Introduction

In international perspective, rural Britain appears something of a paradox: Britain's rural areas differ in many respects from those of other countries, and yet they are strongly subject to similar international forces and influences, notably from the EU. The New Labour project itself was born partly out of an international perspective. Giddens (2002) sees its origins in Labour's recognition of the need to rethink leftist doctrines in the light of the big changes happening in the world – globalisation, the emergence of the knowledge economy, the rise of individualism and ‘postmaterialist’ concerns, the ‘dysfunctions’ of the welfare state, and the emergence of new risks such as climate change – as well as the electoral need to reach beyond working-class votes.

When the Labour government came to power in 1997, ministers and policy advisers had had a long period in opposition to consider this changing international context, as well as approaches to social and economic policy in other countries and their relevance to Britain. While Bill Clinton's ‘New Democrats’ offered models for welfare reform and ‘third way’ thinking, European social democracies struggled to sustain strong welfare states in the face of rising unemployment, prompting new discourses of ‘social exclusion’. Once the New Labour approach was in place, its architects sought to reassert Britain's international influence by promoting their ‘modernising’ and ‘third way’ approaches through supra-national forums, such as the European Union, G8, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the World Trade Organization. This has included New Labour's proposals for agricultural and rural policies.

Critics of New Labour have presented their ‘third way’ as essentially vacuous, “an escape from self-definition – a butterfly always on the wing” (Toynbee, 2001). But the broad lines and intellectual underpinnings of New Labour's thinking were set out in the 1994 Report of the Commission on Social Justice (Borrie, 1994), established by John Smith under the auspices of the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR) think tank and described by Tony Blair as “essential reading for everyone who wants a new way forward for our country”. Not only did the state have to change because the world had changed, as Giddens argues, but policy renewal would itself change Britain's place in the world (Borrie, 1994, p 91).

The report argued that policy needed to engage with worldwide economic, social and political revolutions that faced all advanced industrialised countries.