What Both Parties Get Wrong About Rural Voters

They are not a bloc to be won with a slogan. They are a set of very specific complaints.

Every election season in Calder, the same ritual plays out. A party leader puts on a borrowed waxed jacket, is photographed beside a gate somewhere above the valley, and declares that the hill towns have been “forgotten”. A slogan follows – this year it is “Rooted in the Region” from one side and “A Fair Share for the Hills” from the other – and then the campaign buses head back down to the city, where most of the votes are.

I grew up in one of those hill towns, and I have spent the last decade reporting from them. I want to make a simple argument: neither of the main parties understands rural voters, because both insist on treating them as a mood rather than a list. The people who live above the Ardle are not a bloc to be charmed. They have very specific complaints, and most of them could be fixed without a single speech.

A list, not a feeling

Ask anyone in the upper valley what is wrong and you will not hear about identity or neglect in the abstract. You will hear about things. Here is what came up, unprompted, in conversations I had over three weeks this autumn:

• The number 41 bus, which stops running at 6.40 p.m., making evening shifts in Ardle impossible without a car.
• The closure of the Harrow Moor minor injuries unit at weekends, which means a ninety-minute round trip for a sprained wrist.
• Broadband that drops whenever it rains, which in the western hills is most of the time.
• Planning rules that make it easier to convert a barn into a holiday let than into a home for a farm worker.
• A single cash machine serving four villages, which charges a fee.

None of these is a matter of culture. All of them are matters of budget lines, timetables and planning guidance – precisely the levers the Assembly controls. That is why it matters that the two independents from the hill towns now hold the balance in a 61-seat chamber where no party has more than 24. They were not elected on a slogan. They were elected on the 41 bus.

The mistake on each side

The party of the centre-right tends to assume that rural voters want to be left alone: lower rates, fewer rules, less interference from City Hall. Some do. But a farmer in her sixties who cannot get her husband to an appointment in Calder does not want less government. She wants a bus that runs after dark.

The party of the centre-left makes the opposite error. It assumes rural voters need to be persuaded of the value of public services, and so it offers grand programmes – a regional transport strategy, a rural renewal fund – that take years to arrive and are announced from a podium in the old town. By the time anything reaches the hills, the people who were promised it have stopped believing it will.

Brigid Faulkner, who chairs the parish council in one of the smaller villages above Harrow Moor, put it to me more bluntly than I could.

“They come up here and ask us how we feel. I tell them I feel like I would like the gritter to come before nine in the morning. They write that down and then they go and make a video about community spirit.”

The obvious objection

The counter-argument deserves a fair hearing. Rural seats are few, and parties have finite money and attention. Fixing one bus route in the hills costs as much per passenger as a dozen routes in the city. A party that chased every specific grievance would, the argument goes, end up with a manifesto of potholes and no vision at all.

I do not think that holds. First, the costs are smaller than they look: extending the 41 to a 10 p.m. finish was costed by the regional transport board last year at under £300,000 annually. Second, the vision problem is the wrong way round. Voters in the hills do not distrust politicians because they lack vision; they distrust them because the vision never arrives. Delivering five small things would build more trust than announcing one large one.

So here is my request to both campaigns as they court the hill-town independents this winter. Leave the jacket at home. Bring a timetable, a staffing rota for the injuries unit and a planning circular. Rural voters are not hard to understand. They have been telling you exactly what they want for years. The difficulty is that you keep asking how they feel.