The BNP is one thing - what about badgers?

Updated: 21:47 EST, 30 May 2009

I have always found Somerset to be an excellent test-bed for ideas. I know of no place that puts a higher value on reflection, on 'giving time to time', to borrow a Spanish proverb. Somerset has the virtue of being just beyond the cultural dominance of London.

When I come down from London, it is as though all the clocks have been adjusted to a slower rhythm. Many - but not all - of the fashionable London ideas seem remote. Somerset people value steadiness; they do not hurry to make up their minds.

Somerset is deeply historic, with fragments of the Iron Age, the Romans and the Anglo-Saxons, and noble church towers built with the wealth of the medieval wool trade.

The ruins of Glastonbury and Wells Cathedral, and King Arthur, St Patrick and Alfred the Great are among the Somerset shrines and heroes. Most of them are more than 1,000 years old. There are also modern institutions, including the Glastonbury Festival and the great Royal Bath & West Show. Somerset has a slow pulse, but a long history.

Last week, Conservative leader David Cameron spoke at the Royal Bath & West Show, where the Somerset farmers gather. His speech followed on from his ideas about constitutional reform discussed earlier in the week. In his speech he gave a specific warning about the danger that the current disgust with politics and politicians would lead to voters giving their votes to the British National Party (BNP).

'These people are not pleasant people,' he said. This was a shrewd appeal to a Somerset audience. The culture of our county puts a high value on pleasantness; we do not particularly pride ourselves on calling a spade a spade. There is enough of the old Celtic tradition in Somerset to make us desire to find an acceptable euphemism for 'spade' if 'spade' is too bold a way of describing an agricultural implement.

Cameron went on to say: 'Do not be naive about what these people stand for. They dress up in a suit and knock on your door in a nice way but they are still Nazi thugs.'

The picture of Nazi thugs dressing up like old-fashioned life assurance salesmen and walking, perhaps in patent leather shoes, half a mile up a muddy Somerset farm track, only to find the farmer is carting dung in a distant field, has a certain appeal.

But Somerset is a tolerant place, where fascists would stick out as they do in the novels of P.G. Wodehouse.

Cameron probably expected to answer a lot of questions about the great issues of the day, including the global recession and MPs' expenses. On both issues, our Somerset views are not always the same as London's thinking. The recession is rather less scary in Somerset. There are relatively few big businesses planning to dismiss workers by the thousand, but the county has a large number of small firms and self-employed people.

As for the expenses question, there is the same general anger, but there is also regret. 'What a pity,' is a widespread Somerset response.

However, the Somerset farmers wanted to find out whether Cameron was sound on an immediate practical issue of great importance to them. Because badgers have protection in law, they have multiplied. That, in itself, would not matter greatly. The trouble is that an increasing number are infected with tuberculosis, and this disease has spread to cattle.

The Somerset farmers want to control this epidemic by culling the badgers, but the law does not allow them to do so without permission from Whitehall.

Every farmer Cameron spoke to asked him whether he would approve the culling of badgers if he became Prime Minister. Fortunately, he knows about badgers - there are likely to be many infected badgers in his own constituency of Witney, Oxfordshire. He said he was in favour of culling.

Cameron was well received by a mixed audience; the farmers, but not only the farmers, liked what he said. The countryside knows the town has the voting majority, and always will. What country people want is a system of government that pays more attention to their needs and views. The issue of badgers is just one of hundreds on which the country feels neglected.

When one reads what Cameron has written on constitutional reform, it seems clear that he has grasped the relationship between constitutional reform, the information revolution and the need to bring power closer to the people. Decentralisation is the central theme of his proposals. He believes in it and believes voters want it.

The specific proposals he is now making include local control over schools, housing and police, more mayors, open primaries for parliamentary candidates and curbs on the powers of the whips in Parliament - and the spin doctors in Government. He recognises politicians have made this sort of promise before. Margaret Thatcher was in part a great liberator and in part a great centraliser. Cameron aims to be a liberator.

He also understands information technology has transformed politics. The power of Google presents its own problems, but it does equalise access to information. Cameron argues that the development of this new technology means there will no longer be a need for a 20th-Century centralised state.

One can quote Karl Marx to explain this broadening of access to information. 'Mankind always sets itself only such problems as it can solve; since . . . it will always be found the task itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution already exist.'

I prefer to quote Tennyson, the English conservative rather than the German socialist: 'A land of just and old renown, / where Freedom slowly broadens down / from precedent to precedent.'

Each generation should gain a broader base of freedom. Less power to the elite; more power to the people. That is not a bad policy.