SARAH VINE: As minister says rural pubs and black labradors are ‘far-Right’, why does Labour hate the whole lot that’s good and particular about Britain?

Are black labradors a ‘far-Right’ breed? Does drinking fermented hops at room temperature make you a bigot? Are pubs – especially cosy countryside ones that smell of wood smoke and scampi fries – inherently boorish?

Apparently so. Or at least according to Jenny Riddell-Carpenter, who was appointed Labour’s nature minister in July. She told a fringe event at the party’s conference in Liverpool this week that these things ‘keep her awake at night’ as she wrestles with the notion of a British rural landscape that ‘never really existed’ and is nothing more than ‘a very far-Right nostalgic vision’.

Instead, she insists, we should be embracing ‘a progressive vision for the countryside’. Uh oh. The word ‘progressive’ coming out of a Labour minister’s mouth is always a red flag.  

What you or I or the cast of the Archers might consider ‘progressive’ in a rural context – restoring local post offices, improving bus services, keeping village schools open, protecting wildlife, improving flood management – is not generally top of Labour’s agenda.

What someone like Ms Riddell-Carpenter means when she uses the word ‘progressive’ is more in line with the idea of replacing fields of wheat and grazing pasture with gleaming banks of solar panels.

It’s erecting great forests of wind turbines, giving the go-ahead to giant, heat-generating, water-sapping data centres despite the desperate pleas of locals whose properties and lives are blighted as a result.

It’s forcing rural pubs out of business with punitive tax measures, pushing generations of farmers off their land so local councils can buy it cheap and build giant housing estates to satisfy the needs of Labour voters hooked on welfare.

It’s dumping thousands of unvetted male asylum seekers in small rural villages such as Piddington and then accusing them of racism when they raise concerns about a potential clash of culture.

So far, such ‘progressive’ policies have been mostly limited to urban and suburban areas: places like Epping, for example, Braintree and elsewhere. And look what a success they have been there (not).

It is now time, Ms Riddell-Carpenter believes, to extend that ‘success’ to the people of rural Britain.

Her boss, Andy Burnham, agrees, and has said as much himself, stressing that ‘all parts of the country’ need to do their ‘fair share’.

And so, the dead hand of Labour class war, which has already done so much to turn vast swathes of our cities into pits of squalor, where masked youths on scooters and e-bikes run riot unchallenged, where the rubbish spills out onto pavements, where the stench of weed permeates the night air and gangs ram-raid each other’s houses, will now reach out and throttle what little remains of civilised Britain.

The thwack of willow on leather, a pint with friends, the soft brown eyes of a faithful companion, a walk home through the gloaming, the sound of woodpigeons: who knew that these were all symptomatic of a far-Right fantasy?

But perhaps the more important question is this: why does the Labour Party hate everything that is good and special about Britain, why does it despise the very things that make us unique, why do they want to erase every last vestige of this island’s rich and eccentric culture and replace it with a joyless, characterless sludge?

So what if there’s an element of nostalgia in the idea of rural life? There’s nothing wrong with a bit of nostalgia. In a world where everything increasingly seems to be going down the pan, nostalgia is the perfectly harmless refuge of a disillusioned mind.

But more to the point, is Ms Riddell-Carpenter so stultifyingly stupid she can’t appreciate the rampant hypocrisy of her position?

Incredibly, photos have emerged, shared by Riddell-Carpenter herself, of a black Labrador sitting in front of a roaring fireplace and another showing her pulling a pint behind a bar in a rural pub.

Not only that, but this entire government appears to be one giant exercise in nostalgia – as evidenced by our Prime Minister’s intention to take the country back to what he considers were the glory days of the 1970s, when the unions ruled, when taxation soared, when there was mass social housing and when anything that moved was nationalised. All far-Left fantasies, many of which he doubled down on in yesterday’s conference speech.

But the British countryside isn’t just a fantasy. It is a real, timeless, beautiful part of this island’s heritage and patrimony. If you rip the heart out of it, you rip the heart out of Britain itself.

British rural life – thatched roofs, pubs serving terrible food but great company, honesty boxes at the end of people’s drives, cottage gardens, cricket pitches, country house shoots, fishing – not only are these things all part of a British culture that transcends age and class, but they are also aspects of Britain that set us apart as a nation and are admired the world over.

Rural tourism in England alone contributes £13billion to the economy annually, generating around four million jobs. Are all these people really engaged in a ‘far-Right fantasy’? Of course not.

For someone such as myself, whose family emigrated to Italy in the early Seventies (in large part, as it happens, to escape the mess and misery the last hard-Left government inflicted on this country), I see the British countryside with a foreigner’s eye.

Driving home for holidays and Christmas as a child, I was always struck by the stark contrast between the landscape on the continent and the views that greeted us as we rolled off the ferry into rural Kent.

Half-built houses, vast factory developments, jerry-built high-rise blocks, road-side shacks gave way to neat fields and pastures, country lanes and pretty houses with well-kept front gardens. There was a strong sense that people took pride in their slice of land, whether it be a tiny cottage or a vast estate.

The smell of wet labrador on the stone floor of my aunt’s farm in Cornwall, crawling along at snail’s pace behind a tractor down a country lane, stopping to wait for some sheep to cross, pausing for half a shandy and a packet of cheese and onion crisps: these were the simple pleasures of home. 

There seemed to be an order and purpose to it all that I found both familiar and reassuring. Britain felt like a place with its own clear identity, at times rather odd and a little peculiar, but nonetheless certain of its character and place in the world.

For some unfathomable reason, Labour despises all that. For them it smacks of Empire, of privilege, of something they can’t control or understand. It suits them to break it up, to fracture these communities and traditions, to bully and intimidate them out of existence so they can replace them with their own vision and, crucially, their own voter base.

That is why they are so pro-immigration and so reluctant to take concrete steps to limit the numbers of people from very different – and often morally problematic – cultures arriving on our shores. It suits their anti-British agenda; it helps in the ultimate dilution of our culture, and that in turn plays to their advantage.

The British countryside represents the last bastion of ‘small c’ traditional conservatism, and Labour are coming for it. If these wreckers get their way, this green and pleasant land, this landscape that carries the memories of countless generations of Britons, will be lost forever. Labour will indeed pave paradise – and put up a parking lot.

Why does the Labour Party despise women so much? I only ask because tomorrow, October 1, the release of convicted criminals begins under the Government’s new scheme to reduce prison crowding. 

Among those are domestic abusers, stalkers and repeat violent offenders who have their victims – many of whom have only just begun to rebuild their lives – trembling in fear at the prospect. Honestly, I don’t know how Angela Rayner, Jess Phillips, Bridget Phillipson and all those other Labour so-called ‘women’s champions’ sleep at night.

Speaking of Angela Rayner, I understand that she has her woman-of-the-people image to protect, but should a Secretary of State really be hosting a DJ set at party conference? Whatever happened to the dignity of high office?

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the nightmare my mother faces in dealing with the endless ‘sadmin’ related to my father’s death. Many of you got in touch to detail similar soul-sapping experiences. And as if life wasn’t hard enough for older people (and those caring for them), Andy Burnham has now announced he’s abolishing the pension triple lock. Truly, this is no country for old men (or women, for that matter).