There’s plenty of wilderness to go around

FROM what I observe it has become fashionable, in the last few days, to throw policies abruptly into reverse. Suddenly ideas which were being talked up only last week as the best thing since sliced bread are now totally discredited, out of date or simply unworkable as the politicians perform another spectacular handbrake turn before taking the country off down another side road leading goodness knows where.

It would all be highly entertaining and a source of general merriment if every twist and turn of the shambolic progress of this Government wasn’t affecting people’s lives, incomes and general wellbeing.

But when it comes to selecting reverse gear as and when changing circumstances demand it, I am all in favour.

So I have been a little encouraged in the last couple of weeks to witness the backtracking that is quietly going on over the matter of sacrificing more of our countryside to solar power generation, tree planting in the name of carbon offsetting, and particularly the creation of wild, untamed habitats for the benefit of exotic species.

All of which may have seemed desirable when we were still living in the good times. But we have left the good times behind us – at least temporarily – and it is a little more important now to be thinking seriously about how we are all going to have enough to eat in future.

And I am grateful to those politicians (not a phrase I would often use under normal circumstances) who have concluded that the primary purpose of farmland is to grow food. Not to sprout trees so that multinathem. tional corporations can continue polluting the air and the water. Not to support forests of solar panels. And certainly not to be used to increase the amount of wilderness in the UK.

On this final point in particular, no one has managed to convince me that we need any more anyway.

In addition to our national parks we have vast areas of fells, mountains and moorland which provide the average person with all the wilderness they are likely to require and which will never, ever support more than a little rough grazing.

There are plenty of places where it is possible to sit and contemplate a landscape which has little changed in thousands of years. Plenty of places – as the rescue services will testify – where it is possible for people to get lost or injured as they explore The problem seems to be that they aren’t conveniently situated. They often require lengthy train or car journeys to reach.

The rewilders would rather have wild Britain brought to them and placed within easy reach of the urban hordes.

Without, of course, demonstrating satisfactorily that the urban hordes themselves (a) want more wilderness or (b) would visit it, which they probably wouldn’t once it started raining.

Apart from a relatively small number of hotspots, our wilder areas are generally little-visited. There is plenty of wilderness to go round.

And that situation is unlikely to change given that you require both a lot of stamina and expensive equipment if you are going to start exploring it.

I have friends in national parks who tell me they can ramble all day without encountering more than two or three other people.

There is no evidence to suggest we are running out of wild areas or that people are forming orderly queues to have access to them.

The rewilders are, in other words, campaigning on the basis of a ‘need’ that is entirely unproven, trying to achieve a changed landscape that only they and their followers would ever visit or appreciate, while the vast majority of people in this country are rather more concerned about not only having food on their plates, but being able to afford to buy it.

And only the dedication and hard work of British farmers – and our use of every square inch of productive land – will be able to fulfil those requirements.