The countryside is green and pleasant, not white and racist

I live in the country and you live in the town. You think I’m mad, I think you’re nuts. This actually unites us

The murky light of dawn crept up over the distant Blackdown hills this morning as I ploughed forward in the car on the school run. The lanes were flooded and as we edged round the Quantocks to Taunton, the mist was slowly lifting.

The West Somerset countryside, so lush and green I thought, or, as I now realise I should have thought, so damn racist. For, as a report submitted to an all-party parliamentary group by the Wildlife and Countryside Link (which represents a large number of wildlife charities) claims, the British countryside is not just green – it’s white and it’s “racist colonial”. The MPs had called for evidence on the link between “systemic racism” and the “climate crisis” – and you can bet your bottom dollar that when a bunch of eager-toplease members of Parliament, desperate to improve their reputations as gutter-festering inadequates, ask for such evidence, they’ll damn well get it.

Just the idea that rural racists are having a detrimental impact on climate change is quite a thing for Farmer Jones to contemplate. Before he’s even turned the key of his tractor in the chilly, early morning darkness, he needs to shoulder the burden of being a racist AND a destroyer of the planet.

There are, undeniably, fewer people from ethnic minorities living in the British countryside. The significant migrations of our island story see people coming to British cities, which is where most of the opportunity is perceived to be.

The majority settled and made their homes and built communities in cities, with a few later making new lives in smaller towns or villages. It is natural to feel at home with people who look like you, so I can understand that.

However hard we try, most of us end up, culturally, like our parents. So I live in the country and you live in the town. You think I’m mad, I think you’re nuts. My strict Christmas routine is surely bonkers, except that it feels just right. And your family traditions, alien to me, will similarly make you feel settled and comfortable. The great divide is actually what unites us.