Today, like many people I imagine, I have been out walking. What a beautiful day it has been! And how wonderful to walk along verdant footpaths surrounded by cow parsley, with the sun filtered by the new leaves on the trees.  So I am in the country. All agreed? I thought so, as I walked 3 miles to a neighbouring village, never crossing a road, never encountering another person, and unable to get public transport  there. This is not an urban environment. However, I am labouring this point because I was walking to call on faithful Lib Dem voters, and more than one grumble that they had when I got there was about this very point.

The views from their houses look, uninterrupted, over fields to the rolling countryside and the Downs. This village boasts detached houses and big gardens, looking luscious in this weather, and many many times the size of my own. And yet, they are not so keen on the District’s recycling of green waste once a fortnight – a service that I personally thought of as welcome and quite ground breaking. Why does this not suit? For the very logical reason that their gardens are too large for one bin to accommodate two weeks worth of compostable rubbish – they live in a larger space: in the countryside – and other convenient means of disposal have been withdrawn.

Another lady living in the same lane complained that she had been told, by someone high in officialdom, that she was not entitled to a view on fox hunting … why? She lived in a built up area!

There is something wrong and potentially very dangerous in this ‘one-size fits all’ approach – this idea that either we are townies  (with public transport and superfast broadband, I presume) or in the deepest darkest depths. The real truth, especially in an area like the South East, is that there are precious few people who really live in the deepest countryside – you are never far from others, from civilisation – but those of us who live on its margins love to do so, but live differently from those in towns. We need to be catered for and understood, otherwise the disconnect between such voters and government at every level will only grow.

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