In the dying days of last year, just before the foot-and-mouth crisis blew all plans and predictions apart, the British government published its Urban and Rural White Papers. Despite appearing within days of each other, they contained no significant cross-references: so much for joined up thinking. What they did have in common, however, was a foreword by the Minister for the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions whose unwieldy title and capacious responsibilities include both town and country matters.
John Prescott was photographed (in the case of the Rural White Paper) wearing a Barbour jacket, his hair windswept, against upland countryside with not a single by-pass, factory farmer, or built-on flood plain to be seen. The complacent unreality of the scene was both record and portent. Three months later, the first case of foot-and-mouth disease was diagnosed in Northumberland.
Instead of the traditional terse pages of magisterial prose, the White Papers occupy some 350 pages in toto, and read like an early report from a colonial commissioner, albeit a modern one, to his superior. The two reports are full of good intentions and anxieties; their joint message is that we, the colonial authorities, notwithstanding the immense cultural divide that separates us from the natives, have understood the British people and their problems and wish to include them - all of them - in our plans.
Everything is mentioned - from crime to climate change, from rural post offices to brownfield sites. But somehow the reader is left wondering, at the end, whether the report has any real policy to offer, beyond getting the people to accept the legitimacy of colonial rule.
Hence neither paper attracted much public debate, especially in comparison with the coverage of the unprecedented levels of flooding and rail disruption that enveloped many parts of Britain at the time. As people in 21st century Britain rowed to their local railway station to catch a train which might or might not arrive, and would probably take longer to reach its destination than it would have done a hundred years earlier, the endless lists of minor works programmes and spending initiatives trumpeted in both White Papers seemed irrelevant.
Still more do they seem so now, after foot-and-mouth disease has wiped out whole segments of the rural economy. The insensitive and incompetent culling of millions of healthy farm animals has left rural Britain in a state of shock. The Governments answer to this rubber-stamped by the media - is Phoenix the calf. Everythings OK: Phoenix lives! She has even been given a part in a London musical. Another national identity crisis has been averted: we have discovered the Princess Diana of cows.
Discontent in the countryside is not cured by sentimentality. But it is certainly fuelled by it. Nothing illustrates this better than the matter which, until the foot and mouth crisis, did most to set the countryside ablaze: the issue of hunting. Whether we approve or disapprove of hunting as practised in Britain, there is no doubt that it commands enormous support in rural areas, and is fundamental to many local forms of social inclusion, to use the New Labour jargon.
This is a government which loudly announces its desire to include everyone in its plans. It is therefore odd to find that it should have, as its most urgent and most concrete project, a plan to outlaw the only form of inclusion that is strong enough to set the countryside marching on London (see the Countryside Alliance website).
There is a reason for this, which is that banning things, especially things of purely local and traditional significance, is the easiest of all policies, even if nothing positive is achieved thereby. Aside from the question of field sports, the problems of the countryside are far from local, and not amenable to legislative solutions, but only to long-term and conscientious policy-making.
The foot-and-mouth crisis makes this abundantly clear. For it shows the devastating impact on unguarded local economies of the global transportation of food. It is the result of decisions led by lobby groups, multi-national businesses, the supermarkets and the WTO - in other words by unaccountable and un-elected power centres, from which politics alone can protect us. And the politicians, for the most part, have been silent.
It is partly thanks to the global economy, and the unprecedented mobility it generates in every sphere of social and economic life, that many towns and cities too are decaying. Many towns are now places where the normal aspirations of community-minded people - or those with a strong sense of civic consciousness - are today frustrated or denied. Despite high levels of private wealth and economic activity, many of Britains cities have an ageing and poorly maintained infrastructure of Victorian schools, hospitals, a decaying public transport system, and grid-locked rush hour streets.
Private affluence and public squalor co-exist uneasily in many cities today. These things, together with increasing crime in many places, mean that those who can afford to do so seek a new life in suburbia or in greenfield developments from which to commute, sometimes for as much as a hundred miles each way on a daily basis.
People want the countryside as a resource and an icon. But if the recent crisis has taught us anything, it is that the countryside is not an inert, scenic background, maintained in existence by Ealing Studios. It is the by-product of a way of life, and the central character in that way of life is the farmer. At the same time the farmer depends on economic decisions that are made in towns, by people who never think of farming, where self-interested multi-national businesses and tunnel-vision politicians continue to believe that the price of cheap food is purely economic, and has no long term social or environmental ramifications.
Yet we are now beginning to realise that children already born, whether living in Gloucester, Strathclyde, London or Cardiff may well live to see the river and coastal waters close to where they live rise by over a metre in their lifetime, and in many other ways their lives are likely to be increasingly disrupted by freak and long-term changes in weather patterns.
Climate change may allow Teessiders to bask in temperatures hitherto enjoyed by Tuscans. Or, if the theories about the vulnerability of the North Atlantic Gulf Stream are right, it will freeze. Radical change to the flora and fauna of the landscape will re-configure its habits and cultures and agriculture. Meanwhile, the trend for richer people to buy most of the available housing in rural Britain is still increasing (dramatically so, according to Mark Shucksmith of Aberdeen University). Little in the Rural White Paper gives comfort that this will be reversed.
In the cities, there are still many places where poverty, social alienation and poor governance continue to reinforce each other, widening the divide between rich and poor to alarming levels. Voting levels in local elections of less than ten per cent in some urban wards do not inspire confidence that we have found ways of involving people in planning and shaping the future of urban communities. Achieving a balance between the politics of individual choice and that of collective well-being is always going to be difficult, but it is not helped by a political system in which local government is starved of funds and the power to be creative, while it can always be taken to court by developers and over-ruled by the Ministry of the Environment.
In this City and Country strand of openDemocracy we shall encourage people to join in a far-reaching and constructive dialogue. Our focus will not be the day-to-day disputes of politics, but peoples long-term hopes and fears, especially those concerning the quality of life and the nature of the environment. We need to argue out an understanding of the forces that are now at work in city, town and countryside which include shifts in peoples national, regional and local self-perceptions as well as their conditions of life.
We also need to understand the complex relations that cause decisions in one sphere to affect decisions in another. Agricultural subsidies, urban schools, animal welfare, policing, transport - all these areas of policy-making are connected at the deepest level to the need to try to balance universalism and cultural diversity. The problem of building a locality, a sense of community and a home for all the inhabitants of Britain, and to learn from and compare with the experience of other countries, requires us to cross many divides. This is what we hope our discussion will do.
It is an ambitious aim. But we know from experience that we can move some way towards realising it. In November 1995, the Town and Country Forum was set up to bring together people from a wide range of backgrounds and political traditions, in order to discuss openly and honestly how a new kind of rapprochement between pressing and urgent town and country issues could be achieved. The discussion led to the publication of Town and Country as a book. openDemocracy is one way in which the work of the Forum can be carried on.
Over the next ten weeks, and longer if funding and support is forthcoming, we shall be publishing in this pilot of openDemocracy a series of short essays and polemics in the City and Country strand. The question of planning in all its ramifications will provide our initial focus, not just in its usual technical sense (though this too is important) but as a way of bringing together themes of environment, settlement, movement, and government that are too often considered separately.
We therefore welcome comments, contributions and responses on these issues from all who care deeply about them. From different points of view, these will focus on the thesis that issues of urban and rural livelihood must be tackled within a single common framework, a joint strategy to preserve the living differences of city, countryside, suburb, town and village.
Those who wish to respond are welcome to do so - especially if you bring your own distinct experience to bear on the defining issue of urban-rural relations. Together, we hope we can demonstrate over the coming weeks something of the quality, range and depth of public concern about matters of city, town, suburb, village and country.
