Apparently ‘countryside’ is not just another word for killing Guardian readers, it is the name of a place which occupies 90 per cent of the British landscape. Less than a fifth of the British population live in the countryside. If we are to believe the Wildlife and Countryside Link (WCL) charity, which claims to represent several countryside charities, the countryside is no country for ‘people of colour’.
For a brilliant takedown of the ridiculous ideas portrayed by the WCL in its recent report presented to the Parliament on Racism, look no further than Country Squire Magazine where Editor Dominic Wightman has done a hilarious demolition job.
Without a shred of objective evidence for, or examples of, racism in the countryside, the WCL depends on that old clincher that the countryside was ‘perceived’ to be racist. WCL, using the usual intersectional gobbledygook, explains: “Cultural barriers reflect that in the UK, it is White British cultural values that have been embedded into the design and management of green spaces, and into society’s expectations of how people should be engaging with them.” adding that “racist colonial legacies continue to frame nature in the UK as a ‘white space’.”
Given that the native population of the UK is white and that, apart from miners emerging from pitheads, there was barely a black face to be seen until well into the last century, it is not surprising that the countryside represents White British cultural values. What the hell do they expect? People of colour still only constitute less than a fifth of the UK population.
More to the point, what do WCL expect to be done about it? How could we make the countryside more accommodating for people of colour? In fact, how do we make it more accommodating for anyone, especially the people who live there?
If people of colour don’t feel welcome in the countryside then they are in good company. The rural population of the UK declines by over 1 per cent annually as people move to urban areas. Nearly 200,000 people make that journey every year. For the rest there is absolute poverty, admittedly not as high as in urban areas, but it comes with a unique set of problems including ‘lack of public transport, lack of affordable food, seasonal working patterns and unreliable mobile phone coverage and internet access’. Farmers, clearly an important group of people in the countryside, sometimes take the final solution into their own hands by committing suicide. There were 36 suicides in 2021-2022 but in the previous year it was 133.
It seems to me that if people of colour feel oppressed and marginalised in our urban areas then they ought to feel a great deal of empathy with the downtrodden population of the countryside. Organisations such as WCL would be better applying their intellects to how conditions in the countryside can be improved for the people who choose to live there and who, often for very little reward, tend to the design and management of our green spaces.
As the inspiring and highly acclaimed (by the farming community) TV series Clarkson’s Farm showed us townies, the poor blighters barely make a penny from their efforts. When they do try to branch out, innovate and be entrepreneurial they are strangled and strung up by rural red tape. Much of this is imposed by people living and working in urban areas whose view of the countryside is bucolic and sybaritic.
The UK countryside is not racist, and neither are the folk living there. The countryside is the way it is because that is how it has been curated to feed people, to grow forests for house building and with areas for recreation. The folk living there are not racist; they simply don’t have the time.
Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He is a columnist with Unity News Network and writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.
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We live in a lovely village in rural Somerset. Quite how we can be racist when we never see a person of POC from one month to another beats me; which rather suggests it is those who are calling us racist are in fact the real racists.
A magnificent feat of projection.
Ah, yes, but you see the charge isn’t that you people are racists–which could be true or false–but only that cultural barriers, cultural values, the design and management of spaces, society’s expectations and colonial legacies are–which couldn’t. You mustn’t think that the writers are saying something verifiable (or–come to that–saying something, in the ordinary sense of those words, at all). These phrases aren’t accusing anyone of anything. They are just a form of display, like the peacock’s or the bower bird’s. Perhaps the writers want to attract mates, or keep their jobs.
Turn the “charity” argument round and say ‘people of light colour’ feel unwelcome in many urban areas, especially those run by and curated for groups they don’t belong to, and the hate crime charges would drop like manna from above. Any self-respecting member/financial contributor to the three “charitys” represented by this mouthy “charity” who doesn’t immediately cancel their subscriptions ought to be themselves charged with hate crime facilitation.
Wish I’d thought of including that in my article
Hullensians by adoption unite, much wit & wisdom flows via the Hop & Vine!
Thank you Roger, the sad part about all this type of virtue-signalling navel-gazing is the effect it is having on society. It is certainly not bringing people together and I suspect most of us (black or white) do not have any truck with this guff, just the usual activists and those making money out of it.
There is a superb article today in the Telegraph written by Dia Chakravarty headed, “‘Anti-racists’ are destroying what makes Britain a great country”. She makes an excellent point, “…which ‘ethnic minority values’ should replace the offending “white values” in the countryside? Hers, as a Bangladeshi? Would they be acceptable to a Nigerian Brit, purely because they would be untainted by whiteness’? If not, then how are these distinct values meant to operate within the same space without impinging on each other? Does the absurdity of these ideas really need to be spelt out?”
The more people (preferably those charged as “oppressed”) challenging this rubbish the better for all of us.
Finally, a glance at the latest Accounts (2022) from the WCL show, of their 11 staff and 10 Board members, only 1 is from an “ethnically diverse background”. Normally I’d say, “so what!”