Black Labrador and Warm Ale Life is No Fantasy, But it is Tragically a Minority Pursuit

Much ridicule has been heaped on Labour MP Jenny Riddell-Carpenter for her comments that the black Labrador, warm ale country pub vision of Britain only exists as a "far Right fantasy", but I think she is onto something. The Deep England she described is so galactically far removed from the experience of the overwhelming majority of the population that it may as well be a fantasy. This is the real tragedy.

Now classified as elitist and "far Right", rural life used to be enjoyed by more than the current 17% who bask in this black lab and warm ale dream. Because the 83% majority of the population now live in towns and cities, there has evolved a strange notion that this is what life is supposed to be like. A friend who grew up in an Northern ex-mining town said of the exquisite Gloucestershire village where I grew up: “This place is a fairytale. It’s not real.” And this is the tragedy that I think Jenny Riddell-Carpenter MP inadvertently articulated. Village life is sadly a minority pursuit and too many people are genuinely unaware that such a pleasant, if hardworking, way of life in The Shire is possible. 

I have been haunted by a comment from a Daily Sceptic reader after an article I wrote about modern architecture. It reads:

I may tell you, as a resident of Croydon (not the town itself, but the wider borough), that if it hadn’t been waging war against beauty for