Chapter 19: Rural PoliticsFarmers Party and Structuralism; Radical strategy option for Farmers Party; Good food and a living countryside; Policy high ground yielded to Green Party.
A case could be made for including the Farmers Party in amongst the Structuralists. Had they remained the representative party for the Swedish peasant farmer, the smallholder, championing his cause and that of rural interests against urban interests and their rural agents, the agrobusinesses, then we might have done so.But instead, over the years, the direction of the Farmers Party has been towards the knob twiddling brigade. In an attempt to build themselves an electoral power base in the city regions, they have departed from principle and abandoned their roots. Better that they had stuck to their granaries and kept their guns.
Indeed the best strategic advice anybody could give them as a party would be to abandon their urban bridgeheads; they are not defensible. Give up your attempts to infiltrate the urban and suburban districts of the city regions.
Instead position yourself as the party of good food and a living countryside. Sharpen the distinctions between rural interests and urban interests. Form alliances with maritime interests. Bring to a head the conflicts between the big landed interests as agents of the urban money power and your own alliance of interests with those who fish the lakes and the sea as good food power. Then you can deal from strength.
Bankers do not like to eat profit statements and cannot drink their balance sheets, however liquid they might tell you they are. Threaten to starve the urban areas. Refuse to allow them entry to your countryside. The balance between town and country will not be rightly struck unless the difference in interests is confronted.
The destruction of the common interest in good food and a living countryside will not be avoided unless the city banker playing farmer with his factory farms and his agrobusinesses is driven back into the gloomy vaults and the unhealthy buildings from whence he came.
Nature’s abundance cannot be monopolised
It must be partnered
Nature’s creatures must not be tortured
They must be cared for
Fields are not factories
Plants are not products
Cows are not milk quotas
Farmers are not industrial workers
But master gardenersThis party would be structuralists, out there battling for real shifts in the relationship between farms, food and families. The logic of their position would require the phasing out of agriculture and its replacement by horticulture as well as dramatic improvements in rural life.
But this is not the direction the party has taken. Instead, by default, it is the Green Party that has moved into the policy vacuum resulting from the failure of the Farmers Party to claim the high policy ground of structural change.