I think they need to stop looking at extending half-arsed solutions like FTTC out to rural areas and instead focus on bringing improved services to urban and suburban areas. People out in the sticks make an awful lot of noise about not having the same access to services as those in towns and cities, especially when it comes to things like TV/radio reception and broadband, but it's their choice to live out there and they have to take the rough with the smooth, just like those of us in urban areas have to put up with eg. traffic.
The fact that you apparently have Virgin suggests you are in a decent sized (sub)urban area as NTL/Telewest/Virgin never bothered going anywhere even semi-rural.
However, this has left you short on knowledge of rural life.
1. You don't need to be rural to get terrible internet. My parents are on the edge of an FTTC-enabled village, but their line comes from the next village 3 miles away for reasons history does not recall. Fibre would make that moot, but lots of people in London or urban areas seem to have the same issue with EO lines and associated weirdness. A rationalisation of the network would instantly help.
2. Why do urban areas need FTTP? You can do VDSL or indeed G.Fast quite efficiently over short distances. Yes, they're inferior to P2P fibre, but digging up roads is expensive and do you really need more than 300Mb/s right now? As B4RN proved, soft-digging can be done relatively cheaply and efficiently compared with the usual £/km quoted for laying fibre (okay, they were uber cheap by being community based, but even for a profit-making business, soft-dig is cheaper than hard-dig).
3. DEFRA. Farmers don't get a "choice" about being rural. Nor do other, necessarily-rural industries. Meanwhile DEFRA are going paperless and demanding that farmers complete admin online, having downloaded 100Mb, 1000-page PDFs on compliance. This is one hand not talking to the other. If you're requiring rural areas to do their admin online, then it is necessary to ensure rural areas have adequate internet access. Since copper does not work over long distances, this leaves fibre. OR address your complaint to DEFRA and tell them to go back to Royal Mail based admin.