According to its website, “Wildlife and Countryside Link (Link) is the largest environment and wildlife coalition in England, bringing together 82 organisations to use their strong joint voice for the protection of nature.”
They provided parliament with evidence to show that the British countryside is a “racist colonial” white space.
This begs a lot of questions. Why is the countryside a white space? Perhaps, given the rubbish wages, high levels of rural deprivation and the high cost of housing, people who aren’t on serious money don’t want to move here?
As for visiting, I suspect that for people who are financially struggling, whatever their skin colour, the sheer cost is enough to put them off. When you’re struggling to cope with the increased cost of living, something has to give.
As for farming, to be fair, I know a lot of people who weren’t born in this country who have a good work ethic. I would happily employ them but there are two problems. The first is that I don’t make enough money to take on employees, and the second is that they’re too smart to work ridiculously long hours in poor conditions for damn all reward when they can, with the same sort of commitment, actually make a decent living and build up a business in a more urban setting.
But to be honest, I have two problems with the Wildlife and Countryside Link pronouncements. The first is that we have a lot of well paid, predominantly metropolitan people who obviously haven’t a clue what life is like in the countryside. Even Suella Braverman is switched on enough to describe the wildlife groups’ claims as “naïve and based on a Beatrix Potter version of the countryside when, in fact, rural communities suffered poverty and deprivation as acute as urban areas.”
As always we have those with money pontificating about the failings of the poor. But in point of fact I once met an old chap who as a boy has seen Beatrix Potter, or Mrs Heelis as she was known, walk up from the ferry, just another farmer’s wife with a sack thrown over her shoulders to keep the rain off. She had forgotten more about rural reality than some have ever known.
Then there’s this talk about it being colonial. I looked up what the word really means (other than when it’s used as a generic insult meaning ‘a bad thing’.) Colonialism is “the policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically.”
Like when rich metropolitans lobby to get control over rural policy so they can go in and tell the peasantry (who are obviously too stupid to run their own lives) how things should be done.
I’m sorry that the good and doubtless adequately compensated people at Wildlife and Countryside Link feel that the indigenous population are failing to meet their high standards. Perhaps, to paraphrase the words of Bertolt Brecht
The Wildlife and Countryside Link had leaflets distributed in parliament
Stating that the rural peasantry had forfeited the confidence of the elite and could win it back only by redoubled efforts.
Would it not be easier In that case for the elite to dissolve the rural peasantry and select another?
Me? I’m so damned indigenous that it’s almost embarrassing. Apparently my family have been mixing a bit of farming and fishing along this coast since before the American colonies revolted (that we know of.) Will I have to be ethnically cleansed to put things right? Or if I just tick the ‘white, other’ box on forms, will that do?
♥♥♥♥
If it helps, she’s not got a lot of white on her
As a reviewer commented, “Jim Webster’s recollections, reflections and comments, about life as a Farmer, are always worth reading, not only for information, but also for entertainment and shrewd comments about UK government agencies (and politicians).
One of the many observations that demonstrate his wryness, is as follows:
There was a comment in the paper the other day. Here in the UK, clowns are starting to complain that politicians are being called clowns. The clowns point out that being a clown is damned hard work, demands considerable fitness, great timing and the ability to work closely with others as part of a well drilled team!”
Tagged: Beatrix Potter, Bertolt Brecht, Suella Braverman, Wildlife and Countryside Link
Jim Webster 
Just before the pandemic I led the funeral of an elderly lady who – as a young woman – had been what would now be called Beatrix Potter’s PA. ‘Living links’ go back quite a way. But on the main theme, please don’t be misled, Jim, by the idea that facts can displace fashionable opinion,
As for fashionable opinion, apparently mockery can puncture pomposity 🙂
But yes living links go back a long way. I remember as a small boy hearing an old man describing how he took shelter in a knocked out tank in Flanders during 1918
And my Grandfather who fought in that war could have talked to a man who rode in the Charge of the Light Brigade. Technically he might even have been dangled on the knee of a man who was a drummer boy at Waterloo but that would have taken some planning 😉 .
You make many excellent points – but those city folk are pretending to expertise they don’t have, created out of what the road to hell is full of.
I am white, mongrel, mixed – and there may be other bits I don’t even know about, but most of my roots are recent immigrants to the States, except for the Mexican side of the family. Not that it matters much, except that the ‘mixed’ part makes it hard to fill out government paperwork, which always wants you to pick something off their list, but doesn’t provide the tick boxes for my ancestors.
Our kids are even more mixed, with a stirring in of husband’s Italian and German ancestors.
But we ‘look white’, and smarmy people are surprised that many of us speak quite fluent Mexican Spanish (and understand what they’re saying about us as they think we don’t understand).
I like it this way. If more of the bigots had to have their ancestry checked out by the DNA people, they might stop being idiot exclusivists.
You’re going to have to start really pushing the motto of us disabled folk and diverse folk and women and …: “Nothing for us or about us WITHOUT us.”
In the UK we have the poverty truth commission which I’ve somehow got caught up in 🙂
https://povertytruthnetwork.org/commissions/what-is-a-poverty-truth-commission/
Which does use the strapline “Nothing for us or about us WITHOUT us.”
Basically the people with lived experience have to be able to explain what the reality is
And the ones asking for the lived experience to be explained to them have to be willing to listen, possibly visit and see it demonstrated for them, and to dump their prejudices.
Instead of just complaining about ‘rubes.’
They should also expect not to be trusted until they’ve demonstrated trustworthiness – people have been fooled too many times before.
That’s where we’re trapped by the culture of entitlement. Because they’ve got this job, or this qualification, or are on this salary, they expect to be listened to.
Whilst I personally have no time for Trump and what he stands for, I can see how people have been driven to support him, because they have been treated as rubes, deplorables, or whatever.
Only to find he has infinite contempt for them. He’s offering what he has no intention of providing. Already proved that.
But sadly, is he any different in that from any other major faction? Stand in their shoes and ask what any of the others have done for them in the last generation? We sit on the other side of the ocean, but terms like ‘trailer trash’, fly over states, ‘the rust belt’, don’t indicate that those in charge actually care about these people.
Ironically Biden’s aid for Ukraine, being in the form of a gift token to spend with US arms suppliers, is probably the most investment into heavy industry that many places have seen since the war. And those who should benefit from it and being told that it should be blocked
The Communist countries want what the capitalists have – but without paying for it by allowing their own people the freedom to think.
They don’t get it – they’ve blocked their own people’s creative instincts.
I’d prefer more Social Democratic aims – but never the communist.
Remember that with many undemocratic systems it’s the party apparatchiks who get the good things without paying for them.
That can happen in democratic systems as well but it’s far easier to dispose of them,
Morning Jim,
The ‘Black Farmer’ seems to have done quite well, crafting his sausages in deepest, rural Devon. He shops locally too, wearing his trademark stetson hat.
Nothing to see here, but a passing bandwagon.
Move on.
Indeed he called this pronouncement by the great and the ‘good’ as ‘dangerous nonsense’
Good on him
Well, I’m an unashamed mongrel genetically speaking. Go back far enough and my ancestors were dallying with Neanderthals and having a spot of nookie with Denisovans. Closer to today, I’ve got Russian, Irish, Yiddish and the peculiar mix of Anglo-Danish that is West Yorkshire. I look just like any other bald white male, though.
I live as close to countryside as I can for my sanity’s sake and whilst I do fall firmly into the city dweller salary bracket, I do my best not to show it. Car on a PCP loan, and my house is a Victorian terrace. I also do my best not to know better than other people, or at least not to show it and that’s something a lot of the urban idiots would do well to mimic.
Right about now a lot of the so-called new countryside movement are busy trying to be greener than thou, and are also trying to buy up cheap land upon which to plant trees to use as carbon credits. Others, of course, are trying to “re-wild” areas for other nebulous and frankly stupid reasons.
We here all know what happens if you plant a load of trees on an area and don’t then look after it, or see that the nascent wood is well fenced and especially well ditched to prevent vehicles getting onto it. If you don’t, then the first fifty metres from the gate (nicked if it was any good, and some fence along with it)becomes a flytippers’ paradise until their trucks can no longer get in, and the rest becomes a waste.
If the wood is near a village or town it will be ransacked and ruined. If it is further out then it will turn into variously an unofficial Gypsy site, poachers’ paradise, badger baiters’ den and so on. It won’t ever properly re-wild unless you actively manage it and put large herbivores on to complete the fauna; a herd of Heck cattle or at least Heck crossbreeds would do wonders to exclude human pests.
And then we have carbon offsetting. Selling indulgences from the Great Church of Climate Change, in other words.
Very true.
And I love your phrase “And then we have carbon offsetting. Selling indulgences from the Great Church of Climate Change, in other words.”
I’ve never seen it summed up so well
I’m absolutely bog-standard white, but I am directly descended from someone black; my uncle and grandfather had/have a kind of blood factor that only a sub-saharan african man can have, and it only passes down directly from father to son. There’s no sign of it in 1000 years and we can’t go back any further but Roman Britain was rather more multi-cultural than it is now, and of course the Algerian Legions had a lot of guys from sub-saharan africa so maybe it was one of them who settled here. But it doees show what a load of bollocks it all is. Here in East Anglia there are a lot of foreign workers in the fields, but they are mostly from eastern Europe and are, therefore white, so I assume they don’t count. There are a lot if farmers of Italian origin in Sussex, too, although they’re onto 2nd or third generation now, I guess so presumably they don’t count either …
I think you’ve rather summed it up 🙂
🤣🤣
As you said, it sounds like complete ignorance to me.
Yes, that seems to sum it up