When Thompson met her friends that night, she challenged them to guess what she’d just seen. When they all guessed right, her heart sank. The oinkers, it turned out, were the talk of the town, with sightings along Stoner Hill Road plastered over Facebook and the local news. Yet if Thompson was thrilled at her encounter, not all her neighbors agreed. Comments left on local Facebook groups range from the welcome, to the bemused, to the outright murderous. “Police,” said one, “should get someone out to shoot it”.

This is typical. The descendants of enterprising boars hopping farm fences in the Eighties, British wild boars are rural wildlife’s version of Marmite: a keystone species that could bring untold benefits to Britain’s biosphere — but also wreak havoc for gamekeepers and farmers. More than that, this is one of the few species in the country on which your opinion is likely to be informed by your politics. Your typical Guardian reader will see them as unjustly maligned; dirty, to be sure but, thanks to their habit of turning over the soil, capable of large-scale rejuvenation. The average Telegraph reader, though, will have been treated to many a tale of the wild boar chaos in the UK and Europe. The animals have attacked dog walkers on Dartmoor and disrupted Italian prosciutto production.

Just how divisive these animals have become is also illustrated by the hostile reaction of the New Forest Wildlife Park’s press officer when I ask to see a family of wild boar at the zoo and interview one of their keepers. It’s an impolite no. “[W]e have learnt over the years to not engage in any media requests regarding wild boar,” he says, “as the story never gets published in a true and pro-conservation-based format.”

I see the family anyway. When I approach the fence, the sow stares directly at me from inside her sty, while four brown, striped piglets chase each other in circles, before all five begin to root through the pitted earth outside. They’re looking for food: invertebrates, seeds, bulbs. Then, in a separate enclosure to her right, the sow’s mate emerges: black-eyed, tusked and much, much fatter than his partner. For a moment, he stares at the sow and her hoglets, as if pining to join them, before losing interest and waddling off, stopping occasionally to shake great clouds of brown dust off his frame.

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Though these boars don’t seem particularly fearsome, I’m also glad to see them behind two sets of wire fencing. Being charged by one, as Jake Swindells was in Sweden several years ago, can prove to be a painful experience. “It’s not fun,” admits the Countryside Alliance Scotland director. “They can open up the inside of your leg, rip the arteries. They can disembowel you quite easily if you stumble and fall.”

We’ve long known how brutal boars can be. Medieval chronicler Bartholomaeus Anglicus described them as the indomitable bruisers of the British forest, “that for his fierceness and his cruelness, he despiseth and setteth nought by death”, preferring to mount frontal charges against spear-wielding hunters even after being mortally wounded. This defiance saw the boar adopted as a symbol of dauntlessness by the elite, from the Anglo-Saxon kings sporting boar eyebrows on their helmets to the knights that depicted the creature rampant, tongue bared, on their coats of arms. That symbolism outlived the boar themselves in British forests, who were hunted to extinction by the 13th century.

Their history thereafter is one of sporadic releases of continental-born hogs — naturalist Gilbert White recorded one such occurrence in 1789, which led to the group, or “sounder” being exterminated by locals — until the Eighties. That’s when the UK developed a taste for farm-reared boar. Escapes soon followed, and by the following decade stable populations had been established in Scotland, the Kent-Sussex borders, Devon and the Forest of Dean. Taken together, there are perhaps 2,600 nationally — not enough to lead to many human-boar confrontations. In the Highlands, says Swindells, you’re much more likely to see the destruction left by wild boars, from half-eaten crops to pitted lawns, than face their tusks head on. Even then, he adds, rural communities in the Highlands are still coexisting relatively peacefully with these hairy hogs. That’s largely because populations remain relatively low compared to those in Europe. Should those sounders go forth and multiply a bit too much, controlling the population is and has been an option.

All the same, Swindells suggests that intentional reintroductions in Scotland are undesirable: while wild boars do a good job of regenerating the soil, a reintroduced population would almost certainly escape from whatever conservation area designated as their new home and march headlong toward new potential feeding grounds — farmland, back yards — where they definitely wouldn’t be welcome. In time, they’ll encounter roads and private property, and begin spinning the flywheel of negative stories about ruined lawns and car accidents all over again.

That’s clear enough in the Forest of Dean. Home to an estimated 583 boars, which Forestry England regularly culls to keep to an even 400, sounders in the area have been recorded marching past pubs, scaring motorists by rooting alongside roads and even biting off a man’s fingertip. All the same, says Chantal Lyons, the author of Groundbreakers, a history of wild boar in Britain, you’d be hard-pressed to find much hysteria in the area now. Having lived alongside them since the Eighties, concerns about the animals have “really died down” — and shown what life might be like in rural England if they were fully reintroduced.

This, says Lyons, would not only be good for the soil, but the soul, too, an infusion of the truly wild into our staid, regimented lives. As she says in her book, more and more studies point to the rejuvenating effect of short, sharp shocks delivered by hunger or intense exercise. “We don’t need animals to run in sheer terror from,” Lyons writes. “But we do need a space in our minds for the unknown — or that which can only be known through other, different beings.”

All the same, Lyons is also a realist. Plenty of species have been successfully reintroduced to the UK in recent years, she says, but they tend to be cuddly and stay out of the way of people, like most wild animals in the British countryside. But wild boar, because “they are of a size and a power that we’re not used to in this country,” test our mettle for large-scale rewilding. Because of the oft-repeated threat that wild boar might spread swine flu to pig farms, meanwhile, it’s unlikely that their legal status as dangerous wild animals will be downgraded in the near future.

Guerrilla rewilders have different ideas, with the sudden appearance of wild boar in Devon last year prompting suspicions of an illegal release. It is possible that the same thing happened outside Petersfield. In certain respects, Stoner Hill would be a much better habitat for the boar than Dartmoor. Steep and so forested it almost feels Jurassic, the terrain is forbidding to walkers and, as I can attest myself, difficult for drivers to ascend in anything higher than third gear. But descriptions of the boars’ behavior by eyewitnesses, coupled with the fact that only a handful were ever seen, suggest a more innocuous origin.

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The fact that the boars of Petersfield were seen as often in the daylight as in the gloom, Lyons explains, indicates that they’re not genuinely wild boar — but rather recent escapees from a local farm. A landowner in Froxfield, on the western side of the plateau of farmland scaled by Stoner Hill, also suggests that they may have simply been dumped by someone too cheap to hire someone to euthanize them. It’s a wish that seems to have been granted, judging by the persistent rumors that one was hit by a car and another shot by a gamekeeper.

There is, of course, the possibility that wild boar are already living, unseen, on the West Sussex and Hampshire borders. Though often mistaken for muntjac deer in low light and thick undergrowth, local news report isolated sightings near surrounding hamlets. I also speak to a local gunsmith who sometimes hears idle chatter from gamekeepers about wild boar, albeit shyer and smaller than those recorded outside Petersfield, scampering out of sight before they can get a shot off. Then, tantalizingly, a source sends me a clip of a healthy wild boar in Colemore, four miles north of Stoner Hill, which he claims was taken days after the feral pigs were last spotted in East Meon — though, since he has deleted the original video and its metadata, this proves impossible to verify.

What if boar were to return to Hampshire in greater numbers? Eliana Thompson wouldn’t really mind. “I think it would be lovely if we had them, personally,” she says, provided people had guidance on how to react if they encounter these beasts of the forest. “They’ve got just as much of a right to be here as we have.” Perhaps. But it’s still hard to imagine that this country is ready for boars’ full-scale reintroduction. It hasn’t been for centuries. Our countryside is more crowded and slashed with borders than we appreciate, borders guarded in their multitude by gamekeepers, farmers and unsympathetic motorists. The boars that survive will be small and wily, trained by generational trauma to scamper to the safety of the next dark hollow when he hears the heavy footfall of an unsuspecting Briton. Such creatures may well have found a way to survive in the forests of Hampshire. One hopes that they have.

Just about the only attempt the current government has made to engage with farmers was to appoint Baroness Batters, the former president of the National Farmers’ Union, to do a review of farm profitability. She handed her report in to the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) last month, and then… well, nothing. Last week, sources told The Times that the report had been “buried” by the Treasury until after the Budget. This is outrageous: surely the Treasury needs to know what the issues are to shape the Budget accordingly. Surely they should be working with farmers, not burying the facts.

The apparently “locked away” review is expected to call for an urgent reset of the relationship between government and farmers. My guess is that it highlights what a shitshow the government has created for farmers, leaving them unsupported, exploited and barely able to function to provide the food we need. My suspicion is that burying all this avoids further embarrassment to Chancellor Rachel Reeves, who seems to have chosen farmers as her sacrificial victim.

The scale of the problem facing farmers was revealed in a separate report published earlier this month by McCain Foods, which found that one third of British farmers made no profit in the past year. More than half have considered leaving farming in the past year because of its dire finances; 40% think they will be forced to leave the industry in the next decade. And 92% of farmers think the greatest threat to the long-term growth of British farming is the government.

You might think these awful statistics would trouble our political leaders or make them wonder whether they’d got farming policy right, but we’ve seen no sign of any soul-searching yet. We’re told in soundbites that the government cares about farming — but their policies suggest otherwise, making real life on farms often close to impossible. According to the McCain report, only 4% of British farmers believe that current government support and protection is adequate.

Someone’s narrative about British farming is wrong. And I’d suggest you make a judgment: either farmers are all crazy, or else something has gone catastrophically wrong with the relationship between British politics and farmers.

It is worth acknowledging at this point that no one thinks the problems with our food system began with the current Labour government. But all serious commentators agree that this government, and the last, have screwed up massively — and worse, are actively choosing to double down on their stupidity.

Let’s remind ourselves how we got into this mess. Before Brexit, Britain was part of an EU system— the Common Agricultural Policy, or CAP — which, though far from perfect, at least attempted to protect farmers. The system often ripped off farmers by asking them to sell products below the real cost of production but bailed them out each year with production subsidies. That meant my dad scraped a living working long hours on our little farm in Cumbria, with nonsensical subsidized accounts that barely got above break-even. Still, the subsidies kept his farm afloat. Under this system, the consumer benefited from plentiful supplies of cheap food, while British farmers were protected by the Italian and French farm lobby and by EU bureaucrats who understood the boring vagaries of food systems.

The British Left hated this system: in their view, farmers seemed kind of “rich” — so why would anyone give them money? — and they certainly didn’t vote Labour. The old-school Tory toffs supported the CAP because it kept their tenant farmers happy, but when the last of these “wets” were pushed out post-Brexit by Boris Johnson and replaced by free-market wankers, all sympathy for farmers died in British politics.

After Brexit, Britain scrapped the CAP system and decided, thanks to Michael Gove, an enthusiastic Defra reformer, to implement a system that delivered way more nature on farms. The new mantra was “public payments for public goods”. We were promised that farmers would receive the same amount of money as always, though rather than being subsidized to produce bacon, milk, or bread, they would be paid to deliver good environmental stewardship by planting trees or wildflower meadows, making soil healthy, or creating ponds. The farmer would become a service provider, committed to restoring nature; meanwhile, food production would be left to the free market.

Everyone back then, including Labour, seemed to agree that the environment was a big deal. The Left’s distaste for farmers was assuaged with promises of more butterflies and birds, and the Right’s by the fact farmers would no longer be paid a “subsidy” but instead would receive the market rate for public goods.

The new system sounded promising. Yet the Conservatives failed to pay for it properly, breaking their promise that every farmer could receive the same amount of money for nature restoration as they’d previously got for food production. (This is when things began to go very sour, because farmers took the government at its word, and then it failed them). It also took Defra ages to create the new system, and when it was just about functioning and starting to look, dare I say it, quite good, the Conservatives lost a general election and Labour came into power. Since then, the whole damn thing has gone into freefall.

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The Treasury, under Reeves, then pleaded ignorance that any such “public payments for public goods” contract existed with British farmers. Labour didn’t even attempt to make the new environmental schemes available to all farmers, instead making them competitive — so many, perhaps most, farmers have not got any kind of new deal. The schemes that do exist are either paused due to over-subscription, or have already fallen way behind inflation, so the funding is in real terms a fraction of the pre-Brexit investment. The result is this: half the farmers in England have been stripped of their production subsidies and left to the mercy of the global markets; the other half are being paid by the government to take land out of food production for nature restoration. But it doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone at the Treasury that this might make food scarcer or more expensive, or force farmers out of business.

Barely any British politicians, and apparently no one at the Treasury, understands the dire position British agriculture is now in. After all these years of government ineptitude, I have concluded that we are, as a society, agriculturally illiterate. People increasingly talk about farmers like they are some archaic vested interest group, like miners, whereas they actually feed millions of people every day. Our politics merely magnifies that illiteracy, creating rooms full of people at the Treasury who don’t even understand the basics making decisions with massive implications for our food system.

One person who clearly has no clue is Reeves, who last autumn delivered her coup de grâce: reforming inheritance tax so that farmers lost one of their remaining sops in a lifetime of being ripped off. In the past, farmland had been exempted from the tax, but from April next year, farmers will have to start paying. But farmland isn’t cash, nor does it generate much cash — so farms will inevitably have to sell land, making them less likely to survive in the future. To farmers, this doesn’t make any sense.

You can’t understand the inheritance tax angst in farming communities without understanding the context and history. The slightly crap pre-Brexit deal said to farmers like my dad: if you work hard to produce food for minimum wage, you can at least keep your farm, and hand it on to your kids. Reeves’s new deal means that farmers are going to be ripped off their whole lives, blamed for everything, and when they die their farms will incur a staggering death tax that might take the farmer’s loss-making, or already half-broke, descendants as many as 20 years to pay off.

If farmers were fairly treated and had a decent chance of profitability, then I, for one, think they could and should pay the same taxes as everyone else. But the fact is that they’ve been exploited for decades. And this is the last straw.

One response to all this, perhaps from the Left, might be: Who cares? These farmers are always whinging and are just another vested interest group that wants more handouts.

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And yet if we abandon our farmers, everyone will ultimately suffer: you, me, the environment, and the poorest people in our society. Farmers are the basis of our food system; if they withdraw their labor and capital because they can’t afford to keep farming, then who will feed the nation? So even if you think you don’t like farmers, going after them is still terrible politics. We need them to do their jobs.

We’re already beginning to see the inevitable and widely predicted consequences of our nation’s agricultural policy. Inflation is currently exceeding government targets, causing the Treasury terrible problems. And one of the key drivers of this is food price inflation, running at just below 5%, way in excess of the overall government inflation target of 2%. Food prices have risen by around 37% in the last five years. And this is disproportionately hitting the poorest in our society, who spend a greater part of their weekly budget on food.

This inflation is partly due to what’s happening on our farms. Since it has become very difficult and expensive to produce certain farm products without subsidies or protection, some farmers are simply producing less. And so prices are going up. Cattle prices have almost doubled in value since 2020, as farmland has gone out of production. And the number of dairy farmers has dropped by 56% in the past 20 years — some experts estimate that one dairy farmer a day goes out of business.

Then there’s the question of food security. Get support for farmers wrong and you’re taking a gamble that there won’t be enough food to feed the nation. Currently, according to Professor Tim Lang, the UK’s leading expert on food security, Britain’s food system is over-reliant on foreign imports and highly vulnerable to shocks and crises, such as disease outbreaks, extreme weather, or geo-political instability. Already, repeated droughts are impacting crop yields in the south-eastern triangle of England, which produces massive amounts of our food.

At the rate we’re going, the situation will only worsen. Earlier this month, a report from the All-Party Group on Science and Technology, “Feeding Britain sustainably to 2050”, warned that if the UK continues to prioritize housing, Net Zero, tree planting, and nature restoration, it could lose around a quarter of its productive farmland by 2050. This would see domestic food production reduced by a third, while the population continues to grow, leaving the UK far more reliant on imports.

Free-market ideologues say we can just import more food if we need to, but we’re living in La La Land if we think that’s a good idea in today’s unstable world. The rest of the world is increasingly focused on feeding their own growing populations, and climate change is already threatening global food supply chains. Almería in Spain, which has long fed Britain, is already drying out. Meanwhile, once-reliable exporting nations are now erecting trade barriers because of Trump-like protectionism. As an island nation, which now stands outside the EU, the UK is particularly vulnerable.

Farmers understand this, but it appears the Labour government does not. Our politicians would be wise to learn the lesson of rural America. When the grown-up parties of government fail to care about, and act upon, the pain of rural communities, the political fall-out becomes toxic. Social media finds disillusioned people and stokes their anger and alienation. This is happening now in online farming forums where Right-wing memes and explanations for the assault on farmers are spreading like wildfire. Reform knows exactly how to exploit this political failure to their advantage.

To be honest, I’m not really surprised that this government isn’t great at food, farming and the environment. All governments have blind spots and make mistakes. I can even forgive them some bad decisions. The issue is that they have refused to listen as the problems become ever more serious. The Treasury in particular seems to stubbornly dig in behind terrible policies — keener to bad-mouth farmers than hear them out. And now, at a time when we need an expert’s insights and analysis to inform a Budget, the government has buried its own farming review. It is shameful. Publish the review right now. And act upon it.

A strong case could be made that children’s literature, which by virtue of its audience often sheds the self-consciousness affecting many British writers, fits the bill perfectly: for what is childhood other than a lost and half-remembered homeland? An inward-looking British nationalism would owe more to the world of Brambly Hedge than the Lusiads or Kalevela: yet even Tolkien’s modern-day national epic, a conscious imitation of European nationalist myths, was explicitly written for children. Even the Edwardian high-summer whimsy of The Wind in the Willows is suddenly interrupted, in the “Piper at the Gates of Dawn” sequence, by a mystical, neo-pagan reverence for the spirits of the land. Tapping into the deeper wellsprings of cultural consciousness, children’s writing perhaps reveals hidden potentialities for such a project.

If we accept this thesis, then a suitable candidate, I would suggest, for such nationalist myth-making would be the postwar writer Rosemary Sutcliff’s series of novels, most of them ostensibly written for children, on Roman Britain and its violent collapse. For as Sutcliff remarked to an American audience, gathered to celebrate her work, “Children should be allowed the great themes, which are also often tragic themes, which they can receive and make use of better than most adults can.” Last year’s 70th anniversary of her most famous novel, that staple of the pre-Blair primary school library The Eagle of the Ninth, saw a modest flurry of appreciative retrospectives. Yet The Eagle, though her breakout book, is not representative of her mature body of work (which, by the way, offers passages of fine writing, particularly terse and beautiful nature-writing, far beyond that currently marketed towards adults). The Eagle is, essentially, a Kipling novel, directly influenced by her literary Sussex neighbor in space, if not time: indeed Puck of Pook’s Hill was Sutcliff’s childhood favorite.

The Eagle’s lead character, a young Roman officer, disguises himself as a native in a Boy’s Own adventure of self-discovery, leading him across the rainy Northwest Frontier to live among Pictland’s untamed frontier tribes, in their smoky mountain huts bedecked in the savage brilliance of “colorful native rugs”. The native tribes, driven to fury by “their holy men” to wage war against “the unbelievers” are, with great difficulty, outwitted by the decent, sensible young Roman subaltern, who then retires, like a good servant of the Raj, to live the quiet life of a Sussex country gentleman on his army pension. An obvious post-imperial novel, though perhaps not fully consciously, The Eagle is most interesting in establishing the mythic framework, and much of the anthropological quality, of her later, more morally and politically complex novels set within the context of the great Saxon migration — we might call it the Vortigernwave — that would carve an England from the land of the unwilling Britons.

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Ultimately, though, Sutcliff’s reputation ought to rest on her great adult Arthurian novel, Sword at Sunset, written in a period of what she described as trancelike “possession”. With the medieval Matter of Britain as her subject, Sutcliff imagines a world where a society that once seemed enduring crumbles into disrepair. Yet the love of Britain, and its strange and ancient insular civilization, drives its hero to a fierce, if doomed, rearguard defense, “that the things worth saving shall not go down into the dark”. Half-Roman and half-Briton — his battle cry is Yr Wydffa, the Welsh name for Snowdon whose official re-adoption is now resented by some Anglophones — her Artorius is torn between two worlds, that of Roman rationality and straight lines, and of native Celtic mysticism and curved and sinuous pattern-making.

This is a theme running throughout her books, in which the decent, sensible if officious Roman is an obvious stand-in for the modern Englishman, in a world where the Englishman’s actual ancestors are the wild invading barbarians. As she notes in the introduction to her children’s retelling of the Irish Ulster Cycle, “The Cuchulain Saga belongs to the Celts, the people of Ireland and Wales and the Highlands of Scotland, just as the story of Beowulf belongs to the Anglo-Saxons; that is very broadly speaking, to the English, and the Scottish Lowlanders. And neither Celt nor Saxon could have bred the other one’s story, for they belong to two quite different ways of thinking.” Fully adopting Matthew Arnold’s 19th-century distinction between the stolid, dependable Saxon, and the creative but erratic Celt, Sutcliff continues:

“However wild the happenings in the Saxon story, its feet remain firmly on the ground; and Beowulf and his companions are recognizably human beings grown to hero-size. But the Celtic tale leaps off into a world completely of the imagination, and the Red Branch Heroes have the blood of the Gods and the Fairy Kind (almost the same thing in Irish legend) running fiery in their veins. It is worth noticing this difference when reading either story, and remembering that in the main the people of Cuchulain and the people of Beowulf separately or mixed together are the stock that we in Britain are sprung from.”

A children’s writer today would not comfortably write the same thing, in the same way, yet a glance at Puffin novels of the Sixties and Seventies shows a world where the mythology of the British Isles, so bafflingly neglected today, was a common theme in postwar children’s writing. In other circumstances, we would term this, too, a kind of cultural nationalism: the creation of a shared corpus of myth spanning the British Isles, in which the Atlantic Archipelago, though at war with itself, is nevertheless a shared cultural unit.

For however distinct the Britons, or Picts, or Irish are in her novels, the Saxons or Romans are more different still: all the Celtic characters in her novels share a common religious and cultural worldview, and speak an apparently mutually intelligible language. Indeed, across her novels, Sutcliff creates her own pan-Isles vocabulary, gathered together from across dialects and eras with a brisk disregard for accuracy: a world of burns and bairns and kalegarths, where her British Celts say Sláinte as they down their anachronistic “fiery barley spirit”. Hibernicisms, of words and syntax, abound in her writing, whether justified by context or not: Sutcliff observed in her autobiography that her mother, of pure West Country extraction, would adopt a baffling Hiberno-English accent at moments of high emotion, “becoming Irish of the Irish. My father just used to wait patiently for the black mood to depart.”

From her Wessex mother, too, from a family devoted to the Raj and imperial service, Sutcliff claimed to derive a “residual trace of the second sight”. A believer in reincarnation, the increasingly physically disabled author, who chose to spend her life in the deep English countryside, overlaid her love for the land itself, for its “pale and changeful northern skies and the green plover calling”, with an awe-filled sense of its ancient, only partly buried power. Sutcliff’s Britain is an ancient, magical land, from which, at certain times and in certain remote places, great reserves of power can be summoned and drawn from. Magic may or may not be real — her rational, Romanized characters are ambivalent on the question — but, at times, it feels real enough to serve a political purpose.

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In just such a way, in Sword at Sunset, her Artorius, acclaimed as emperor within a circle of standing stones, “felt the great carved stone at the back of my heel, and something in me, in the touch of my heel against the stone, in my very loins that linked me with the earth and the gods and the stones of the Earth…” Britain is, to Sutcliff as many others, an ancient insular civilization unto itself: few other writers capture so succinctly both the natural beauty and the sheer strangeness of Britain, the enchanted weirdness of it, waiting to be drawn upon in time of need.

Though bred in the threatened softness of southern England, Sutcliff’s Late Roman heroes retreat to the upland peripheries of Wales, the Scottish Highlands and Borders, and the bleak moorlands of today’s northern England in search of personal and national renewal. Behind them they leave the great cities of Rome’s once-glorious British civilization, falling into ruin and squalor as the invading Saxons settle them, now “half derelict, the frescoed plaster falling from the walls, the fine Purbeck marble cracked and damp-stained, the gilding blackened”. It is the world, returned to again and again in her novels, of the Saxon poem, “The Ruin”, though told from the perspective of the Romano-British refugee fleeing to the safety of the western hills, and not the squatting interloper. Abandoning the cities, now falling into danger and disrepair, her characters lament the transience of the world that bred them, even as they seek to make their final stand in Deep Britain.

This is precisely the process described by the scholar of cultural nationalism John Hutchinson when he observed that one product of nationalist revivalism, when viewed as a comparative type, “was the unexpected ‘discovery’ of remote areas of natural beauty, or of great cultural significance, that because of their ‘wildness’ and ‘hidden’ quality became mysterious reservoirs of the national spirit.” These wild and untouched peripheries, whether Finland’s lakes and forests or the bleak expanses of Connemara, “became ramparts of the nation to which groups, especially alienated urban educated middle classes, could turn to escape assimilation into foreign values and experience moral regeneration, thereby embedding themselves in the land. The defense of these regions from foreign cultural or political threat galvanized powerful nationalist movements.”

Sutcliff’s heroes, objectively British nationalists, represent one iteration of this ideological current. In today’s nascent British nationalist movement, if the oft-discussed “MythoYookay” X account represents Britain’s current, fallen state, then its counterbalancing ideological colleague is the MythoBritannia account, which centers on Britain’s dramatic landscapes, with an emphasis on the mystical and otherworldly — Glastonbury Tor, holy wells, the last surviving rainforests. The gentle downs and fields of southern England are less often invoked than the bleak and dramatic peaks and valleys of Britain’s highland peripheries: these are wild, untouched landscapes, which through their careful curation speak to a Britain older and more magical than England alone. Consciously in MythoBritannia’s case, and perhaps unconsciously in Sutcliff’s, this retreat to the peripheries represents a reservoir of cultural Britishness, directly analogous to the classical nationalisms of the 19th and early 20th century, from which modern-day political strength can be drawn. Both invoke the spirits of a nation not dead but merely sleeping, ready to be summoned, like Arthur and his knights, in the trials ahead.

Sutcliff’s characters are victims of a once-proud imperial state that can no longer protect them, or their ancient way of life, in their own homeland. All is transience, and irreparable change, the unwanted result of political failure, experienced as a catastrophic loss. “When you thought about it, you realized that you were living in a world that might fall to pieces at any moment,” observes a character in The Lantern Bearers. “Rome is hollow rotten at the heart,” says the British warlord Carausius in The Silver Branch, “and one day she will come crashing down. A hundred years ago, it must have seemed that all this was for ever; a hundred years hence — only the gods know… If I can make this one province strong — strong enough to stand alone when Rome goes down, then something may be saved from the darkness.”

What did Sutcliff, with her claimed second sight, feverishly writing while “possessed” by something greater than herself, mean by returning again and again to this threatened, collapsing civilization, while writing in the very different circumstances of immediate postwar Britain? As she would herself say of Sword at Sunset’s Artorius to a later interviewer, “for me in a way he stands for Britain” at a time when “we’re awfully uncertain of our future. Therefore we feel a kind of kinship for the Dark Ages; and I think for this reason we feel in a way the need for something to back us up, in the same way as Arthur ‘lights up’ the Dark Ages. We have the need for an archetype of some sort to pull us together, to get us through this, to spread light into the darkness until we can get through to a better world.” Sutcliff’s late Roman world, in our increasingly contested transition from one kind of nation to quite another, is perhaps better suited to a 21st century adult audience than a postwar children’s one. Morally complex, startlingly violent, both elegiac and cynical, Sutcliff’s own writing represents a lost land in itself.

To his audience of liberal Tories, Major clumsily evoked a microcosmic life of the nation that, piece-by-piece, constituted the Conservative Party. His party would survive, Major argued, because it was rooted, not in ideology or activism, but in the daily practices and associations of millions of people: attending church, organising clubs and conducting ordinary business.

Even at the time, Major’s vision of an intact civil society bolstering a centuries-old party was out of date. Indeed, a few years later, in the “invincible green suburbs” of Major’s speech, millions of Conservatives abandoned the party in 1997 for Blair’s Labour.

Yet, there was something concrete in his political elegy. The mediating associations of the Conservatives, although weak, survived 1997 and helped rebuild the party under David Cameron’s vague “Big Society” project. In contrast, the clubs and associations that kept Labour voters loyal — Miners’ Institutes, Workingman’s Associations, Labour Clubs, trade unions and the Methodist chapel — had already declined by the early Nineties. Without these structures, Labour’s core vote in the Red Wall happily turned blue in 2019.

However, from the vantage point of 2024, the Conservative Party’s 14-year revival now looks like a blip. In 1953, the Tories had more than 2.8 million members: almost twice that of Labour. Today, it claims only 172,437.

Historically, the Tory Party relied on “Conservative” or “Constitutional” clubs as auxiliaries, connecting MPs to their communities through cheap booze, snooker, music hall acts and darts. These clubs were once the “non-political” bedrock of the Conservative Party: expressing a paradoxically non-ideological vision of ideology and governance.

Indeed, many members of Conservative Clubs I spoke to refused to concede that their membership was in any way political. “We don’t talk about politics here,” was a common response to my inquiries. Few saw the irony of saying so while sitting beneath portraits of Winston Churchill, Boris Johnson or Margaret Thatcher.

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“In the Eighties, a friend of mine was visited by a Conservative Party worker in the Surrey stockbroker belt and was invited to a BBQ at the local Conservative Club,” Rupert Morris, author of The Tories: From Village Hall to Westminster, tells me. “When he said he would only come if they BBQed Mrs Thatcher, the grand Tory lady replied: ‘Oh, but we’re not political around here, anyone can come.’ There was an unquestioning sense that one would naturally be a Conservative in a place like Surrey.”

Such placid content has since disappeared. Over the last decade, these clubs have closed at a rapid rate: bludgeoned by rising energy costs, Covid-19, declining membership and the expense of entertainment. Some clubs are now trying to change their names, strategising that their political affiliations are putting off punters. When I phoned Charles Littlewood, the Deputy Chief Executive of the Associate of Conservative Clubs (ACC), to discuss closure rates, I was greeted with flat-out refusal and accusations of media bias.

And so, I travelled to the suburban south coast of West Sussex, to find out for myself. Here, the private Lancing College rises from the South Downs, while fishing cottages, council estates and vast rows of suburban semis crowd the shoreline. In many ways, it is an all too neat encapsulation of Major’s “invincible green suburbs”. It should be the perfect place for Conservative Clubs, if not the party, to thrive.

However, this coastline, once assumed to be representative of the average Tory safe seat, is rapidly changing. While Worthing and Shoreham still possess a few Conservative Clubs, both parliamentary seats are expected to fall to Labour this week. Many in the area understand this as a consequence of high house prices and the migration of young Labour-voting professionals and families away from the extortionate rents of London and Brighton.

Goring Conservative Club, the first venue I visited, is housed in a grand neoclassical building in the middle of an estate. A week before the general election, and there are no political posters or banners of any kind: only flags for the football. In the atrium of the building, I meet Simon Flack, the chairman of the club, and Catherine Lane, a committee member. Inside, there are no openly party-political features. Instead, English and Scottish flags for the Euros are draped over the bar.

“I don’t know necessarily, at the present moment, whether I want to invite him,” says Flack, when I ask him about the club’s connection to Sir Peter Bottomley, the local Conservative MP. “He’s never approached us. A year ago, I had a man turn up who was looking after Peter. He thought they would be meeting here, but they were actually meeting in the library down the road,” Flack adds. “Why he didn’t ask us to use the function room is beyond me.” (One of Bottomley’s staffers later tells me: “We’ve gone our separate ways, over the last nine years we’ve not had an email asking him to attend the club. I can’t believe they would invite Sir Peter.”)

Flack described how the club used to connect its members to the Tory high and mighty: “If you look at our honours board, it’s Colonel So-And-So, Sir Whomever, and several famous MPs, but this is going back to the 1940s and 1950s.” Lane adds that, today, politics is rarely discussed. “Politics is never spoken about here, it’s never seriously spoken about — people come here to socialise, the [Conservative] name is part of the deeds, we have to keep it.”

Indeed, the breakdown between the Goring Conservative Club and the Tory Party reached a tipping-point last year. “An ex-president of ours was as Conservative as they come, and he actually did a video for the Labour Party a couple of months ago,” Flack explains.

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Down the road in Shoreham, the local Conservative Club huddles beneath a huge glass development stretching along the river. Inside, the room is packed out for Saturday night’s entertainment. The average age is 70.

Shoreham’s  atmosphere immediately feels more politically charged. The local Tory candidate’s leaflets sit in a large pile at the door. Portraits of the late Queen and Winston Churchill watch over the bar. From the far side of the room, a series of photographs of Conservative prime ministers from Rishi Sunak to Thatcher line the wall. “We skipped Liz Truss,” a bartender jokes.

One table tells me they’re suspicious of the media and politicians. “They’re all the same… Farage is the only one saying what people think.” They tell me all their children will be voting Labour: “National service scared them off [the Conservatives] didn’t it?”

On another table, two women sip at gins. “I wouldn’t come in here if it wasn’t Conservative,” Carol tells me. Tim Loughton, the local MP, regularly attends the club’s AGMs and seems popular with them. “Have you seen him dancing?” Carol asks. “He swung me around like a bleeding cat.” She goes on to explain that she will vote Conservative: “If Labour gets in, everything will go up in price and my pension only stretches so far.”

Later on, I speak to David, an elderly ex-serviceman, who is having drinks with his family. He explains that he’s 72 and still working, largely to pay for dental treatment. “The Conservatives have been in power for 14 years and I can’t afford things.”

Does he believe that a Labour government will remedy this? “I used to have faith in politics. I’ve always been a working-class man,” he says. “Labour doesn’t support the working-class, so I became Conservative because I was self-employed. I’ll vote Reform now.” He looks around the room. “This is obsolete, these [Conservative Clubs] are dying out. But there’s respect here.”

One of David’s younger relatives, roughly in his early 20s, laughs and tells me he has a tattoo of Nigel Farage’s face. I ask where it’s located. “I couldn’t tell you that, mate.” He laughs again. For the few young people in the club, the pomp and circumstance of conservative ritual seem irrelevant in the face of populist provocation and a sense of looming crisis. For now, politics lies outside association: in the realm of the meme and the extended joke.

Outside, the spires of Lancing College frame mudflats where boats moor and fly fishermen reel in their catch. Numerous hedgerows hide thousands of houses sheltering under the South Downs. However, in these “invincible green suburbs” of Major’s accidental requiem, the Conservative Party is now an exhausted force, disconnected from those it claims to serve. The Labour Party looks likely to win these seats. Despite the vital role Conservative Clubs play for their elderly members, it looks likely that they, too, will soon be forgotten.

Lasch had an affinity for the common man. He made appeals to religion and tradition for moral guidance; he saw the family as a “haven in a heartless world”; he regarded a sense of pride in one’s hometown as essential for the community functioning of Middle America; and he called for a political economy wherein people would be able to access meaningful work that called them to a higher vocation. These visions never came to fruition during his lifetime. But that hasn’t stopped others from attempting to pick up the mantle. Today, his heirs can be found across the world — in the increasing trend towards homesteading and localism.

In The Culture of Narcissism (1979), Lasch argued that American culture had become increasingly addicted to instant gratification, which placed individual desires, unmoored by virtue-based cultural norms, above the flourishing of the common good. Fundamentally, he attributed this cultural rot to the idea of progress, which, he explained in Mass Culture Reconsidered two years later, is couched in the “refusal to acknowledge limits to human powers”, and ultimately “tears people out of familiar contexts and weakens kinship ties, local and regional traditions, and attachments to the soil”.

Over the past few decades, a growing movement of individuals and communities has embraced this idea — choosing to reject the dominant culture of consumerism and “progress” in place of homesteading and localism as functioning alternatives. Most of these people, I have suggested, are driven by a larger, more amorphous sense of risk, which I attribute to the trend of societal decline.

I recently interviewed a number of small-scale home producers in and around Chicago, and most appeared to be driven by a larger, more amorphous sense of risk and societal decline. There, I was as likely to find a rural second amendment libertarian as an urban progressive socialist. In certain cases, their distrust concerned government regulations and labelling schemes; in others, there was a general sense of uncertainty around industrial food production and corporate incentives toward profit-maximisation; still others had become fed up with the entire food system after attempting to resolve persistent health issues. Despite their divergent politics and backstories, they all shared an impetus to turn to home food production to gain some sense of control and self-sufficiency.

Cultural historian Morris Berman calls this Dual Process, or the ways in which people are forced to discover alternatives in the twilight of a waning civilisation. Berman suggests that as societal functioning breaks down — as it did in Ancient Rome — people find other ways to meet their basic needs. It is in this process of meeting those needs that individuals, usually unconsciously, develop parallel institutions that could end up developing into the society that succeeds the collapsing empire.

Homesteading is, in many ways, borne out of this sense of alienation. It involves, at its most basic, taking part in the home production of goods, such as rearing livestock, hunting, fishing, beekeeping and preserving foods. This was the common mode of living for most of human civilisation until the industrial revolution, but it didn’t disappear. Interest in home production returns in waves: as victory gardens during the Second World War; as the back-to-the-land-movement of Sixties and Seventies; and now as a new self-sufficiency movement spurred in part by the pandemic and the sense of disorder that followed the decline of urban life and global supply chain shocks.

Often, the individuals I spoke to felt drained by the meaningless work of “email jobs” and an ever-increasing treadmill of consumerism. Here, they channelled Lasch’s remark in The True and Only Heaven (1991) that “capitalism itself, thanks to its growing dependence on consumerism, promotes an ethic of hedonism and health and thus undermines the ‘traditional values’ of thrift and self-denial”. Through the act of homesteading, however, these individuals have started to flex their atrophied muscles by taking responsibility for their needs. Lasch argued that a distributed universal ownership over the means of production, both through household production as well as “small producers — farmers, artisans, master craftsmen, journeymen” were essential for a functioning republic.

In general, homesteaders seek to reduce their reliance on technology and other external systems that may one day prove unreliable. As a result, many are forced into a daily confrontation with the unfiltered messiness of nature through work with their hands, unmediated by screens or advanced tools. Lasch drew on thinkers such as William Morris in The True and Only Heaven, suggesting there is a fundamental dignity of labour in creative handicrafts, and a certain “pride of workmanship formerly associated with small-scale private ownership”. Juxtaposed with the wage labour of early factory life, or even rote spreadsheet work in a modern office job, the act of production in the home can be immensely satisfying.

Homesteading is by definition driven by an interest in self-consumption, which differentiates it from a commercial small farm. However, some home-scale producers do have budding cottage food businesses selling at farmer’s markets. The Smith Homestead in Mississippi, for example, started out with a small garden over health concerns and access to healthy foods, and now has a small operation selling hand-made soaps, candles, handicrafts and fresh foods locally. It is also quite common for these households to share or barter in informal economic exchanges. In that way, it becomes both an act of self-reliance and a way to make an accessible, meaningful vocation in the crafts of small-scale production in the home.

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It’s hardly surprising, then, that many homesteaders also advocate localism, whose goal is to build resilient and sustainable communities by prioritising local resources and production, and instilling a kind of civic pride of place and belonging. According to Lasch, what he calls “particularism” was an antidote to the progressive idea that we could or should love every citizen of the world in the same way we love the members of our families or communities. He pointed to people such as Willa Cather, who spoke to the particularities of place, attributing “Nebraska’s vigour and prosperity to the presence of Bohemian, Scandinavian, and German immigrants”.

Today, people engaged in homesteading seek a similar sense of belonging, something they feel has been robbed from them by the atomised society of the advanced economies they were born into. Take, for example, the recently published children’s poem “All the Ways You Can Stay“, by Wally Chamberlain, who grew up on a third-generation dairy farm in rural New England. Intended as a remedy to Dr Seuss’s “Oh, The Places You’ll Go!”, which encourages young adults to leave their hometowns for office work in the nearest metropole, Chamberlain offers:

“The barns they all lean, and the field’s overgrown.
Paint peels quicker on a house that’s not home.
It’s hard to see, but indeed is the truth,
That places will fade without memories and youth.
Yes places need people, and this one does too,
And maybe this place, and these people, need you.
Your family, your friends, these hills, and this town,
They’d not be the same, without you around.
So leave if you must, but perhaps not today.
Stop and consider all the ways you can stay.”

What this reveals is that, despite recent pearl clutching that homesteading is adjacent to “white supremacy” or localism is “blood and soil”, many engaged in these activities care not just about prioritising individual action, but also about building communities that champion ecological sustainability and decentralised power structures, including caring about hyper-local politics and informal economies. These people often come together to share knowledge, resources and support, creating networks that prioritise resilience and self-sufficiency. Roxanne Ahern of Happy Holistic Homestead, for instance, hosts a “swap and shop” a couple of times a year with neighbours where everyone exchanges clothes and other gently used items. Again, for Lasch in The True and Only Heaven, there is a power in informal networks developed by the Common Man, which can be the foundation for the “revival of active citizenship”.

Looking towards those experimenting in homesteading and localism, we might therefore gain some insight about the modern world engaging with the not-so-distant past — a time where relying on nature to scratch out a larger force was commonplace. Those who are seeking a fundamentally more meaningful existence, through the rejection of the false promises of technological progress and the embrace of the limits of nature, are showing us the glimmers of a path towards a life that could simultaneously begin to address our spiritual and economic woes.

Lasch spent his career documenting the tragedies and loss in industrial modernity. He wrote of “the decline of craftsmanship, the fragmentation of the community, the loneliness of the modern metropolis, the subordination of spiritual life to the demands of the market” — but never lived to see a fully embodied example of people celebrating “the goodness of life in the face of its limits”. If Berman’s Dual Process theory is correct, and we are firmly in a moment of civilisational decline, we are also in a moment of great promise and opportunity. Almost 30 years after he died, Lasch’s vision could soon become a much-needed reality.

This is a mistake. Demography may be destiny, but it is geography that determines its political shape. The greatest division today is to do with place: in particular, three basic terroirs — urban, suburban and rural — which reflect a divergence in economic interest, family structure and basic values, particularly between big city economies and those on the periphery.

This fracture is widening at a time when the demographic balance between these regions is shifting. For much of the past two centuries, the overwhelming inclination was towards urbanisation, with dense cores serving as the prime engines of economic, cultural and social change. Today, however, that pattern is shifting, particularly since the pandemic, which saw two million citizens move out of big US cities. Even in urban-oriented Europe, 63% of cities experienced a population decline during the pandemic.

Does this mean “the era of urban supremacy is over”, as the New York Times put it? Quite possibly. But don’t expect the urban leadership to acknowledge it. Even as they desperately attempt (and largely fail) to lure workers back downtown, urban political interests continue to dominate the national conversation — even amid high levels of crime, street-level disorder and the resulting shuttering of businesses.

Largely ignored by the city-dominated media, the world’s urban core has been losing this battle for generations. This is not only evident in the United States, but also across Europe and Australia. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, little more than 5% of growth from 1966 to 2021 was in the core cities. In Europe, barely 37% of people live in cities, with the rest in fast-growing suburbs, small towns and rural areas.

Of course, many cities have experienced some revival over the past decade, but that “boom” has largely benefited educated newcomers and their wealthy employers. Urban regions became both richer and poorer; according to Pew research, the greatest inequality in America now exists in “superstar cities”, such as San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and San Jose.

These shifts have, unsurprisingly, shaped urban politics. As middle-class families have left, the urban terroir has been gutted of the old urban bulwark of solid middle and working-class families; as Fred Siegel has observed, it is dominated by an “upstairs/downstairs” coalition of the affluent and dependent.

This demographic reality has driven a shift towards a more progressive politics. In 1984, for example, Ronald Reagan won 31% of the vote in San Francisco and 27.4% in Manhattan. In 2016, Donald Trump won only 10% of the vote in each. Between 1998 and 2018, urban counties — which sometimes includes suburbs — went from 55% to 62% Democratic. Today, there is not a single Republican Mayor of a city of more than one million people. Recent victories of progressives in Los Angeles, Oakland, Chicago, New York and Minneapolis, despite widespread social disorder and economic decline, suggest this pattern may well be inexorable.

The antipode to the urban terroir lies in the countryside and rural hinterlands, which are experiencing a modest revival across the Western world. Yet even as they begin to regain appeal, rural areas are struggling against the dominant urban drive to “net zero”, which threatens economies based on local fossil fuel development, farming and manufacturing. For instance, it was high energy prices brought on by climate policies that sparked the Gilets Jaunes movement in France’s small towns, villages and exurban communities. To meet climate demands and limit their use of chemical fertilisers, Dutch farmers, among the world’s most efficient and ecology minded, have similarly risen up and joined their Spanish, Polish and Italian counterparts.

Even worse, the urban elites propose reaching their net zero fantasies by physically disfiguring rural communities. This offensive is being pushed by oligarchs such as J.P. Morgan’s Jamie Dimon, who resents peasants blocking land acquisition for subsidy-driven “green” investments and seeks federal help to secure these lands. But he is just one man of a wider movement, in which rural areas, home to the vast majority of proposed new solar and wind projects, are now asked to fulfil the green dreams of Manhattan, San Francisco and west Los Angeles. In California, the Nature Conservancy estimates that fulfilling the state’s net zero targets would require up to one-tenth of the farming acreage in the coming decades.

People living in the areas have responded as one might expect: between 2015 and 2022, community rejections of such projects in the US grew from 50 to over 500. A similar narrative is playing out throughout the EU and among farmers Australia, who fear transmission lines and windmills will not only make their farms less productive, but destroy the surrounding landscape.

For now, the political revival in small towns and rural areas represents an enormous boost to the Right. The once-strong progressive populism of rural communities has evaporated as more residents now feel more threatened by urban interests than corporate power. As a 2020 study from the Bennett Institute at the University of Cambridge found, there is a “deepening geographical fracture” in European societies reminiscent of “the stark urban-rural political divides of the early 20th century”.

This can be seen most clearly in the United States. In 2008, Barack Obama won nearly one quarter of the country’s non-metro counties. Eight years later, Hillary Clinton won barely 10%. In the past, notes Ernie Goss, professor of economics at Creighton University, the rural states regularly elected Democrats. How will Biden fare? “He couldn’t get a cup of coffee in this part of the country,” he told me. “To say he’s unpopular is an understatement.”

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Caught between these two increasingly extreme polities lies the third terroir, “the middle landscape” of suburban and exurban areas. Although these areas constitute an absolute majority of Americans and two-thirds of Europe’s 99 largest metros, they have little political power. This largely reflects the fact that suburbs tend to be populated by middle and working-class households, often too preoccupied with making a living and raising a family to indulge in political theatre. In other words, the middle landscape has the numbers, but has not found its voice.

Yet ultimately, it is the suburbs that will determine America’s future. They remain, unlike the other terroirs, contestable, home to at least 40% of all US House seats. For almost 20 years, the Republican-leaning suburban voters held steady at around 47%, with Democratic leaders at 45%. In 2016, the suburbs voted 50 to 45 for Trump, but two years later the suburban electorate tilted blue, effectively handing the House back to the Democrats. Then, in 2022, the predicted GOP landslide never developed, in large part because suburbanites split their ballots.

Whether this will be repeated remains unclear. On the one hand, Biden’s embrace of policies that seek to force communities to densify and take in low-income residents are not likely to be widely popular among suburbanites, who, after all, moved there to escape the city. On the other, the suburb’s changing demography could work to the favour of Democrats, as culturally liberal millennials and ethnic minorities join the city exodus.

But none of this represents the politics of choice — a programme suited to the needs and aspirations of this middle terroir. Right now, politics is inflicted on these communities rather than being shaped around them. Until they gain a voice, the West’s geographical cleavage will continue to widen, producing endless conflicts that fail the majority caught in between.

The witch is Esme Boggart. She represents a new collective established to campaign against no-fault evictions, and to support the families affected by them. In this case, the owner of the estate had commissioned an architect to refurbish the cottage. But, when the architect recommending demolishing and rebuilding the house instead, the tenants were handed their notice. A family of seven, they had lived on the estate for 26 years. “The owners of this property don’t live here,” reads Esme Boggart’s campaign literature. “They don’t know our community.”

Esme Boggart, in contrast, stands for “people who belong to a landscape, but don’t own an inch of it”. The people behind the protest use her name instead of their own because they are afraid to lose their own homes. “We are sick,” they write, “of this neo-feudalism that governs our lives.” Folksy as it is, the collective is identifying a modern twist on an ancient and serious problem: though stereotyped as a world of affluent comfort, the British countryside is a place of profound inequality. As a new UnHerd polling map shows, forgotten provincial regions are experiencing a cost-of-living crisis equal to the inner cities, compounding an existing problem of rural poverty and working-class displacement. 

No-fault evictions are commonplace across the country — reports say they increased 76% in just three months last year — but there are no official statistics that break down how many take place in rural areas. If you speak to those who live in an Area of Natural Beauty, you’ll hear the same story again and again, of landlords evicting local people so they can make more money from their properties, often by turning them into holiday cottages. In some places in Wales, the Highlands, Cornwall and the Lake District, one in four properties are Airbnbs. When you add second homes to that statistic, there are villages like Elterwater in Cumbria where 80% of houses are unavailable to live in. Inevitably, it is the lower classes who are pushed out.

For hundreds of years, if you worked in the countryside, you were usually given a “tied” house to live in. Villages used to have a house for the doctor, the teacher, the policeman, and so on. Foresters were provided with cottages in far-flung, newly-planted forests. Cotton mills, which were first built in the depths of the countryside so that they could take advantage of the waterfalls to power their factories, provided dorm-like accommodation for their workers (who were mainly orphans: children were cheaper to employ). Slate, coal, copper and tin mining all provided rows and rows of badly insulated houses.

Many of these traditional rural industries are gone, and most with good reason. There is no point romanticising them. The homes they provided were often cramped and sometimes isolated. And if you lost the job, you lost the house too. The words of a Scottish crofter, from 1883, are evidence of the impact this insecurity had: “I want the assurance that I will not be evicted for I cannot bear evidence to the distress of my people without bearing evidence to the oppression and high-handedness of the landlord and his factor.” His words eerily echo those of Esme Boggart, a reminder that the old ways are not the best.

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While the old schoolhouse might have been sold off, this ancient status quo still exists for farmers, who have lived in “tied” houses for centuries. If you rent the farm, usually a home will be provided too. Currently, around a third of England is farmed by tenant farmers. But having lived and worked on the land for decades, they often find themselves forced out of the landscapes they love. Christine, who lives on a tenant farm in Yorkshire, will have to leave her home when she and her husband can’t farm anymore. In preparation, they have bought a small house in the nearest market town. They would have preferred to stay in the countryside, but they simply can’t afford it.

And while people who have worked the land their whole lives are forced to move off it, people who work in cities are retiring to the countryside in droves. The Highlands and Islands Business Federation, for instance, is worried that some areas will simply become “glorified retirement communities”. If there are no children left to go to the local school, and no-one left to run the county show, put on the pantomime at Christmas or run the shop, these things cease to exist. Businesses are already shutting down because they can’t find enough local staff.

Some sectors still provide homes for workers — usually the ones that cater to outsiders. Big hotels need plenty of staff, and will provide rooms for bar managers, waitresses, chefs, and cleaners if necessary. Distilleries provide accommodation. The National Trust houses workers on some of its properties. But most restaurants and cafes do not, and slowly but surely, they are closing.

This is a sign that it’s not just the older generation, whose working days are done, being forced out of rural areas and into towns. Rachel grew up near Hawkshead, in the Lake District. When she first left home, she worked at a hotel in a neighbouring village. “Obviously I couldn’t afford to buy round Hawkshead,” she told me. Any houses that come on the market in the picturesque village get snapped up by people who can afford to pay sky-high prices. “The cheapest house was in Kendal,” about 20 miles away. But it was subject to a local occupancy clause, designed to keep houses in the hands of local people. It wasn’t very well designed: “They said I wasn’t local enough! My whole family is from either Kendal or Hawkshead area!” She wrote to the local councillor arguing her case, and was eventually allowed to buy a one-bedroom house in Kendal.

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Ten years later, Rachel was married and pregnant with her first child. She and her husband applied for another local occupancy house in the same area but were, again, told no. This time the reason for refusal was because they didn’t have children. “I was about to have a baby!” And her choices were limited. There is still no way she could afford to buy in the village where she grew up. Opportunities to rent long-term are rare.

“It’s not a housing crisis, it’s an affordability crisis,” says author Catrina Davies. In other words, it’s not about building more. A decade ago, when she was in her early thirties, she wanted to move back to Cornwall, which has the largest number of second homes in England. Catrina spent her childhood there, but the only place she could afford was a shed. “Houses have become a luxury item”; they are supposed to be homes. The shed is over 100 years old and she has no running water, but it is just that: a home.

Rural areas have benefitted from the wealth of those who don’t live there for decades, but now the balance has tipped. Locals are being squeezed out by those with more money than them, and communities are starting to vanish. The government is, slowly, doing something about it. As of April 2023, a holiday home must be rented out for a minimum of 70 days a year to qualify for business rates as opposed to council tax. In Wales, local authorities have already been given the power to increase council tax on second homes by 300%. And in Scotland, properties intended to be used as holiday rentals will have to apply for a licence from local authorities.

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In England, however, the crackdown is slower. In December last year, Cumbrian MP Tim Farron campaigned for more powers to restrict short-term lets. It was voted down by 321 votes to 172. It is worth noting, at this point, that MPs are three times as likely than the average citizen to own a second home.

With understandably limited faith in the authorities, communities are fighting back. There are now over 200 community-bought woodlands across the nation, for instance, used for a range of things, from forest schools to improving biodiversity. And collectives are buying land on which to build houses that can unequivocally belong to local people, locking in clauses to make sure they are never sold off as second homes. But many, like the anonymous campaigners behind Esme Boggart, are too afraid to directly challenge those with the power to evict them. As for the family in South Oxfordshire that the witch represents, they have been given another six months. What then, who knows.

But this isn’t wholly the Tories’ fault. Rather, it’s another omen of the ongoing transformation that began with de-industrialisation: the end of fossil-fuel-era mass prosperity. This is now percolating well beyond the “left-behind”, and snapping at the heels of the next tier up the ladder: the Caravan Dreamers.

You’ll find them out in force on the A1, early on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Usually, they’re transporting a secondary mode of transport — such as mountain bikes or vintage cars — to another location, in order to enjoy a transport-based leisure activity. By and large, Caravan Dreamers are practical, decent people. They’re pub-goers and dog owners. They buy gifts in garden centres. They own small businesses and shops. They pick up litter. The Caravan Dream is a modest one: to enjoy both relative independence and relative comfort, at an affordable price point. It’s an autonomy made sweeter by being saved for weekends and bank holidays, and it doesn’t matter if earning the money to fund the Caravan Dream rules out actually being rootless. That feeling of freedom, for a few hours of a weekend, offsets the real-world effort needed to sustain it.

London is, of course, a different country. But out in actual England, in my anecdotal observation, Caravan Dreamers are well-represented among the 1.5 million UK households with open fires and wood-burning stoves. And it’s no wonder — the woodburner conveys something like the same aspiration to affordable independence and comfort, with just the slightest edge of one-upping your neighbour. But as the climate debate has grown shriller, the dream of affordable independence has begun to take on an anxious edge.

Britain’s carbon emissions have halved since 1990, in part by shifting away from coal-burning power stations — but also, in part, at the expense of the industrial working class. For a major contributor to this first phase of decarbonisation was in fact de-industrialisation. Since 1990, British manufacturing’s share of GDP has collapsed from 16.5% to 8.8%, as carbon-intensive industries departed for countries such as China, with lower labour costs and less stringent environmental laws.

But Phase One decarbonisation wasn’t really decarbonisation in an absolute sense. Instead of making carbon-intensive consumer goods in Britain, now we just import them from China, where carbon emissions per capita have climbed even as they’ve fallen in the developed West. Worldwide, we’re generating more greenhouse gas than ever. So the pressure is on to cut deeper. But we can’t do anything about China building coal-fired power stations, and at home we’ve picked all the low-hanging fruit. How to make further reductions? The obvious, uncomfortable answer is that reducing emissions means people are going to have to start doing without nice things.

But whose nice things are next for the chop? If the Caravan Dreamers are growing restive, it’s because they harbour the suspicion that the answer is: them. Towing the caravan anywhere is getting painfully expensive. Further down the line lurks a ban on new internal combustion engines. How far can an EV with a limited range tow a caravan? How long until vintage car rallies are banned?

And the threatened loss of freedom goes deeper still. If owning a woodburner afforded the reassuring prospect of being able to stay warm even in the event of power cuts or rationing, the threat of government restrictions on their use brings with it a suffocating sense of avenues closing off for the type of modestly comfortable independence, long cherished as core to the Caravan Dream. In its place looms the panicky feeling of having even provisional, partly illusory freedoms forcibly stripped away, replaced by a centrally surveilled and unaccountably-administered condition of helplessness.

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And if politics feels so bitter and volatile at present, this is at least partly because Caravan Dreamers are Tory at a cellular level, much as the industrial working class was (and to a great extent still is) Labour. Theirs is not the Toryism of high finance, or large land-holdings, or a manicured pile in the Cotswolds. It’s the shopkeeper Toryism that produced Margaret Thatcher — and, with her, the seeds of its own demise.

The slow hollowing-out and financialisaton of Britain that Thatcher inaugurated has already delivered “Brexitland” populism, as well as the Left’s turn away from blighted post-industrial regions in favour of an exciting new coalition of students, identitarian “communities” and higher-rate taxpayers. Now, the Caravan Dreamers suspect their interests, too, have been sidelined by the Tories who once championed them.

They have some grounds for thinking so. After more than a decade of Tory rule, British life has transformed radically in a number of ways that are anathema to the Caravan Dream. This is structural: it is no longer possible to deliver the growth that underpins middle-class British prosperity without degrading the middle-class British way of life. Until relatively recently, the Tories squared this circle by externalising the pain overseas or among non-Tory voters, but (notably in the housing debate) this approach is now causing widening fissures within the Tory coalition.

My staunchly Tory constituency was outraged last year, for example, when the then Transport Secretary Grant Shapps waved through Luton Airport expansion plans. As a result, passenger planes have been re-routed over our heads, several times an hour, at about 5,000 feet (this is quite loud). Airport expansion, is, he insisted, “core to boosting global connectivity” and perfectly compatible with “our commitment to the environment”. So you can perhaps forgive me for laughing hollowly when I learned that Shapps was to be the new Minister for Net Zero, tasked with deciding who flourishes, and who takes the hit, as the British public are alternately shoved and cajoled toward this goal.

Given his previous approach in the Transport brief, we can expect Shapps (himself a keen amateur pilot) to support the aviation industry and doubtless seek savings elsewhere. And this is where we begin to see the widening fissures in the Tory coalition, and the reason Caravan Dreamers are growing mutinous.

According to one 2020 study, half of aviation emissions are caused by “super-emitters” representing just 1% of the world’s population. Bill Gates, for instance, is the author of How To Avoid Climate Disaster but also owns four private jets worth $200m, and admits that travelling by jet is his “guilty pleasure”. If aviation is to be supported, even as wood-burners come under scrutiny, from a Caravan Dreamer’s perspective the inference is clear: that, much as we saw after the Great Crash and again during Covid, we were not in fact “all in this together”.

You don’t have to be a basement-dwelling internet addict to see the contours emerging. The couple who run my local post office are quintessential Caravan Dreamers, and in their shop window, alongside local concert and church group announcements, there’s a lurid yellow-and-black poster warning about the danger to individual freedom posed by an elite plan to replace cash with digital currency. Nothing could capture more neatly the rising sense of existential terror bubbling under post-pandemic small-town Britain.

This is the mood powering increasingly prevalent and colourful concerns about surveillance, climate change, microchips, Klaus Schwab, digital ID and so on. It’s also behind increasingly frequent eruptions of public dissent, for example in the protests last weekend against Oxford’s proposed “15-minute city” scheme. And while detractors may mock rising popular objections to this diffuse cluster of changes as far-Right, conspiracy-mongering, or just straight-up lunacy, much of it is factually wrong but still directionally accurate.

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For while the details are often overblown, the sense of being downgraded from yeoman to serf is not baseless. Justin Trudeau ended the trucker protests by freezing protesters’ bank accounts; it should already be obvious that a fully-digital currency would grant wildly extensive new powers of surveillance and control to any government that adopted it. What might a government do with such powers? Well, just a few days ago, the Times reported on a new University of Leeds study suggesting that “rationing has been neglected as a climate change mitigation policy option”. To force further reduction in emissions per capita, the authors suggested, governments should impose artificial scarcity, then ration carbon-intensive goods such as long-haul travel, petrol or meat. No one in government is proposing such a scheme at present, but a middle class who recently learned just how much more flexible lockdown rules were for the right people will already be taking an educated guess at how climate rationing might play out.

If you’re a Caravan Dreamer, chances are you ration nice things already, and view the free enjoyment of that ration as your hard-earned right. In that scenario, assent to “15-minute cities” threatens a net loss of prized personal autonomy, with no corresponding improvement in quality of life. And, most likely, it also means a whole new set of class stratifications: just this week, shoppers in Tesco, Asda and Morrisons were outraged to discover vegetables rationed due to unseasonable cold in Spain and Morocco.

I’m far from being a climate denialist. I suspect most of us will get used to fewer nice things, as the century goes on. But I also think the Caravan Dreamers are not wrong to treat current manoeuvring with deep suspicion. The tide of abundance that once promised to reach all the way down the social ladder past them, to the working class, is already some way back from the high-water mark and still withdrawing. All the signs suggest that, however leaders dress up their changes as climate solidarity, it will be those with only a little to lose who get sacrificed next.

Out with the caravan, and in with 100 permits a year to leave your neighbourhood. Out with the woodburner, and in with a “smart meter” that hands control of your heating to the energy supplier. And all while Bill Gates continues to warn of climate disaster — and travel by private jet.

A preview of the tension this will inevitably arouse was revealed towards the end of last year, when a film about rural China became a surprise box office hit in the country — before being pulled. Return to Dust, directed by Li Ruijun, portrays a rural couple (played by renowned actress Hai Qin and farmer-turned-amateur-actor Wu Renlin) who are pushed into an arranged marriage. Over time, they develop a quiet, understated love while dealing with countryside poverty. The luminous and deeply moving story ends in a muted tragedy.

The film received international accolades, but in September, it was abruptly removed from Chinese streaming services and discussion of it was censored on social media. No official reason was given, though there was speculation that the film’s bleak and unglamorous view of rural society was unwelcome just before the 20th Party Congress, when Xi Jinping would seek (and gain) an unprecedented third term in power.

Before it was banned outright, there was a brief moment when the distributors tacked a more upbeat ending onto the end of the film. There is a long tradition of this tactic. Back in 1950, one of the first films made under the new Maoist government was This Life of Mine, directed by the brilliant Shi Hui, and based on a story by the novelist Lao She. The story is bleak: across the first decades of the 20th century, a policeman falls lower and lower in social status as his economic situation worsens. Eventually he falls down dead. Although the film was an indictment of the old society that had been ended by the 1949 revolution, the censors clearly thought that such a downbeat ending was too depressing for audiences in a glorious new China. So they added some gratuitous but rousing footage at the end of People’s Liberation Army soldiers storming towards victory.

Yet the desire to change narratives in films about contemporary issues is a thread that runs through the Chinese Communist Party’s political tactics. Gao Xiang, the historian who has just become president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), recently reiterated the importance of treating history as a “Marxist” subject; in other words, one that has a definite grand narrative, based on “objective” factors. The rise to power of the CCP is the grandest possible such narrative, and the transformation of Chinese society the inevitable consequence of its rise.

That certainty sits in stark contrast with the story that the CCP tells about the pre-1949 world. This Life of Mine made the cut in the Fifties because it was primarily about a supposedly feudal society that had now been eliminated, one where individuals had little control over their own fates. There are scenes in Return to Dust that could easily fit into the 1950 film — for instance, a moment when the protagonist is pushed into donating blood to save the life of a local landlord, in the hope that he’ll be given some leeway on his rent (he isn’t).

As metaphors go, this one isn’t subtle. Yet this isn’t the bad “old society” but the 2020s, a decade after the initiation of Xi’s “new era”. In this context, the implication that ordinary Chinese citizens, particularly the peasant farmers who were at the heart of the revolution, have turned into passive victims of fate, is an indictment of the CCP. After all, in the Forties, the revolution was made in the countryside, with “land reform” used euphemistically to describe the violent seizure of land, and public humiliation and lynching of thousands of landlords by poorer peasants, all organised by the Party in campaigns to “speak bitterness”. Today, that same party does not welcome hints that seven decades of reform have not eliminated that bitterness.

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Here, the countryside is a particularly sensitive subject. China’s rural areas did suffer during Covid, but less from the effects of the disease than from its knock-on effects. Online teaching, relatively easy to arrange in well-connected cities, proved much harder to arrange outside of urban areas. The capacity crisis was further exacerbated by longer-standing problems that have dogged China’s attempts to improve rural education in the past few decades. China offers free primary education, up to grade 9 (aged 14-15), but textbooks and tuition fees then fall on family shoulders during high school. Many parents move to the city to earn enough money to pay for their families. However, the internal passport (hukou) system means that if their children come with them, they can’t register at local schools (although there are charities that do provide some schooling for migrant labourers’ children in some cities). And if their children stay at home, they do so in the care of grandparents or state boarding schools, which are a long way from the elite high schools in Shanghai that nurture youthful genius in maths and music.

Local governments are expected to foot the bills, but they are almost all strapped for cash and loaded with debt. (One of reasons for the Zero-Covid protests was that the central government created the legislation but local governments were expected to pay for its implementation, including expensive PCR tests). Then, even if you have funding, it is very hard to get good teachers. Few urban graduates want to spend years in what they consider backward parts of the country on miserable salaries.

Back in 1987, Chen Kaige directed King of the Children, which dealt with the dilemmas faced by an idealistic teacher going to an impoverished area of southwest China. Today, however, there are too few real-life equivalents to his fictional hero, meaning that some 60% of rural children drop out of high school. This doesn’t bode well for a country whose shrinking population means that it will have to develop a highly educated workforce serving a high value economy. There are more signs of this change in southern China, where the financial power of Hong Kong and the emergence of the Shenzhen tech hub have created a much stronger set of economic drivers. But in the impoverished north-west, the need for levelling-up makes Britain’s gap seem tiny.

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In one scene in Return to Dust, we are shown a “solution” to the rural dilemma which is becoming all too common. The couple’s land is purchased at a low price, under pressure from local elites, and they are scheduled to move into one of the new, underpopulated tower blocks that mark so many of the instant cities thrown up during China’s property boom (now in danger of becoming a property crash). “Where will my donkey go?” asks the protagonist plaintively. It’s not just donkeys who are cut out of the picture in the new cities, but also the rural way of life as a whole. Simply creating instant urbanites, without lives and structures to replace what they have lost, is a huge challenge. No wonder that nearly 100 million Chinese suffer from mental health or anxiety disorders.

Some might suggest that Return to Dust, though beautifully shot and movingly performed, is slow and doesn’t have a definitive conclusion. But that, in a sense, is the point. There are plenty of narratives created by China, and by others about it, that have conclusions either transformative or apocalyptic: from the power of its economy to its threats over Taiwan. Yet for many Chinese, it is the slow but very real crises in the countryside that are likely to create dilemmas on a day-to-day basis. These can be the specifics of poor education or rising Covid rates. But they might also be the anomie that comes from a growing realisation that China is a fast-modernising society which has yet to develop a convincing story about how its peasant farmers, for thousands of years the backbone of society, are going to fit into its national story.

***

Return to Dust is available to stream online (outside China).

The hunting season in France, which begins as early as August in some north-eastern départments, is in full swing — and inevitably, there will be deaths between now and March, when it closes. According to the National Office of Hunting and Wildlife (ONCFS), since 1999 more than 3,000 shooting accidents have occurred, with in excess of 420 mortalities. Some of the dead were absolute innocents: a 69-year-old woman was shot in her own garden after a hunter fired through her hedge; a driver was killed by a bullet that had rebounded off a wild boar. Most of the dead, however, are hunters themselves, engaged in a pastime which is not just dangerous for the animal.

The ONCFS attributes the deaths to “a failure to comply with basic safety rules,” but one needs to acknowledge the nature of the game in the Hexagon. Significant beasts on the French “to-shoot list” include deer and wild boar, both of which require a round from a rifle — which can spin a projectile a whole kilometre — as opposed to the shotgun standard in British shooting, the range of which is mere metres. Yet the most obvious, and the most culturally significant, reason for the mortalities is the sheer number of people involved in the pursuit. If the number of registered hunters has gone down since the start of the century, it still stands at 1.2 million. By a long shot, hunting is France’s third most popular hobby, after rugby and football.

Hunting is also part of the national bloodstream, part of France’s sense of itself. It may be Europe’s most sophisticated country (Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Hermès, the globe’s three leading luxury brands, are all Gallic), yet it is stubbornly rural, with non-urban areas accounting for one-third of the population (compared to a European average of 28%, and 17% in Britain). And France’s rural population inhabits 551,500 km², making the mainland population density just 11 people per km² — about a quarter that of England. Thus, the nation’s National Institute of Statistics concluded, France is the second most rural country in Europe, after Poland.

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Not unrelatedly, the French are Europe’s most persistently anti-globalist nation, the most possessed by the notion of heritage. It is a country with a strong sense of Patrimoine, a country where bull-fighting and cock-fighting remain legal because they are preservations of the past — and in France heritage can trump animal ethics, let alone the prejudices of “townies”.

In 2019 second-home owners on the Ile d’Oléron, off the west coast, brought a case against a cockerel, Maurice, for crowing too early. The locals supported Maurice, and a judge upheld the cock-a-doodle-doos, ordering the plaintiffs to pay €1,000 in damages to Maurice’s owner, Corinne Fesseau. After a host of similar cases in which the unholy trinity of “neo-rurals”, Brit ex-pats and – worst of all – holidaying Parisians complained about the loud and smelly ways of France profonde, the National Assembly backed a bill from Pierre Morel-À-L’Huissier, a deputy from the Lozère, to protect France’s “sensory heritage”. By this was meant “the crowing of the cockerel, the noise of cicadas, the odour of manure.”

President Macron, before he discovered Tik-Tok and the young metropolitan electorate, brazenly tried to win the rural vote by lauding la chasse. He even re-launched the presidential boar hunt at Chambord, the Loire valley hunting castle of the 16th-century French king, François I. Cannily, in the so-called “Chambord Pact”, Macron halved the cost of the hunting licence to €223.64.

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In France, unlike in the UK, hunting is not primarily an elite activity; les chasseurs in our neck of the Charente woods are the local boucher, the boulanger, the garage mechanic, the nurse and the peasant farmer, who all tip up in white Citroen Berlingo vans. It is the hunt that donates the boar to the charity roast, it is the guys from the hunt who mark out the paths in the forest for the village communal walk.

Quite literally, hunting in France doesn’t need to get off its high horse; hunters primarily hunt on foot, rather than aboard an equine. The right to shoot game was won from the aristocracy during the Revolution, and if French property rights are abstruse, it is generally accepted, courtesy of 1789 and All That, that hunters have a right to roam, unless formally forbidden by the landowner. In France, hunting is a Revolutionary act, as opposed to confirmation of class status.

So why do les chasseurs go out on a Sunday with a gun? Some are pragmatic. “It is food on the table, and will keep the family going for a week,” one acquaintance told me about the wild boar in the back of his van. For others the hunt, in shooting crop-destroying boar and deer, is performing a public duty. Many seek immersion in nature, to find their inner selves; or, as Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega Y Gasset described in Meditations on Hunting, the world’s classic on the subject (recently re-published in French as Sur la chasse): “One does not hunt in order to kill; on the contrary, one kills in order to have hunted.”

Such semi-mystical chasseur-speak draws ridicule from the pressure group Rassemblement pour une France sans Chasse (RAC) (“the Union for a France Free of Hunting”) and the actress-turned-animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot. Opponents of la chasse are increasingly vociferous, and believe they have time and political fashion on their side; the majority of hunters in France are men over 45 years old, and younger generations are polled as being averse to the killing of wild animals.

The poor safety record of the hunt hands ammunition to its critics: there are now calls galore for restrictions on hunting so that joggers, walkers, cyclists and drivers going for a Sunday spin can enjoy their pastimes in peace and safety. A recent online petition directed at President Macron, organised by the Association for the Protection of Wild Animals (ASPAS), called for an outright ban on Sunday hunting and garnered almost 200,000 signatures.

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The most essential phrase in French life is: C’est compliqué. In what is perceived as a calculated blow to hunting, the glue-trapping of birds was finally outlawed by Macron in June, bringing France into line with the rest of the EU. (For decades, France has claimed a derogation under the “preserving heritage” rubric.) In August, trapping with nets and cages was similarly banned as being contrary to the 2009 EU “birds directive”. Perhaps 5,000 hunters engage in the practices, which are abhorred even by some fellow chasseurs. But should the glue-trappers and the netters be defended by the hunting fraternity — and the countryside generally — because, to paraphrase that other essential clause of French life, “an attack on one, is an attack on all”? C’est compliqué.

In the tension between city and country, it is not only the former ramping up the lobbying, the petitioning and the campaigning. The powerful Fédération Nationale des Chasseurs (or FNC), headed by Willy Schraen, has committed itself to combating “the erosion of biodiversity” — to the relief of its members, who consider themselves the original appreciators and champions of nature. After all, the French countryside is speckled with little metal signs in the Tricolour’s red, white and blue announcing land Réserve de Chasse et de Faune Sauvage under a government directive from 1991.

Increasingly, the FNC is targeting Big Farmer and intensive agriculture, which will play well in a country where peasant agriculture plucks the heartstrings. Moreover, in the public war over hunting, the chasseurs are finding allies which give their middle-aged male image a useful makeover. Model and Instagram star Johanna Clermont has become the torchbearer for younger and female hunters, as has 25-year-old Jessica Héraud, leader of the FNC-approved Charente-Maritime women’s hunting federation “Les Dianes”, named for the Roman goddess of hunting. “The fact that women are in the minority in what for years has been a man’s hobby does not mean that they do not have a place in it, quite the contrary,” the FNC states on its website.

The hunters also have friends in the highest branches of the political tree. In the National Assembly, one in five MPs is a member of the Hunting and Territories group; in the Senate, the Hunting and Fishing group has more than 70 members. If Macron himself has now lined up with the environmentalists and animal rights activists, other prominent members of his party are siding with la chasse. Alain Péréa, an En Marche member of the National Assembly, is co-president of the Hunting group.

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Last Saturday, there were pro-hunt protests across all corners of the country — in Mont-de-Marsan, Amiens, Redon, Caen, Charleville-Mézières and Forcalquier. The demonstration in Mont-de-Marsan, a modest-sized town in Nouvelle-Aquitaine, was attended by an intergenerational crowd of 20,000, many of whom were wearing the orange hi-vis vests of the hunter. “Démonstration de force des chasseurs,” went the headline of the regional paper Sud-Ouest Dimanche. The hunters played their trump card: along with the calls for preserving la chasse were the calls in defence of ruralité. In the French mind, la chasse and the countryside are still one, still intertwined. “Macron gravedigger of our traditions” read one placard.

Three years ago, the President first had trouble with the Gilets Jaunes. He should be wary, today, of tangling with the Gilets Oranges. There has been hunting in France since the Paleolithics painted animal scenes on the walls of the caves at Lascaux in the Dordogne. It will take some killing.