BY JIM WEBSTER

Dear Editor,

As a rural, white farmer based on the Cumbrian shores, I read with interest your article on alleged racism in the Countryside.

To recap, Wildlife and Countryside Link provided parliament with evidence to show that the British countryside is a “racist colonial” white space. They are the “largest environment and wildlife coalition in England, bringing together 82 organisations to use their strong, joint voice for the protection of nature.”

I must say that their report 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 must 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, make a decent living and build up a good 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 the countryside 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 Bertolt Brecht, The Wildlife and Countryside Link should have 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? Is that why farmers are being squeezed to the point they have to shut up shop and close down their farms?

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. Will I have to be ethnically cleansed to put things right? Or if I just tick the ‘white, other’ box on forms, will that suffice?

Yours,

Jim Webster, Farmer, Cumbria