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 ALEX STORY So, Trump brought the big boys to town. More than $15 trillion sat around the table for the White House Artificial Intelligence summit, represented by twenty-one of the world’s biggest companies at the end of September. Robotics, artificial intelligence and the economic impact of both were on the agenda. It led, Trump said, to the signing of a morally binding document, “almost … Continue reading All is Flat
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 ALLISON LEE The famous annual Masham Sheep Fair takes place in Masham Market Square and around the town on the last weekend of September. In 2026, it was held on 26 and 27 September, and I went along to see what it was all about. The weather was a perfect blend of sunshine and a gentle breeze, with not a drop of rain in … Continue reading Masham Sheep Fair
BY IAN MITCHELL In the course of a long and thoughtful review of my book Russia and the Rule of Law, Dom Wightman wrote in Country Squire Magazine: “This is a monumental, eccentric, often maddening, and utterly indispensable work of historical synthesis that dares to ask the largest possible question: how does law deal with violence?” That question is key. How do peaceable folk deal … Continue reading Law and Violence
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 SEAN WALSH The discussion about machine intelligence is ramping up in the US as it starts to dawn on people that AI might be planning to destroy the planet. As with all things US, the argument is settling on political lines. Yes, really. President Trump has had it with people treating Artificial Intelligence with less deference than it deserves. He has solved the problem … Continue reading A Trillion Abaci
BY ALEXIA JAMES Jenny Riddell-Carpenter (pictured), Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Nature no less, awakes at 3am in a cold sweat. The nightmare is always the same: a pub. A pint of Adnams. A black Labrador. A fox hunt in the background. She reaches for her phone and drafts a conference speech. It was a quiet Monday in Liverpool when the Labour Party gathered to … Continue reading Beware the Black Lab
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 LIZ HODGKINSON After the Piddington outcry comes the Diddington debacle. No, not for migrants this time, but for something equally unwelcome to locals: a vast solar farm. Plans have recently been approved to build a solar farm which will spread across 111 acres of farmland, equivalent to 63 football pitches, just outside this tiny Cambridgeshire village. Diddington is a one-street, dead-end hamlet just off … Continue reading After Piddington Comes Diddington
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 BERT BURNETT Scotland’s environmental agency NatureScot has unveiled a new twenty year strategy to restore its native wildcats, with the ambition of seeing populations recover and thrive by 2045. The strategy brings together 26 organisations to coordinate conservation efforts for one of Scotland’s most threatened native species. The plans include restoring and reconnecting habitat, establishing new wildcat populations, reducing hybridisation with domestic cats and … Continue reading Not Another One!
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 ED ANDERSON Only the deluded could think letting the Chinese into your computer systems and steel industry is a good idea. September 11th obviously has a lot of important anniversaries. For the United States, it’s the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre; for Catalonia, it is the fall of Barcelona in 1714; and for Chile, it was the day their democracy was bombed … Continue reading Laffer’s Trojan Horse
BY NICK PEARCE The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) has introduced a ticket-only parking restriction at its Snettisham reserve in Norfolk for the Wader Spectacular days. Visitors must now book a parking space in advance on the RSPB website and pay a fee—including paid-up members. The Wader Spectacular is a natural phenomenon where tens of thousands of waders swirl in the skies … Continue reading RSPB Greed?
