BY THOMAS CLAYPOLE Support our British farmers—and here’s the good news: you don’t have to replace your entire weekly shop in one heroic afternoon to do it. Your first trip to a farm shop can be gloriously small: one ingredient for a meal you’ve already planned, a loaf for the weekend, or just a few vegetables that catch your eye. That modest beginning leaves room … Continue reading Support British Farmers Today
VICAR Dear Readers of Country Squire Magazine, Hallowe’en is upon us, and the countryside has settled into that strange, expectant hush that comes at the very end of October. The clocks have gone back, most of the leaves have fallen, and the evenings draw in early now. This is the night when the year turns from autumn to winter, the night when—as our ancestors believed—the … Continue reading A Halloween Prayer
BY ALLISON LEE If ever there were a hamlet that might have come straight from a children’s fairy tale, it is Rievaulx in the Rye Valley, North Yorkshire. With its narrow, winding lanes, pretty houses—some with thatched roofs—and a quietness city dwellers can only dream of, it really is the quintessential English country village. What it lacks in amenities (you won’t find a corner shop … Continue reading Rievaulx
BY PAUL T HORGAN Looking at the disturbances across the Channel, commentators are worried the same may happen here, and soon. Perhaps they are right, but perhaps not. The weather here is too bad for regular outbreaks of civil disorder. In fact it was a torrential downpour that did it for the Chartists in 1848 while the rest of Europe fell to revolutionaries. There is … Continue reading A Very British Uprising
BY BERT BURNETT The Moral High Ground Is Easy When Your Hare Count Is Zero There is one certainty that will emerge from the new falconry licensing regime for mountain hares in Scotland, and it has nothing to do with principle. No licence will be granted to fly a hawk at a hare on land owned by a conservation NGO or a rewilding estate. Not … Continue reading No Hares, No Licence
BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN There is a moment, familiar to any man who has ordered a gin and tonic in a fashionable bar, when the soul recoils. The barman, a young fellow whose moustache suggests he has never done a day’s physical labour and whose tattoo suggests he believes himself oppressed, reaches for a bottle of something pink. He calls it gin. He calls it ‘botanical’. … Continue reading The Last Redoubt of Human Civilisation
BY IAN MITCHELL In praise of unearned income The world owes to Darwin some ground-breaking insights into the history of life on earth. Mankind and its environment, he argued, was not a creation of God’s but the product of many millions of years’ evolution, starting from much simpler life forms. The theme of this book is how Darwin changed our view of history. No longer … Continue reading Darwin, Son of Capitalism
BY ALEX STORY The children looked so young. The pictures were only taken a few years ago. They lived with us then. Chaos and life danced together, naturally, in harmony. They are gone now. Silence rules. When we speak, mostly over devices, and if time allows, their voices are deeper, intimating a gradual discovery of the world as it is. When we see them, time … Continue reading Life
BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN There is a strip of concrete in a yard that slopes so sharply that the word ‘pitch’ feels like a courtesy. It runs uphill. It has grooves in it, scars from some forgotten building project, and when the plastic ball with the seam lands on one, it spits up at your throat like it has taken personal offence. The stumps are plastic. … Continue reading The Hindu, the Muslim and the Christian
BY ALEXIA JAMES Take a look at this nonsense from Cwis Packham’s mate, Dale Vince: Dale Vince wants you to believe he is a brave truth-teller standing athwart the water industry, but a line-by-line look at his claims shows a man who has mastered the art of the ideological gobshite: take a real problem, inflate the numbers, conflate categories, and shout it loudly enough that … Continue reading Dale Vince and the 25% Fiction
VICAR Dear Readers of Country Squire Magazine, we are halfway through October now, and the countryside has settled into the deep, golden hush that only autumn can bring. The mornings are sharp with frost, and the leaves are falling in earnest—not the gentle drift of early October, but a steady cascade of gold and russet and bronze. The hedgerows are stripped of their berries, the … Continue reading A Prayer for Mid-October
BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN Civilised England, what remains of it, makes a sound, and it does not. The sound it makes is weather, the clink of china, the murmur of a nation waiting its turn, and, when pushed past all endurance, the sharp, righteous crack of incivility, delivered once and never unnecessarily repeated. The sound it does not make is the horn. Watch a country road. … Continue reading The Quietest Virtue
BY ANDREW MILNE Holborn and St Pancras is a strange place and not indicative of the wider country. I worked there once and indeed was a student up the road at the polytechnic in Kentish Town. Disconcerted at the bizarre by-election as the dust settles, squires should take heart from several little-reported facts. First: In a constituency with 70,000 registered voters just 12,000 turned out … Continue reading A Walk Along High Holborn
BY SEAN WALSH I voted for Brexit because it seemed to me that the Russian bots who were trying to persuade us to leave the EU had better arguments than the UK officials who were cajoling us to stay. I judge these things on merit. I have seen nothing that has changed my mind. And one of those things I haven’t seen is Brexit, probably … Continue reading Was I Brainwashed by Russian Bots over Brexit?
BY BERT BURNETT The Conservatives’ vow to scrap Natural England and the Environment Agency and bring their powers back under direct ministerial control has set the cat among the pigeons at Defra. Victoria Atkins, the shadow Defra secretary, announced at the NFU breakfast briefing at the party conference that a Tory government would “restructure Defra completely” and abolish both quangos as the first stage of … Continue reading Quangos Out, Accountability In
CSM EDITORIAL Sir Jim Ratcliffe cannot run a football club. Manchester United have been a shambles under his stewardship, and no amount of petrochemical billions has bought him a clue about how to pick a manager or a sporting director. On that, the whole country is agreed. But on Britain, he is not wrong. Ratcliffe says the country is “on the slide.” He says high … Continue reading A Mandate of None
BY ALEX STORY Leo the Parisien drew a very large, peaceful crowd in Paris at the weekend. He entered Notre Dame, the first pontiff to do so since the fire engulfed the Cathedral in 2019. 800,000 lined the streets of the French capital to hear his message. Among other things, the Pope reminded Macron, France’s deeply unpopular president, that the right to life was the … Continue reading Crashing Through the Floor
BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN There are books that inform, books that provoke, and books that fundamentally rearrange the furniture of one’s mind. Ian Mitchell’s Russia and the Rule of Law, Volume I: Status Unbound (862–1856) belongs emphatically to the third category. It is a monumental, eccentric, often maddening, and utterly indispensable work of historical synthesis that dares to ask the largest possible question, how does law … Continue reading A Magnificent Obsession: Ian Mitchell’s Russia and the Rule of Law
BY SEAN WALSH The government’s response to the invasion of frustrated young men from sexually regressive and misogynistic cultures—men who are acculturated to casual violence and the cheapening of human life—is to insist that the incoming violence must be distributed “fairly” across the whole country. That is not quite true. The instinctive response is not policy-related at all, but rather to gather some words—fair, share, … Continue reading Leftism’s Abstract Principle Problem
BY THE EDITOR In Service of the Republic: The Art and Science of Economic Policy by Vijay Kelkar and Ajay Shah presents itself as a sober, technocratic intervention in India’s policy discourse. The authors, both esteemed former senior civil servants and professional economists, argue that India’s economic trajectory, particularly the marked deceleration after 2011, reflects a failure of institutional capacity rather than intent. Their diagnosis is … Continue reading In Service of the Republic
