Is the countryside too ‘white’? Last time I checked it was green
The murky light of dawn crept up over the distant Blackdown hills this morning as I ploughed forward in the car on the school run. The lanes were flooded and as we edged round the Quantocks to Taunton the mist was slowly lifting.
The West Somerset countryside, so lush and green I thought, or, as I now realise I should have thought, so damn racist. For, as a report submitted to an all-party parliamentary group (APPG) by the Wildlife and Countryside Link (which represents a large number of wildlife charities including the RSPCA, WWF and National Trust) claims, the British countryside is not just green – it’s white and it’s “racist colonial”.
There all us country folk were, some tending the soil, some farming it – grazing or growing – some managing it with hedge cutting, or tree-felling and planting – some grappling with drainage, others tackling it for infrastructure. But what we didn’t realise, but have now been helpfully told, is that all this work, activity or mere existence is nothing less than the example of “White British cultural values that have been embedded into the design and management of green spaces”.
This is not the first time that the suggestion, sorry absolute conviction, of racism has been levelled at the British countryside and those who dwell on it. I remember having a bath one day (I know, I know, non-racists shower) and hearing on the radio that a group called Muslim Hikers had complained that rural areas were unwelcoming and off-limits to minority communities. I sort of convulsed, involuntarily splashed the water and nearly flooded the bathroom.
And here it is again, and this time writ large in an official report to MPs, who had called for evidence on the link between “systemic racism” and the “climate crisis” – and you can bet your bottom dollar that when a bunch of eager-to-please members of Parliament, desperate to improve their reputations as gutter-festering inadequates, ask for such evidence they’ll damn well get it.
And thus, from the wildlife charities – all those boardroom explorers whose collective passion is more for putting buzzwords onto flipcharts than examining a piece of good, English sod - comes the news that “racist colonial legacies continue to frame nature in the UK as a ‘white space’” and “the perception that green spaces are dominated by white people can prevent people from ethnic minority backgrounds from using green spaces”.
Just the idea that rural racists are having a detrimental impact on climate change is quite a thing for Farmer Jones to contemplate. Before he’s even turned the key of his tractor in the chilly, early morning darkness, he needs to shoulder the burden of being a racist AND a destroyer of the planet.
It thus comes as a slight surprise to us gentle, meek rural folk who haven’t spotted the signs at motorway junctions and railway stations that scream: ‘No ethnics, blacks or browns’. Except, of course, that’s the point. The signs are invisible, you can’t see them, you don’t look for them, they are simply ever-present, their malevolence pervades every hedgerow, tree, field and ditch.
So, the report concludes, the Government must act. There should be a “rights-based approach” to accessing green spaces and a “legally-binding target for access to nature”.
I look forward to seeing how that will be actioned. Will Farmer Jones be ordered to jettison his weekend fence-mending and, instead, man the footpaths with a clipboard? “It’s been an excellent morning: I’ve had two black chaps and an Indian family.” Or will the council dispatch the bright anorak brigade, brandishing tally counters and walkie-talkies?
OK, OK, I say, ducking your slaps at my infantile musings. But allow me to take a step back and to spell out some truths here, some reasons why it might be that some people on the lookout for racism in the countryside might have spotted some.
There are, undeniably, fewer people from ethnic minorities living in the British countryside. The significant migrations of our island story see people coming to British cities, which is where most of the opportunity is perceived to be. Very few would-be immigrants packed their bags from, say, Delhi and said, “Dad, I’m off to Wiveliscombe.”
The majority settled and made their homes and built communities in cities, with a few later making new lives in smaller towns or villages. It is natural to feel at home with people who look like you, so I can understand that.
In the same way that this week I, a white Brit, walking along Blackhorse Lane in Walthamstow at 3.30pm found myself weaving through hundreds of girls from Eden Girls’ School, Waltham Forest, all of whom were from ethnic minorities and dressed as befits the faith of Islam. I wasn’t uncomfortable, I just felt different and was interested and curious to observe.
If the same few hundred girls were to walk through Wiveliscombe at half past three in the afternoon, the locals would be curious. But this doesn’t make them racist. And neither is racism the reason a great number of people from ethnic minorities do not take to the countryside at the weekend.
They do not come here because, frankly, the concept is eccentric. Who in their right mind would dress in knackered old brown jackets and boots with holes in them and tweed caps, to drag their feet through footpaths that are nothing but mud-baths, climb over rusty gates, wrestle with collapsing styles and kissing gates,and make a wide berth of large beasts of beef cattle, all in the name of a pint of room-temperature, frothy ale and snacks made from pigs’ skin, all the better, apparently, if they have hairs on them?
Countryside living and life is weird and eccentric and most of us do it because our parents did. Why else would someone choose to farm? What exactly is the logical and pragmatic reason for picking a profession where you must rise at dawn, work 365 days a year, engage in a pursuit that is dependent upon the weather over which you have no control, and for which products produced – wheat, barley, lamb, beef – you get paid a pittance and (as Jeremy Clarkson taught the nation) for an annual profit, if there is one, of about £14.50.
However hard we try, most of us end up, culturally, like our parents. So I live in the country and you live in the town. You think I’m mad, I think you’re nuts. My strict Christmas routine is surely bonkers, except that it feels just right. And your family traditions, alien to me, will similarly make you feel settled and comfortable. The great divide is actually what unites us.
And truly, seriously, if you’d like to jettison your trainers, pull on some waterproof trousers and join me for a Second World War trenches re-enactment, with a pint of Exmoor ale (and no halves, remember, The Bear in Wiveliscombe doesn’t serve “cocktails”) and a plate of scampi and chips in two hours’ time I’ll welcome you as a brother.
