"Unless we give rural areas a voice we are failing in our jobs as politicians," was the message on the conference fringe from Lib Dem MP David Heath.

Looking to the wave of fuel protests that have plagued the UK in the last fortnight, the MP for Somerton & Frome told the 100 or so party members gathered at the Country Landowners Association reception that in the countryside there was an "inchoate sense of rage that people aren't getting their message across" to government.

Nods from the audience seemed to prove his point, as do some recent opinion polls.

Turning to Labour's long awaited White Paper policy proposals to address rural malaise - which the fringe heard runs from declining agriculture, closing village banks, shops and pubs, to poor public services - he said it was long promised but never quite came into view.

"It's like waiting for a bus at Whiton Priory on a wet Sunday during a fuel crisis," the Lib Dem frontbencher said.

Action was needed now, Mr Heath said, to avoid country villages becoming just gaps between towns - or sterile dormitories where people live but where nobody works.

Although happy to share the platform with the CLA, Mr Heath made no bones over his party's points of difference with the landowners - their call to reduce the tax on developing greenfield sites being the main one.

"Developers," he said would, "go for the cheapest option, until we start to equalise the cost between developing brownfield urban sites and greenfield sites".

The tax was necessary, he insisted, to stop the surbanisation of the countryside - turning Somerset into Surbiton.

But not one to leave the townies out, Mr Heath said the problems of rural life could only tackled in tandem with those of the cities, making them better places to live would benefit everyone, he said.