HAVING come last year to the hard-up North West to tell us Britain has no North-South divide, Tony Blair goes today to depressed Devon and Cornwall to tell rural folk how well off they are.

Again, the Prime Minister seems to be wearing a set of blinkers provided by his spin doctors.

For while, as he maintained before, the regional pattern of pockets of prosperity and poverty may not amount to a stark 'two nations' economic divide and, as he says today, many rural folk are better off than town and city dwellers, he is foolish to be so generally dismissive of these crises where they do exist.

And for many country folk crisis is not too strong a word for their plight.

Rural Britain faces serious problems on many fronts. Incomes in agriculture have plummeted to poverty levels and to bankruptcy in many cases.

Country communities have been devastated by job losses and housing made unaffordable by invading weekenders. Shops, pubs, schools and post offices are closing with disappearing transport services and rocketing fuel prices.

For those enduring such hardships, these are not scattered blemishes on a rosy economy overall; they are desperate predicaments that they expect the government to address rather than dismiss.

As with the response to deprivation in the regions, the Blair solution to the crises in the countryside is to sally forth on a lightning tour and, armed with selected statistics, talk down the problem instead of investigating it.

In the case of the countryside, Mr Blair seems to regard the rural lobby as a politically-inimical interest group, manipulated by bloodsports pressure groups. If he dug deeper and set aside the middle-class metropolitan values that seem to guide New Labour he would find in rural Britain true poverty and deprivation that needs action.

And he should remember what befell the last Labour prime minister who employed the dismissive tactic of "Crisis? What crisis?"

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.