Johann Hari: Time to stop mollycoddling the countryside and to start nurturing our cities instead

One of the most gnarled and disingenuous clichés about Britain is that while our cities are coddled, the countryside is forgotten. The semi-feudal writers at The Telegraph and other temples of right-wing opinion proclaim incessantly that in the national distribution of resources, London always trumps Cumbria, and Glasgow always trumps Dorset. Now that foot-and-mouth disease has somehow seeped out of an American pharmaceutical lab and into the animal population, this complaint is poised to become the casual received wisdom once again.

But far from taking our cities too seriously, we treat their fate with a glib and casual self-assurance. By contrast, every single rural worry, no matter how unjustified, is given a wildly disproportionate weight in the national debate. If you want evidence, there are two fat examples this summer. If foot-and-mouth disease has carried beyond the initial Ground Zero, we will swiftly proceed - as we did in 2001 - to kick a hefty dent in our second biggest national industry, tourism, to rescue a tiny and economically worthless beef export market. And, at the same time, we may be poised to hand the mayoralty of our biggest city to a reactionary rural clown.

There is a simple solution to foot-and-mouth, followed by many South American countries: vaccinate all hoofed animals at birth. It hardly costs anything, and, as a result, no animals get sick or die. There are none of the periodic panics about the disease we suffer, and none of the pyres of burning animal corpses broadcast across the world, proclaiming to potential tourists your country is dangerous and closed for business. The only drawback to vaccination is that our beef would no longer be available for export, because most countries are still trying to fend off foot-and-mouth rather than accept it as a reality and vaccinate. But you only have to look at the figures to see why this really isn't that bad. The British beef export market brings in £700,000 a year, and employs fewer than 40,000 people. Almost none of that money is real profit: it comes from the £5bn of direct subsidies that we city-dwellers hand to the countryside every year. By contrast, the tourism industry brings in more than £70bn and employs nearly 2 million people.

Is it sensible to do terrible damage to tourism to save a titchy rural cottage industry with almost no net worth?

But the lack of seriousness we apply to the interests of our cities may be about to suffer a much worse blow than this. Boris Johnson's candidacy to run our capital city cannot be dismissed as a joke. The London mayor is elected by a system called the Alternative Vote, which means voters are asked to express a first and second preference for mayor. Nobody wins more than 50 per cent of first preferences, so it is the second preferences which decide who becomes mayor. The danger is that Boris will get enough have-a-laugh Number Twos to win.

I've met Boris a few times, and on a personal level, like everyone else, I find him fun. But the London mayor is not a stand-up comedian. He is the chief executive of one of the most important cities in the world. Yet Boris is the voice of a romanticised rural England in constant clash with the reality of 21st-century London. This is a man who supports, and has taken part in, not just fox-hunting but stag-hunting. He writes excitedly: "I remember the guts streaming, and the stag turds spilling out on to the grass from within the ventral cavity. Then they cut out the heart." He goes on to add: "This hunting is best for the deer."

His views get worse. London today is the first truly global city, internationalism made flesh-and-concrete. In my apartment block in East London, there are Russian exiles, Chinese students, a Ghanaian academic and a Colombian doctor - in the middle of a Bengali area. At any given time, half the population of London is now foreign nationals. This is a rolling experiment: can you really have - as Ken Livingstone put it after the 7/7 massacres - "the whole world in one city"? At the very least, it needs careful management - and Boris's rural, retro-imperial attitudes are a guarantee he can't do it.

This is a man who has, with echoes of Enoch Powell, described non-white children as "piccaninies", and written about the "watermelon smiles of black people". These atavistic mental images feed into his policies. After the London police treated Stephen Lawrence's family with contempt and let his murderers walk free, it was essential for all London politicians to press the Met to reform itself to root out these attitudes. Boris did the opposite. He attacked "the PC brigade" for "punch[ing] a hole in the Metropolitan Police". He damned the sensible Macpherson reforms as "hysteria" and "a witch-hunt", even comparing them to the tyranny of Nicolae Ceausescu. If Boris was mayor, the pressure on the police applied by Ken Livingstone to treat all Londoners equally would be off.

Boris has other beliefs that would be just as dire for London. This city is particularly vulnerable to global warming, with millions of people living on its flood-plains and defences that are often in an "appalling" condition, according to a recent London Assembly report. The London mayor needs to be a voice on the global stage against this on-going disaster, as Ken Livingstone has been. Boris believes the opposite. When George Bush refused to sign the Kyoto Treaty, Boris cheered: "When Bush says no, he is doing what is right not just for America but for the world."

London has great gashes of poverty between its glistening towers. The charity Médecins du Monde used to operate only in Third World countries - until it was so shocked by conditions here in East London that it felt obliged to open a clinic last year. The capital needs a mayor like Ken who champions a city-wide living wage - but Boris has opposed even the minimum wage. He actually wants to abolish the family credit system the Government has introduced for the working poor, which has lifted 800,000 children out of poverty. He calls this "an irrational system of subsidy" that "warps honest people" - yet he passionately supports the genuinely irrational subsidies paid by Londoners to farmers to produce goods nobody wants.

For too long, we have allowed romantic ideas about ruddy-cheeked farmers to make us underrate and underfund our cities. Far from going to small farmers, most of our subsidies go to vast agribusinesses and millionaires: Tate and Lyle has received over £233m in subsidy in two years, and Charles Windsor and his mother are handed over £1m annually for their farms. Now we seem poised to react to foot-and-mouth with the same tourism-trashing mania, and perhaps even to elect a shootin'-and-huntin' rural toff to run London. So remind me again - what were you saying about how we "ignore" and "neglect" the countryside?

j.hari@independent.co.uk

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