ABSTRACT
Rural politics in Britain were for a long time largely conflated with agricultural politics. W. Grant in a review of research on rural politics in Britain, noted that studies had tended to focus primarily on the politics of agriculture, yet this academic bias essentially reflected policy and popular assumptions. The dominance of the agricultural elite in rural local government was accompanied by growing agrarian influence in the Conservative Party giving the farming lobby a national voice that was institutionalized as the National Farmers' Union and, to a lesser extent, the Country Landowners' Association, were incorporated into policy-making mechanisms. The manufacture of discourse of a rural crisis coincided with a period of political maneuvering ahead of the first elections to the National Assembly for Wales in May 1999, in which parties and interest groups jockeyed to dictate the landscape of the new Welsh political culture.
