Who started this "them and us" between town and country? The mis-named Countryside Alliance when they marched on London last year and later brayed outside the Labour party conference in Bournemouth.Yesterday the prime minister went to Devon and blew their cover. They are not "the countryside". They are a bunch of Tory hunters and farmers who no more represent most country dwellers than red-braced commodity brokers in City champagne bars represent townies.Blair has the facts on his side and he delivered a barrage of them yesterday: the countryside is doing pretty well. There is a farming crisis, there is real rural poverty (though proportionately less) but life for most people in the country is better than in towns. They are healthier, happier, safer, better educated and richer. Not surprisingly townies tell pollsters they wish they lived there too. The traditional left likes to stress the two nations of the north/south divide while the right tries to capitalise on a rural/urban split, both playing to their own electoral heartlands. William Hague was stoking up that old anti-townie sentiment in his speech to the NFU this week: "The rural way of life is under threat from urban values, Islington pressure groups and a metropolitan elite who know nothing about the countryside."Tony Blair is attempting to dismantle the banality of these national semi-myths: the north is also rich, the south also poor, town and country share most common concerns. In Devon yesterday he rightly sought to disentangle the tiny farming industry from most of rural life. Agriculture is only 1% of GDP and only employs 2% of the workforce in England. Even in rural areas it only employs 4% of the workforce. Like everyone else, most people work in services or in small businesses. There is no "rural crisis".  But yes, there is indeed a farming crisis and this is the worst agricultural recession since the 30s. What should be done? "Income can go down as well as up and is not guaranteed," says the very small print at the bottom of all financial service ads. Most of us live with that possibility because it is part of the human condition to know that disaster can strike.But farmers seem to consider themselves outside the cut and thrust of the normal market processes they so heartily endorse when they go into the polling booths to vote Tory. In real terms farmers' incomes rose by 100% between 1990 and 1995. But now they have dropped by 60% since then.   There's every reason to feel especially sorry for the 20% who are tenant farmers with nothing to sell up, but most farmers own valuable land, the price of which has soared recently.Yet even farmers sitting on a fortune think they should be bailed out. Why? Walk into the bankruptcy court any day of the week and case after case will bring tears to your eyes at the sight of so many decent people wiped out by bad luck or bad judgment. Two out of three new business start-ups fail. Farmers are not the only hard-pressed businessmen to commit suicide. Should the state step in and bail them all out?  Images of the harsh treatment meted out to the miners colour all our current attitudes towards compensating lame-duck industries. Mrs Thatcher said we couldn't and shouldn't pay people to dig out coal no one wanted, so now it's hard to see why farmers should be paid to breed unsaleable cattle, pigs and lambs. Global markets change and in over-producing meat, farmers misjudged their markets. It happens. We can feel very sorry for them, though their political attitudes don't always make it easy. Letting the Countryside Alliance be their advocate is about as helpful to their cause as Arthur Scargill was to the miners'.  Cleverer leadership would have had the farmers' tractors rolling down Whitehall long ago to protest at the high pound which is the gravest single cause of their distress. Other industries get some benefit from cheaper imported raw materials, but for farmers who import nothing the high cost of exporting is pure calamity. The NFU has always been pro-euro, but they haven't rolled out their tanks to demand early entry.Where are the green Barbours on platforms up and down the land demanding we join and that everything is done to lower interest rates, bring down the value of the pound and make euro entry possible? (Now we have missed entry on day one, the only way to lower interest rates without inflation is to raise taxation instead. Are they for it?) Instead the NFU conference applauded William Hague's strange pleas for more EU subsidy and didn't query his admission that "the strong pound has hit all livestock farming with unprecedented ferocity".   The farming lobby is powerful and emotive because it taps an atavistic national fantasy that everyone's roots or their retirement destination is the countryside of Hovis dreams. It was brave of Blair to face the farmers down with some home truths: adapt or die is his hard message. Labour has handed out 435m extra in direct aid to farmers, but from now on there will only be more for those things that are socially useful. Ten million - not enough - is to subsidise the cost of converting to organic or semi-organic methods. (Absurdly we import 70% of our organic produce as we don't grow enough here: there are long waiting lists of farmers wanting to convert.)Other funds will help turn farmers into countryside   stewards: we may not need sheep to eat, but we need them as lawn mowers on barely profitable hill farms, to preserve those much loved patchwork landscapes with dry-stone walls. There are grants for developing new industrial crops to generate energy, make plastics and grow hemp for manufacturing. But all these are small funds for small schemes. In the end the market is let rip. Except, of course, for the continuing disgrace of the CAP, whose snail's pace reform still hands out a monstrous 3bn farming subsidy mainly to those who need it least: 80% goes to 20% of the farmers, many of them the richest.  The future, the government suggests, lies in tourism, to which some farmers reply arrogantly that they don't want to be park-keepers. But for some it's that or nothing: 90% of the people live in towns and they want access to the country. They are the market and farmers   had better learn to smile at them instead of blocking footpaths and setting dogs on them. They may be townie sentimentalists but they want fewer pesticides polluting the soil and more live birds. (The RSPB has more members than all the political parties put together - and they are, incidentally, outraged that Blair's one pointless sop to the farmers this week was an unexpected pledge not to introduce a proposed pesticide tax to make farmers cut down on their use.) The Countryside Alliance's opposition to the right to roam was just another example of their disastrous leadership on rural matters: if they want to survive they are going to have to learn to love ramblers, picnickers and even people from Islington. No more of this "them and us" romance.