Keir Starmer’s merciless Labour Party is at war. With its own country.
Keir Starmer and Ed Miliband wage war on our wonderful countryside (Image: Getty)
Since last year’s election, it has launched an all-out assault on the green fields, shaded lanes, ancient woodland and quiet villages that make up the British countryside. Labour doesn’t understand it, doesn’t value it, and treats the people who live there as an ideological enemy to be defeated.
Its latest move is an arrow aimed at the very heart of rural life: the British pub. As I’ve written before, the pub is one of our greatest national assets. It’s social glue for locals and a magnet for visitors. Yet Chancellor Rachel Reeves has already called last orders on hundreds of pubs with her ceaseless tax raids, and is now piling on the business rate hikes.
One pub closed every day in 2025. That pace will only accelerate. Aside from a few weasel words from Starmer, Labour shows no interest in stopping it.
First, the cash grab, now Labour’s po-faced busybodies will strike the killer blow. Its new road safety strategy includes plans to lower the drink-drive limit, supposedly to cut road deaths.
Similar moves in Scotland have had little impact, with fatalities actually rising. But for rural pubs it’s a death knell as just one pint will put drinkers over the limit. It’s not as though they can hop on a bus instead. In much of the countryside, there isn’t one. Labour doesn’t care. As long as another activist group is appeased.d
Labour has waged this war from day one. Weeks after last year’s election, I warned the party was hellbent on destroying the English countryside. The only thing I got wrong was underestimating the scale.
One of Labour’s first acts was lifting the ban on onshore wind farms. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband, the ultimate North London townie, plans to plaster our green fields with pylons, cables, solar panels and towering turbines, to fulfill his insane net zero drive.
I should declare an interest here. Twenty years ago, I lived in coastal Suffolk. We still visit every summer. Last year, the stunning landscape was torn apart. Roads, hedges and trees ripped up. Historic views are being scarred by pylons and battery plants, all in service of Miliband’s arrogant net zero crusade.
Friends who still live there are distraught. Now Miliband could even dump nuclear waste on the countryside too.
Starmer has also pledged to “bulldoze” the planning system, allowing volume housebuilders to bury our precious green belt and country villages under identikit estates, when brownfield city sites are crying out for new homes.
Not to be outdone, Reeves joined in by targeting inheritance tax at family farmers. The backlash forced Labour into a partial retreat, but not before some were pushed to the brink of suicide.
Her tax war continue to crush rural employers, farms, pubs and village businesses operating on wafer-thin margins. Just another element of the Chancellor’s scorched earth policy.
Labour is an urban party, utterly divorced from rural life, and treats the other half of the country with barely concealed spite.
Not content with banning fox hunting, it now wants to outlaw trail hunting too, a legal and non-lethal practice. This shows that campaigners were never concerned about animal welfare, they just loathe country types pursuing their own kind of fun.
As Nigel Farage suggested, Labour will be banning dog walks next.
Labour is also backing ‘draconian’ gun licensing and shooting rules, hitting gamekeeping, pest control and rural incomes.
Farmers have shown it’s possible to fight back. The rest of the countryside must do the same. We cannot let Starmer bulldoze a way of life Labour seems to actively loathe, and is only too happy to obliterate.
