The witch is Esme Boggart. She represents a new collective established to campaign against no-fault evictions, and to support the families affected by them. In this case, the owner of the estate had commissioned an architect to refurbish the cottage. But, when the architect recommending demolishing and rebuilding the house instead, the tenants were handed their notice. A family of seven, they had lived on the estate for 26 years. “The owners of this property don’t live here,” reads Esme Boggart’s campaign literature. “They don’t know our community.”

Esme Boggart, in contrast, stands for “people who belong to a landscape, but don’t own an inch of it”. The people behind the protest use her name instead of their own because they are afraid to lose their own homes. “We are sick,” they write, “of this neo-feudalism that governs our lives.” Folksy as it is, the collective is identifying a modern twist on an ancient and serious problem: though stereotyped as a world of affluent comfort, the British countryside is a place of profound inequality. As a new UnHerd polling map shows, forgotten provincial regions are experiencing a cost-of-living crisis equal to the inner cities, compounding an existing problem of rural poverty and working-class displacement. 

No-fault evictions are commonplace across the country — reports say they increased 76% in just three months last year — but there are no official statistics that break down how many take place in rural areas. If you speak to those who live in an Area of Natural Beauty, you’ll hear the same story again and again, of landlords evicting local people so they can make more money from their properties, often by turning them into holiday cottages. In some places in Wales, the Highlands, Cornwall and the Lake District, one in four properties are Airbnbs. When you add second homes to that statistic, there are villages like Elterwater in Cumbria where 80% of houses are unavailable to live in. Inevitably, it is the lower classes who are pushed out.

For hundreds of years, if you worked in the countryside, you were usually given a “tied” house to live in. Villages used to have a house for the doctor, the teacher, the policeman, and so on. Foresters were provided with cottages in far-flung, newly-planted forests. Cotton mills, which were first built in the depths of the countryside so that they could take advantage of the waterfalls to power their factories, provided dorm-like accommodation for their workers (who were mainly orphans: children were cheaper to employ). Slate, coal, copper and tin mining all provided rows and rows of badly insulated houses.

Many of these traditional rural industries are gone, and most with good reason. There is no point romanticising them. The homes they provided were often cramped and sometimes isolated. And if you lost the job, you lost the house too. The words of a Scottish crofter, from 1883, are evidence of the impact this insecurity had: “I want the assurance that I will not be evicted for I cannot bear evidence to the distress of my people without bearing evidence to the oppression and high-handedness of the landlord and his factor.” His words eerily echo those of Esme Boggart, a reminder that the old ways are not the best.

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While the old schoolhouse might have been sold off, this ancient status quo still exists for farmers, who have lived in “tied” houses for centuries. If you rent the farm, usually a home will be provided too. Currently, around a third of England is farmed by tenant farmers. But having lived and worked on the land for decades, they often find themselves forced out of the landscapes they love. Christine, who lives on a tenant farm in Yorkshire, will have to leave her home when she and her husband can’t farm anymore. In preparation, they have bought a small house in the nearest market town. They would have preferred to stay in the countryside, but they simply can’t afford it.

And while people who have worked the land their whole lives are forced to move off it, people who work in cities are retiring to the countryside in droves. The Highlands and Islands Business Federation, for instance, is worried that some areas will simply become “glorified retirement communities”. If there are no children left to go to the local school, and no-one left to run the county show, put on the pantomime at Christmas or run the shop, these things cease to exist. Businesses are already shutting down because they can’t find enough local staff.

Some sectors still provide homes for workers — usually the ones that cater to outsiders. Big hotels need plenty of staff, and will provide rooms for bar managers, waitresses, chefs, and cleaners if necessary. Distilleries provide accommodation. The National Trust houses workers on some of its properties. But most restaurants and cafes do not, and slowly but surely, they are closing.

This is a sign that it’s not just the older generation, whose working days are done, being forced out of rural areas and into towns. Rachel grew up near Hawkshead, in the Lake District. When she first left home, she worked at a hotel in a neighbouring village. “Obviously I couldn’t afford to buy round Hawkshead,” she told me. Any houses that come on the market in the picturesque village get snapped up by people who can afford to pay sky-high prices. “The cheapest house was in Kendal,” about 20 miles away. But it was subject to a local occupancy clause, designed to keep houses in the hands of local people. It wasn’t very well designed: “They said I wasn’t local enough! My whole family is from either Kendal or Hawkshead area!” She wrote to the local councillor arguing her case, and was eventually allowed to buy a one-bedroom house in Kendal.

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Ten years later, Rachel was married and pregnant with her first child. She and her husband applied for another local occupancy house in the same area but were, again, told no. This time the reason for refusal was because they didn’t have children. “I was about to have a baby!” And her choices were limited. There is still no way she could afford to buy in the village where she grew up. Opportunities to rent long-term are rare.

“It’s not a housing crisis, it’s an affordability crisis,” says author Catrina Davies. In other words, it’s not about building more. A decade ago, when she was in her early thirties, she wanted to move back to Cornwall, which has the largest number of second homes in England. Catrina spent her childhood there, but the only place she could afford was a shed. “Houses have become a luxury item”; they are supposed to be homes. The shed is over 100 years old and she has no running water, but it is just that: a home.

Rural areas have benefitted from the wealth of those who don’t live there for decades, but now the balance has tipped. Locals are being squeezed out by those with more money than them, and communities are starting to vanish. The government is, slowly, doing something about it. As of April 2023, a holiday home must be rented out for a minimum of 70 days a year to qualify for business rates as opposed to council tax. In Wales, local authorities have already been given the power to increase council tax on second homes by 300%. And in Scotland, properties intended to be used as holiday rentals will have to apply for a licence from local authorities.

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In England, however, the crackdown is slower. In December last year, Cumbrian MP Tim Farron campaigned for more powers to restrict short-term lets. It was voted down by 321 votes to 172. It is worth noting, at this point, that MPs are three times as likely than the average citizen to own a second home.

With understandably limited faith in the authorities, communities are fighting back. There are now over 200 community-bought woodlands across the nation, for instance, used for a range of things, from forest schools to improving biodiversity. And collectives are buying land on which to build houses that can unequivocally belong to local people, locking in clauses to make sure they are never sold off as second homes. But many, like the anonymous campaigners behind Esme Boggart, are too afraid to directly challenge those with the power to evict them. As for the family in South Oxfordshire that the witch represents, they have been given another six months. What then, who knows.

Sir Keir Starmer, from autocue:

Comrade delegates. Fellow Knights of the Realm. Common folk. Ladies. Gentlemen. Old, young, happy, sad. People with an important sexual or gender disposition we absolutely need to know about. Everybody in this fantastic, broad, inclusive, tolerant, united, forward-looking, secular church of ours – thanks for another brilliant Conference. Wow. Amazing. No, thank you.

I have a very important announcement to make. But first I ask Conference for your forbearance as I attempt the customary humorous preamble. Ha ha. Yes. Yeah.

Older comrade delegates may remember the American pop songster Roger Miller. And his fantastic hit record, England Swings. Way back in the 1960s, when the internet was still only science fiction. You madam — in the front row there. You remember him, I bet. You look as though you were a bit of a swinger yourself, eh! Oh, it’s Harriet Harman. I rest my case! As I used to say! Fantastic.

“Ingerland swings…” went the refrain. “Like a pendulum do”. Ingerland swings. Like a pendulum do. And in post-war Britain, politics did indeed swing like a pendulum do. The Tories got in for a couple of terms, people got bored with them, voted us in and so on ad infinitum. Well, comrade delegates. Look where we are now. The political pendulum swings still. It do, it does. But entirely within the Labour Party. The Government blunders from strength to strength, stumbling towards their goal of running a one-party state. Meanwhile, Labour’s trapped, padding from left to right and back again like a mangy old tiger in some unremembered cage. I don’t know if you’ve seen that Netflix series about a zookeeper guy called Joe Exotic, fantastic watch, really takes your mind off things.

But seriously, again. Apart from the BBC, no institution does self-loathing quite like the Labour Party Conference does it, comrade delegates? Oh, we all pretended as usual to enjoy a coming-together, a renewal of purpose. Statements were made and listened to solemnly. Consensus was declared, as is customary, on the badness and wrongness of Toryism. Speakers have emphasised Labour’s unique contract with working people. Now everything will be packed up for another year, nothing will have changed, and that’s the bloody problem. Isn’t it? ISN’T IT?

But things have to change. That’s why I have prepared some KEYWORDS to illustrate my speech. They are: SLOGAN, SEIZURE, MILITARY COUP, TWITTER, NET ZERO, UNIONS, ELECTORAL COLLEGE and NEW LEADERSHIP. Hey, guy there in the raspberry beret — you get it! Full disclosure, I’ve had two gins and tonic to stiffen the sinews, come on, it’s showtime!

OK firstly, comrade delegates: SLOGAN. This year’s slogan — A New Leadership — is pretty good. On one level — here I am, not Jeremy Corbyn, fantastic! Sort of winning already. Also, on another level, Labour can offer the leadership the country isn’t getting from Mr Tumble at No 10. It’s also good on a meta-level, we’ll come to that later.

Comrades, I’d like to talk about SEIZURE. I’m not having one, I’m advocating one ha ha, all right now, settle down. I’m proposing a mass seizure of assets that should never have left public ownership in the first bloody place. Now I’m guessing from that noise, like the air being squashed out of 1,000 paddling pools, that you’re shocked. Well tough halloumi because it’s time we embraced SOCIALISM once again. “Oh but why are you abandoning centrist policies, which must be the way forward because they always have been, Sir Keir?” you whine, like abandoned puppies. Yeah, well I’m sorry. That “essay” I wrote for the Fabians about tiptoeing along the middle of the road. I’ve had a major rethink. I have marked that essay “D minus, see self”. I have had a word with self. The new Me begins now.

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Fact: young people love socialism. They get it. They can see what Vulture Capitalism’s doing to the world and they know that Disaster Socialism is the only way forward. Why should they be denied a stake in their own future when THE FUTURE IS SOCIALIST my gasping comrade delegates! We watched while buy-to-let landlords bought right-to-buy council houses and turned them into rent-to-frack human juicers. We need rent controls and affordable housing. “Deal”, as we say in Shadow Cabinet.

Here’s a puzzle — what’s the point of having privatised railways and bunging them more than £7 billion a year in subsidies? If the French state, the German state, the bloody Dutch state can own our railways, so can OUR state. Same with all the energy companies and the NHS. Oh dear, shareholders, your luck can go up or down, read the small print, we’re having the LOT back, cost price, sling your hook. “Oh but how are we to achieve this legally, Sir Keir?” I hear you mewl like neurotic kittens. Listen, I worked my way up from conveyancing solicitor to Director of Public Prosecutions, leave the paperwork to ME!

“COUP”. It’s an ugly word, and God knows I hope it doesn’t come to it. But I had some Generals round for a barbecue last month and let me tell you they are HARD for regime change. One of them told me in confidence that they’d cheerfully invade the Cotswolds if it meant the end of “Commander-in-Chief Fuckjumbo and that shower of arriviste shits”. His words, not mine.

Talking of posh, I’m seriously pissed off with the media, who keep unhelpfully calling me “Sir Keir”. Sir Keir doesn’t sound like the sort of guy who’d keep the Red Flag flying anywhere, does he? It’s a bit much when the leader of the Labour Party sounds more aristo than Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. What’s particularly unfair is that I notice more and more journalists, finally tiring of our capricious, dithering arsehole of a prime minister, have started calling him by his surname rather than his clown name. I think I’d be much more appealing as “Starmer”. Imagining an exclamation mark after that. “Starmer!”, sort of like a white “Shaft!” Lady over there to my right, you’d like that too, am I right? Ha ha, no offence love, just banter.

Talking of which, can we stop trying to triangulate policy positions by asking “What Would Twitter Say?” Firstly, who cares what Twitter says? Secondly, we all know what Twitter says, which is “FUCK YOU, BE KIND!” Comrade influencers — social media is not an important forum for the exchange of ideas. It is a mosh pit. It is a primal therapy screaming room. It is a distraction. When I first came into politics, people would stare out of the window or have a cigarette to break up the monotony of their day. Now they scroll through Twitter to find out who’s said hurtful words to whom. Who has “liked” the wrong “tweet”. Can you hear how infantile that sounds? “Hashtag I Stand With…”? NO. Stop “standing”, comrades! You CLAP are CLAP not CLAP in CLAP fucking CLAP HAMILTON! Log off, comrades. Twitter is a bourgeois prison of the mind.

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What’s next? Ah yes: ELECTORAL COLLEGE. All that “we’re changing the rules about how we elect a leader”. Soz, just winding up the crypto-Stalinists. As usual. Ha ha Corbyn you peevish, brittle old git. Next…er, NET ZERO. A Green Deal for a Green Britain. Green Jobs for Green Industry. Green Power to a Green People. A Green Future with a Green Economy. Delegate comrades, are we willing to turn Green Platitudes into a Green Reality? Only green time will greenly tell…

Ah yes. THE UNIONS. Protection of workers’ rights has never been more important. OK, maybe it has. But frankly the Starmerist wing of the Party, which has been headed by me, should shut up now and set about strengthening the power of the unions. Closed shops, lightning strikes, bring it on. Oh, and let’s have Clause 4 back, see how Lord Blair of Baghdad likes THAT. If the entire country’s unionised, what could possibly go wrong? In return, unions would be obliged to take their stupid dinosaur heads out of their arses, so fingers crossed. Why do I feel so giddy, comrade delegates? It’s not just the gin.

I’M STANDING DOWN. Oh that paddling pool noise again. Yeah, happy now? I won’t wait until we’re “in power”. I’ll shuffle off this afternoon, so we’ve actually got a shot at being in power. Comrade delegates, I was always only ever a caretaker leader. We just needed a breather after the Corbyn Experiment. Time to hang up my brown coat. Time for a new broom. I don’t want to overstay my welcome, and the earlier I go the more noble I seem. Anyway, I’ve got a LOT of Seizure Paperwork to tackle. So without further ado comrades, I’d like to hand over to Deputy Leader Ange Rayner. Cheers, yes please, ice and a slice love!

Sir Keir Starmer leaves the stage. Ms Angela Rayner addressing Conference:

All right? Yeah, totally endorse what Starmo’s just said there, let’s crack on. You can see what it says on the wall behind, “A NEW LEADERSHIP”, here we go then.  Comrade delegates, this is the 21st Century right? Labour has never had a woman leader yeah? Let’s correct that now. Proposal: make the contest for a new leader a women-only shortlist. All those in favour gasp. Motion carried. All are welcome to put themselves forward but don’t get me wrong. One of my best mates ever is Rebecca Long-Bailey, but we’ll never get in if we’re led by that pillock, bless her, with her tiny little face in her mam’s make-up. I, Ange Rayner, am ideal, as I can totally unite the party. Look at my credentials, Conference. Northern, working class, free school meals, pregnant at 16, my life saved by a Sure Start Centre. Remember what administration brought those in? Exactly. I owe a LOT to the Blair years. I speak as I find. Remember how the Tories sneered at my lack of education? Remember? I do. Well now Nadine Dorries — NADINE DORRIES — is Culture Secretary.

Comrade delegates, I commend all this to Conference, here’s to a new beginning, a new leadership, Green Socialism, let me lead us into battle and twat the Tories. Cheers.