Labour’s war on the countryside

Two miles from where I am writing, the neighbouring village is plastered with posters demanding ‘Say No to Pylons’. The object of loathing is a 112-mile power line from Norwich to Tilbury that would carry wind-generated electricity from the North Sea to a supposed 1.5 million homes. As a concession to the famous landscape of Dedham Vale on the Essex-Suffolk border, the cabling will run underground for 3.3 miles. But because of John Constable’s inexplicable failure to paint the rest of the route, people living near the other 108.7 miles must have their vistas ruined by 160ft pylons. The developers claim it is twice as expensive to bury power lines than to hoist them on great metal towers. Objectors disagree and demand more consultations. East Anglia is an affluent region, the protestors are raising money, and the area is packed with influential, professional people who know how the world works – and many of those who work it. Things will turn ugly.

This violation of the eastern counties – historically a notoriously Conservative-voting area – is but one example of the government’s utter disregard for the countryside and those who live there. The scheme to carpet the area with pylons was conceived in the most crackpot net-zero-at-all-costs phase of the last Tory administration; but Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, has grasped it fervently. Why shouldn’t he? There is nothing in his past to suggest he could care less about rural England, so why start now?

This nicely complements Labour’s Budget plans to wreck family farms by levying inheritance tax on them; itself of a piece with the party’s long history of wilfully, or accidentally, misunderstanding country life and country dwellers. These are areas and people who have (with aberrations such as in 1945, 1997 and last July) almost always voted Conservative, and even at the last election supplied the Tory party with almost all of its MPs.