NORWICH, England — Keir Starmer broke the Conservatives’ monopoly on Britain’s rural heartlands. Nigel Farage reckons he can seize it next.

Voters ditched their decades-old loyalty to the center-right Conservative Party at last year’s general election, voting in a wave of Labour MPs to represent their constituencies — in some places for the first time. It followed a charm offensive from the U.K. prime minister, who waxed lyrical in the bucolic bible Country Life about his own upbringing on the “edge of rural England.”

But, with Labour in the political doldrums, the flat-cap, wax-jacket-loving Farage hopes voters will turn to him next.

Rural constituencies will be a “massive” target for Reform, Farage’s deputy Richard Tice told POLITICO in an interview. In regional elections in May, the right-wing upstart party seized control of large rural county councils — including in Derbyshire, Lincolnshire and Kent — from the Conservatives.

“The rural vote traditionally was a Conservative vote, and if you look at the places where we won control of the county council, it’s a massive rural vote. It’s a very traditional old English vote,” he said. “As we move towards the elections next May, I think that will be the ongoing battleground.”

But Farage’s political opponents are not relinquishing the countryside just yet. The Conservatives are on a drive to win back their lost rural vote. Incumbent Labour MPs are battling to push rural issues up the agenda in parliament. And the Liberal Democrat and Green parties spy an opening too.

“The countryside is being fought over now by four parties in England, and then in Wales and Scotland you could throw in the nationalists as well. It’s a real battleground,” Tim Bonner, chief executive of pressure group the Countryside Alliance, said.

Battle of the wax jackets

Controversial Labour inheritance tax changes, which will hit some farmers, have offered Starmer’s political adversaries an easy opening.

Tractor protests coursed through Whitehall, the center of British power, earlier this year and Conservative Leader Kemi Badenoch donned a wax jacket while Farage put on his flat cap to try to seize the agenda.

Tice argues that Starmer’s embrace of renewables, and his party’s push for net zero greenhouse gas emissions, presents another opportunity for Reform to endear itself to rural voters.

“We’re the strongest on getting rid of the net zero madness and all of the renewable eyesores that we are beginning to see,” he argued.

Opposition to huge solar farms in Lincolnshire helped Reform do well in local government elections there earlier this year. “In Lincolnshire alone, there’s plans for 140 square miles of solar farms. So we’re going to be pushing against that very hard over the coming months,” Tice said. 

Reform is also building up its branch infrastructure in rural communities “fast,” Tice added.

But Reform’s critics think the party could have misjudged rural communities with its muscular opposition to net zero.

Tim Farron, the Liberal Democrat rural affairs spokesman and a member of parliament for a rural constituency in Cumbria, says “wonderfully wise” rural communities have “managed the landscape for generations.”

“There’s no part of our economy more badly hit by climate change than farming, drought and flooding,” he warned.

“The fact you have a bunch of people at Reform who think they know better than farmers, who are experts in this because they see the seasons changing, is mad,” Farron added. Farron admitted he is also opposed to putting solar panels on productive agricultural land. 

Farage’s close association with Brexit could also work against him, Labour strategists hope.

A government official, granted anonymity to discuss strategy, said Reform’s “entire trade strategy” created “huge dividing lines for us to exploit against Reform going into the next election.” Farage has criticized the government’s reset deal with the European Union struck earlier this year, and has leaned into the idea of the U.K accepting chlorinated chicken from the U.S.

On the hunt

Another flashpoint in the battle for the countryside could come if ministers push ahead with their election manifesto pledge to ban the controversial practise of trail hunting.

The government official quoted above said Labour is committed to “delivering it this parliament,” although they would not say when a new law would be put forward.

Fox hunting became a hot political issue when Labour banned the practice in 2004. In the run-up to the vote, almost half a million people joined a Countryside Alliance march through central London opposing the ban, which was championed by then Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Blair got the ban through parliament with a compromise allowing rural communities to continue to meet and trail hunt — a pursuit which sees hounds follow a pre-laid scent without chasing a live animal.

Some Labour MPs, and animal rights activists, argue trail hunting has been a “smokescreen” for continued fox hunting and Starmer has pledged to ban that too as part of a wider package of animal welfare improvements. Ministers said in parliamentary debate in April they would consult on plans later this year.

Tice says Reform would “strongly oppose” plans to ban trail hunting. It is “part of the bond of rural communities,” he said, warning ministers will have “completely lost the plot if they think that’s a good use of time and debate.” 

Starmer’s handling of trail hunting “could not be more explosive politically in terms of the rural vote,” Tim Bonner, the Countryside Alliance lobby group chief, warned, cautioning the prime minister’s approach will have a huge impact on “how Labour is viewed when we get to the next election.”  

Starmer made great strides in the run up to the last election “moving away from the culture war politics of the countryside, which was so damaging at the back end of the Blair administration,” Bonner argued.

Different times

But Labour MPs are skeptical the issue would really be as contentious as it was in the Blair era.

Perran Moon, Labour MP for Camborne and Redruth, a rural coastal constituency in Cornwall in the south-west of England, said it’s a “myth that people who live in rural areas like or are tolerant of fox hunting.”

A second Labour MP, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said they were dubious Labour votes had ever come from pro-hunt voters in the first place. 

“Animal welfare is a big win for us, even beyond trail hunting. No politician has got into trouble by being pro-animal welfare,” they added.

The Conservatives appear cautious about joining Reform on the hunting barricades.

“We will wait and see what they do on this because I’m not going to create policy on the hoof,” Victoria Atkins, Conservative shadow rural affairs secretary, said when asked about the Conservative position, though said it would show “a real lack of priorities” if a ban was brought forward.

After suffering a kicking at the 2017 election, then-Prime Minister Theresa May dropped a pledge to hold a vote on repealing Blair’s fox hunting ban. She told the BBC at the time there had been a “clear message” against it from the public.

Putting in the face time

Bonner said the Conservatives are “still some way from understanding quite how far they drifted from the path of common sense, during especially the post-Brexit period.”

He cited anti-cruelty legislation on animal sentience — which transferred EU legislation recognizing animal sentience into U.K. law — as a “complete and utter horror” under the Tories, and blasted a lack of delivery on a “post-Brexit settlement” for farmers.

Atkins insisted the Tories are “doing a lot of thinking” about why they took a “hell of a kicking last summer.” But she told POLITICO Labour inherited “a good farming policy that had the ability to build and progress, and we were intending to do that iteratively.”

The Conservatives are, she said, putting in the face time with rural communities, “going around the country listening to people about farming, but also about animal welfare, about nature and the environment” as part of an ongoing policy renewal program. She hoped the Tories will be able to present a “really interesting set of ideas from countryside to the coast in the years to come.”

Hope springs eternal 

Labour MPs fighting to hold onto their seats are now getting organized too — and hoping incumbency can give them an edge over their many rivals.

A like-minded group of rural Labour MPs set up the Labour Rural Research Group (LRRG) earlier this year to raise issues important to their constituencies.

Environment Secretary Steve Reed — a close ally of Starmer who was seen as a key figure in the strategy to win over rural voters last year — has been engaging with the Rural PLP of backbench MPs.

Headlines about the changes to agricultural property relief had been “concerning,” a third Labour MP, who is in the LRRG, said. But they were more optimistic the party could win again on “bread and butter issues” like the National Health Service, housing and jobs — which are actually what most of their voters care about. That sentiment was echoed by the government official quoted above.

Britain’s current political volatility could mean their seats — some of which were not even on target lists at the last election — will be more winnable than those held by more urban colleagues, the third MP said.

“You look at areas like Bristol, Peterborough and Norwich —there is much more volatility over particular issues like Gaza, and much stronger campaigns from independents and left-wing candidates,” the MP said.