Failure to stop the spread of ash tree disease is just the latest example of a government far too focused on urban concerns
News that a fatal disease has landed on British soil understandably causes alarm. Today, the disease in question – Chalara fraxinea – threatens trees, not humans, but it's a sign of the esteem in which we hold our ash trees that the alarm bells have been so loud. This could be like Dutch elm disease all over again, an unstoppable plague that transforms the countryside.
As someone who manages a 10-acre woodland in Somerset, I've always thought that Fraxinus excelsior, our native ash, is the most magnificent specimen in the woods. It's beautiful, with a smooth, honey-coloured bark and a clean, white wood. Its delicate, pinnate leaves let in the light and the tree is useful for almost anything: it's both strong and elastic, so we use it for making all sorts of furniture, anything from chairs to four-poster beds. Ash can be used to make snooker cues, tennis rackets, hockey sticks and oars. It's also the finest firewood: as the old saying goes, "ash wet or ash dry, a king shall warm his slippers by". In both Greek and Norse mythology humans were made from it. Odin was speared to an ash – the mythical Yggdrasil. Ash was used both for the symbolically important maypole and the Yule log.
For the last three years, since we set up our woodland shelter for people in crisis, we've been thinning out the willow, hazel and hawthorn to give more space and light to our ashes. Believing the old planter's proverb – that the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, and the next best time is now, we've added 200 ashes in various clearings. We've protected the coppice against deer.
So the news that they're now endangered fills me with melancholy and something close to fear: when you heat your house and your water with wood, ash is your oil. And when the ashes are the tallest trees in the woodland, they're your canopy, your roof. It's as if someone had told you that, pretty soon, your fuel will run out and your tiles will disintegrate.
The government's reaction to the crisis has been flat-footed. A disease that had destroyed 90% of the ash trees in Denmark was first noticed here eight months ago: in Buckinghamshire, Leicester, Scotland, Yorkshire and County Durham. There were links to imported saplings. Last week was simply the first time the dreaded disease had been witnessed in mature trees rather than nursery stock.
So for eight months nothing has happened. A ban should have been imposed on imported ash saplings immediately. Bear in mind that this pathogen was first discovered in Poland in 1992. It's not as if we haven't had time to act. It's the sylvan equivalent of knowing about HIV/Aids, but forgetting to advise about condoms.
This is the umpteenth time the countryside has felt aggrieved by metropolitan policymakers. In recent years, the squires of the countryside have been dismayed by the ban on foxhunting, a piece of legislation which put wind in the Countryside Alliance's sails. They've been infuriated by politicians lacking the cojones to cull badgers and have also been appalled that their incomes are dwindling as costs rise. Milk prices are just the most recent example of hard-working farmers being screwed. Our bees are dying out, either because of the weather or the varroa mite. The cost of feeding our pigs has increased 25% in two years. Even urban visitors to the shires recognise that the government's idea of selling off a third of the Forestry Commission's 1.85m acres was barmy; and that cutting the commission's budget by 25% would drastically reduce its ability to combat this catastrophe.
Rising fuel prices also affect rural areas unduly; mobile reception and broadband coverage is patchy; access to public transport and other services is often woeful. This year has also seen the worst harvest for a generation. It's understandable that rural residents feel hard done by.
Our instinct is to blame politicians. Many feel our metropolitan MPs inevitably have a blind spot when it comes to the countryside. In a democracy in which 90% of the electorate live in urban areas, they're bound to. "The countryside," says Jonathan Dimbleby, a former president of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, "is a second-level problem for politicians. Over the last 20 or 30 years they've concentrated so much on the urban environment that they only wake up to the countryside when it becomes a problem."
Of course us agriculturalists will always moan. As the English humorist AP Herbert wrote:
The Farmer will never be happy again;
He carries his heart in his boots;
For either the rain is destroying his grain
Or the drought is destroying his roots.
If we're honest, we should be grateful for the huge subsidies and grants that have come our way in recent times. Our woodland is a tiny operation, but we have received a few thousand quid to create a 5,000-gallon pond, plant 450 trees and control Japanese knotweed.
And yet anyone who lives in a rural area still feels there's something wrong in the representation of the countryside as somewhere to "escape" to. Television offers a deeply sentimentalised view of it, an idyll where stress is replaced by serenity. For most people it's not, then, a place of toil and blisters, but the backdrop for weekend recreation: it's where daytrippers go for walks, see birds, or shoot birds, enjoy stately homes and roaring fires. For most Brits, the countryside is a pleasurable museum, not a tough place to live.
In other countries it's different. France has its mythical "France profonde", the deep soul of the nation that resists urban fashions. In Italy, Sicily was known as the "granary of Rome" and, even now, the country's beloved pasta is provided by native wheat fields. America has its corn belt and even elected a peanut farmer, Jimmy Carter, as president.
In other nations it just seems as if rural labourers are a vital niche of the electorate. That, perhaps, is why no British politician that I can remember has ever spoken so clearly to the farming community as Eisenhower did when he said, parodying bureaucrats: "Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you're a thousand miles from the cornfield."
The problem is perhaps historical: we were the first industrialised nation and our ancestors left the land in such large numbers that, even now, the terms "agricultural" or "a bit village" are easy insults. The idiot in any Shakespearean production always has a Somerset accent. Britain was the first global superpower, meaning that long before we became obsessive foodies, we already had exotic tastes for foreign foods and timbers. Sugar, tobacco, tea and mahogany became commonplace. The reason the UK imports 42% of its food isn't just because we're a crowded island, it's because we insist on eating what our climate can't accommodate.
The result is a complete lack of connection between what's on our plates and what's in our fields. And I'll bet my fine breeding sow, Harriet, the chair you're sitting on to read this isn't made from native timber. If it's wooden at all, chances are it's from the forests of Russia or Poland that supply Ikea.
We want everything to be cheap, whether it's furniture or milk. That's understandable, but there's a hidden cost. I remember when I was buying those 200 ash saplings, a woodsman warned me not to save a few quid by buying from a nursery that imported them from Hungary. "Never know what might come in," he said, looking suspicious. At the time, I thought his comment was the woodland equivalent of racism, but I did as he advised. At a marginally increased cost, I bought all our saplings from a nursery that guaranteed British provenance.
I assumed the woodsman was mildly ignorant. In fact, he was very wise – because it's absurd that we've been importing ash saplings when they regenerate so prolifically from our 18m UK specimens. From tomorrow, Owen Paterson, the environment secretary, will introduce a ban on imports, but it's far too late. The disease is here and spreading. Fifty thousand ashes have already been burnt. Shakespeare's "blessed plot" will soon, sadly, be a lot more bare.
Tobias Jones is the warden of Windsor Hill Wood (windsorhillwood.co.uk)
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