BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN There is a photograph circulating, and it shocks. A masked ‘man’ in a balaclava, hood up, stares at a child on a pony. The child is small, seven perhaps younger, dressed in the tan coat and velvet helmet of a hunting child. The man’s eyes are fixed on him. The expression, whichever benefit of the doubt is given, is hatred. Assume the … Continue reading The Boy is Not Your Enemy
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 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 SEAN WALSH The late Michael Wharton was the genius behind the Daily Telegraph’s Peter Simple column. Therein he created a dystopian hellhole, fantasy when he wrote it, inhabited by a collection of ghastly Leftist caricatures (or at least they were at the time). This was all very prescient pre-lanyard cultural anticipation, and Wharton was smart enough to die before it all happened. The most … Continue reading The Thornberry Derangement Syndrome
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
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 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
CSM EDITORIAL The admission slips out with increasing regularity from those responsible for prohibiting rotational cool burning on England’s uplands. Yes, they concede, it may take years for rewetted land to reach a state where it is naturally protected from wildfire. The honesty is welcome, if somewhat late. What they omit is that any such transition remains entirely speculative. There is no evidence base demonstrating … Continue reading The Ban on Cool Burning is an Act of Faith, Not Science
BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN The British establishment’s resistance to artificial intelligence in governance masquerades, at best, as principled conservatism, a defence of the constituency surgery, the ministerial red box, the human touch. It is, in truth, a defence of administrative fiefdoms. The civil service, the silent colossus of Whitehall, has become the obstacle to the democratic will it was designed to serve. The answer is not … Continue reading Digital Magna Carta
BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN The first herald of oblivion was not a sound, but a scent. It crept into the sanctum of Chandrakant Deshmukh’s slumber like the ghost of a forgotten epoch, a primordial musk of sun-scorched earth and overripe fruit, an olfactory violation of his whitewashed walls and the sterile geometry of his meticulously ordered existence. He surfaced from the depths of an afternoon nap … Continue reading The Unsealed Window
BY NICHOLAS ENGERT In a world of over abundance and hence over consumption, we increasingly fail to discern between what is truly beautiful and yet functional and the cheap or vulgar alternative. Consider three simple objects we use around our homes, namely a pencil, a flower pot and a tea towel. So pedestrian and mundane are these articles we fail to appreciate that their elegance … Continue reading Simple, Elegant & Functional
BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN The English countryside does not shout. It simply is. Consider the hedge. Not the clipped suburban thing, but the ancient wall of hawthorn and bramble, wild rose and blackthorn, woven against wind and time. The hedge-layer knows what we have forgotten. He bends the long whips nearly to the ground, wounds them so they send up thicker shoots. Strength lies not in … Continue reading The Wisdom of Entanglement
BY ALEC SWAN There comes a time, usually when the first frost bites hard and the last curlew’s call fades across a barren moor, when one must ask serious questions of those entrusted with the guardianship of our natural world. Are they merely incompetent, or have they, in the words of a more cynical age, simply come to see the public as an endless cash … Continue reading Hoarding, Hypocrisy, Hollow Promises
VICAR Dear Readers of Country Squire Magazine, I have been thinking, this week, about the quiet rebellion of doing nothing. In a world that constantly demands more—more productivity, more output, more engagement—the act of simply stopping feels almost dangerous. We have forgotten how to rest. We treat our Sundays like any other day, filling them with chores and errands and the endless scrolling of screens. The … Continue reading A Prayer for the Gift of Rest
BY ALLISON LEE The Ryedale Show is held annually on the last Tuesday in July; this year, it fell on the 28th. Established in 1855, it is a traditional agricultural show run for the farming and local communities, and it truly has something to offer everyone. Though much smaller than the Great Yorkshire Show in Harrogate, Ryedale remains highly popular. Set against the picturesque Duncombe Park … Continue reading The Ryedale Show
BY STEPHEN PAX LEONARD The Arday scandal is a chance to ‘restore’ academia in Britain Following the tragic death of Jason Arday, the Prime Minister has called for a period of reflection. I agree. We need to reflect on how we can avoid such a tragedy happening again and how we can restore the intellectual rigour of academia in Britain. Instead of removing the systemic … Continue reading From DEI to Dystopia: Reclaiming the University’s True Purpose
BY NIALL MCCRAE Passing Port Talbot en route to Pembrokeshire for a family holiday, I gazed across the vast complex of furnaces, chimneys and warehouses, all lying silent since the Net Zero axe was wielded by Ed Miliband (until recently Keir Starmer’s minister for energy rationing). Most of the heavy industry of South Wales has disappeared, leaving rundown towns with high streets occupied by vape … Continue reading Who Rules Best? Lords of the Manor or Marxist Milibands?
