There is a certain kind of political utterance that arrives fully formed, as if it had been waiting in a drawer marked “Things One Says at Conference Fringes When One Has Run Out of Anything Useful to Say.” Jenny Riddell-Carpenter, the Nature Minister, recently produced a specimen of the type. Warm ale, local pubs, and black Labradors, she informed her audience, constitute a far-right nostalgic vision of Britain that never really existed. The rest of the country, which had been under the impression that these items formed a fairly reliable description of Tuesday evening in any number of villages, was invited to revise its understanding of reality.
The claim has a crystalline purity. It does not merely suggest that the countryside is more complicated than a postcard. It asserts that the postcard itself is a forgery, a piece of political stagecraft cooked up by people whose real interest is fox hunting and other un-progressive sports. The black Labrador, that most democratic of dogs, becomes an ideological prop. The pint of ale, traditionally served at a temperature that would not disgrace a room-temperature soft drink, is reclassified as a symbol of reaction. The pub, which has for centuries provided the British with a place to sit down, complain about the weather, and occasionally talk to one another, is revealed as a non-existent institution, a sort of rural Brigadoon that materialises only when the far right requires scenery.
One is forced to admire the ambition. Most politicians content themselves with redefining words. Riddell-Carpenter has set about redefining the contents of the average living room and the average village street. The black Labrador, according to the Kennel Club, remains among the most popular breeds in the country; pubs continue to open their doors each morning with the weary optimism of institutions that have survived worse; and warm ale, while no longer the universal default, still appears on enough hand-pumps to suggest that the vision in question has not entirely evaporated. Yet these facts are to be treated as inconvenient ghosts. The minister prefers a progressive countryside, one presumably stocked with different dogs, different drinks, and establishments that have been carefully stripped of any residual atmosphere that might be mistaken for tradition.
Picture the scene the minister finds so alarming: a wooden table, a glass of something amber and unchilled, a black Labrador of the sort that regards the floor as its natural estate. Around them, the usual traffic of human beings who have decided, for the evening, that the great questions of national destiny can wait until after closing time. This tableau, we are told, never really existed. It is a nostalgic confection, a far-right fantasy. One wonders what the minister makes of the photographs that appear regularly in local papers showing precisely this arrangement, or of the large number of citizens who return from walks with dogs of the offending colour and then, without apparent political intent, stop for a drink.
There is a fine tradition in British public life of metropolitan figures discovering the countryside and immediately declaring that it has been doing itself all wrong. The countryside, for its part, has long since learned to receive these revelations with the patience of a farmer listening to a town planner explain soil. Riddell-Carpenter’s contribution is distinguished mainly by its willingness to classify ordinary pleasures as extremism. The man who takes his Labrador into the local, orders a pint, and sits down without once mentioning the need for a progressive vision is, on this reading, participating in a dangerous myth. The myth, of course, is that such a scene is normal. Reality, according to the new dispensation, is something else entirely, something that must be constructed rather than merely observed.
One is tempted, in the face of such confident historical revision, to mention a particular black Labrador that managed to exist with inconvenient clarity. Wing Commander Guy Gibson’s dog, a male Labrador Retriever and official mascot of No. 617 Squadron, went by a name that modern ears find unspeakable and that the wartime generation, less burdened by the future’s sensitivities, used without ceremony. The animal was run over and killed on the eve of the Dambusters raid; its name became the code word for the successful breaching of the Möhne dam. Here, then, was a black Labrador thoroughly entangled with one of the more celebrated episodes in British military history—hardly the invention of a far-right public-relations committee, and even less a vision that “never really existed.” It simply existed, walked about, waited outside the officers’ mess, and died at the wrong moment, leaving behind a footnote that no amount of progressive countryside planning has yet managed to erase.
The minister has since clarified that she does not, in fact, believe country pubs and black Labradors are far-right. The clarification arrived with the slightly strained cheer of someone who has noticed that the audience is no longer laughing with her. She has even produced images of her own dogs, as if to prove that affection for animals can survive contact with progressive thought. The damage, however, is already done. Once a politician has described everyday British life as a far-right fantasy that never existed, the subsequent insistence that she meant something more subtle tends to sound like a man explaining that when he said the bridge was closed he was speaking metaphorically.
What remains is the original proposition, delivered with the confidence of someone who has mistaken a fringe meeting for the real world. Warm ale, local pubs, and black Labradors are not symbols of a vanished past. They are simply what a great many people continue to like. The attempt to rebrand them as political pathology says rather more about the speaker than about the objects under discussion. The objects, after all, are still there: the dog on the floor, the glass on the table, the low murmur of conversation that has never required a progressive vision in order to continue. The far right did not invent them. It merely failed to abolish them. That, in the end, may be the real offence.