The blue south

There are endless possibilities for investment and rejuvenation across the country, held up by endless apathy from the Government and endless moaning from the eco-loons.

A wise man once said a hungry man is not a free man. So, in a pursuit of liberty I recently set out to buy a bag of freedom from the local chippy. The nearest is a six-mile drive and only takes cash. So, I first popped into the Spar to use the cashpoint, only to find that it was out of order. “We don't do cashback,” the cashier said when I looked for an alternative. And so began the most disappointing journey home since the Second Crusade. This is not atypical of a thing in rural England.

Large swathes of the country have been left behind by globalisation, particularly the Midlands and the North which remain scarred by import shock and deindustrialisation. But lesser talked about are our rural areas, which have suffered a 200-year slump into decay. The alienation is such that the train strikes which grabbed the attention of the national media for an entire week barely registered with many of us down here. Thanks to the Beeching cuts, the nearest railway station from me is twenty miles away, and it can cost the best part of £150 quid for a return ticket to London. Buses from villages into Taunton, Somerset's county town, are one every two hours on a weekday, less on Saturday, and none on a Sunday. It doesn't make much sense to us when the great and good talk about cutting down on car travel, since the next alternative would be a horse.

In Devon, home to the cash machine which spoiled my evening, the Tories got thumped by the Lib Dems in the recent by-election. Though it had up till now been a Conservative stronghold, it shared with other areas of the West Country a certain unsureness as to why. It's clear who the Conservative voters are here in the main – the farmers and the elderly, of whom there are a disproportionate number against the national average. Most young people are in exodus. But in the market towns, there is serious deprivation, decrepit high streets and underemployment. These people might be instinctively reactionary, but they aren't Conservative Party loyalists.

John Heathcoat moved his lace-making business to Tiverton in 1816. He built a schoolhouse for his workers and an impressive home for himself and his family on the outskirts of the town. The factory still stands, kept on life support by Ministry of Defence contracts for parachutes, and his house is now a National Trust property. There is no white-collar work here, so other than a couple of industrial estates and a smattering of retail jobs on the High Street, at Greggs and WH Smith, Heathcoats remains, 200 years on, the predominant employer.

Tiverton is one town of many where the last it saw anything like ‘levelling up’ was the time of Heathcoat. A local job vacancy sought out workers to cut straw in fields, the “traditional way”, read: “With a sickle,” for between £7 and £9 an hour. It might cost you a tenner in petrol to commute to a far-off farm, and by the time you've bought lunch, paid your National Insurance and chomped on a Mars bar, you realise you might as well have stayed home and claimed benefits. Of course, these kinds of jobs are enticing prospects for foreign workers, who can live ten to a caravan for a summer, and send the money back home, where it's worth ten times as much relative to prices.

I had a carpentry job in the Somerset town of Bridgwater, to replace all of the fire doors in a house of multiple occupancy. The tenants were from East Timor and worked the nightshift at what I think was a biscuit factory. They were sleeping on mattresses, without bed frames, and using their high visibility jackets as duvets. Several ant trails were leading to and from the kitchen and the garden. The two days spent working in the place were unspeakably depressing. But this is the reality of the rural economy, where agricultural and industrial jobs have declined in terms of pay and conditions- to the extent that even some of those who first came over for work, including the Polish, want shot of the whole thing, and have left in droves over the past decade. I know electricians who now go to Poland for work.

But it doesn't have to be this way. Cornwall is home to vast reserves of Lithium, the element essential for battery production and, by extension, future motor car manufacture. But the exploration of these deposits remains in the embryonic stage, and even by 2025 will only employ, at best, 200 workers. Across the South West, there are largely untapped stores of strategic metals like tin, copper and tungsten, all of which are being under-exploited. There is a vast coal field across the West Country which could be drawn upon to support our beleaguered steel industry. We have over 625 miles of coastline, but our fishing industry is as weak as ever and there are no serious attempts to harness water power with tidal lagoons. There is scope for the extraction of natural gas by fracking, but it is prevented by this Government's moratorium.

But it's not just industry, revitalising and reopening our railways could encourage monied professionals who only need to be in the capital for a day a week to move out of London and into rural towns, bolstering the service economy. Much of the game shot here, a tourist attraction in and of itself, is lost to mishandling, rather than stocked on local shelves. There are endless possibilities for investment and rejuvenation in the region, held up by endless apathy from the Government and endless moaning from the eco-loons.

So, while the Tories went down for a shocking defeat in Tiverton and Honiton, it wasn't particularly surprising. Conservative hegemony in the area has done nothing but manage the decline for several generations. Nobody thinks the Liberal Democrats will do anything, of course, but there is an easy appeal in hitting the ruling party with whatever weapon comes to hand. The Brexit realignment saw the Northern and Midland's working classes prioritise their cultural interests over their economic interests in the main – they turned down free broadband in favour of immigration control and sovereignty. But the opposite now threatens to happen in parts of the Brexit-supporting South, where social conservatives and outright reactionaries will vote for the pronoun-toting Liberals, on the first-hand as a revenge act, and secondarily, because of anti-protectionist and pro-globalisation stances taken by the Government in relation to its trade policy. Of course, the untapped potential of these areas' resources doesn't even warrant a mention, no party will exploit them. Without radical revival, the blue sea across the South West could go yellow, and who knows, perhaps in a couple of generations, red.