Don’t send these men to prison, make them plant trees instead

If anyone wondered why Reform are doing well, they need look no further than the sentimental hype and faux outrage gushing from every media and social outlet about the felled Sycamore Gap tree.

Here, in a sad little tale, is the perfect microcosm of today’s politics, where one half of the country despises the other half for their attitudes. All we liberals, perhaps even up to and including the movement they call Blue Labour, seem blind to the realities of life for the poor, uneducated and disenfranchised.

Two men, Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers, were found guilty on Friday of cutting down the landmark tree near Hadrian’s Wall. Nobody died and only a few more stones got knocked off a wall already four-fifths depleted by the passing of a couple of millennia, but it was murder in the court of public opinion. Nature had been reviled; heritage despoiled; feelings hurt. Why, those who got engaged there would never recover.

By the time the BBC led the teatime news with the court case, wide-eyed at the heinous crime, and Krishnan Guru-Murthy had emoted at great length with a bloke from Kew Gardens about the spirituality of trees, the felling had become an insult to humanity itself.

This was not just a tree. This was a cultural icon, the most special in the universe, mourned from Hollywood to Islington. The prosecution, ridiculously, had claimed it could be valued at more than £620,000.

Reporters gave a gleeful narrative to the prison van driving away with Graham and Carruthers inside. Lip-smackingly, they might even get ten years when they’re sentenced in July. Then over to the lynch mob online, where even the nicer comments described the two men as pig-ignorant trailer trash.

Nobody got it. Nobody saw that Graham and Carruthers lived on the margins of society. That they came from North Cumbria, where 29 communities are within the ten per cent most deprived areas of England, a heartland of the poor North where Reform is growing, where the failure to understand the lives of the awkward, the cynical and sometimes not-so-bright is unravelling politics.

The two men both lived in caravans. Each had their own untidy yards full of machinery, guarded by dogs. These were their castles, in defiance of planning laws, clinging on to the edges of civilisation.

Graham came from a broken home, was estranged from his mother, experienced the suicide of his beloved father, and had loved one of his horses so much he’d built a concrete garden of remembrance over where he’d buried it. He had a landscaping business and drove an elderly Range Rover.

Carruthers, whom Graham met when he fixed a Land Rover for him, lived with his girlfriend and their two young children. He had no criminal record. He’d grown up on a council estate, dropped out of an apprenticeship, and scratched a living fixing old cars.

There are lots of Grahams and Carruthers, basically decent people working on homes and gardens. Their lives are dominated by hard physical work, small rewards, tough realities and zero expectations. They lack education and comfy houses.

They’re the sort of kids teachers call poor wee souls. Graham, it’s said, had no friends; Carruthers, no brain (“he never said a word in school, like a mouse”).

And just sometimes in the chemistry of very close mates, a very stupid idea gains traction. And having done that unbelievably stupid thing, their very own Withnail and I, Graham and Carruthers tried to lie their way out of it – which of course made them a laughing stock.

There is no point at all jailing such hapless individuals. They’d be political prisoners. The sycamore was just a tree. They haven’t hurt anyone except themselves and achingly sentimental middle-class sensibilities. Give them community service tree planting. And let’s all, legacy party politicians especially, start walking more miles in other people’s shoes.

Photograph by Getty