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Yorkshire Post - 18
December 2006
Not for nothing is Alistair Darling, the Trade and Industry Secretary (and hot tip for Chancellor under the regime of fellow-Scot Gordon Brown) labelled a “safe pair of hands.” Labour was in need of safe pairs of hands that day: whilst Alistair Darling was announcing the closure of one in six Post Offices the Prime Minister was being interviewed by Police investigating the “cash-for-peerages” allegations.
Tory and Liberal-Democrat benches in the Commons were packed: curiously fewer than 20 Labour MPs turned up to hear Darling. The countryside had the argument pretty much to itself.
And, of course, the countryside will be the hardest hit by the closure of 2,500 offices. Or, to be more precise, the elderly and poor people living in the countryside. The National Audit Office, which monitors Government spending programmes on behalf of Parliament has reported that the take-up of welfare benefits by eligible pensioners is at its lowest precisely in the most rural areas.
The Post Office – overwhelmingly owned and operated by one-man (or one-woman) businesses- have become a symbol of the countryside. The adjective “rural” has become attached almost by magnetic force to the words “Post Offices.” Often part of the village shop, the post office is seen as perhaps the last bastion of a village culture of inter-dependence, social responsibility and care.
Now, despite the promise of a continuing Card Account (which the Post Office will have to compete to retain from 2010) and the promise of some 500 “Outreach” locations (mobile post offices or provision in village halls, community centres or shops) thousands of village Post Offices face a fight for their lives.
Is this part of a Labour “assault” on the countryside? The honest answer is not by design though the effect of Labour policies has been to leave the countryside feeling bruised and unloved.
The most damaging failure has been at the Rural Payments Agency, the Government body which manages farm support payments. A combination of radical change in farm policy under the CAP, pressed through in the shortest possible timetable, bringing in thousands of new claimants, requiring detailed digital mapping of farm holdings against the background of office re-organisation and staff cut-backs has led to the total implosion of the system.
The Government has had to resort, twice, to emergency down-payments but many farmers have had to wait many months to receive any cash at all. This has been at a time of persistent and debilitating crisis in the dairy industry and growing problems for beef and sheep producers. The drying up of a normally predictable cash-flow has immediate implications across the rural community. This was certainly not conspiracy, but as “cock-ups” go it has been on a heroic scale.
The can has been carried by senior civil servants: Mrs Margaret Becket, who presided over the mess, is now, to everyone’s surprise (including, to be fair, her own) Foreign Secretary!
The “modernisation” of health services has also sent alarm bells ringing across the rural areas. The new Primary care Trust spanning North Yorkshire, for example, will have the third biggest client population in the country as it amalgamates four existing trusts. The Government’s failure to provide for money to follow the patient has led to a reluctance to send patients for recovery (or a peaceful end close to family and friends) to community hospitals. Given the loyalties small cottage hospitals can enjoy from their communities this has been a huge cause of dismay and anger from local people.
For a Government so obsessed with spin and “narrative” Labour’s failure to project a vision for better health care has been spectacular. There is, in fact, a very good case for trying to treat people as much as possible through the GP surgery (and rural areas often have very large, multi-competent surgeries compared with, for example, London’s small-scale and limited practices) and for minimising stays in hospital, but the financial crisis in the NHS has made it impossible for the Government to refute convincingly the accusation that its action are driven by concern for cash rather than for care.
There is, of course, the other side of the coin: the migration of people to live in the countryside; the slow-down in the rate of closure of rural schools; the reduction in rural unemployment (though much employment is relatively poorly paid); small business start-ups fuelled by the near universal availability of broadband; and the slow spread of innovative programmes to enable young people to make their home in the countryside.
But Labour feels unconnected to the countryside, almost as if it found a foreign language there. It is not just the impact of policy: it is, at root, a question of culture. Labour MPs may be avid ramblers and knowledgeable bird-watchers. They may fish even if they neither hunt nor shoot. But too many Government ministers – including the Prime Minister- give the impression that the countryside is another kind of abroad.
And, increasingly, the countryside is responding with a sense of alienation. Labour’s boast that, on the basis of its landslide elections wins, it had become the party of the countryside, leaves little now but the taste of bile.
© Yorkshire Post
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