Introduction

In a review of the impact on the British countryside of the policies of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government, Cloke (1992) observed that “the Thatcher era has ushered in new ‘structured coherences’ in some rural localities” (p 292). The restructuring of state relations, Cloke noted, had limited the ability of government agencies to intervene in rural planning and development; the deregulation of planning and the privatisation of utility companies had created new opportunities for investment and the exploitation of rural resources; and the privileging of middle-class interests had helped to generate new markets for countryside commodities. Collectively, these processes had produced a new marketplace rural economy, while also intensifying conflicts between the interests of production and consumption in the countryside.

The countryside during the Blair era has been a far more turbulent place than it was during the Thatcher years, with rural issues occupying a more central position in political debate and discourse. Yet, the ideological imprint of New Labour on rural Britain is far less discernible than that of Thatcherism.

As the contributions to this volume have described, the New Labour administration will be associated with a number of historic Acts which have recast the legislative and administrative framework through which rural Britain is governed. It introduced three historic pieces of legislation pertaining to the countryside – the 2000 Countryside and Rights of Way Act, the 2004 Hunting Act, and, in Scotland, the 2003 Land Reform Act – all of which mark the culmination of long-term struggles by the political Left and represent symbolic defeats for the traditional rural establishment (see Chapters 6 and 8). However, the number of people in the countryside directly affected by these three items of legislation constitutes only a very small minority of the total rural population.

Beyond these measures, however, it may be questioned whether it is possible to identify a distinctive and coherent New Labour legacy in the British countryside. To some extent this reflects the vagaries of New Labour's political philosophy, with the ideological device of the ‘third way’ interlaced with pragmatism. Nonetheless, as detailed in Chapter 1, during the first Blair administration Labour set out at length a vision for the countryside that implied a new approach. Yet, the chapters in this volume demonstrate that the translation of this vision into practice has been, at best, inconsistent.