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Speech: Tim Farron speaks about rural Britain at Liberal Democrat Conference

Mon, 21 Sep 2009

"You must win in rural Britain next year because the alternatives are unthinkable," said the MP for Westmorland and Lonsdale.

Conference I am a very keen and very awful fell runner.  You may have seen me in the last couple of days looking unfathomably attractive in my somewhat brief fell-running shorts and it is a measure of the discipline that we have in this party that you have all managed to control yourselves.  Well, like I say, I’m keen but I’m not very good. But over the summer, I won an award. 

I ran in the Coniston fell race – it’s six miles, three miles to the top of Coniston Old Man 2,500 feet up and 3 miles back down.

The winner did it in 52 minutes.  It took me 58…just to get to the top! 

I finished in 89, and after I’d got my breath back I was asked to present the prizes. 

I gave out the prize for the fastest man, and then for the fastest woman and then the veteran categories.  Until we got to the prize for the fastest woman over 60…

Only there were no women over 60 in the race… so in a moment of inspiration and pity, the organisers gave it to me! 

So ladies and gentlemen, you are looking at the 2009, Coniston Fell Race over 60s female champion.

Anyhow, when I got to the top of the mountain and stopped for a second to compose myself, I looked around.

My constituency is slightly bigger than the whole of greater London  and from up there you can see almost all of it…. And it’s perfect.  I can see lakes, mountains, valleys, picturesque villages and everything looks fine. 

...and it is fine, unless you’re the hill farmer who maintains that scene and you’re working 80 hours a week for an annual income of £8,000 because the supermarkets have you over a barrel and are paying you a pittance for your produce because they know that they can…

And it’s fine unless you are one of three families crammed into a single two and a half bedroomed private rented house because some idiot decided to sell off all the council houses…

And it’s fine unless your local school has closed down because three quarters of the houses in your village have been snapped up as second homes by some Mancunian barrister, London banker … or Labour minister….

So I am here today because I am angry at the way that over the last 10 years this government has attacked and impoverished rural Britain just as the Thatcher government scourged and laid waste to urban communities 20 years ago.  The joblessness, the homelessness, the hopelessness. 

Personally, my response to the wickedness of the Thatcher years was to join the Liberals and fight back.  So today I want people across rural Britain to join us, rise up and take back power.

But there is absolutely no point getting angry, if you don’t have answers – and so I’m here to give you answers because although rural Britain suffers deep inequality and injustice there can and there must be real hope for something better. 

It’s our job to provide that hope

This week sees the start of the British political party conference season.  But I’ll tell you what, it ends this week too!

There will be no politics in Brighton or Manchester.  There will be Olympic-standard public relations, there will be speeches even more polished than this one… but there won’t be any politics.

So as the other parties get more and more polished, plastic and pointless, and while rural Britain reels, there is a clear choice and I’m here to make an ambitious bid for the Liberal Democrats to be the party of choice for our countryside right across Britain.

So all is fine in the countryside.  And the problem is that that is exactly what Labour thinks.  Everything is fine. 

Labour hardly has any seats in rural areas, so their assumption is that country folk must all be against them. 

They assume that affluence is the norm in rural villages.  They look at house prices averaging a quarter of a million but overlook average wages at £17,000. 

Their ignorance is mind-numbing – I mean have you seen the Defra ministerial team – they are not exactly in touch with rural realities? 

They’re nice folks don’t get me wrong!  We’ve got Hilary Benn who represents the rolling hills of err.. Leeds Central.  Jim Fitzpatrick the MP for the mountainous wilderness of..um.. Poplar and Canning town.  Until recently we had Farming Minister Jane Kennedy from the immensely rural – and soon to be Liberal – Liverpool Wavertree. 

This is a ministerial team full of people who don’t even own a pair of wellies!

Now then, the Tories have a very strong connection with the countryside – or rather with the forces that blight it. 

They have strong connections with the supermarkets who abuse their power to keep farmers in penury,

Very strong connections with the explosion in excessive second home ownership that turns villages into ghost towns,

Unbelievably strong connections with the selling off of our social housing stock.

And despite all of that they still arrogantly assume that rural Britain will vote for them time after time. 

When we won Westmorland and Lonsdale after 95 years of trying, the local Tory leader complained that they had had the seat ‘stolen’ from them – as if it was theirs in the first place! 

That arrogance should motivate every one of us.  They might own the property deeds to most of the countryside but they don’t understand it and they certainly don’t speak for the people who live there….

So there you have it.  Labour ignorance and Tory arrogance.  Look, if someone came  and wrecked  your community whether it was out of ignorance or arrogance, you’d be angry.  Well I am angry. 

Angry enough to want to win, so that we can sort it out. 

So we’ve looked at the ignorance and the arrogance – here’s some substance. 

Liberal Democrats have got a real vision for rural Britain and we are not afraid of taking on the vested interests who, make no mistake, will oppose us.

There are four supermarket giants and however they dress it up, they massively abuse their power. 

This year across Europe, the price that supermarkets pay farmers for their milk has gone down by nearly a third – but the shelf price that you and I pay for a litre of milk has hardly changed. 

The farmers incomes are slashed, the consumers don’t benefit, the supermarkets pocket the difference. 

My mate who is a dairy farmer makes a loss of 15% on every litre his herd produces even though the supermarkets can comfortably afford to pay him more. 

Look, you have thousands of farmers existing on an hourly rate less than I got for stacking shelves when I was 16, they are working 15 hours a day, seven days a week with no holidays with no security of accommodation and reliant on farm payments. 

But look there would be no need for farm payments if farmers got a fair price for their produce.

We have the tragic irony of millions of consumers going to the supermarket each week, going down one aisle and buying fair trade Columbian coffee …

and then going down the next aisle and buying the milk to put in that fair trade coffee from an exploited British dairy farmer. 

And the same exploitation happens right across our food market in every sector of farming. 

Look at your membership card – on the back of it, it says we exist to ensure that no one is enslaved by poverty… so Liberal Democrats, we will not tolerate this situation! 

We demand fair trade for all farmers. 

It shouldn’t matter whether they are from Columbia or Cumbria. 

Supermarket greed is forcing farmers out of business. So whilst world food demand is set to double over the next 40 years we are losing the capacity to produce it. 

This situation is not just immoral, it’s completely stupid.

The big beasts of the food market are behaving the way the banks have done, risking the future for the sake of short term gain and as a result thousands of farmers see their lives work go down the plughole – unless Liberal Democrats are given the power to stop it. 

So I pledge to you that I will introduce a powerful food market regulator to enforce fair trade for British farmers. 

Because it’s wrong that farmers are going under. But I don’t want them to merely survive, we need them to thrive.

But the future of farming is intrinsically linked with the future of rural communities as a whole.

As communities from St Ives to Sutherland sink under excessive second home ownership we are seeing the removal of post offices, village schools and public transport links because the houses that used to provide the demand for them are empty for most of the year. 

So, I pledge that we will give councils the power to increase tax on second homes in those areas worst affected and to use that money to create affordable homes for local families.

As the recession forces more families onto the council house waiting list – the witlessness and the wickedness of the 1980s sell-off is stark. 

It makes my blood boil as I see 4,000 of my constituents queuing for a home when 9,000 local homes were sold off without being replaced under Mrs Thatcher. 

We need innovative and practical ways to create new affordable homes for families in rural areas. 

In South Lakeland – the centre of the political universe – the Lib Dem council has adopted a policy we call ‘Home on the Farm’ –

It involves converting disused and underused farm buildings into affordable homes for local people. 

Affordable homes in the back yards of people who actively want them there. 

The Lib Dem council have changed their planning policy and provided a grant scheme to make this a reality. 

With proper government backing this scheme will help breathe new life into rural Britain

And that is why we will ensure that 50,000 new affordable homes in Britain’s rural communities will be created in this way.  Tackling the outrage of homelessness in our villages, and giving real hope to families squeezed out of the communities they grew up in.

We are the party of Beautiful Britain… I mean look at us! 

And look at the places we represent, the Highlands, the Borders, Northumberland, the Lakes and Dales … I’ve only reached the midlands, shall I carry on…?

The Brecon Beacons, Norfolk, Exmoor,  Dartmoor, Cornwall… the Isles of Scilly… and just to please Graham Watson and the Daily Mail, Gibraltar! 

Beautiful Britain! 

I mean it’s quite clear that those much-visited places have understood the real, tangible tourism value of having a Liberal Democrat MP! 

The urban communities have cottoned on too! 

I mean, I understand that there are coach loads of tourists turning up in Colchester just to look at Bob Russell. 

But look, the breathtaking beauty of Britain’s uplands is the essential backdrop for the tourism economy and the backbone of food production…

But six out of every seven British hill farmers have no identified successor. 

When they go, it’s likely that no one will follow them, and the crowning glory of our countryside will fall in to unkempt and inaccessible wilderness. 

Liberal Democrats, we will not let this happen. 

That’s why we will strip out £7million of waste from the Rural Payments Agency and invest it in a hill farm apprenticeship scheme to bring new life, fresh blood and real hope to those communities.

Conference, we’ll put communities in charge of their own destiny. 

In rural communities we are fed up of having things done to us, having services removed, being ignored.

Nowhere does this cause more pain than when unelected NHS quangos close down rural hospital emergency units. 

Putting lives at risk on avoidably longer ambulance journeys just to satisfy national dictats.

If you live in the countryside, the chances are that you are already living a long way from the safety of an emergency unit.  How dare unelected bureaucrats close your unit and put your life in danger?!

Let me ask you a question, ‘Do you think that those government appointees would close down heart and stroke units for example, if they had to answer to the electorate?’  Not likely!

So we will introduce elected health boards – real democracy.  Because rural communities should have the power to protect their vital health services and not fall foul of the one-size-fits-all Whitehall way.

Conference, last year 2,500 post offices were deliberately shut by this government. 

Those closures came on top of 3,000 already closed by Labour and 4,000 closed by the Tories. 

When a village loses its post office, it loses its hub, it loses its social glue, it loses its heart. 

The ignorance and arrogance of recent governments leads to the assumption that post offices are an anachronism and that their time has gone – but that’s rubbish

because a government with wit, commitment and an understanding of rural communities can breathe new life and purpose into our post office network. 

We will not let our communities die, we will not isolate those communities, we will not let a single rural post office close.  That is a promise.

There is a clear demand and future for rural post offices – if they are allowed to provide the services that the community needs. 

Only the Liberal Democrats have a plan to invest hundreds of millions into the network, to make sure that no rural post office will close and to open new branches to give new life to communities.

And for the vast areas of rural Britain that lie within our spectacular national parks, we will make the national park authorities directly accountable to local people. 

Bringing national parks in England and Wales into line with those in Scotland.  National parks have all the powers of a local council but none of the democratic accountability.  That is wrong. 

It’s wrong but it’s part of a wider theme of decisions taken that affect and often blight real people in our communities, but over which we have no power. 

The loss of hospitals, the closure of post offices, the blocking of desperately needed new affordable homes by unelected national parks. 

Mind you, the government are very happy to ensure that we get consultations in these cases – which is of course wonderful!

Never have we been more consulted and never have we been less listened to. 

So we enter the general election with anger but with answers.  With no appetite to make up the numbers but a hunger to make a difference. 

We are right to call for fair trade in the food market,

We are right to stand shoulder to shoulder with struggling communities in the face of the loss of key services

And we are right to plan for affordable homes to revitalise those communities.

But do you know what?  I am fed up with being right and coming third! 

David Steel once said, ‘I am not at all interested in power without principles, but I am only faintly interested in principles without power’ – too flaming right!

Look you can’t change the world unless you win.  And it matters that we win – it’s very easy to lose by accident, but it is impossible to win by accident. 

When I was at the top of Coniston Old Man looking down own on my little patch I confess to feeling a real pride. 

Looking out on this most beautiful and vibrant part of Britain. 

But it took us nearly a century to win it, and we didn’t win it easily. 

We only won it by being completely unreasonable in the expectations we had of ourselves and of each other – while still sticking together as a team. 

You must win in rural Britain next year because the alternatives are unthinkable, but you will only win by being unreasonable. 

One of my favourite quotes is from Mario Andretti the Formula 1 racing driver. He said, “If everything seems calm and under control…. You’re just not going fast enough!”

That’s your motto for the next few months …. Not so that you can win for the sake of it …. But because the marginalised communities of rural Britain need you to win.  Don’t let me down, don’t let them down.