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By Root 415 0

as some stalwart of Woman’s Hour trying to talk about urban grime music. They so desperately want to be down with the kids, but just don’t have a clue how. Presented with the choice of a way-marked woodland stroll or hanging out with his mates down the Arndale, almost no teenager is going to skip up to the woods, however many MP3 downloads may be on offer. But still the council officers try, wringing their hands with guilty despair at their own fuddy-duddy whiteness, middle-classness and middle-agedness. One of the very newest local authorities, Cheshire East, formed in 2009, thought that this point was worth highlighting in boxed large text in its ROWIP: ‘It is very difficult to find info on public rights of way in the area on the internet. If you want to increase the usage of public rights of way in the area by young people then it is absolutely vital that this changes.’ Gosh yes, you can see their point. I just googled ‘rights of way Cheshire’, and it took a full 0.18 seconds to come up with the council’s own lists and maps, the Discover Cheshire website, the exhaustive database of the East Cheshire Ramblers and a Wikipedia entry entitled ‘Recreational Walks in Cheshire’ with scores of links leading from it.

These same faultlines are developing in some of the pressure groups and charities too – even in the hallowed halls of the Ramblers’ Association. In 2009, it spent £35,000 rebranding itself in lower-case postmodernism as the ramblers. Losing your capital letters is rarely a good thing. It began with companies that wanted to appear fluffy yet trendy, achingly hip yet responsible eco-capitalists: howies, purveyors of organic surf-dude wear as worn on the waves of W11, were one of the first on trend. As were innocent smoothies, palatable if pricey little bottles of puréed gunk, but almost guaranteed to come up again if you made the mistake of reading the label, with all that ‘drink me, i’m really tasty and good for you’ simpering. Tellingly, both companies were namechecked as amongst those he most admired by David Cameron, in one of his first big speeches after becoming Conservative leader (he was speaking at the Google Zeitgeist conference, no less; the words ‘pig in shit’ really spring to mind there). Even more tellingly, howies are now owned by Timberland, innocent by Coca-Cola, and the lower-case bandwagon has had its windmill ripped off and replaced with a turbo engine, courtesy of rebrands such as npower, bp and e-on. And, er, the ramblers.

Leading the charge for the new identity was Tom Franklin, appointed as Chief Executive of the still-capitalised Ramblers in autumn 2007. The whole process has become inextricably identified with him, for the rebranding was his baby and driven through on the back of surveys and focus groups that, as with the councils, were strategically nipped and tucked to tell everyone precisely what he thought they needed to hear. Respondents (it’s not said who they were) were asked what they associated with the RA, which produced a predictable roll call of ‘retired’, ‘walking boots and sticks’, ‘men with beards’ and ‘anoraks’. Asked how they should attract members, the unqualified responses included ‘modernise’, ‘make it more trendy’, ‘do what they can to make me aware of their existence’ and ‘change their outward appearance’. Shown the old logo, a simple but striking boxed pictogram of a hillside with ‘The Ramblers’ written above it, the mystery respondents chorused as one: ‘it doesn’t mean anything to me’, ‘it looks a bit cheap’ and ‘it’s dated/old-fashioned’. Bullseye!

None of this should have surprised the RA, for Franklin’s background is steeped in this kind of stuff. Student Labour politician, Blairite cheerleader and party researcher, he seemed to be heading straight for the Commons and a smooth ministerial career, having become a councillor in Lambeth at the age of 24 and the leader of the council at 30. A newspaper profile at the time quoted an ex-boss of his: ‘He cares about poverty and disadvantage, but he will be ruthless to get what he wants, and he is very ambitious. This