We are supposed to be apolitical in our society but we cannot ignore the simple realities that it is governmental edicts that govern the way our society functions. Government policies are implemented by local councils, government policies decide that (for example) Regions will exist and so change the way planning works and, whether we like it or not, government policies affect each and every one of us by the mechanisms set up to implement them.
Knowledge of these policies is vital to amenity societies like yours since without this knowledge we cannot effectively represent your views to the local authorities. So, whether your political sympathies lie to the left, right or middle (whatever that means these days), it is useful now and then for your newsletter to examine some of these policies inflicted upon us by government. I claim precedent in that some of the older newsletters I examined in the preparation of the Index (in this issue) were very vociferous in their criticism of Michael Heseltine when he imposed house-building burdens we disagreed with on South Bucks.
In this context I decided to read an imposing document, issued by Ruth Kelly, in her role as head of the Department for Communities and Local Government, called 'Strong and prosperous communities - The Local Government White Paper' - all 247 pages of it. The whole document is littered with motivational words like 'leadership', 'empowered' and 'efficiency', so I felt suitably 'inspired' to write this editorial.
As with all documents of this nature it’s best to speed-read it the first time to get the flavour and the first thing that struck me was that the authors clearly believe the world was created in 1997 and that it consists only of cities and urban communities. To test this impression I carried out a word search and discovered that
the word 'countryside' is not mentioned once! Obviously this is not an approved government word, so I tried 'rural' and got precisely 18 hits, each one of which was in a throwaway phrase like this following gem, (referring to migrants in section 8.41): 'Migrants are performing key tasks in our public services. They are also working on our major construction sites and in rural areas, for example in agriculture and tourism'. Seven instances of the word were in just two short paragraphs. I was seriously tempted to include the rest of this short section on migrants but I might be accused of unseemly bias. In actual fact, if there is any bias it is in this document, which, to my mind, scarcely admits of the existence of a countryside and agriculture. I also carried out a search for instances of the word 'agriculture'. It is mentioned just once in the whole document – and that’s in the example quoted above. As an example, in another article in this issue, I report on a specific case in which the British farming community is being actively downsized to accord with the EU CAP policies.
Perhaps I’ve got this wrong but I thought that 'local government' and 'communities' were both terms that apply to rural areas such as ours just as much as to the cities and city-regions in our country.
Fred Russell
