wide range of popular novels like those of village life by Miss Read. Seen in this historical perspective, the centrality of ideas of the rural to the English national culture and identity is much clearer – as are some of the tensions arising from it. These tensions have changed in form in the Second World War periods and perhaps become more apparent and hence more central, to very recent political argument at least. Let us look briefly at some key areas. At the most basic level all post-war government, at least until the 1980s, sought, via ‘green belt’ legislation, to protect rural areas from excessive building, especially, although not always, on the outskirts of existing urban areas. Yet the demand for rural housing, and a part of rural Englishness, continued to rise. To an extent, this has been dealt with by those wishing to live in rural areas buying and modernizing old housing stock freed from occupation by the continuing fall in the numbers employed in agriculture. There is also the limited possibility of converting agricultural buildings, especially old barns, to residential use. In this situation conflicts over housing began to emerge in villages between those who were ‘original’ inhabitants and those described as ‘incomers’, which has been widely discussed in sociological and anthropological literature from the late 1950s onwards. As Frances Oxford wrote in 1981 of the village of Elmdon in North-West Essex, about an hour from London: The capital cost of buying and modernising the old houses has prevented local people from entering the market. … The prices of houses have been pushed up by people with high incomes moving out of more expensive housing markets (especially London) and into Elmdon. Elmdoners have no control over this and, not surprisingly, local people consider that the immigrants threaten their housing supply. (Strathern, 1981: 217) This situation was made worse in Elmdon, and in many English villages, by the inability, or more often the unwillingness, of local authorities to build low-cost housing for rental, and was further exacerbated by government legislation encouraging the sale of such housing during the 1980s. Yet old housing was scarce and getting scarcer, especially in the mainly south-

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eastern areas of Britain where economic boom in the commercial and service sectors since the early 1980s has created huge demand. For example, the 1991 census showed that the fastest growing areas in terms of population in Britain were Buckinghamshire and Cambridgeshire, both within less than an hour of central London, where population had grown by between 10 and 12 per cent in the previous ten years, and where demand shows no sign of easing off. This has led, particularly during the last twenty years, to a piecemeal relaxation of planning legislation, and to growth of small-scale and often expensive housing development in small towns and even villages. These changes provoked a fierce reaction from Country Life, which in 1990 wrote: ‘In the course of a decade the present government has steadily thrown to the winds many of the great achievements of post-war town and country planning … in the last ten years suburbia has begun once again to swamp large areas of the south and midlands’ (Strong, 1996: 218). As a result of these changes it is obvious that the majority of the population in rural England no longer have any real contact with the land. Even in 1977 the Elmdon study showed that only 30 per cent of the population of this ‘rural community’ worked in agriculture while 20 per cent travelled to London every day. ‘Rural’ society in Britain is more and more a matter not of economic factors but of social and cultural ones. As Country Life again put it in the Editorial of the issue celebrating its ninetieth birthday in 1987: ‘Love of our landscape is a mainspring of our existence. … English civilisation differs from that of France, Germany and Italy, and other countries of the western world, in that it is not emotionally based on cities … but it is emotionally based on the countryside’ (Strong, 1996: 219). What is terribly important though is that this cultural construction of an essentially rural Englishness had, in a curious way, come of age, and become a mass movement, in the new housing and the commuter-dominated villages of southern England, a landscape which was in a way both post-industrial and post-agricultural. But the very fact that these ‘incomers’ had no contact with the workings of agriculture had the potential to cause problems, not least because of the huge success of post-war British agriculture. At the end of the Second World War British agriculture stood at a high point in public esteem. Britain’s farmers had more than helped to win the war: they had, in the view of their own organization and (more importantly) in the view of public opinion, been absolutely fundamental to victory. In his Conclusion to his ‘official’ history of wartime agriculture Sir Keith Murray writes: ‘this history should be, without question, a “success story” – successful far beyond the calculations and estimates of the pre-war planners’ (Murray, 1955: 340). And indeed the record was impressive, even with the caveats of more recent work like that of Martin and the present writer (Howkins, 2003a: chs 7 and 8; Martin, 2000: 47–57). Against this

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background the continuation of wartime subsidies to agriculture seemed not only economically necessary but also morally just – rewarding farmers for their part in the ‘people’s war’. Government subsidies became the basis for the continued profitability of farming in the post-war era. As Howard Newby has written, British agriculture from the 1950s to the 1980s was ‘spectacularly successful; farm productivity increased fourfold in the four decades after 1939, and by 1983 Britain had become virtually self-sufficient in temperate foodstuffs’ (Newby, 1987: 186). At the basis of this change, though, was the use to which subsidies were put mainly in saving labour costs by the widespread introduction of machinery and artificial fertilizers and pesticides. The heroes of Britain’s ‘people’s war’ found a powerful ally in the new science to create a second agricultural revolution, which like the first fed the cities and depopulated the land. This view of agriculture’s huge success has found little challenge in mainstream academic work – economic, social or scientific – in the last few decades. Economic accounts of post-war agriculture like that of Holderness by and large accepted the prevailing wisdom of the success story, even if later accounts, like that of Martin, ‘raise worries’ about some of the environmental issues. No such problem was present in mainstream agricultural writings before the late 1970s. Even as late as 1979 the Seventh Report of the Royal Commission on Environment Pollution could conclude: ‘there is no doubt that the use of pesticides is essential to maintain crop yields and therefore keep down the costs of agricultural products to consumers’ (Royal Commission, 1979: 5). This view was endorsed by Sir Tom Blundell in his Forward to Martin’s study of agriculture since 1931 (Martin 2000: xiii). Nor did the ‘new’ science of sociology have much to say on large-scale agriculture before the 1974 study undertaken by Newby and his colleagues, staying instead with studies of the ‘marginal’ agricultural regions, especially regions of hill farming, which were seen as ‘traditional societies’ under threat. However, the changing social composition of the rural community, and the growing importance in a cultural and social sense of Britain’s countryside to the near 50 per cent of the urban world who longed for a rural escape, increasingly came into conflict with agricultural success. Firstly, the fact of living in the countryside but not working in it raises quite different questions about country life. As Robin Grove-White, former Director of the CPRE, put it in The Guardian in 1995: ‘there are now a growing variety of views as to what (the countryside) is actually for. This transcends the issue of the right to roam. It can be seen in the range of non-work uses to which urban dwellers now wish to put the countryside’ (Guardian Society, 27 September 1995: 4). But it is not only ‘urban’ dwellers, rather the urbs in rure, who are seeking new uses for the countryside, which seldom fit in with the changes in English agriculture since the war. As Roy Strong wrote of those who moved into the countryside in the 1970s:

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This general tone was given specific focus by the general growth in environmental consciousness from the late 1960s. This is perhaps where Graham Cox’s ‘residents who have no connection with farming’ who have been recruited as ‘local “eyes and ears” by regulatory agencies in the fight against farm based pollution’ have come from (Cox, 2000: 4). Also centrally important is the growth not so much of an organized green movement but the politicization of existing welfare and preservation groups. In Britain this centred, initially at least, on specific damage done to wildlife, especially wild birds, by the use of chemicals, the ‘ill treatment’ of farm animals, which were intensively reared, and the grubbing up of hedgerows. In this movement, slowly at first, and then with real force, ‘agriculture’ was seen as the villain of the piece. In 1995 I used the organization ‘Mass Observation’ to get people’s views on changes in post-war agriculture and the current state of the countryside. What is clear from this is that a significant minority blames agriculture, and farmers in particular, for what is almost universally seen as a deterioration in country life since 1945 (Howkins, 2003b). The reaction of the agricultural industry to these changes has been twofold. The first has been to pass the blame onto the urban world by claiming that it is the city, with its demand for cheap food, which is ultimately the source of the problems. As Farmers’ Weekly put it in 1994: ‘at the heart of farming’s image lies a paradox. Most consumers romanticise a British countryside that never was, yet are wholly reliant on modern farming for low-cost, high quality food’ (Farmers’ Weekly, 28 February 1994: 5). This view often invokes history; here, for instance is William Deedes, the right-wing journalist, writing on the 1998 Countryside March: There were quite a few on the march who belonged to my generation and who remembered a time when, not much more than half a century ago, the life of this nation lay in the farmer’s hands. German U-boats knew how to strangle this island, in both world wars. Everything we could grow contributed to victory. In both world wars, we looked to the farmer for salvation. (Daily Telegraph, 22 April 1998) Secondly, there is the argument that the urban majority does not ‘understand’ country life and agriculture. In this view the country is essentially ‘England’ – an embattled minority who are surrounded by an alien and cosmopolitan society, which seeks to destroy its ways and its ‘freedoms’. Time and again the rhetoric is

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that of 1940 with the countryside representing Britain standing alone in the face of tyranny. Not for nothing was the main slogan of the 1998 countryside march ‘Resist the Urban Jackboot.’ These divisions now appear to be fundamental to any consideration of the current state of the British, and especially English, countryside. England, we could argue, is the first post-industrial nation as she was the first industrial one. Yet, despite the urbanizing and supposedly ‘post-modernist’ trends since the 1980s, the rural, in some sense the ‘pre-modern’, remains extraordinarily powerful. It is clear that a huge number of people want to live in the rural areas, but have no way of fulfilling that dream. Even more regard the countryside as a site of leisure. Between them these groups make up the huge majority of the British population, and in a democracy that is central. However, both the desire to live in the country and to ‘use’ it as a site of leisure, which I have argued are deeply rooted in the national culture, appear to be at odds with much current farming practice. Against this majority view there is clearly a strongly held belief among the minority of the population, who live mostly in the rural areas, that the urban world is using its power to crush much that they see as central not only to country life but to national identity. Added to this, the undoubted decline in aspects of the rural economy which has been obvious in the last few years has produced a sense of bitterness and anger in many country districts which is directed against the same ‘outsiders’ – i.e. governments, ‘the chattering classes’ and Europe – who are seen as the wearers of the notorious jackboot. Ultimately, there is a deep irony here. Both sides of the divide believe in the same thing – the essential part of the countryside in English national culture – and both believe that they are its defenders. Both use the same images of timelessness and continuity, although they attach them to different things. What neither group recognizes is the final contradiction that the rural England they so desperately seek and seek to defend is no more. In a brilliant and elegiac novel of 1990s rural England, The Harvest, Christopher Hart (1999) draws a picture of a village from which agriculture is banished, in which farms have become either factories or theme parks, and where the villagers are either incomers or exiles in the few remaining council houses. It tells the story of six months in the life of a 17-yearunemployed country boy, while moving backwards and forwards through the last fifty years. It is the story of the end of a way of life. Early in the book the desolation of that lost world is summed up brilliantly: But Lewis Pike went walking on the high downs. He met no one in all those acres and miles. Those high downs empty of shepherds, those fields empty of ploughmen and nodding horses. Those lost landscapes. (Hart, 1999: 17)

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200 A C KN O WL E D G E M E N T S

A different and shorter version of this chapter was read as a paper at ‘Rustica Nova’ International Conference on Rural Studies, Somero, Finland, in July 1999 and published in Kalle Pihlainen and Erik Tirkonnen (eds) Rustica Nova: The New Countryside and Transformations in Operating Environment, Turku: Institute of History, 2002 REFERENCES

Ashby, Mabel K. (1961) Joseph Ashby of Tysoe, 1859–1919: A Study of English Village Life, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Brace, Catherine (2000) ‘A pleasure ground for the noisy herds? Incompatible encounters with the Cotswolds and England, 1900–1950’, Rural History, 11/1, 75–94 Carr, J. L. (1980) A Month in the Country, Harmondsworth: Penguin Census (1923) Census of England and Wales, 1921: General Report, London Chase, Malcolm (1988) The People’s Farm: English Radical Agrarianism, 1775–1840, Oxford: Clarendon Press Department of the Environment (1995) Rural England: A Nation Committed to a Living Countryside, London: Department of the Environment and Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food Fussell, Paul (1975) The Great War and Modern Memory, Oxford: Oxford University Press Hardy, Denis and Colin Ward (1984) Arcadia for All, London: Mansell Hart, Christopher (1999) The Harvest, London: Faber and Faber Holderness, B. A. (1985) British Agriculture Since 1945, Manchester: Manchester University Press Howkins, Alun (1986) ‘The Discovery of rural England’, in Robert Colls and Philip Dodd, Englishness: Politics and Culture, 1880–1920, London: Croom Helm (1996) ‘From Hodge to Lob: reconstructing the English farm labourer, 1870– 1914’, in Malcolm Chase and Ian Dyck (eds), Living and Learning: Essays in Honour of J. F. C. Harrison, Aldershot: Brookfield, Ashgate Publishing Co. (2003a) The Death of Rural England: A Social History of the Countryside Since 1900, London: Routledge (2003b) ‘Qualifying the evidence: perceptions of rural change in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century’, in David Gilbert, David Matless and Brian Short (eds) Geographies of British Modernity, Oxford: Blackwell Jeans, D. N. (1990) ‘Planning and the myth of the English countryside in the interwar period’, Rural History, 1/2, 249–64 Laing, Stuart (1992) ‘Images of the rural in popular culture, 1750–1990’ in Brian Short (ed.), The English Rural Community: Image and Analysis, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

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Lloyd George, David (1910) Better Times, London: Hodder Mandler, Peter (1997) The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home, New Haven and London: Yale University Press Martin, John (2000) The Development of Modern Agriculture: British Farming Since 1931, Basingstoke: Macmillan Mellor, David (ed.) (1987) A Paradise Lost: The Neo-Romantic Imagination in Britain, 1935–55, London: Lund Humphries Mitchell, B. R. and Phyllis Deane (1962) Abstract of British Historical Statistics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Morris, William (1891) News from Nowhere, London Mosse, George L. (1990) Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press Murray, Keith A. H. (1955) Agriculture: History of the Second World War (United Kingdom Civil Series), London: HMSO Newby, Howard (1987) Country Life: A Social History of Rural Britain, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson Newby, Howard, Colin Bell, David Rose and Peter Saunders (1978) Property, Paternalism and Power, London: Hutchinson Prioleau, John (1929) Car and Country, London: Dent Royal Commission (1979) Seventh Report of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, London Samuel, Raphael (1994) Theatres of Memory, London: Verso Sassoon, Siegfried (1983) Diaries 1915–18, London: Faber and Faber Strathern, Marilyn (1981) Kinship at the Core: An Anthropology of Elmdon, a Village in North-West Essex in the Nineteen-Sixties, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Strong, Roy (1996) Country Life, 1897–1997: The English Arcadia, London: Country Life Books Thirsk, Joan (1997) Alternative Agriculture: A History from the Black Death to the Present Day, Oxford: Oxford University Press Todd, Nigel (1986) Roses and Revolutionists: The Story of the Clousden Hill Free Communist and Cooperative Colony, 1894–1902, Newcastle: People’s Publications Webb, Barry (1990) Edmund Blunden: A Biography, New Haven and London: Yale University Press

INDEX

Abbot, A., 136, 138 Abercrombie, Patrick, 31, 36, 195 Accum, Frederick, 123 Acts of Parliament: Adulteration of Food and Drink Act (1860), 123 Adulteration of Food and Drugs Act (1872), 123 Agriculture Act (1947), 12, 28, 53, 67, 84, 100–1 Agriculture Act (1957), 101 Animal Health Act (1981), 126 Cattle Diseases Prevention Act (1866), 124 Contagious Diseases (Animals) Act (1894), 124 Countryside Act (1968), 71 Countryside and Rights of Way Act (2000), 12, 71 Environmental Protection Act (1990), 71 Food Act (1984), 128 Food and Drugs Act (1938), 123 Food and Drugs Act (1955), 128 Food and Environmental Protection Act (1985), 128 Food Safety Act (1990), 127–8 National Insurance Act (1911), 44, 123 National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act (1949), 71 Nature Conservancy Council Act (1973), 71 Notifiable Diseases Acts, 122–3 Public Health Act (1848), 122 Public Health Act (1875), 122, 125 Sale of Food and Drugs Act (1875), 123 Town and Country Planning Act (1932), 32

Town and Country Planning Act (1947), 12, 28 Wildlife and Countryside Act (1981), 71, 148 Adam, B., 129, 138, 141, 142 Adelman, L., 184 A g e n d a 2 0 0 0 , 82, 85, 99, 101, 105, 107 Agricultural Organization Society (AOS), 36 Ahearn, M. C., 99, 106 Albert, Prince, 122 Anderson, Benedict, 13, 15 Anderson, I., 136, 138 Andrews, A. H., 125, 138 Appleby, J., 133, 138 A r c h e r s , T h e (BBC radio soap opera), 4, 161, 195 Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONBs), 72, 76 Argyle, Michael, 11, 15 Aristotle, 119 Ashby, A. W., 192 Ashby, Mabel K., 192, 200 Ashdown, Paddy, 23, 35 Ashworth, K., 184 Ashworth, W. B., 131, 138 Asquith, H. H., 35 Assize of Bread and Ale (1266), 120 Atkins, P., 126, 130, 135, 138 Attlee, Clement, 23, 30 Austen, Jane, 147 Avery, G., 101, 106 Baldwin, Stanley, 22–3, 24, 27, 30, 34, 36, 37 Balfour, Lady Eve, 44–5, 46, 52, 58 Barker, John, 65 Barlow, K. E., 47, 49, 54, 56, 58 Barnett, A., 92, 106

204 Barnett, Anthony, 17, 54, 57, 58 Barth, Karl, 50 Bartle Bogle Hegarty (advertising agency), 153 Bates, Thomas, 121 Bazalgette, Joseph, 122 BBC, 4, 15, 22 Beck, U., 129, 138, 141, 142 Bell, Colin, 16, 184, 201 Bellerby, J. R., 84, 107 Bennett, Sir Norman, 45 Bennett, R., 127, 138, 141 Benson, Richard, 7, 15, 17 Bettelheim, Eric, 145, 152, 154 Birkenhead, Lord (see Smith, F. E.) Black, S., 185 Blackburn, Sue, 137 Blair, Rt. Hon. Tony, MP, 23, 35, 151, 156, 162 Blaisdell, J. D., 120, 138 Blake, William, 25, 163 Bledisloe, Viscount, 42, 53 Blundell, Sir Tom, 197 Blunden, Edmund, 26–7, 37, 192 Blythman, Joanna, 12, 15 Board of Agriculture, 35 Body, Sir Richard, 63, 80 Bowers, J. K., 71, 80 Boyes, Georgina, 48, 58 Brace, Catherine, 194, 200 Bradley, T., 164, 172, 183 Bradshaw, J., 184 Brassley, Paul, 5, 13, 15, 90, 107 Brett Young, Francis, 194 Bridgeman, J., 141 British Association for Shooting and Conservation, 155 British Field Sports Society, 152, 155 British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), 179, 180, 181 British Institute of Agricultural Consultants, 65 British Medical Association (BMA), 131 British Social Attitudes Survey, 1992, 146 Britton, D. K., 90, 109 Broad, J., 121–2, 136, 138 Brooke, Rupert, 192 Brookes, B., 95, 109

The Contested Countryside Brown, M., 177, 183 Bruce, Maye E., 46 Buckwell, A., 110 Bud, Robert, 127, 134, 139 Burge, Richard, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163 Burnett, John, 123, 139 Burns, Lord, 161 Cameron, Ewen, 161 Camerson, S., 164 Campaign for Shooting, 152, 154 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), 158 Campbell, B. M. S., 120, 139 Canterbury, Archbishop of, 132 Carlton Club, 36 Carr. J. L., 193, 200 Carter, H., 124, 139 Census, 1921, 193, 200 Central Veterinary Laboratory (CVL), 126 Chadwick, Edwin, 122 Chamberlain, Austen, 36 Channing, F. A., 83, 107 Chapman, Dr Guy, 45 Chapman, P., 180, 182, 183, 185 Charlemagne, 119 Chartism, 190 Chase, Malcolm, 190, 200 Cheshire, P., 71, 80 Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG), 168 C h o o s e L i v e l i h o o d , 160, 163 Christiansen, K., 138 Christie, M., 142 Clarion Movement, 189 Clark, G., 147, 163, 185 Clark, J., 164 Clifton-Hadley, R., 138 Cloke, Paul, 170, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 182, 183–4 Clousden Hill Colony, 190 Cobbett, William, 3 Cockburn, W. C., 127, 139 College of Physicians, 119 Collins, E. J. T., 124, 138, 139 Colls, Robert, 200 Colman, D., 92, 107

Index Comerford, John, 54, 58 Commission of the EC, 79, 85, 86, 94, 101, 102, 103, 105, 106–7 Committee of Inquiry into Hunting with Dogs, 161 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), 65, 67, 68, 70, 81, 84–5, 98, 99, 100, 102, 112, 148 Common Market, 67 Commons, House of, 101, 103, 107, 127, 130, 140, 162 Company of Barbers, 119 Conford, Philip, 12, 58, 59 Connerton, P., 158, 163 Conservative Party, 10, 192 Constable, John, 21 Conway, E., 185 Cooper, Yvette, 39 Corn Laws, repeal of (1846), 20, 28, 34, 35 Council for the Church and Countryside (CCC), 48–52, 58 Council for the Preservation of Rural England (CPRE), 23, 26, 27, 31, 36, 197 Country Illustrated, 161 Country Landowners Association (CLA), 156, 161 Country Life, 24, 196 Country Sports, 155, 159, 162 Country Sports Business Group, 152 Countryside Agency, 1, 15, 72, 80, 150, 158, 161, 177, 179, 180, 182 Countryside Alliance, 13–14, 17, 145, 146, 150, 151, 155–63, 187, 190, 199 Countryside Business Group, 145, 151–3, 154, 155 Countryside Commission, 150 Countryside Movement, 13, 145, 150, 152, 153–5, 163 Court of Auditors, 82, 105, 107 Coward, Ralph, 49, 56 Cox, Graham, 13, 198 Crawley, D. P., 92, 108 Crewe Chronicle, 44 Crocker, Lucy H., 49, 59 Croft, G., 90, 110 Cullen Commission, 154 Currie, Edwina, 127

205 Curry Commission, 74 Curth, Louise, 132, 137, 139 Curtin, C., 178, 184 Daily Mail, 151 Daily Mirror, 151 Daily Telegraph, 151, 156, 198 Daston, L., 131, 139 Davies, John O., 128 Davies, R. H., 139 Davoudi, S., 164 Davy, Sir Humphrey, 123 Deane, Phyllis, 188, 201 Debord, Guy, 6, 15 Deedes, William, 11, 16, 198 DEFRA, 1, 16, 61, 62, 66, 68, 77, 80, 92, 105, 106, 149 Department of the Environment, 171, 188, 190, 200 Descartes, 51 Diack, L., 136, 139 Dickinson, B., 127, 139 Disraeli, Benjamin, 19 Dodd, Philip, 200 Douglas, Mary, 129, 133, 139 Drach, Alain, 153 Dubgaard, A., 110 Duffin, J., 122, 123, 133, 139 Duke, Edward, 159 Duncan, C., 168, 184 Dunleavy, P., 164 Dunlop, Robert H., 119, 120, 129, 139 Dunn, J., 179, 184 Durrall, J., 163 Dyck, Ian, 200 Echlin, Edward, 57, 58 Economic Reform Club and Institute (ERCI), 40–1, 42, 58 Edwards, K. L., 132, 134, 137, 139 Elias, N., 130, 139 El-Osta, H. S., 106 Engel’s Law, 11 English Nature, 62, 71, 80 Environment Agency, 71 Euro PA and Associates, 63, 80 European Economic Community (EEC), 5, 67, 70, 78, 84–5, 88, 99

206 European Union (EU), 12, 61, 64, 68, 70, 73, 78, 80, 81, 82, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 91, 94, 95, 99, 100, 103, 104, 112, 127 Eurostat, 86, 87, 91, 93, 96, 97, 102, 106, 108 Evans, S. J., 130, 139 Ewart Evans, George, 133, 140 Fallows, S. J., 120, 123, 140 Family Expenditure Survey, 96 Family Resources Survey, 96 Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN), 94, 95, 104, 106 Farm Business Survey, 91, 93, 94, 96, 98, 102, 104, 106 Farm Management Survey, 91, 92–3 Farmers’ Club, 40, 41, 42 Farmers’ Weekly, 8, 198 Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group, 72 Fennell, R., 85, 108 Ferguson-Smith, M., 141 Ferry, G., 128, 140 Fincham, I., 126, 140 Findeis, J. L., 108 Fine, B., 130, 140 Fish, R., 6, 16 Fisher, J. L., 120, 140 Fisher, J. R., 124, 136, 140 Fitchen, J., 168, 183, 184 Flynn, A., 164 Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 42, 89, 108 Food and Drug Agency (USA), 134 Food and Farming Year (1989), 149 Food Standards Agency, 71, 77, 128, 149 Ford, Henry, 36–7 Fordham, Montague, 47–8, 57, 58 Foster, Michael, MP, 151, 156, 159 Fowler, A., 134, 140 Franklin, M., 85, 101, 105, 109 French, M., 140 Fumagalli, V., 131, 140 Fussell, Paul, 192, 200 Galen, 131 Gamble, A., 159, 162, 164

The Contested Countryside Game Conservancy Trust, 152 Gamgee, John, 121, 130 Gardiner, Rolf, 42, 48–9, 56, 58 Gardner, B., 82, 105, 108 Gasson, R., 82, 84, 108 GATT, 67, 70, 127 Geddes, Lord, 53 George I, 121 George, Janet, 159, 164 George, W., 131, 140 Georgians, The (school of poetry), 26 Gerrard, Nicci, 188 Gibbon, Edward, 118, 140 Gilbert, David, 200 Giles, A. K., 92, 108 Gillan, Audrey, 9, 16 Gilman, 136 Glaisier, Bruce, 191 Glasner, P., 142 Glentanar, Lord, 53 Gnosticism, 50 Goering, H., 20 Goldsmith, Oliver, 4 Golinski, J., 129, 140 Goodison-Wickes, Dr, 155 Goodwin, M., 183 Gordon, D., 175, 184 Gorman, Teresa, 127, 141 Gowland Hopkins Committee, 1934, 135 Graham, S., 164 Grassmugg, B., 110 Gray, Thomas, 167 ‘Greensleeves’ (song), 56 Griffiths, Clare, 10, 16 Griggs, Barbara, 44, 58 Grove-White, Robin, 163, 197 Guardian, The, 147, 155, 156–7, 187, 188, 197 Gummer, John Selwyn, 99 Haase, T., 184 Hallam, H. E., 120, 140 Hallberg, M. C., 82, 108 Hallett, J., 147, 164 Halley, R. J., 140, 142 Hammond, 35 Hammurabi, Code of, 119 Hanbury-Tenison, Robin, 155, 159

Index Hansard, 140 Hardy, Denis, 193, 200 Hardy, Thomas, 6, 16, 194 Harris, S. A., 134, 142 Harrisson, Tom, 20–1, 22, 23, 25, 27 Harrop, A., 180, 181, 184 Hart, Christopher, 199, 200 Hart, Simon, 162 Harvey, D., 135, 140 Harvey, Graham, 14, 16, 17 Healey, P., 164 Health and Life, 46, 56 Health and Safety Commission, 9, 16 Healy, B., 184 Heasman, M., 140 Hemleben, J., 47, 58 Henley Centre for Forecasting, 188 Henry V, 26 Heron, Mary, 46, 58 Herrmann, R., 85, 108 Hildegard of Bingen, 120 Hill, Berkeley, 13, 14 Hobbema, 27 Hobsbawm, E., 148, 164 Hodge, I., 184 Holderness, B. A., 188, 197, 200 Holland and Holland (gunmakers), 152, 153 Holliday, I., 164 Holloway, J., 131, 140 Holloway, L., 12, 16 Holme, Constance, 8 Hooke, 132 Horace, 4 Horder, Lord, 40 Horse and Hound, 157, 159 Hosking, J. E., 49 Housman, A. E., 194 Howard, Sir Albert, 43, 44, 45, 47, 49, 52, 57, 58 Howarth, R. W., 99, 109 Howkins, Alun, 3, 14, 16, 17 Humphrey, Tom, 127, 135, 138, 140 Huns, The, 119 Hunt, L., 138 Hunza tribesmen, 43, 45 Hussey, Christopher, 23–4 IAHS, 96

207 Independent, The, 39 Independent Labour Party, 189 Ingold, Tim, 7, 16 Inland Revenue, 96 International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), 159 Irwin, A., 129, 140, 143 Itzkowitz, D., 148, 164 Jackson, John, 151 Jacob, M., 138 Jardine, L., 132, 141 Jeans, D. N., 194, 200 Jefferies, Richard, 26 Jefferson, Thomas. 4 Jenks, Jorian, 43, 49, 50, 53, 59 Jenner, M. S. R., 131, 141 Jensen, U., 108 Jesus Christ, 46, 50 Jews, 131 Jones, Eric, 122 Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 179, 183 Jukes, D., 128, 141 Kahun papyrus, 119 Kaye-Smith, Sheila, 9, 194 Kendall, 88 Kiddle, C., 184 Kieckhefer, R., 131, 141 King, F. H., 41, 59 Kinship in Husbandry, 42, 49 Kipling, Rudyard, 194 Kirk, J. H., 88, 100, 109 Kneafsey, M., 16 Koch, Robert, 130 Koolmees, P., 138 Kriple, K. F., 122, 141 Kuhn, T. S., 129, 141 Labour Leader, 191 Labour Party, 10, 162, 163, 187, 192 Laing, Stuart, 195, 200 Lancet, The, 123 Lancisi, Giovanni Maria, 121, 132 Lane, J., 120, 141 Langland, William, 4 Lansley, S., 175, 184 Lash, S., 129, 141

208 Lass, D. A., 108 Lawrence, F., 12, 16 Lawson-Tancred, Mary, 10, 16 Leader Scouts, 189 League against Cruel Sports, 146, 164 LEI, 104 Levitas, R., 184 Liberal Party, 192 Lindberg, D. C., 138 Linking the Environment and Farming (LEAF), 72 Linnaeus, 132 Lloyd George, David, 35, 36, 191–2, 201 Loftus, Pierse C., 42, 57 Lords, House of, 99, 109 Lovett, Neville, Bishop of Salisbury, 49, 59 Lowe, P., 147, 148, 149, 164, 183 Lund, P. J., 89, 97, 109 Lymington, Viscount (see under Portsmouth, Earl of) McCarrison, Sir Robert, 43–4, 47, 59 McFague, Sallie, 50, 59 McFall, John, MP, 147 Macfarlane, R., 155, 157, 164 McInerney, J., 127, 135, 141 Mack, J., 175, 184, McLaughlin, B., 171, 172, 173, 177, 178, 182, 184 McLaughlin, Rev. Patrick, 50 Macmillan, Harold, 57 Macnaghten, P., 163 McNally, R., 142 McNeill, W. H., 119, 141 McQuiston, J. R., 10, 16 MacSharry, Ray, 67 Madani-Pour, A., 164 Maddocks, Anne, 138 Maher, T. J., 107 Mail on Sunday, 147 Mairet, Philip, 49, 51–2, 59 Major, John, MP, 23, 35 Mandler, Peter, 193, 201 Mansholt Plan, 63–4, 80 Margetts, H., 158, 162, 164 Market Supply Committee, 40 Marks, H. F., 90, 109

The Contested Countryside Marsden, T., 149, 164 Marsh, Sir John, 12–13 Marshall, A., 133, 141 Marshall, B. J., 138, 139 Martin, John, 196, 197, 201 Martin, Tony, 9 Marx, Karl, 56 Massingham, H. J., 47, 49, 55–6, 57, 59 Mass Observation, 20–1, 22, 30, 37, 198 Matless, David, 200 Meat (play), 128 Medical Testament, 44, 52 Mellor, David, 194, 201 Merlin, 56 Michell, A. R., 141 Middleton, S., 184 Midmore, P., 142 Milbourne, Paul, 14, 164 Miller, E., 120, 141 Miller, Simon, 12, 13 Milton, John, 132 Ministry of Agriculture/Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF), 30, 44, 66, 77, 85, 88, 91, 92, 93, 97, 100, 101, 102, 106, 109, 124, 126, 127, 128, 130, 136, 141, 149, 152 Ministry of Health, 44, 136 Ministry of Information, 20 Ministry of Transport, 31 Mitchell, Austin, MP, 99 Mitchell, B. R., 188, 201 Monk, S., 184 Montagu, 35 Moore-Colyer, Richard J., 59 Moreddu, C., 109 Mormont, Marc, 149, 150, 163, 164 Morris, William, 47, 191, 201 Morris Owner, 194 Moseley, M., 172, 184 Mosse, George L., 193, 201 Mother Earth, 43, 45, 46, 48, 49 Munk, K. J., 110 Munton, R., 164 Murdoch, J., 147, 164 Murray, Sir Keith, 196, 201 Naphy, W. G., 141

Index Nash, Roderick Frazier, 1, 16 National Angling Conference, 152 National Farmers’ Union (NFU), 5, 8, 10, 30, 156 National Health Service (NHS), 54 National Parks, 75 Nehru, J., 42 Nelkin, 136 Newbould, Frank, 194 Newby, Howard, 6, 8, 16, 167, 168, 169, 184, 190, 197, 201 New English Weekly, 56 New Poor Law, 1834, 122 New Scientist, 117, 141 North, R., 127, 141 North, Richard A. E., 14, 17, 18 Northbourne, Lord, 42 O’Hagan, Andrew, 14, 16, 17 Obelkevich, J., 132, 141 Observer, The, 22, 158 Ockenden, J., 85, 101, 105, 109 Ojala, E. M., 90, 110 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 82, 96, 98, 104, 105, 110 Orr, Sir John Boyd, 39–41, 42, 43, 58 Orwin, C. S., 55, 92 Outlaw, J. E., 90, 110 Oxfam, 2, 16 Oxford, Frances, 195 Oyler, Philip, 41, 59 Page, Robin, 163, 165 Palmer, G., 180, 184 Pantazis, C., 184 Park, K., 131, 139 Pathans, 45 Patsios, D., 184 Pattison, I., 130, 141 Payne, S., 184 Pearse, Dr Innes H., 49, 52, 54, 59 Peck, Revd David, 48–50, 59 Peck, Revd W. G., 47, 59 Peele, G., 164 Pennington, H., 139 PEP, 52 Perren, Richard, 130, 141

209 Perry, J., 106 Peters, G. H., 92, 110 Peterson, G. M., 104, 110 Phillips, J., 139, 140 Phillips, Lord, 128, 136, 141 Phillips Inquiry, 128, 136 Phimister, E., 183 Pickerill, J., 160, 165 Picton, Dr Lionel J., 44, 52, 53, 57, 59 Pihlainen, Kalle, 200 Pioneer Health Centre, 52, 54 Plot, Robert, 132 Policy Studies Institute, 179, 184 Pope, The, 121 Poppe, K. J., 109 Porter, Roy, 118, 119, 122, 123, 130, 131, 142 Portsmouth, Earl of (Gerard Wallop, formerly Viscount Lymington), 42, 49, 53, 56, 59 Potter, Angela, 137 Power, A., 135, 142 Price, Weston A., 45–6, 52, 57, 59 Prioleau, John, 194, 201 Prior, L., 133, 142 Public Record Office, 34, 37 Ramazzini, B., 121 Ranger, T., 148, 164 Ratzan, S. C., 128, 142 Ray, John, 132 Read, Miss, 195 Reconstruction Committee, 35 Redclift, M., 140 Rees, W. H. G., 126, 142 Regional Development Agencies, 149 Regional Development Authorities, 72 Reith, Lord, 24, 29, 31–3, 37 Reports: Barlow Report (1942), 23 Beveridge Report (1942), 44–5 Brambell Report (1965), 127, 134, 138 Dower Report (1945), 23 Larsen Report (1994), 85, 103, 107 Middleton Report (1916), 35 Scott Report (1942), 11, 12, 13, 19–37, 49 Uthwatt Report (1942), 23, 30

210 Ritvo, Harriet, 125, 132, 142 Robbins, Lord, 88 Roberts, D., 185 Roberts, P., 141 Roberts, W. N. T., 88, 110 Robson, N., 110 Room, G., 178, 184 Root, Frederick, 33, 38 Rose, D., 16, 184, 201 Rose, H., 134, 142 Rousseau, J.-J., 47 Rowell, R., 123, 128, 142 Rowett Research Institute, 40 Rowntree, Seebohm, 35 Royal Agricultural College (Cirencester), 145, 154 Royal Commissions: on Agriculture (1880s/1890s), 83, 189 on Environmental Pollution (1979), 197, 201 on Health of Towns (1843–45), 122 Royal Institution, 123 Royal Society, 117, 134, 142 Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), 154 Royal Society of Arts (RSA), 44 Royal Society of St George, 22 Ruggles, S., 7, 16 Runciman, Walter, 35 Rural Development Commission, 150, 158, 171, 177, 179 Rural Development Programmes, 105 R u r a l E c o n o m y , 43, 49 Rural Lifestyles (research programme), 173, 174, 176, 177, 181 Rural Regeneration Unit, 162 Rural Sociological Task Force on Persistent Rural Poverty, 168, 184 Ruskin, John, 47 Russell, E., 139 Sabean, D. W., 132–3, 137, 142 Saeed, A. M., 139, 143 Sainsbury, D., 126, 142 St Francis de Sales, 48 Salvidge, Sir Archibald, 34 Samuel, Raphael, 194, 201 Sanderson-Wells, Dr T. H., 42, 52–3, 59

The Contested Countryside Sassoon, Siegfried, 192, 201 Saunders, P., 16 Saxon, Edgar J., 46, 56, 57 Schaeffer, J., 138 Schafer, A., 108 Scharff, Dr J. W., 45 Schwabe, C. W., 119, 120, 125, 142 Scott, A., 128, 136, 137, 142 Scott, D., 184 Scott, Lord Justice Leslie, 11, 12, 13, 19–37, 49 Scruton, Roger, 17, 54, 57, 58, 163, 165 Selborne, Lord, 35, 36 Self, Peter, 69, 80 Sellar, W. C., 163, 165 Sempill, Lord, 40, 42, 53 Sennett, Richard, 4, 16 Seymour, John, 57 Seymour, S., 16, 164 Shakespeare, William, 130–1 Shaw, George Bernard, 35 Shaw, J. M., 170, 185 Shenton, N., 184 Shepherd, Derek, 138 Shoard, Marion, 2, 12, 16 S h o o t i n g T i m e s , 155 Short, Brian, 200 Shucksmith, M., 177, 178, 183, 185 Sikhs, 45 Simonds, Professor, 130 Single Farm Payment, 68 Sissons, Michael, 17, 163 Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs), 62, 72, 76 Smith, D., 139 Smith, F. E. (Lord Birkenhead), 35, 36 Snowdon, E., 88, 110 Sockett, P., 127, 142 Soffe, R. J., 142 Soil Association, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48 Sontag, Susan, 133, 142 Squire, J. C., 22 Stamp, Dudley, 30, 34 Stapledon, Sir R. George, 54–5, 57, 59 Steel, David, 145, 154 Steiner, Rudolf, 46, 47

Index Stephenson, M. J., 120, 142 Stöhr, Klaus, 117 Stone, David, 138 Storing, H. J., 69, 80 Strathern, Marilyn, 195, 201 Strong, Sir Roy, 196, 197–8, 201 Sturgess, I. G., 92, 93, 110 Suggett, R. H. G., 152, 165 Surrey Anti-Litter League, 194 Survey of English Housing, 181 Survey of Personal Incomes, 96, 97, 98 Survival International, 155 Swabe, Joanna, 118, 119, 120, 121, 124, 126, 127, 129, 137, 142 Swann, M., 134, 143 Swann Committee, 142 Sweeney, D., 139 Sykes, Friend, 45, 60 Tamils, 45 Tangermann, S., 100, 110 Tapper, S., 152, 165 Taylor, Miles, 3, 17 Temple, Archbishop William, 48, 57 Teniers, 27 Terwitte, H., 108 Teviot, Lord, 53 Thatcher, Margaret, 39 Thaw, John, 23 Thirsk, Joan, 17, 191, 201 Thomas, C., 183 Thomas, Keith, 14–15, 17, 131, 143 Thompson, E. P., 4, 17 Thompson, F. M. L., 5, 17 Tillyard, E. M. W., 143 T i m e s , T h e , 23, 145, 151, 163 Tirkonnen, Erik, 200 Todd, Nigel, 190, 201 Tolstoyan communes, 190 T o r r e y C an y o n (environmental disaster), 134 Tovey, H., 184 Town Planning Institute, 31 Townsend, Peter, 171, 175, 184, 185 Tracey, M., 63, 80 Treaty of Rome, 1957, 67, 84, 85, 101 Trevelyan, G. M., 25

211 Trow-Smith, R., 120, 143 Turner, Everard, 45 United Nations (UN), 86, 89, 110–11 United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), 106, 110–11 United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), 99, 111 Upward, R., 183 Urry, J., 163 Van Loon, J., 138, 141, 142 Veldman, Meredith, 47, 59 Vera-Toscano, E., 183 Veterinary Investigation Service, 126 Veterinary Laboratories Agency, 126 Veterinary Residues Committee, 61, 80 Vidal, John, 157, 187 Vincent, Graham, 32, 33, 38 Virchow, Rudolf, 125 Voices of British Agriculture, 6, 17 Walker, Alan, 168, 169, 170, 172, 185 Wall, P. G., 127, 143 Walsham, Alex, 131, 138, 143 War Damage Bill, 31 Ward, Colin, 193, 200 Ward, L. R., 127, 143 Ward, N., 164 Watkins, C., 16, 152, 164 Watson, J. M., 89, 97, 109 Webb, Barry, 192, 201 Webb, Beatrice and Sidney, 35 Webb, Mary, 194 Wells, H. G., 25, 35 West, G. P., 117, 143 Westman, R. S., 138 Westminster, Duke of, 1, 154 Whatmore, S., 164 Whetham, E. H., 88, 92, 111 White, Lynn, Jr, 51, 59 Widdowfield, R., 184 Wildavsky, A., 129, 139 Wilkinson, L., 121, 132, 143 Williams, D. J., 119, 120, 129, 139 Williams, J., 184 Williams, Raymond, 147, 165 Williams, Robert, 191

212 Williams, W. M., 7, 17 Williamson, Dr G. Scott, 52, 54, 57, 59 Winnifrith, J., 84, 111 Winter, M., 147, 148, 152, 162, 164 Wittgenstein, L., 147, 159, 165 Women’s Environmental Network, 4, 17 Wood, Sir Kingsley, 88 Woodgate, G., 140 Woods, Abigail, 126, 135–6, 138, 143 Woods, M., 151, 165 Woodward, R., 176, 185 Woolton, Lord, 53 Worboys, M., 124, 125, 136, 143 Wordsworth, William, 21 World Conference of Agricultural Statisticians, 106

The Contested Countryside World Health Organization (WHO), 117, 143 World Trade Organization (WTO), 57, 67–8, 69 Wray, C., 139 Wrench, Dr G. T., 43, 59 Wright, J., 140 Wright, Patrick, 17 Wright, S., 183 Wu th er in g H e ig ht s , 8 Wynne, B., 129, 143 Yapp, B., 131, 140 Yeatman, R. J., 163, 165 Young, G. M., 30, 38 Young, Hugo, 156–7 Young Farmers’ Clubs, 7, 8