Rural crisis: Why anger is the everyday story of country folk

Country dwellers are on the march. Their field sports are threatened, farm incomes have slumped and now there are plans to build millions of homes on green field sites. Is their plight exaggerated or does rural Britain face a blighted future? The Independent's specialist writers report

A quarter of a million disgruntled country people are expected to march through the capital on the first day of spring. The mass protest will be a plea for sympathy and support from the nation's urban majority, but it will also express disgust at what they see as its shabby, unfair treatment of them.

Mass movements like this which quickly gather strength are driven by a sense of injustice, often accompanied by hatred of the oppressor. There are signs of this happening in rural Britain.

The Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, is seeking to head-off the protests by taxing development in the green belt and keeping the money within his Department of Environment budget to pay for the revival of inner cities. Mr Prescott is convinced that a range of green taxes will be acceptable to the voters, if they are perceived to be for a good purpose.

Other green taxes include the possibility of higher taxes on cars and out-of-town car parks to shift shoppers back into the towns, and commuter taxes on cars travelling into towns and cities. Mr Prescott wants to keep the money to spend on improving public transport, but many country dwellers will see them as a tax on their liifestyles.

The Tories will exploit the unrest against the Government in the countryside by launching a Commons debate tomorrow on building in the green belt. William Hague, the Tory leader, will visit some of the development sites next Monday, and he will be at the rally.

Organisers of the huge march planned for Sunday, 1 March are expecting many more people this time than the 120,000 who gathered in Hyde Park last July to protest at the anti-hunting Bill. No march on this scale has been seen since the vast anti-cruise missile protests of the mid-Eighties.

Janet George of the pro-hunting Countryside Alliance said: "The feeling is that we run the countryside, and we're not going to let you lot ride roughshod all over us. It's a case of the peasants are revolting."

Some will see this impressive display as an oppressed countryside finally rising against the urban majority and a new, anti-rural government. They will be wrong. This is a marriage of convenience, forged in a fast-changing rural Britain where the distinction between town and country has become ever more blurred. Nor does new Labour wish to be seen as anti-countryside; too many of its huge new intake of MPs represent largely rural seats.

Take the issue of rural development, particularly house building, which the march organisers say they also want to protest about. In threatened green belts around the country, you find the most vocal opposition to greenfield housing coming not from farmers but from country dwellers who commute to work in big towns and cities, or used to before retiring. Having paid for a view of fields and woods the last thing they want is for it to be filled with a new estate.

For every farmer who hates the idea of countryside covered in bricks and mortar, there is another thrilled at the prospect. Last week, estate agents Strutt and Parker emphasised its skills at matching farmers with housebuilders who "are now scouring the countryside looking for potential building land". It pointed out that farmland values could increase from pounds 3,000 per acre to more than pounds 300,000 if planning permission was obtained. On hunting, to say that townies oppose it and country people support it is wrong. While the hunt followers on foot and in cars may be mainly rural dwellers, many of those on horseback will be well-to-do people who have urban careers and homes. A MORI poll late last year found that 57 per cent of country dwellers supported the Private Member's Bill on hunting with hounds proposed by Michael Foster, Labour MP for Worcester, and were opposed to hunting.

Take farming, still a major industry in the United Kingdom made up of thousands of small and medium-sized businesses. After a run of excellent years, it had a very bad 1997 mainly due to the strength of the pound. Exports were down, farmgate prices fell, imports were up, and incomes fell by more than one-third.

But less than 2 per cent of Britain's jobs are now on the land. The proportion has been shrinking for decades and is expected to continue to do so. Across most of the countryside only one-tenth or less of the local jobs are in farming. Services and manufacturing both employ more people in rural areas, according to the Government's Rural Development Commission.

Near big towns and cities, most country dwellers who work do so in the urban areas. There is nowhere in England, even in the deepest countryside, from where at least some people do not drive to town to work. Professor Philip Lowe, Director of the Centre for Rural Economy at the University of Newcastle on Tyne, said: "The reality is that a lot of the economic and social distinctiveness of the countryside has greatly eroded."

The march is bound to be impressive, but it will represent a minority of the modern countryside. The majority - which many of the marchers would regard as made up of displaced townies - is silent.