Straight to the point

In the latest edition of News & Views, the local pamphlet delivered to all houses in the little constellation of villages on the Lincolnshire-Nottinghamshire border where I am from, the editor praises the “snowdrops, daffodils and crocuses” which have sprung up in April’s verges. He excitedly recounts that “planning has already started” for the annual gala, garden show, and even the fireworks display in November; he adds, sombrely: “As I write this, world events are rapidly evolving in an apparent downward spiral. One can only hope that common sense and maybe a bit of good diplomacy prevail.”

Within is a jamboree of bin collection dates, updates from the cricket club, bingo and bowls (“newly retired? Looking to meet local friendly people?”). There’s a recipe for bacon bolognese, a dispatch from the rectory, and a gallery of Anglo Saxon brooches (decorated tinfoil plates) made by children from a local primary school.

It’s difficult to imagine this sort of conscientious localism anywhere in London; if such a newsletter exists, it will be buried beneath an avalanche of Domino’s flyers. Rare is the villager who has forgotten the Bus Stop Incident a few summers ago, in which evidence of what appeared to be a hit-and-run soiling was the subject of outcry on the local Facebook group for weeks; suspects were pictured, timestamps were provided, witnesses were corralled. Such a fracas would probably be met with weary dispassion in the capital, where all that and more goes on in the perennially piss-fragranced Vauxhall underpass. The difference is a question of two Englands: one urban, anonymous, globalised; the other rural, community-centred, and populated by both lifelong residents and grateful rat-race retirees.

The concerns of England’s villagers have very often been the butt of the joke. At best, they are portrayed as endearing, bumbling bumpkins — think of Kerry and Kurtan in the BBC’s much-missed sitcom This Country, or the attendants of car-crash meetings of the Dibley parish council. At worst they are paranoid, cultish and incestuous, tropes sent up by both The League of Gentlemen and Cold Comfort Farm. The stereotype of conservatism does, I think, hold water; it’s borne out by voting patterns which indicate that while British rural populations are more likely to vote Conservative, they are comparable with city-dwellers in terms of “democratic satisfaction, political trust and authoritarianism”, unlike in many other Western states where the countryside has been found to bubble with resentment and tend towards extremism.

As Reform UK and the Conservatives battle for the soul of Middle England over the coming years and in the local elections on 1 May, they would do well to respond to a growing anti-urban appetite. This is palpable among the young — whose tastes are traditionally urbanite. Now, as the season turns, TikTok has been flooded by clips of bucolic England, ivy-swamped cottages, sandstone Cotswold villages, foxgloves framed by little windows (“wtf is Dubai”, says one, shuddering at that soulless shopping centre in the desert so beloved by Turkey-toothed young Brits). Many are set to the sound of Robert Browning’s Home Thoughts, from Abroad, a perhaps surprising trend: “Oh to be in England now that April’s there,” it rhapsodises over picture carousels of country lanes. Understanding this urge as simply aesthetic misses the point: running towards village life means running away from the collapsing project of metropolitanism which is everything the fantasy cottage is not — grey, loud, unsafe, dirty. The rejection of a politics which has compelled the young into those cities comes hand in hand with lusting over thatched roofs. A return to the countryside — even if only imaginary, going as far as sighing over TikToks — is a retreat to political ur: the city fantasy of a way of life that is ancient and unchanging.

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To some extent, this is true — many of the villages around here crop up in the Domesday Book a millennium ago. The setting is relatively stable, unlike the churn of cities forever throwing up new student accommodation and opening and closing vape and betting shops. Renters are shunted around different boroughs, rarely forming local attachments; neighbours don’t speak, save in the event of a misplaced Amazon parcel or an early morning noise complaint. No wonder young people are longing for a slice of rural England.

The problem with divining an archetypal folk “Englishness”, a distilled sense of its values, is that the diviner is never free from preference. Think of Cecil Sharp, the Edwardian folk revivalist who collected traditional songs from England’s regions at the turn of the century, and whose pursuit of “merrie England” could not resist bowdlerisation. According to the folk singer Shirley Collins, Sharp had a habit of sidelining the “raw and real”; he would “pretty up” folk songs “for middle-class parlours”. Her renditions, including Hares on the Mountain, which Sharp collected in Somerset in 1903, favour the “lived-in” feel of vestigial Appalachian versions over Sharp’s formal, Victorian stylings. Then as now, dreams of an “escape to the country” had more to do with middle-class romanticism than realism.

Precisely because it is subject to fantasy, rural England’s reputation for quaintness means it is often a flashpoint for the encroachment of modernity, the downsides of health and safety or bureaucracy or globalism. Last week, the church tower in Askrigg, the Yorkshire Dales setting for All Creatures Great and Small, was given the “landlord special” — painted bright white for no particular reason. Talking to the press, the embattled vicar said the crumbling tower could only be saved by a limewash; it didn’t stop locals busting out the usual phrases “out of keeping” and “eyesore”. What ensued was a war of words in which residents and the Rev Dave Clark argued over whether the tower was in fact the colour it so clearly was: “With my hand on my heart I can say it is not white,” said the reverend. Of course it is, but it will soon weather, and the drama will subside. But these things matter because, even for locals who in all likelihood have never set foot in St Oswald’s, some things are worth preserving.

In this, there is a kernel of wisdom. There is an understandable perception that city-dwellers privilege global issues over local ones, particularly in moments of diplomatic crisis (as over Ukraine and Gaza). Yet the priorities of individuals rarely correlate with grand geopolitical projects: in England, potholes, bin collections, and unsightly new developments are, rightly or wrongly, among the top priorities of the average taxpayer. One party that seems to understand this is Reform: Nigel Farage launched the local election campaign by riding into a Birmingham rally on a tractor. Potholes, he said, were the “perfect symbol for broken Britain”, and councils were “asleep at the wheel”. Of course, the reason potholes are never fixed is a lack of funding and council incompetence, neither of which would be helped by a Reform victory — but other parties must nevertheless not leave the “petty concerns” of localism to Farage. These concerns are real, and worth untold votes.

Much like the church tower fiasco, a comparable panic has ensued around the construction of a £2.5 million “supermosque” on the edge of the Lake District. Again, the facts of the story do not hold up to hysteria: it is outside of the national park’s boundaries in Dalton-in-Furness and not, as many as TikTok has suggested, slap-bang in the middle of the craggy Ice Age landscape. “RIP the Lake District 8000BC-2025,” says one video. There are already three mosques in Cumbria. Yet the outcry speaks to a larger fear of the transformation of rural England into something resembling our “Yookay”-ified cities: Whitechapel’s Bengali tube signs, machete fights in Birmingham, signs banning ski masks in Westfield. It speaks to the desire to contain globalisation within major cities where it might be ignored; the countryside will always be a flashpoint for immigration, because symbolically it is meant never to change. The nightmare image of the Lake District mosque is fearmongering, but centrist politicians must address these anxieties before the far-Right does. Sir Ed Davey is canny in making a counterintuitive punt for Middle England in the local elections, but Reform has an edge in being the only party which seems to address immigration directly.

As the Right eyes a comeback in the UK in coming years, the symbolism of rural life will grow in importance. (For a Labour Party which has continually proven itself intolerant to the concerns of “normal people”, you sense that the game’s long gone.) The wisdom of hyperlocalism and its newly fashionable instincts towards populism which prefers, like the editor of my local newsletter, “common sense” over detached, complex ideology, are developments politicians would do well to take on board at a time when what many perceive to be the worst excesses of liberalism — DEI, gender legislation, a welfare state groaning under ADHD diagnoses — are jettisoned. If village politics, and village life, is about resilient simplicity, neighbourliness, a fine balance of community and self-interest, then it makes sense why many yearn for it in a confusing, entirely self-interested, anonymous urban landscape. This is not just an opportunity for the Right; it is in traditional Labour heartlands that the most closely knit communities have fallen apart, and the co-operative instincts of the Left must kick in if Keir Starmer hopes to avoid losing Middle England altogether — a real prospect as local elections play out. What politicians must provide is not a manicured hedge, or a gambolling lamb, but a sense of rootedness, security and identity: these are the lessons Westminster must learn from village life.

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