There’s a certain sound that sticks with you once you’ve lived in the English countryside. Not birdsong, that’s too obvious, but the deeper rhythm of things: the tractor coughing to life at dawn, Chameau boots crunching on the gravel, the hooves of horses going for a ride, the quiet murmur of a village pub where everyone knows exactly why you’re there, even if they’ve never seen you before.
I once had a house in rural Northamptonshire. Not a fantasy “weekend vacation,” but a place where life actually happened. One evening, over a pint, the village gamekeeper, “wirt” and slightly prejudiced, offered to teach me how to shoot. “You’ll be good enough,” he said, “and maybe you can spend a day with us on the estate.”
After a few sessions on the clay courts with a beautiful Purdey side by side, I was thrilled, not just because I had hit the target – my hit rate had been very impressive, I was told – but also by the world around me. The quiet discipline. The sense of responsibility. The unspoken understanding that this wasn’t about bloodlust or bravery, but about responsibility. It’s about knowing the country, respecting it and earning your place in it.
That is why, as 2025 draws to a close, I am deeply concerned about the future of Britain’s rural economy and the way of life that surrounds it.
We have been told repeatedly that concerns about farming, shooting, hunting and the rural economy are either nostalgic indulgences or political dog whistles. Watch a few episodes of Clarkson’s Farm and tell me that again with a straight face. Strip away the jokes and the celebrity glitz, and what you’re left with is a documentary about a sector permanently on the brink, a crop failure, a policy change, a rise in costs, teetering on the brink of collapse.
That risk became painfully clear this year when the government set its sights on inheritance tax relief for agriculture. What began as a plan to lift long-standing protections for family farms sparked outrage in rural Britain. As the Financial Times reported, the subsequent withdrawal, which raised the thresholds and softened the blow, was portrayed as a compromise. But once uncertainty is introduced, it doesn’t go away politely. It remains. It freezes investments. It speeds up exits.
Family businesses are not tax havens. These are capital-intensive, low-margin generational businesses whose value is tied to land rather than liquidity. Treating them like dormant piles of wealth rather than functioning businesses is quietly dismantling a sector without ever admitting that you intended to do so.
And it’s not just farmers who are feeling the pressure. Wildlife farming, shooting sports and landscape management support tens of thousands of jobs and support rural tourism, hospitality and supply chains. A stark warning was recently issued in the Telegraph’s analysis of the decline of wildlife farming, which highlighted how rising costs, regulation and political hostility are displacing skilled farm workers altogether.
This is not culture war nonsense. It’s economics.
Added to this is the increasingly hard-to-shake feeling that rural Britain is culturally misunderstood by policymakers. Labor’s proposals on animal welfare and transhumance have reignited fears that legislation is being shaped by an urban moral perspective. The Guardian reported warnings from rural groups that rural voices were being marginalized rather than engaged.
Meanwhile, the data tells its own grim story. Farm closures continue to outpace new farms, with thousands of farms disappearing under the weight of rising costs, labor shortages and unpredictable returns, FarmingUK highlights. When a farmer goes, he rarely goes alone. The contractor loses work. The feed supplier closes. The pub is shortening its opening hours. The village is being hollowed out.
What worries me most is that this erosion is occurring quietly and politely, without the drama that usually forces a political reckoning. There is not a single villain. No obvious cliff edge. Just a steady loss of viability until one day we look around and wonder where everyone has gone.
The landscape is not an amusement park or a television backdrop. It is an economic ecosystem that feeds us, employs us and anchors communities. Once it’s gone, you can’t rebuild it with grants and slogans.
I learned to shoot because a gamekeeper entrusted me with his craft. This trust between the country and its people, tradition and modernity, economy and culture is really threatened. If policymakers continue to treat rural Britain as a sentimental inconvenience rather than a strategic asset, they may one day wake up and find that the countryside still looks beautiful… but no longer works. And that, unlike a missed throw, is a mistake that you can’t try again.
