Why is the UK Government Killing the Countryside?

The roots of the British peoples are deeply set in the countryside, and as Solzhenitsyn said, "To destroy a people, you must first sever their roots."

From The European Conservative

By Sebastian Morello, PhD

As long as there’s a settled, traditional people with deep roots and connectedness to the landscape, it will be observed that there always were indigenous peoples of these isles, and such an observation is unacceptable to the progressive project of our political class.

Something strange is afoot in British politics. I’m not referring to the fact that many in our political class seem to be embroiled in the activities of a sex offender and kingpin of child trafficking operations who was conveniently killed—ahem, sorry, I mean, who died—in prison before he could out most of them. After all, we all know that our political class largely comprises ghouls and vampires. No, what I’m referring to is the odd way by which a thousand cuts have been dealt to kill our countryside. I’ve been monitoring adverse rural policy for years, but the comprehensiveness of the government’s current attack has even caught me by surprise.

It’s all very odd. Sure, Westminster has long disliked rural Britain because Westminster doesn’t understand rural Britain. And despite its many successes in doing so, Westminster has nonetheless always found the task of deconstructing rural Britain an onerous affair. 

For as long as living memory, the Labour Party has harboured an especial hatred for the countryside and its communities. Previously, this hatred was bound up with a pathological class obsession to which I now look back nostalgically. Back then—and still at the time Tony Blair was bringing down the ban hammer on natural hunting with hounds—this pathology identified rural life with the nobility and squirearchy, and urban life with the unemancipated proletariat. Anyone who knows about town and country Britain will know what an erroneous view of British society that is, but of course erroneous thinking and pathological thinking tend to correlate.

Today, though, Labour’s hatred for rural Britain is quite different. Labour hates the countryside because the countryside’s existence conflicts with Labour’s ideological intention for society at large. To be propertied, to enjoy relative self-sufficiency, to be attached to a place and a people with ancestral memory, to renew a natural covenant via traditions and mores that transcend ideological divides, to participate in a landscape understood as nature rather than that spectral abstraction called ‘the environment’, all these aspects of rural existence run contrary to the society that Labour seeks to establish—which is really no society at all.

The Labour Party for some time now—excepting its brief flirtation with the romantic Marxism of Jeremy Corbin—has envisaged a future Britain that has absolutely no culture, no native peoples, no national heritage of which to be proud beyond ephemeral notions of ‘tolerance’ and ‘diversity’, a Britain of ongoing integration into a technocratic web of intrusive power-wielding, the locus of which is to be the ever swelling market centre of London at the expense of the rest of the country. But frustratingly, and despite all efforts to eliminate it, there is still a scattered presence of British peoples across the land. And their insistence of surviving as a people simply cannot be tolerated any longer.

The government has developed an ingenious strategy of destroying rural Britain by attacking it from numerous directions. The family farm tax, whose unpopularity across the country has forced Labour to flip-flop on what ultimate form it will take, is quite clearly intended to snuff out farming families and drive their future generations off the land and into the new digital professions of Labour’s impending dystopia.

Then, of course, there’s Labour’s attack on the Green Belt of England, a large area of countryside celebrated for its beauty and hitherto protected from ongoing urban development. Those longstanding measures to protect the Green Belt from being concreted over like much of the rest of Britain are measures that Labour wants to remove. Indeed, Prime Minister Keir Starmer has announced that his government intends to build 200,000 new homes across the Green Belt, effectively turning it into a vast, sprawling borough of London. Given that the UK has a demographic problem, with a serious deficit in births among its native population, it’s reasonable to ask: who are these houses for? They are clearly for the placeless, nationless, new people of nowhere that Labour ideologically identifies with its reign of progress. 

You may think that that’s an assumption too far, but the government has lately explicitly declared its concern that there are too many indigenous English people in the English countryside. Earlier this year, the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) expressed its disapproval that the countryside remains a “white environment,” and thus will become “irrelevant” in the future society that the government is conjuring into being via its aggressive social engineering policies. Indeed, plans have been drawn up to introduce Islamic populations into the Chiltern Hills. Hence, it’s not enough that those whose families have farmed the landscape for centuries, feeding and clothing the nation, should be pushed off the land by new taxation policies; no, no, the countryside must be directly ethnically cleansed as well.

But it doesn’t stop there, for farmers are not the only rural people who daily interact with the landscape, cultivating it and forming it. There are also the fieldsports communities: the hunting, shooting, deerstalking, and fishing communities that have a complex and carefully negotiated relationship with land-managing families. These communities have been at the forefront of conservation efforts for centuries. Of course, they too must be destroyed.

Trail hunting—the pursuit of an artificial scent, which replaced hunting quarry after the 2004 Hunting Act was introduced by Blair’s government—is supposedly to be banned by Labour sometime this year. Though the wildlife management activities of houndwork up and down the country ended over two decades ago, the hunts continue to play a vital social role across rural England. Farming can be a lonely business and rural life can be isolating; the hunts have long been appreciated for bringing communities together in a common activity which celebrates tradition and a unique connection with the landscape. This social aspect of hunting with hounds has persisted over the last couple of decades, and in many places, hunts remain at the heart of a shared, local rural culture that’s survived against all odds. So, of course, the hunts must be destroyed.

The game shooters and wildfowlers of the country aren’t safe either. Labour has proposed that Section 2 and Section 1 firearms applications be merged, making it as onerous and complicated to obtain a shotgun as it currently is for a centrefire hunting rifle. In practice, this will mean that a vast number of recreational shooters will throw in the towel, and the consequences for conservation will be nothing short of disastrous. The semi-wild landscapes of Britain which are used neither for pasture nor arable industry, are largely there because of shooting. If the shooting industry is dealt such a blow, much of that habitat will disappear, and wildlife like grouse, curlew, lapwing, hen harrier, snipe, woodcock, brown and mountain hare, and a great many songbirds will vanish with it. But of course, in the eyes of the Labour Party, it’ll be worth it to destroy more of rural Britain. 

You see, all these attacks are currently happening. The countryside is the object of so much hostile policy, from ethnic cleansing to habitat destruction, that it is not clear how rural Britain will survive the coming years. And that is certainly the purpose of such policy: the countryside’s abolition. The countryside remains antithetical to the modern project, which is a project of urbanisation, homogenisation, state-dependence, and disconnection from both nature and history. Thus, the countryside must be destroyed.

British culture has long stood in the way of the nationless land that Westminster strives to create. Given that British culture is distinctly agrestic, the countryside must be abolished. As long as there’s a settled, traditional people with deep roots and connectedness to the landscape, it will be observed that there always were indigenous peoples of these isles, and such an observation is unacceptable to the progressive project of our political class. That is why the countryside must be abolished: its abolition is essential to the destruction of Britain.

For those who have an attachment to the British countryside, hope can now be placed in the accelerating implosion of the current government. This Labour government is astonishingly unpopular, the backbenchers are beginning to rebel, there’s undoubtedly more Epstein gunk yet to be squeezed out of the wen, and the frontbench is in disarray. Hopefully, then, the government will be so focused on surviving and managing appearances that it simply won’t have time to focus on its own amusements like tormenting farmers or Islamising the Cotswolds. And with any luck, the next government will not hate its own country. That would make for a nice change.