"England's Green Unpleasant Land"
There are times when I suspect the woke aren't actually interested in social justice at all; they just loathe anything that ordinary people enjoy. This is one of them.
I’ve travelled quite widely in my life, and seen a lot of impressive scenery. I’ve been in the deserts of Iraq, Oman, Dubai and Nevada. I’ve stood on top of Mount Tamalpais, looking out over San Francisco Bay and the Pacific. I’ve driven through the stunning karst landscape of northern Bosnia, and lived in Kabul, 6,000 feet up and surrounded by the snow-capped peaks of the Hindu Kush. However, I doubt I’m alone in finding the British countryside uniquely beautiful.
Of course Britain is compact, and we have nothing on the scale of the Himalayas, the Grand Canyon or the great grey-green greasy Limpopo. We don’t exactly have swathes of untouched wilderness, either; almost all our countryside has been shaped by human hands over many centuries, and looks the way it does because our ancestors made it look like that. Still, it has a particular beauty to it that’s been captured in a million paintings and photographs. It seems quite popular, too. Our modest but distinctive countryside draws in millions of tourists from all over the world, as well as giving many hours of healthy pleasure to us natives.
Naturally, the woke left hate it.
The House of Commons has an All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Race and Community, which for reasons that no doubt seem very important to it is looking for links between racism and climate change. As part of this investigation it’s been handed a report by Wildlife and Countryside Link, an umbrella body that represents dozens of charities. Predictably, considering how woke the average charity has become, this report depicts our countryside as a racist hellhole, dripping with the bloody legacy of slavery and colonialism.
No, really - that’s what it says. At this point I should say that the 49 charities represented by Wildlife and Countryside Link aren’t tiny fringe organisations; we’re talking about groups like the Wold Wide Fund for Nature, the Zoological Society of London and the National Trust here. These are charities with history and credibility - and yet they’ve put their names to a report that is absolutely bonkers.
The report complains that “it is White British cultural values that have been embedded into the design and management of green spaces.” Well, yes, it is. What did they expect? About the one thing they got right is that most of our green spaces have indeed been designed and managed. We’re a small island and quite densely populated, and for thousands of years the land, like the rest of us, has had to work for a living. Trees were cut for firewood and building materials. Land was cleared to create fields. More trees were cut to make longbows. More land was cleared for livestock. More trees were cut to build Nelson’s ships of the line.
Almost every inch of our country has been shaped by human hands. Even the wild-looking North Yorkshire moors that surround me are a managed landscape, criss-crossed by ancient dry stone walls. Hundreds of feet above the valleys where the farms and villages lie, and miles from the nearest road, you’ll find modern steel gates built into old stone shippens that have been carefully maintained for centuries.
This landscape, like all our other landscapes - the Norfolk Broads, the rich arable land of the Cotswolds, the endless dark, forbidding acres of Forestry Commission plantations - has been designed and managed for hundreds, thousands of years - and, until the 1950s, almost everyone in this country was white British. Whose cultural values did Wildlife and Countryside Link expect to find embedded in it? Honestly, I’m amazed that even a bunch of leftie charity officials had the sheer effrontery to write something so mind-blowingly stupid.
Go for a walk beside the rice paddies of Vietnam, with their carefully levelled terraces and water-retaining dykes, and tell me whose cultural values are embedded in that landscape. Explore Kenya’s Maasai tribal lands, divided into cattle pastures by thorn-brush barricades, and tell me whose cultural values are embedded in that landscape. Roam through the cultivated valleys of Afghanistan’s Sangin Province - actually don’t; that would be suicidal. But if you did you’d see intricate irrigation systems that are just as old, and have been just as meticulously cared for over centuries, as the stone walls of Yorkshire, so tell me whose cultural values are embedded in that landscape.
Landscapes reflect the cultural values of the people who made them, and the British countryside was shaped by the white British for one simple reason - until 70 years ago nobody else lived in it. I’m not interested in rehashing ahistorical nonsense about how Britain has always been diverse and multi-ethnic, because that simply isn’t true. Britain is multiethnic and diverse now, but really, that’s something that’s only happened in the last 30 years. Even London, the most diverse city in the country today, was 80% white British in 1991.
In the countryside, of course, it still isn’t true. In the villages and small market towns where the people who work the landscape live, diversity is mostly something we see on TV. That might not suit the metropolitan lefties of Wildlife and Countryside Link or the All-Party Parliamentary Group, but it’s nevertheless true - and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Let’s be honest: Immigrants come to Britain for many reasons, but I seriously doubt many came here because they wanted to be on some windswept Yorkshire hillside at 3am on a cold March morning, with sleet blowing horizontally in their face and one arm wedged to the elbow in a ewe’s lady parts. Instead, they settle in our cities and larger towns. If they want to visit the countryside they’re as welcome as anyone else, but they should expect to find a landscape shaped by the cultural values of the people who actually live in it - and if they’re too racist to cope with that, well, they don’t have to come back.
Spot on, Fergus. It’s worrying that the maniacs in HR departments who fool the well-meaning, but non-savvy types who inhabit the boardrooms of trusts and charities, aren’t being found out and then winkled out. There seems to be no end to this!