Your countryside needs you

Roger Scruton says that it’s time for rural residents to protect the land they love by clubbing together and buying it

If you look at an electoral map of England, you will discover that most of it is blue, the occasional pockets of red corresponding to the large conurbations. Rural England is Tory and always has been. It is not surprising, therefore, if our present government has little affection for the countryside, or if it is always looking for new ways either to punish rural voters or to destroy the idyll that nourishes their dissent. No character in politics more clearly embodies this anti-rural sentiment than John Prescott, whose plans to Balkanise England, to centralise planning and to jettison the green belt have caused alarm and despondency in the shires. But it is clear that Mr Prescott’s policies belong to a general movement of ideas and attitudes which has spread through many of the institutions that have the countryside as their ostensible cause — including the Countryside Commission, Defra and many environmental lobby groups.