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Rural Communities (Recession)

I could not agree more with my hon. Friend. Honesty in presentation, packaging and labelling of food stuffs is absolutely crucial in terms of both educating people to allow them to make choices so that we do not incur excessive and unnecessary food miles, and recognising that, in this country, we have the highest environmental and animal welfare standards in the world. Those standards cost, and it is wrong that our farmers should be at a disadvantage to competitors who can sometimes claim that their produce is British, just because it is processed here, and therefore sell it at a cheaper rate. Returning to John Maynard Keynes, if I could, I should say that he, a great Liberal, of course, was unfashionable for many years but has now been proved comprehensively right. He once said, among many other words of wisdom, that""the market can remain illogical for longer than you can remain solvent."" Those words ring painfully true for dairy farmers right now. They ring true for every rural community that has lost its post office; for every community that has seen its permanent population disappear due to the loss of social rented properties and excessive second-home ownership; and for every rural community that is isolated and cut off thanks to the deregulation of public transport and the subsequent loss of vital bus and rail links. In my constituency, and in many others no doubt, too, the number of people registering for jobseeker's allowance has risen significantly. It has tripled in the past year. We do not have many huge employers in our area; our eggs are in many baskets. I would say that that is a blessing, but some of those baskets have come crashing down, bringing heartache and hardship to decent local business people, their employees and their families. The impact of the recession has become tangible. Like many hon. Members, I am seeing in constituency surgeries a huge increase in the number of families in danger of defaulting on their mortgages or private rental agreements, an increase in demand for social rented housing and a rocketing in the number of families being squeezed into inadequate hostel accommodation. There is rising unemployment and the hours or wages of workers in employment are being cut; the downturn has begun to take effect. Two weeks ago, a young mum came to see me in my surgery. That weekend, she had to make the choice between paying her electricity bill and feeding her family. It is against that backdrop that the scandal of MPs' allowances has been played out; it has been juxtaposed with rising hardship, so no wonder there is such visceral anger out there, especially in impoverished rural communities. That economic hardship, coupled with the discrediting of the political class, is a toxic cocktail; I hardly need to remind hon. Members that such a cocktail brought Hitler to power in the 1930s. Shamefully, the same toxic cocktail led to the election of two Nazis to the European Parliament last week. The answer to the crisis is not to wring our hands or chuck eggs at people, but to offer real, tangible hope. To do that, we need to give rural Britain a new deal. We need to invest in our countryside and ensure sustainable communities. Let us start with housing.