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.

Psychogeography was invented by the 1950s Lettrists, a kind of French version of the Beat movement. The Lettrists spent most of their time getting drunk and wandering round Paris, during which time they came up with the theory that cities carry emotive force-fields. These, they posited, vary from location to location, and can be most easily detected by bumbling aimlessly about without trying to get to anywhere in particular.

Cynics might call this an elaborate way of justifying spending your Metro fare on beer and getting lost on the walk home. But the idea that built environments have something akin to emotional content has proved persistent, and regularly reappears in arty protests against (for example) urban gentrification or advertising.

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Don't go looking for utopia in lockdown

By Daniel Kalder

Our rural landscape, as I have discovered, is every bit as much a built environment as Montmartre or the City of London. If you stroll through it while imagining you’re in some kind of pristine ‘natural world’, you won’t experience much beyond an uncomfortable sense of something pure that’s been ruined by human depredations. But if you let your mind wander like a drunken 1950s art-hobo, what emerges are murmurs of a conversation that has been going on for some 800,000 years.

Even those parts of the countryside we think of as untouched have been cultivated for millennia. Archaeological evidence shows the apparently wild, empty vistas of Dartmoor were first created by humans clearing ancient forest for hunting. The land there has been grazed for 4,000 years.

To hear the conversation, take to the footpaths. Such byways riddle the English landscape, in merry contrast to the ‘PRIVATE PROPERTY’ signs and anti-traveller bollards that sprout at estate gates and farm tracks. The very nature of footpaths evokes the past: their existence imposes a duty on landowners to keep them open, an echo of feudal landowners’ obligations to the peasantry. Even the term ‘right of way’ hints at a conception of ‘rights’ that predates our modern ‘universal human’ variety. And when travelling these ancient routes, even in the most unremarkable part of the country, you can still catch glimpses of old England out of the corner of your eye.

I don’t mean you’ll find the hay-wains and apple-cheeked peasants of some chocolate-box Turneresque vista. The modern world is as visible in the countryside as the cities, if you’re looking for it: wind turbines, the bluish-green tint of nitrogen-fertilised wheat, ancient hedgerows unlaid for a century and gradually morphing into trees. But the layers are still there. Bluebells along a footpath will give clues to old woodland now grubbed up for agriculture, while a byway between two villages mentioned in the Domesday Book is sure to be as old as those villages.

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These ancient habits of movement exert a gravity of their own, in defiance of our modern determination to gallop full-tilt at the future. Even repackaged in progressive colours as ‘access to nature’, well-used footpaths represent a Burkean understanding of conservatism, written into the landscape itself. Most of them are unpaved, many are un-signed, and they stay visible because people walk them, trampling cowslips and nettles back, re-carving old routes across farmland.

One of my favourite local runs cuts diagonally across a field that’s usually planted with wheat. The farmer ploughs it up twice a year, and every time that happens, within half a day the path is trodden back in again. Footpaths exist as much in human memory and habit as in the soil.

And indeed, the slippage between the words ‘habitual’, ‘habitat’ and ‘habitation’ richly suggests the small-c conservatism of all the ordinary people, unnamed in history books, whose feet trod (and still tread) our footpaths into the soil. In turn these habits create us: the ‘peasant poet’ John Clare, for example, was driven insane when the Enclosure Acts so annihilated his habitual ways of moving round his locality that he could no longer find his mental bearings.

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John Clare, poet of the Somewheres

By Mary Harrington

Once memorialised in culture and topography, habits of living take a long time to change. On one route, I pass a manor house whose layout is astonishingly medieval. Unlike the landscaped estates created in the 18th and 19th centuries, by mercantile grandees keen to distance themselves from the peasantry, here the L-shaped great house has no formal garden. Instead it abuts the home farm, while just inside the house gates sits a tiny Norman chapel that was still — until the lockdown — in public use every Sunday.

Beyond the manor, I run for miles without seeing a paved road, or another person, before cresting a rise to see two figures on horseback crawling ant-like across my field of vision two hillsides away, near the Norman spire. Abruptly I realise they are not crawling at all, but moving at a gallop. The distance I’ve run suddenly seems enormous, and I find myself thinking about that favourite post-liberal phrase, ‘human-scale’.

Geoffrey Chaucer worried in Troilus and Criseyde about being misunderstood, because of the ‘so great diuersity/In English and in writing of our tongue’. When he was writing, the denizens of two adjacent counties might travel so rarely they’d struggle to understand each other’s dialects. I find this much easier to imagine, having experienced the time and effort needed to travel 15 miles on foot via unpaved roads.

Despite such daydreams, I don’t live at ‘human scale’ in this sense. I’m an urban refugee, new to this area by local standards, and far more a product of the world of abstractions than the kind of rootedness I’m in danger of romanticising here. I consume the local landscape for fitness and thinking-time, not to earn a living. But as my feet make their small contribution to the latest rewriting of ancient paths, so it feels like the paths return the favour, over-writing me as well with the place’s story.

Opened, enclosed, lost or half-remembered, England’s old ways mark out a shared map of landscape-knowledge whose contours are cumulatively as old as human life on these islands, and which is constantly written and re-written by usage. Some of the paths local to me are Roman, or even Iron or Bronze Age. When running them, I find myself wondering: how much has the skyline changed over those millennia? What do I see today that those ancient Britons didn’t? What would they miss or marvel at?

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In those moments, for a split second I glimpse not the world turning, but the ages themselves. Then I turn and pound down the hill, past fields that have just been sold off to build a new commuter town. I wonder whether the new town’s streets will incorporate the ancient footpaths, or whether some central planner will finally scribble them out.

The geography of Britain is an ongoing push-pull between grand schemes (such as new towns) that rewrite the landscape itself, and the ‘little people’, poets or not, whose lives flow round such projects. The balance of power flows back and forth between abstract schemes and habitual experience: on the one hand land enclosures, towns or quarries and on the other, footpaths and other old ways, which stubbornly persist.

Post-liberals have a tendency to idealise the cultural and the collective, with its moral analogue, the ‘common good’, and to have little positive to say about the world of abstractions, modernisers and ‘progress’. But as I’ve delved into my local byways, the rural psychogeography they reveal is a dialogue between the abstract and the emergent, the Whig and the Tory accounts of England. Not wholly human, but everywhere humanised.

Now the Wilderness Drone Police have packed up their rambler-shaming cameras, celebrate the easing of crisis with a dérive through England’s profoundly cultivated natural world. If you do so slowly enough, the footpaths will tell you stories.

On TikTok, the hashtag #cottagecore has over a hundred million views and, with pandemic, it is growing in strength: the artistic arm of Extinction Rebellion. It is an ideal — and idealised — aesthetic of fear; a new Romanticism. Initially it gathered at the edges of the internet and now it blooms — and why not? For the urban modern to yearn for the rural past is age-old, a return to the imagined kindness of (Mother) Nature; a response to climate disaster, claustrophobia and pandemic. It is nostalgia in an age of pain.

Nostalgia is not the same thing as remembrance though, which is knowing. Nostalgia is self-delusion; it is not knowing. Cottage Core — the word “core” basically means enthusiasm — is a daydream of Generation Z, who have lived much of their lives online. This is the contradiction it holds: it promotes dreams of a technology-free world using only technology. The original Romanticism was also contradictory, but it didn’t feel as thwarted or as despairing as this. Those fake rustics were also progressives who, despite their politics, rebelled against the Industrial Revolution, and its landscape of ruin and soot. But they didn’t see the worst of it: artists never do. They could afford to run around Switzerland screaming at mountains.

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Cottage Core is not, they say, the aesthetic of the future surrendered wife, although it is confused by outsiders with the #tradwife trend. Cottage Core is fashionable in queer circles. Its reach goes beyond Cath Kidston fans — girls who don’t want to grow up — to something more ambitious: girls who do want to live in their own world.

Nor it is quite ‘Marie Antoinette Syndrome’, in which the rich covet an idealised peasant life, as she did at Le Petit Trianon dressed as a shepherdess: a shepherdess with a crown, until she lost it. We are speaking of Generation Z, after all: where will they find the money to visit Bruton Farm in Somerset, with its attendant branch of the Hauser & Wirth art gallery, which used to have a recording of a cow mooing in a reconstituted cow shed? Few of them will ever afford a pretty cottage with a duck pond in the garden; or buy clothes from Cabbages & Roses, which are designed for aristocrats wandering in bogs. They dream in photographs and social media posts: thwarted, and I wonder if that is, entirely, its charm.

Cottage Core is not interior design-based, snobbish or whimsical, then; not really, not underneath. Timing is everything, and the timing of Generation Z is bad. They are looking to a world that is functionally dying; you can see that in the yearning. Cottage Core is a fairy tale. One fan told Teen Vogue she was inspired by Snow White and the Seven Dwarves; another likes to dress up as a fairy; yet another says she performs spells, and this is not abnormal. The aesthetic reminds me as much of the witches’ hovels of the Brothers Grimm as Country Life and its obsession with the existential possibilities of stone flooring. Fairy tales are how you help children process their fears. When adults — and they are adults, even if they speak like children — turn to fairy tales it is something new to fear.

Cottage Core, then, bespeaks a desire to retreat further than simply from town to imagined country, and deeper into the transformative power of magic. And why not? They will need magic. It is a fair sequel to populism, magic, and I fully expect a renaissance, since science, some will argue, has failed us.

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This pandemic is only the latest terror. Climate change is raging, and it will get worse. I wonder if this lovely spring — lusher after a wet winter and brighter without the fumes — will soon seem a last flowering, a rebuke. Under these circumstances it is normal, even healthy, to dream of ducklings and a vegetable patch: but it is still desperately sad.

Cottage Core is impervious to reality. That is what dreams are for. It is in no sense a rational response to developed Capitalism, which needs political solutions. In any case, it makes no sense for women. A washing line is pretty, sometimes, but it is an aesthetic of powerlessness. Gardening is hard work; farming too. Keeping an ancient cottage clean enough for Instagram is a full-time job; and, as someone who owns one (or part of one, the rest belongs to the bank) changing your surroundings does not necessarily change you for the better. Women were once delighted not to be at the hen house, the mangle and the dairy. Modernity emancipated them from that, and they were grateful.

It doesn’t matter. This kind of dreaming is, at its heart, a not knowing: a not wanting to know. I suspect that, for young Cottage Core fans, this is entirely conscious and deliberate. It is a lament for something they will never have, and the tragedy is that they know it.

There are political consequences too, to this dreaming, but that is age-old; even John Constable’s famous haywain might have been a unicorn, for all its truth about rural life, and he finished it in 1821. To idealise rural life is not to praise it. Rather, it is to ignore it; to damn it to not being known. Terrible things are done to rural communities by painting them into a dreamworld. Most rural children long for the opportunities of the city, even as they ebb away to nothing. They would laugh at Cottage Core.

The show’s third and quite possibly final season, which is about to draw to a close, has been as brilliant as the previous two. Its bread and butter is the skewering of a particular social class — the rural precariat. It recounts the stories of people who aren’t all that bright, aren’t always that nice, and who are held back in life by their hubris and their capacity to self-sabotage. Its trick, what has set it apart from other shows, has been to do this in such a way that it’s unmistakeably a deeply compassionate piece of television. It’s a celebration of the oddness of a corner of the world where people live limited lives, and, therefore, an insistence on the humanity and individuality of every person, whoever they are, wherever they come from. This Country exists to give a group of people the dignity of being heard.

It has not happened by chance. The show is the work of two artists whose lives were defined, in the years before their success, by the feeling that no one wanted to hear from them, and this has undoubtedly powered their writing. Daisy May and Charlie Cooper, the brother and sister who play Kerry and Kurtan as well as writing the show, made the series a long way from any TV industry influence, living in their parent’s house in Cirencester. It feels more deeply rooted in that environment than in the world of TV commissioning and celebrity casting.

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Almost no one in the show was a professional actor when they started filming — the Coopers’ dad plays the dad in the show, and a group of their Cirencester friends make up most of the rest of the cast. Even one of the few professional actors involved in the core cast, Trevor Cooper, only really seems to be in it because he’s Daisy May and Charlie’s uncle (although he also happens to be a wonderful actor).

Once you know this, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that this casting gives the show a loving kind of authenticity — but it’s also a mark of difference, a proud way of displaying where the show began and where its heart still belongs. Because part of what’s great about This Country is a feeling that it happened in spite of the way the world works, the world of television production in particular. So the Coopers’ use of their family in the casting also seems like a way of signalling what a triumphant act of defiance it was for them to get this show made — and a means of showing their scars.

In an interview with the Independent published earlier this year, Daisy May Cooper spoke about the poverty she and her brother lived in while they came up with This Country. “We were sharing a broken mattress at our parents’; all the springs had gone in the middle and we didn’t have any internet because we couldn’t afford it. Every morning, we walked down to the library to check our emails and Facebooks. We had nothing. The stress of it. It was so humiliating, and you have no choices when you don’t have money. Your dignity is absolutely… you’ve got no self-respect.”

Charlie Cooper speaks in the same interview of the psychological impact of the way they lived, the sense of being overlooked: “that total fear of being left behind, we felt like that for years. If you’re young and working class here, it’s so difficult to escape. There just aren’t any opportunities. You see so much about inner city poverty and inequality, but you don’t see anything rurally and it’s so fucking difficult.”

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Many artists tell this story about their early career — years of struggle, a sense that no one’s speaking for you, a tough start you have to fight your way out of. In some ways, it might be an essential narrative — why would you need to write anything, if the story you wanted told was already out there? But Daisy May and Charlie Cooper’s story has particularly interested me in the years since This Country first aired, because they had to overcome unique challenges for their voices to be heard.

Charlie Cooper alludes to this when he says there’s so much said “about inner city poverty and inequality”. This is a complex point that’s worth unpicking. The issue is not that urban experiences of want are adequately understood and documented. While it is true that producers, who live and work in overwhelmingly urban areas and who make work for people based overwhelmingly in urban areas, do focus more on the problems they see every day, and the problems they think will interest their viewers, you couldn’t suggest for a moment that means urban inequality is adequately represented.

The central problem with British culture today is that everyone with a household income of under £80,000 can legitimately claim to be underrepresented. This is a product of the fact that producers know people like looking at nice, aspirational houses and families, and encourage stories to be set among them. (And possibly that writers get lazy once they’ve had a hit and got themselves a mortgage – trace a writer’s career, and you’ll often find their work peters out into dinner parties and marital strife when the money starts coming).

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If it is true that rural experience is even more sparsely documented than city life, the reason for that lies partly with the gatekeepers — very often, rural storytelling falls into the ‘escapist’ strand of a TV channel’s programming, so that a venture down the B roads also becomes a venture back in time, allowing viewers to long for the world before the petrol engine in a vaguely queasy, Brexity way, and leaving the people who live down those same roads today unnoticed and unspoken.

In recent years there’s also been a complacency about how stories are sought out, which has stifled a lot of talent. I remember hearing a literary manager from a major theatre tell a packed room 10 years ago: “I think we can be pretty certain there are no mute inglorious Miltons”, and feeling like the industry I wanted to work in had it all the wrong way round — that the point of finding stories wasn’t waiting for them to arrive through the post, but getting out into communities you wanted to hear from, and identifying potential, and trying to develop it. In the intervening decade that’s become a mainstream view, and the complacency I heard in that room is thinner on the ground among the people who commission stories. But it will have held back the Coopers in the meantime, all the same.

The bigger issue for artists in rural areas, though, which is much harder to solve, is that they tend to live further away from artist development schemes, and so tend to find it harder to access them, grow as storytellers and emerge into the public discourse. Even once a belief in developing voices is established, it can still be hard to unearth people if they live miles from anywhere. A young artist growing up in a city can get to a youth theatre or a writers’ group in an hour, most nights of the week, and see a decent piece of theatre every night if they can find cheap tickets.

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That’s not true for any village kid. The courses are fewer and further away, public transport is dire and so are the shows at the local theatre, which play mostly to grandparents, and are inevitably shaped by the tastes of a vanished world. When I was growing up in Wiltshire, I couldn’t find any courses or work, paid or unpaid, and the endless light comedies and bad revivals available to me at the theatres in that region bore no relation to the art form I was interested in, the serious theatre.

So I’d get the train to London to try and access opportunities and see good plays. I’d stay out all night to get two days in the city, so I could do more before heading home and stretch my money further. I’d walk round till dawn to keep warm, or sleep on sofas or in parks or behind bins or in empty office buildings; once, I spent a few hours huddled in an old coal cellar that had been converted into a fuse box cupboard in Hackney, because I felt unsafe on the street. If you live in Hackney you just don’t have to do that.

This is the extra hurdle the Coopers had to get over — not only were they working-class kids who felt no one spoke for them, they also had a much longer bus journey between them and any goodwill or support.

Having encountered those difficulties that a rural upbringing puts in your way if you want to be listened to, I have found watching This Country a powerful emotional experience, which I’ll miss very much if they don’t make any more.

I’ve rejoiced at each episode because it’s good TV — but I’ve also loved the miracle of it being there at all. I can only hope that its success will encourage other artists growing up rurally to keep fighting to be heard — and producers to keep looking behind the hedgerows to see what might be there.

For those cooped in self-isolation over the next few weeks, I couldn’t recommend it highly enough.

Knepp now feels like a parallel universe: there are thickets of hawthorn and dog rose; red deer and Tamworth pigs roam freely; there’s the riotous cacophony of chaffinch, yellowhammer, chiffchaff, skylark, blackcap, wren, nightingales and cuckoos.

We’ve become used to things being otherwise. Habitat destruction, exploitation of nature and pollution mean that half of all animal life on Earth has disappeared in my lifetime. The world has lost about 60% of wild vertebrates since 1970. Declines in insects (pollinators, detritus-eaters and foundations of carnivorous food chains) threaten to catastrophically destabilise global ecosystems. And the emission of greenhouse gases needs to be addressed if we are to have a chance of preventing climate catastrophe; the government’s climate advisers reported this month that UK emissions must fall to zero by 2050.

The biodiversity crisis and the climate crisis are linked. But there is a solution that addresses both – and that can revitalise local economies: a 2017 report by the Local Government Association and Public Health England notes that “within even the most affluent [rural] areas, there can be real hardship, deprivation, ill health and inequalities” because of seasonal work and poor access to services.

A new plan, published by Rewilding Britain, calls for billions of pounds of farm subsidies to be redirected towards creating more places like Knepp: native woodlands and meadows, and protecting peat bogs and salt marshes. The group claims that wildlife would benefit, farmers would not lose out financially and food production would be maintained. The new wild environments would also be a boost to rural economies: in the UK, tourism already brings in more revenue – £18.6bn – and provides more employment for the rural sector than farming.

Rewilding, wilding or ecosystem restoration would put nature back in the driving seat. When living systems – forests, peat bogs, saltmarshes and the seabed – are allowed to recover, they sequester carbon from the atmosphere, mitigating or even avoiding the dangers of global warming.

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A number of individuals and organisations are already on the case. Since purchasing the 23,000 acre Alladale Estate in Sutherland in 2003, Paul Lister has devoted himself to rewilding the landscape. More than 800,000 Scots pine have been planted in the past 10 years and Lister’s long-term aim is to reintroduce a pack of wolves. And there’s an economic upside: the wildlife attracts tourist money, with high-end accomodation, safaris and shooting.

More recently, after becoming the largest landowners in Scotland, the Danish billionaires Anders and Anne Holch Povlsen announced their intention to rewild an area of 80,000 hectares (200,000 acres) across Sutherland and the Grampian mountains. They propose culling large numbers of red deer to relieve grazing pressure and allow a natural expansion of native pine forest – and, maybe one day, restore the apex predators (wolf, lynx and bear).

From an ecological perspective, the potential is extraordinary, but there is hostility to the grand plans. Neighbouring estates are managed to maintain large numbers of deer for stalking and grouse for shooting. Walkers set great store by their right to roam, and worry that wolf fencing would prevent them.

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Even within conservation circles, the issue is contentious. For the purist, rewilding explicitly requires the reinstatement of top predators, which in Britain should be wolf and lynx. Without them, smaller ‘meso-predators’ such as foxes thrive, and large prey species such as deer increase to the point that they change the whole landscape, meaning balance in the system can only be maintained with human intervention.

A true rewilded landscape must be entirely self-balancing. Which means it must also be vast. Just occasionally, such spaces are in the hands of individuals such as Lister and the Povlsens, with a will to make things happen. But it can’t happen in the average back yard.

A less pure, but highly pragmatic form of restoration is wilding. This can happen everywhere. It requires only an element of letting go to move natural systems towards complexity. The larger the area of land involved, the better, but they don’t have to be in one slab. Wilding can happen on every scale, from window box to garden, farm or country estate.

At the heart of Knepp’s experiment is the influence of the Dutch ecologist Dr Frans Vera, whose ground-breaking book Grazing Ecology and Forest History identified grazing animals as a fundamental and necessary force of natural disturbance. The estate, owned by Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree, at 3,500 acres, is less than 2% the area of the Povlsen Wildland scheme. There are no wolves or lynx, so the large herbivores are culled for meat. It may not be entirely self-balancing, but this land is healing, and it is doing so at startling speed.

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Slaying dragons: the stifling British green belt

By Ian Birrell

The process is not just an ecological vanity project but a working business model: Knepp has expanded into offering accommodation – treehouses, shepherd’s huts, tents or yurts – as well as vehicle-based safaris and guided walking tours to experience birds, mammals, butterflies, beetles, reptiles, plants and fungi in a setting that the owners claim feels as wild and dynamic as the African bush.

We live in a nation where the privations of two world wars, followed by decades of rapid population growth, have fanned an obsession with food security. Any widespread ecological restoration scheme is challenged by calls to cultivate – not liberate. We’re determined that every scrap of land has to be for something, forgetting that, perhaps, some of it was already for something else: absorbing or cleaning water; sequestering carbon; supporting biodiversity; or preventing soil washing into rivers every time it rains.

Rewilding and wilding can be a hard sell. Humans don’t like mess or uncertainty, and natural systems are dynamic, complex, untidy, and erratic. These are the characteristics that bring both diversity and resilience. We must learn to read their inconvenience as a sign that all is well. We should be embracing the mess.

Suggested reading

Why do the Greens make so many see red?

By Tom Chivers

At the local scale, a window box can grow native wildflowers, which support local pollinators; boxes for birds, bats and bees can be installed on most buildings. Road verges could be mowed far less often. On farmland, mindful that profit margins are small, subsidies for obsessive tidying of land into ‘agricultural condition’ could instead pay for 10% of every farm, ideally the edges, to be nature-friendly.

The result could be a vast network of areas where no pesticides are used, where hedgerows grow into huge, tenanted wildlife highways, where field margins several metres wide are filled with nectar-rich and seed-bearing ‘weeds’, where soggy patches were undrained, where ancient trees were given space for both their roots and their children to grow, sheltered from browsing by thickets of thorn.

Just as farmers are emphatically part of the solution, so are local communities. A nature-based economy can provide jobs to help young people stay in their communities, learn new skills, raise their families and sustain the area’s vitality. Povlsen has emphasised the importance of community support, saying no introductions will take place without the support of local people.

He’s taking his time – his vision is a 200-year-long process. Meanwhile, wilding on your patch can start today. Think hedges not fences; think nectar-, seed- and berry-bearing plants; think pond and bramble patches and log piles; tolerate scruffy corners. You’ll see a difference in a matter of weeks.

Wilding is as much about people as it is about nature. One of the first species to benefit from a wholesale change of heart will be our own.

Looking for a bus in the English countryside brings to mind the well-known aphorism about waiting for ages before two come along at once. Except, only the first part of this cliché holds true in any reliable sense: you certainly wait for ages, though a significant period of time usually elapses before a second bus arrives.

The dearth of public transport outside of England’s cities is shocking, especially for those accustomed to the comprehensive network that exists in London – where, of course, even when public transport lets you down there is typically a taxi close at hand (and you have the mobile phone reception to call one, unlikes many parts of rural England).

Having moved back to Somerset for the summer, I recently spent several days travelling around the county by bus in order to see how services compare to when I was growing up in the area. I live in a small village situated roughly half-way between Weston-Super-Mare and Taunton on the south west coast. There are shops located nearby – B&M Bargains, a few curry houses, as well as the obligatory hair salons and charity shops – but to find anything beyond groceries and cheap socks you have to venture further afield. This invariably requires a car or public transport. More than a quarter of Somerset’s population (28 per cent) is aged over 60, and they largely rely on the latter.

The first thing that strikes you about local buses, however, is how empty many of them are. On the 9.20 from Weston-Super-Mare to Burnham-on-Sea I found myself sitting alone on the upper deck – just four elderly passengers sat below. Rural bus services are essential for poorer or ageing communities, but as profit-making enterprises, they’re also unviable ­– something the introduction of free bus passes in 2007 has exacerbated. I was probably the only fee-paying customer aboard that bus.

Services are thus trapped in a vicious cycle in which fewer people travel by bus, so subsidies are withdrawn and fares hiked in order to sustain existing levels of coverage, and that in turn drives away those who can’t afford the higher fares. Figures from the Department for Transport show that passengers in Somerset took 7.2 million bus journeys in 2016-17, 2.6 million fewer than in 2009-10. It’s impossible to say for certain why this has happened, but fewer services and steeper fares seem an obvious starting point.

More from this author

The closed world of the 'enlightened' middle class

By James Bloodworth

As the Government has reduced overall grants to local authorities – down by 49% in real terms since 2010 – councils have had less money with which to subsidise less economical bus routes. Consequently, bus franchise operators have increased ticket prices to fill the gaps (bus fares have risen by 13% in real terms since 2010). A return ticket from Taunton to Burnham-on-Sea (22 miles) costs £8.10. The connection to Burnham from my village is a further £1.70 each way. Many long-standing routes have been cut entirely, or significantly reduced. Last year Somerset County Council announced it would be scrapping Saturday Park and Ride services in Taunton. Webberbus, one of Somerset’s biggest bus operators collapsed entirely in 2016, leading to the disappearance of 24 services across the county.

“There used to be about three or four [buses] but now there’s only this [number] 20,” one elderly lady told me as we waited at the bus stop in Berrow. Services to places like Taunton, Weston-Super-Mare and Bristol still run, she said, but nowadays they were seldom direct and typically took longer. “We had a lovely regular bus to Weston-Super-Mare that took about 20 minutes, but now it takes you about an hour.” I remember catching that bus as an adolescent – it was the only reliable way to get to the nearest Virgin Megastore. And she was right, now it does take almost three times as long.

Speaking to passengers on various routes around the county, this was a fairly typical experience. Down the road in Taunton the service to Bridgwater had recently been reduced from every 15 minutes to every 30 minutes.

Of course, it’s easy to slip into nostalgic reminiscing about the good old days of punctual and frequent public transport. Yet the available statistics – both local and across the country as a whole – do tell a discernible story of decline. Across Britain, more than 3,000 bus routes have been scrapped, reduced or altered in the last eight years, according to the Campaign for Better Transport. Britain’s bus network has fallen to levels not seen since the late 1980s. A lady I chatted to aboard the bus from Burnham-on-Sea to Taunton relayed to me how it took around four and a half hours for her to get to get to Taunton and back, a journey she made twice a week to take her disabled son to hospital. That 17-mile journey takes 40 minutes each way in a car.

Time is the only real commodity that the poor possess. During my research into precarious work in 2016, I learned that a low-income is nearly always synonymous with a great deal of wasted time. To be poor is to wait around at the whim of petty officialdom: for paperwork to be processed at the job centre, or, indeed, for the bus to turn up at the side of the road. It is inevitably the vulnerable and hard-up who are hardest hit when bus services are reduced or scrapped.

Suggested reading

The noise of victimhood culture has drowned out the plight of the poor

By Jenny McCartney

My own journey around Somerset by bus was a pleasant one. Hours whittled away looking out at a sea of green fields – punctuated by picturesque villages like Crewkerne and Blagdon – is hardly an unpleasant experience for those with time to kill. But such bucolic settings invariably grow tiresome if you need to be somewhere in a hurry – say, the job centre, the nearest of which is situated 12 miles from the village in which I grew up.

The fact we don’t take these inconveniences seriously costs us all in the long run. Research commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation earlier this year found that a lack of punctuality on the part of buses was preventing many in the north of England from securing or keeping work. The Yorkshire Post recently reported on the cases of workers who had been fired because local buses had repeatedly failed to turn up to take them to work.

For city-dwellers, the decline of public transport in the countryside is something only noticed on a weekend away. And even then the stakes are inevitably lower: to be delayed on a day-trip to the country is an inconvenience; to lose your job because the bus didn’t show up is a potential catastrophe. This perhaps explains why, beyond the confines of the regional press – itself undergoing something of a crisis – the state of Britain’s buses receives scant political attention. Indeed, when the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn led on the issue of bus services at PMQs in July, he was assailed by online commentators for not leading with attacks on the Government over Brexit.

This could be a metaphor for the entire debate about Britain’s future in Europe more generally: while the commentariat has entrenched itself within its respective Remain and Leave camps, the public has been getting on with their lives, dealing with the everyday concerns that make things that little bit more difficult. The ability of Jeremy Corbyn to tap into such concerns was, I would guess, part of the reason he surprised so many with Labour’s showing at the 2017 general election.

Margaret Thatcher is often quoted as saying that “a man who, beyond the age of 26 finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure”. Though the quote is apocryphal and unverified, it represents a caricature of the former Prime Minister’s attachment to the principle of competition. Slow-moving, collective modes of transport like the bus – as opposed to the assertive steel cocoon of the motor car – exist in this view as a means of last resort for the poor. And services designed for the poor are invariably poor services.

It also hints at an ideological divide that underpins Britain’s public transport status quo. The idea of heavily subsidising rural bus services will probably never be acceptable to those who believe the market solves all problems. Yet rural bus services ­– much like rural postal services – are a collective endeavour which inevitably require an occasional loss to maintain a comprehensive network. It would be better to call this an investment rather than view it pejoratively as a wasteful subsidy.

Suggested reading

A plan to defeat Jeremy Corbyn: provide help to the poorer Britons he has deserted

By James Kirkup

Indeed, the social value of any service that picks up a handful of pensioners to take them to do their weekly shop, or a mother to take her disabled son to hospital, is never going to be satisfactorily measured on the basis of profit or loss. Columns on a balance sheet can’t convey the social value rural bus services provide to those who would otherwise be isolated. “If they got rid of this one I don’t know how I’d manage, I really don’t,” one 76-year-old woman told me as we chatted while waiting at edge of Wellington for the 22 bus to Tiverton. “I don’t drive and a lot of my friends don’t drive.”

The savings made by cuts to bus services will no doubt please those for whom expenditure on public services is a frivolous indulgence. But they rarely see the true cost of such cuts, which are typically borne by those behind closed doors, who quietly lose their independence.

I was of course informed by older friends and family members that, as age took its toll, I would soon want to move back. This was usually relayed to me in terms of having children: “you won’t want to bring children up in the city…”.

And overall, economic outcomes do tend to be better for those living in rural areas than for those living in cities. 15% of households in rural areas live in relative poverty, for example, compared to 22% in urban areas. And over three quarters (77%) of working-age people in rural areas are in employment, compared to 73 per cent in urban areas.

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Why we can't ignore the working-class identity crisis

By James Bloodworth

Yet one of the lessons from the Brexit referendum was the extent to which statistics can belie reality. The pre-referendum period now feels like ancient history, but Britain in the first half of 2016 was said to be on the ‘road to recovery’ after a long recession. News broadcasts were filled with good cheer about the ‘record number of people’ in work, and so on. But one did not have to look very far to see a very different reality.

Indeed, a striking spectacle in the aftermath of the referendum was the wave of liberal journalists voyaging to the north of England – in a way reminiscent of 1930s depression-era writing – discovering, in fact, that many of their fellow countrymen were leading unhappy and unfulfilling lives. If anyone had bothered to look, they would have seen this had been true all along.

Something similar might be said of Britain’s rural areas, where statistics such as those I have quoted – together with television property shows and an outdated view of ‘grim’ inner cities – help to fortify a vision of rural life as an unchanging nirvana of long walks, hearty meals and log fires in cosy pubs.

This attitude is decades out of date, if it was ever accurate in the first place. A 2017 joint report by the Local Government Association and Public Health England notes that “within even the most affluent [rural] areas, there can be real hardship, deprivation, ill health and inequalities”, in particular due to seasonal work and poor access to services.

Suggested reading

How bigoted is Brexit?

By Tom Chivers

Even before the recession, three rural post officers were closing each week in England. In Scotland almost a quarter of post offices have closed since 2002. Rural communities suffer from poorer access to even supposedly universal services: while 98% of the urban population live within four kilometres of a GP surgery, the figure is 80 per cent for those living in rural areas. Moreover, just 55% of rural households live within eight kilometres of a hospital, compared to 97% of urban households.

As the wider economy has become more digitised, economic opportunity has come to depend increasingly on a person’s technological proficiency, but also their access to a high-speed internet connection. Yet in rural areas broadband is often patchy – during the time it’s taken to write this article my Somerset broadband has dropped off twice, for ten minutes at a time.

According to Ofcom, rural broadband speeds come in at around 13.7Mbps, which is more than three times slower than urban areas. “As remoteness and population sparsity increase so too does the likelihood of an area having no or very poor broadband connectivity,” the LGA and PHE report notes.

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Why we can't ignore the challenges of immigration

By Trevor Phillips

Internet access is just one factor in determining the opportunities available to people. Opportunity also correlates with a university education. In the village I grew up in, unless a position in the family business awaited once you finished school, to get a well-paying job you had to leave. When young people choose to spend their most productive years elsewhere it hastens the decline of rural economies.

Moreover, as young people move out en masse, the age profile of rural communities is creeping up, making areas less vibrant and, arguably, even less attractive to young people. People aged 45 years and above now make up more than half of those living in rural areas – in urban areas it is closer to 40%.

Many of these older residents depend on public transport, which has suffered severe cuts in rural areas in recent years due to the unprofitability of out-of-the-way services. As I wrote in a piece for UnHerd back in August, long-standing bus routes have been abolished or significantly reduced as a result of austerity.

Last year Somerset County Council announced it would be scrapping Saturday Park and Ride services in Taunton, and Webberbus, one of Somerset’s biggest bus operators, collapsed entirely in 2016, leading to the disappearance of 24 services across the county. Services like these are a lifeline for the elderly, who rely on local buses to visit shops and access services – without them they’re isolated.

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Left behind – life beyond the London bubble

By James Bloodworth

Often, when I hear city-dwellers talk about moving to the countryside in order to raise children, I wonder if they know what they are letting themselves in for. For one thing, certain kinds of drugs – particularly cannabis – were far more prevalent in the corner of Somerset I grew up in than when I moved to Nottingham in my early twenties, a city that was supposedly the ‘gun crime capital’ of the UK.

Moreover, in recent years there have been reports of drug gangs increasingly targeting rural communities to boost profits. So-called ‘country lines’ activity – where gangs enlist young people to go out and sell drugs in rural areas and market towns – was reported by 71% of police forces in England and Wales in 2016.

Perhaps because there is less to do in the countryside, particularly in winter, the use of recreational drugs has a more obvious appeal. The West Country smokes more cannabis than anywhere else in the UK. Cannabis growers also appear to prefer rural to urban areas, with 55,166 plant seizures in the north west in 2017 compared to 19,397 in London.

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Elitist Britain is a closed shop

By Paul Embery

The countryside has its advantages to be sure. The air is less polluted than in the city. Crime rates are lower. And while the sense of local community fetishised by outsiders may be exaggerated, in many areas, for better or worse (you know everyone, but everyone knows you), it does exist.

Yet this idyllic view of cleaner, safer countryside communities ignores a darker side. Obesity rates tend to be higher in small towns and rural areas than in big cities, according to research (something also true of the United States). Educational attainment among disadvantaged children is far worse in rural and coastal areas – London boroughs dominate the Social Mobility Commission’s list of schools in which poorer pupils achieve the best results. And for those without a university education, London life at least offers the remote possibility of an internship to get a foot in the door at a company. In the countryside such things are largely inaccessible.

In common with the country’s ‘left behind’ towns, up to now precious little interest has been shown in exploring the deprivations of the British countryside. Turn on a television set and rural life is depicted as an agreeable and tranquil Eden – green fields and picturesque country lanes enclosed by hedges and songbirds – where one can hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, and take a trip to a nearby retail park on the weekend, to paraphrase Marx.

But the countryside is much more than a bolthole for the affluent. Rural communities have their own share of social problems; the idea of the ‘troubled’ inner city versus ‘our green and pleasant land’ is hopelessly antiquated. I should know – like many young people I made the reverse journey to the one usually depicted in popular culture: I fled to London to escape.

Looking for a bus in the English countryside brings to mind the well-known aphorism about waiting for ages before two come along at once. Except, only the first part of this cliché holds true in any reliable sense: you certainly wait for ages, though a significant period of time usually elapses before a second bus arrives.

The dearth of public transport outside of England’s cities is shocking, especially for those accustomed to the comprehensive network that exists in London – where, of course, even when public transport lets you down there is typically a taxi close at hand (and you have the mobile phone reception to call one, unlikes many parts of rural England).

Having moved back to Somerset for the summer, I recently spent several days travelling around the county by bus in order to see how services compare to when I was growing up in the area. I live in a small village situated roughly half-way between Weston-Super-Mare and Taunton on the south west coast. There are shops located nearby – B&M Bargains, a few curry houses, as well as the obligatory hair salons and charity shops – but to find anything beyond groceries and cheap socks you have to venture further afield. This invariably requires a car or public transport. More than a quarter of Somerset’s population (28 per cent) is aged over 60, and they largely rely on the latter.

The first thing that strikes you about local buses, however, is how empty many of them are. On the 9.20 from Weston-Super-Mare to Burnham-on-Sea I found myself sitting alone on the upper deck – just four elderly passengers sat below. Rural bus services are essential for poorer or ageing communities, but as profit-making enterprises, they’re also unviable ­– something the introduction of free bus passes in 2007 has exacerbated. I was probably the only fee-paying customer aboard that bus.

Services are thus trapped in a vicious cycle in which fewer people travel by bus, so subsidies are withdrawn and fares hiked in order to sustain existing levels of coverage, and that in turn drives away those who can’t afford the higher fares. Figures from the Department for Transport show that passengers in Somerset took 7.2 million bus journeys in 2016-17, 2.6 million fewer than in 2009-10. It’s impossible to say for certain why this has happened, but fewer services and steeper fares seem an obvious starting point.

More from this author

The closed world of the 'enlightened' middle class

By James Bloodworth

As the Government has reduced overall grants to local authorities – down by 49% in real terms since 2010 – councils have had less money with which to subsidise less economical bus routes. Consequently, bus franchise operators have increased ticket prices to fill the gaps (bus fares have risen by 13% in real terms since 2010). A return ticket from Taunton to Burnham-on-Sea (22 miles) costs £8.10. The connection to Burnham from my village is a further £1.70 each way. Many long-standing routes have been cut entirely, or significantly reduced. Last year Somerset County Council announced it would be scrapping Saturday Park and Ride services in Taunton. Webberbus, one of Somerset’s biggest bus operators collapsed entirely in 2016, leading to the disappearance of 24 services across the county.

“There used to be about three or four [buses] but now there’s only this [number] 20,” one elderly lady told me as we waited at the bus stop in Berrow. Services to places like Taunton, Weston-Super-Mare and Bristol still run, she said, but nowadays they were seldom direct and typically took longer. “We had a lovely regular bus to Weston-Super-Mare that took about 20 minutes, but now it takes you about an hour.” I remember catching that bus as an adolescent – it was the only reliable way to get to the nearest Virgin Megastore. And she was right, now it does take almost three times as long.

Speaking to passengers on various routes around the county, this was a fairly typical experience. Down the road in Taunton the service to Bridgwater had recently been reduced from every 15 minutes to every 30 minutes.

Of course, it’s easy to slip into nostalgic reminiscing about the good old days of punctual and frequent public transport. Yet the available statistics – both local and across the country as a whole – do tell a discernible story of decline. Across Britain, more than 3,000 bus routes have been scrapped, reduced or altered in the last eight years, according to the Campaign for Better Transport. Britain’s bus network has fallen to levels not seen since the late 1980s. A lady I chatted to aboard the bus from Burnham-on-Sea to Taunton relayed to me how it took around four and a half hours for her to get to get to Taunton and back, a journey she made twice a week to take her disabled son to hospital. That 17-mile journey takes 40 minutes each way in a car.

Time is the only real commodity that the poor possess. During my research into precarious work in 2016, I learned that a low-income is nearly always synonymous with a great deal of wasted time. To be poor is to wait around at the whim of petty officialdom: for paperwork to be processed at the job centre, or, indeed, for the bus to turn up at the side of the road. It is inevitably the vulnerable and hard-up who are hardest hit when bus services are reduced or scrapped.

Suggested reading

The noise of victimhood culture has drowned out the plight of the poor

By Jenny McCartney

My own journey around Somerset by bus was a pleasant one. Hours whittled away looking out at a sea of green fields – punctuated by picturesque villages like Crewkerne and Blagdon – is hardly an unpleasant experience for those with time to kill. But such bucolic settings invariably grow tiresome if you need to be somewhere in a hurry – say, the job centre, the nearest of which is situated 12 miles from the village in which I grew up.

The fact we don’t take these inconveniences seriously costs us all in the long run. Research commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation earlier this year found that a lack of punctuality on the part of buses was preventing many in the north of England from securing or keeping work. The Yorkshire Post recently reported on the cases of workers who had been fired because local buses had repeatedly failed to turn up to take them to work.

For city-dwellers, the decline of public transport in the countryside is something only noticed on a weekend away. And even then the stakes are inevitably lower: to be delayed on a day-trip to the country is an inconvenience; to lose your job because the bus didn’t show up is a potential catastrophe. This perhaps explains why, beyond the confines of the regional press – itself undergoing something of a crisis – the state of Britain’s buses receives scant political attention. Indeed, when the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn led on the issue of bus services at PMQs in July, he was assailed by online commentators for not leading with attacks on the Government over Brexit.

This could be a metaphor for the entire debate about Britain’s future in Europe more generally: while the commentariat has entrenched itself within its respective Remain and Leave camps, the public has been getting on with their lives, dealing with the everyday concerns that make things that little bit more difficult. The ability of Jeremy Corbyn to tap into such concerns was, I would guess, part of the reason he surprised so many with Labour’s showing at the 2017 general election.

Margaret Thatcher is often quoted as saying that “a man who, beyond the age of 26 finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure”. Though the quote is apocryphal and unverified, it represents a caricature of the former Prime Minister’s attachment to the principle of competition. Slow-moving, collective modes of transport like the bus – as opposed to the assertive steel cocoon of the motor car – exist in this view as a means of last resort for the poor. And services designed for the poor are invariably poor services.

It also hints at an ideological divide that underpins Britain’s public transport status quo. The idea of heavily subsidising rural bus services will probably never be acceptable to those who believe the market solves all problems. Yet rural bus services ­– much like rural postal services – are a collective endeavour which inevitably require an occasional loss to maintain a comprehensive network. It would be better to call this an investment rather than view it pejoratively as a wasteful subsidy.

Suggested reading

A plan to defeat Jeremy Corbyn: provide help to the poorer Britons he has deserted

By James Kirkup

Indeed, the social value of any service that picks up a handful of pensioners to take them to do their weekly shop, or a mother to take her disabled son to hospital, is never going to be satisfactorily measured on the basis of profit or loss. Columns on a balance sheet can’t convey the social value rural bus services provide to those who would otherwise be isolated. “If they got rid of this one I don’t know how I’d manage, I really don’t,” one 76-year-old woman told me as we chatted while waiting at edge of Wellington for the 22 bus to Tiverton. “I don’t drive and a lot of my friends don’t drive.”

The savings made by cuts to bus services will no doubt please those for whom expenditure on public services is a frivolous indulgence. But they rarely see the true cost of such cuts, which are typically borne by those behind closed doors, who quietly lose their independence.

And yet almost one in three people in my commune (population 354) voted for Marine Le Pen in the first round of the Presidential election last year. More than half of the vote went to anti-establishment candidates of the far Right or the hard Left. If there was to be an election tomorrow, after 14 months of the confident, go-ahead “New France” proclaimed by Emmanuel Macron, the Le Pen vote would be unchanged. It might even be higher, despite the fact that Madame Le Pen’s rebranded Rassemblement National is floundering in national polls and facing bankruptcy.

Why should my peaceful commune in the Calvados hills be so alienated from mainstream, metropolitan or suburban France?  Rural Normandy used to be immune to the appeal of the far Right, but in every similar small commune in Calvados around 30% voted for Marine Le Pen in the first round of the presidential election last year. In parts of eastern and southern France, there are villages which voted between 60% and 70% for the then Front National.

Of all the fault-lines in Emmanuel Macron’s France – thriving white cities versus energetic, frustrated, multi-racial suburbs; secular fundamentalists versus dogmatic Catholics or Muslims – the rural-urban divide is the least discussed. Few of the overdue reforms introduced or planned by the young President will do much for rural France. In Paris, Macron is reviled (unfairly) by the hard Left as a “President for the Rich”.  In La France Profonde, which has long regarded itself as profoundly ignored, he is dismissed as a “President for Cities”.

One year into the Macron Era, I decided to talk to some of my Norman neighbours about politics – not necessarily an easy task. There are two elderly women called Madeleine in my hamlet (population 8) They live 100 metres apart. They have not spoken for 30 years. They have not quarrelled. They just have nothing to say to one another.

The commune’s mayor, Marie-Christine, 67, says: “This is, to be honest, not a very open place. People, many people, not all,  are very enclosed, wrapped in their own lives. They have little curiosity about the outside world. Caen is about as far as their knowledge or imagination stretches. The depressing fact is that this is as true of some of the younger people as it is of the older ones.”

Let me describe, without naming it, the commune to which my hamlet belongs. It typifies, I think, the difficulties facing rural France as small-scale farming retreats, local businesses vanish and the 21^st century – in the form of high-speed internet or reliable mobile telephone coverage – fails to arrive.

It is a commune of 354 people and 260 voters – a string of hamlets and villages in the hills 30 kilometres south of Caen. According to local legend, it was a favourite hunting ground for William the Conqueror when he retired to Normandy in the final years of his reign. The area was mistitled La Suisse Normande – Norman Switzerland – by a British journalist a century ago. Gentle hills loop around one another in shifting tones of grey and green. Forests lap over the ridge-tops. This might be Shropshire Normande or Herefordshire Normande but not Suisse Normande.

When I first came here 20 years ago, there were still a dozen farms, including two small, scarcely mechanised dairy farms in my hamlet. There are now seven farms in the commune and none in my hamlet. Year by year, we have watched as the Caen suburbs seep southwards along the main roads and soak up the hillsides. Our main village – “le bourg” – has its own small estate of pale-peach coloured bungalows, inhabited by people who work in Caen. There is no tension with the long-time locals; there is no contact at all.

Further reading

Flyover France – the forgotten frontier

By Peter Franklin

The big issue locally this summer– one that sums up for many the arrogance of Metropolitan France – is President Macron’s decision to reduce the speed limit on two-lane roads from 90kph to 80kph (50mph). Frankly, I think the decision was justified. French country people drive too fast. The death rate on French roads fell by 5% in July, the first month of the new limit.

Local people do not see things that way. They think that the 80kph limit is designed to harvest more fines from rural pockets to spend on urban France.

But that’s enough from me. Let me allow a few of my neighbours – those who were willing to express an opinion – to speak for themselves.

Catherine, 54, has lived in the commune all her life. She works as an administrator for a painting/building company in Caen 20 miles away. She is about to leave the village and buy a flat in town. “There is no one much here that I can talk to,” she said. “In Caen I have friends. There is night-life. A social buzz. And I won’t have to drive 60 kilometres every day…”

Further reading

What does Flyover France see in Le Front National?

By Nabila Ramdani

Catherine has always voted centre-Right. Faced with a choice between Le Pen and Macron in the presidential run-off last year, she spoiled her ballot.

“No one here ever admits to voting for Marine but the far Right goes up at every election. Why?  This place is not racist or xenophobic. There is no crime, no sense of being insecure. Lots of people, like me, go out for a few minutes and leave their door unlocked.”

“If a black or brown person visited the village, or even came to live here, they would be treated like anyone else. And yet I think that there is a kind of submerged racism all the same. People see brown and black faces on the TV news or in the French football team. Some don’t mind. Others feel uncomfortable. It’s not the France they know. They see riots. They see the terrorist attacks in Paris and Nice. They see the young black men on Ouistreham (the Channel ferry port near Caen) trying to reach England. They feel threatened, even though there is no direct threat to them. They vote Le Pen as a kind of protest or gesture….”

Would she say that there is a cultural divide between urban and rural France, similar to the cultural gulf which appears to exist between urban and rural parts of the US or Britain?

“No, I don’t think that’s an issue in France. People are conservative, yes, but the issues that drive rural people in, say, America – gay rights, guns, religion – they’re not so important here. People’s concerns are more practical. The 80kph speed limit. Macron’s new taxes on pensioners’ incomes.”

Michel, 82, is a retired postman who lives in a mobile home on the edge of my hamlet. He voted for Marine Le Pen in both rounds of last year’s election.

“It’s not just about immigration or Islam. People here are fed up. More and more fed up. We’ve been betrayed by every generation of politicians for 60 years, starting with De Gaulle. And it’s not Macron who’s going to change that. Just look at him. Does he look as though he would care about a place like this? All they want is our money. More and more money. Look at the 80kph speed limit – another thing people in cities have concocted to impose on a countryside which they don’t understand. There’s anger already but nothing compared to what there will be when the first wave of fine notices starts to arrive.”

“People have the impression that they are paying and paying and paying and getting nothing back. And the debt is still out of control. Where does the money go? It must go to the immigrants because it’s not coming back here. We will end up like Italy or Greece with a debt we can’t pay. It’s time to try something else, to put France first, to think of the real French first…”

“I was lucky I got out of farming when I did”, Denis, a 67 year old retired farmer tells me. “It was already no fun with the falling milk price and constant new rules from Paris and Brussels. Now, from what I hear, you have to have a bathroom for each cow. And even the bigger, mechanised  farms can’t make money. They have to invest and grow to survive and they can’t afford to repay their loans. There used to be 20 or 30 farms in this commune. Now its’s what, six or seven, and it won’t end there. Normandy – the whole of France – we are heading for big ranches like they have in America or Australia.”

“I don’t know who votes for Le Pen. It’s not me but I understand the people who do. There is a feeling of betrayal, of having been fed with constant lies. Every year at the big farm show in Paris, the politicians talk about France’s love of farmers and farming. What they mean is that they love the big food companies which pour money into political parties and even control the farming unions…

“Farming, the land, used to be our identity here.  Everyone was connected with farming one way or another. Now, most people in the commune have nothing to do with farming. Their parents or their grandparents may have farmed, but it means little to them. Farmers are a small minority in their own community. People – and not just the incomers either – are furious when they have to wait for a tractor blocking the road.”

Marie-Christine, a retired special needs teacher, is the first female mayor of the commune.

“The older people, I have the impression, remain faithful to the centre-Right or traditional Right. This Le Pen vote – and also the hard-Left vote – is coming from younger people in their 40s or 50s or even their 30s. Partly it is ignorance – a readiness to believe any rubbish that they see on the internet or social media. But it’s not just that. There is also a fear of the future… a sense that everything is changing out there and that it’s leaving places like this behind or threatens us in some undefined way. That’s the way I read the vote for Le Pen – an attempt to slow down a future that people fear.”

Further reading

The brutal truth about forgotten France

By Douglas Murray

Is there a cultural rift, a rejection of Metropolitan values?

“Yes, but not quite like what I read about in the US or in Poland, say. Homosexuality or abortion or transgender rights, they don’t much drive opinion here either way. What you do have is an undefined refusal to accept the new or the modern. Me, for instance, I’m the first woman mayor that the commune has had. I can tell you that it doesn’t go down well with some people – including with other members of the council. There is a feeling that women shouldn’t lead or manage.

“I fear that the extreme vote will continue to grow here. Just look at what has happened in Italy, or Poland or Austria or Germany. The same thing could happen here. It would only take someone with a message a little more subtle than Marine Le Pen.”

In rural France, then, rejection of modern, urban values hardly figures. Guns and hunting and Europe are marginal issues. The main source of anger is a feeling of being ignored or exploited or left behind.

Don’t underestimate the extent and the emptiness of La France Profonde and the problem that causes. France (64 million) has a somewhat larger population than England (55 million) in four times the space. If you climb to the ridge above our commune and look to the south, a town-free landscape of scores and scores of similar villages stretches to the horizon. A similar landscape, rarely interrupted by towns, continues for 800 kilometres to the Pyrenees.

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When farming was king, each of these villages generated its own identity and its own raison d’etre. Energy and life blood has now drained to the cities and suburbs. For all the lip-service paid by successive French governments to small, traditional farms, Paris has almost always favoured large-scale, intensive farming.

Faced with so many economically and socially becalmed rural communities, no government can be expected to devise ways of imposing new energy or confidence from the outside. High speed internet offers remote forms of rural employment but our commune, like many others in France, has poor mobile phone coverage and no high-speed internet. The cables are supposed to arrive in 2020.  Even then, a new influx of net-friendly “horsins” (outsiders, like me) is unlikely to repair the commune’s sense of fractured identity.

Multiply my commune by 30,000 – the number of rural communes in France – and you grasp the scale of the problem. Marine Le Pen may not survive her present difficulties, but rural France offers wide open spaces, literally, to a would-be successor.