The British countryside is a racist hellscape, a ‘white environment’ hostile to all outsiders and especially those from ethnic minorities, who are made to feel not just unwelcome but unsafe.
That’s seemingly the message from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), the Whitehall offices overseen by Labour Cabinet minister Emma Reynolds, and it’s abject nonsense, obviously.
Her department claims the countryside is becoming ‘irrelevant’ in a multi-cultural Britain, suggesting its ultra-privileged ‘white middle-class’ inhabitants see the villages and fields as their personal domain.
In an attempt to counter this, local councils are being urged to commit to diversity targets.
I genuinely wonder whether any of the nameless civil servants and quangocrats responsible for the reports have ever visited the countryside, beyond occasional trips to stay in their friends’ weekend cottages in the Cotswolds or the New Forest.
Do they believe that all farmers are like Jeremy Clarkson, gadding about in Lamborghini tractors bought with the spoils of their media careers, or that Midsomer Murders is an accurate portrait of rural communities?
Their findings are so absurd, my first reaction was to laugh. But the gross misconceptions they are peddling will have serious and dangerous consequences if they are not corrected.
Barrels of council taxpayers’ money are going to be wasted on the pursuit of rural ‘diversity’ – and that’s alarming.
Radical progressives are behaving as though they have the right to dictate where people with black or brown skin ought to go and visit, and that’s sinister.
Worst of all, the demonisation of white country people as xenophobes and racists is insulting, damaging and false – and it diverts attention from the places in the UK where urgent work is needed to reduce ethnic tensions and improve integration in cities like Leicester, where the 2022 riots primarily between Hindu and Muslim male youths from ‘new and emerging’ communities unfolded.
Some on the Left simply hate the countryside as a result of their warped perception of British history.
To them, it’s country houses, landed gentry, Tory shires, fox hunting, feudal class divisions and the legacy of colonial conquest.
An earlier Defra report declared in 2019: ‘Many communities in modern Britain feel that these National Park landscapes hold no relevance for them.
‘The countryside is seen by both black, Asian and minority ethnic groups and white people as very much a “white” environment.
‘Sometimes on our visits it has felt as if National Parks are an exclusive, mainly white, mainly middle-class club.’
For the 10.5million people who live in the countryside – around 17 per cent of the British population, rising to 35 per cent in Northern Ireland – that depiction isn’t remotely recognisable.
In fact, a high proportion of countryside folk are working-class or agricultural labourers.
Many of them do demanding, often dangerous jobs that are vital to our food security: growing the crops, raising the livestock and bringing in the fish catches. Without these workers, the UK would be entirely dependent on imports for our food.
But many on the Left instinctively vilify anything that holds a special place in the hearts of quietly traditional citizens who are deeply conservative.
Meanwhile, a report by the Malvern Hills National Landscapes committee makes this outrageous claim: ‘Many minority peoples have no connection to nature in the UK because their parents and their grandparents did not feel safe enough to take them or had other survival preoccupations.’ All of that is as untrue as it is offensive. As far as I can see, these highly patrician comments are not based on any real data.
They’re simply snobbish preconceptions about people on both sides of a divide that, in real life, do not exist.
In fact, inspired by their faith and culture, there are many ethnic-minority people who have a wholesome connection with the British environment – they naturally care about its sustainability and preservation.
The truth is that families from minority backgrounds are increasingly settling into rural areas and country towns.
A 2024 report published by Policy Exchange on the ‘portrait’ of modern Britain found that growing numbers of ethnic-minority citizens were moving to the countryside, with some setting up successful businesses.
For many, the attractions were obvious: their forebears were country people, they may well have grown up in agricultural towns and villages in their home countries, and they felt more at home in these quieter surroundings than with hectic inner-city life.
If the English countryside is so uniquely hostile towards ethnic and racial minorities, would we be seeing these demographic changes as reported by Policy Exchange?
It seems to me that those at Defra are simply smearing white rural communities as racist and averse to change.
It doesn’t surprise me: we see attacks and slurs on rural communities almost weekly now. A common one is the call for dogs to be banned from public spaces or kept on leashes, for the convenience of people from cultures where dogs are seen as dirty or threatening.
In 2024 the environmental group Climate Cymru BAME recommended ‘dog-free areas in local green spaces’, with the North Wales Africa Society supporting it after ‘a black African female’ told one of their focus groups that she felt ‘unsafe with the presence of dogs’. It’s obviously wrong to expect any established community to abandon practices it holds dear, such as owning pets, to accommodate the whims of the few.
Integration is not simply about accommodating migrants; it rests on the appreciation of the indigenous majority’s culture, heritage and traditions.
Take pubs; it’s ridiculous to claim that Muslims feel automatically uncomfortable with traditional English village inns, just because many don’t drink alcohol.
A 2022 report, once again commissioned by Defra, claimed: ‘Traditional pubs have limited food options and cater to people who have a drinking culture. Muslims from the Pakistani and Bangladeshi group said this contributed to a feeling of being unwelcome.’
Even if this was the case, there are so many other family-oriented facilities and activities to enjoy in the countryside.
The key barrier keeping many people from ethnic minorities out of the countryside is the same one that affects everybody: poor transport links.
It is difficult and expensive to get out of many urban areas to anywhere that is genuinely green and wild.
Britain should belong to all of us. To make that happen, we need much more frequent and reliable train and bus services, and better roads – not the vilification of white rural people.
Dr Rakib Ehsan is a researcher in demography and integration
