David Butterfield

Countryfile is wrong about racism and the countryside

Windermere in the Lake District (photo: iStock)

At last, with the partial easing of lockdown, we have the consolation of an escape into the countryside. There, in the unquestioning simplicity of it all, we can leave society’s struggles behind. A sweet idea, but now rather behind the times, as shown by BBC Countryfile’s recent stirring into action. In its programme last night, Dwayne Fields delivered a piece on how the countryside needs to lose its ‘barriers’ and become truly welcoming to all communities. Ethnic minorities, he worried, feel that they ‘don’t belong’ in the countryside. Fields has done a great deal to introduce inner-city communities to the countryside and is unquestionably an admirable man. But his framing of this subject is mistaken.

Countryfile’s claims drew in part on last year’s Defra-commissioned report into the state of the UK’s national parks. It found that:

many communities in modern Britain feel that these 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. If that is true today, then the divide is only going to widen as society changes. Our countryside will end up being irrelevant to the country that actually exists.

A study published in 2017 by National England found that 44 per cent of white people had ‘visited the natural environment’ in the previous week, a figure that fell steadily for mixed (39 per cent), Chinese (28 per cent), Black (26 per cent) and Asian (26 per cent) communities.

These apparently alarming differences, the psychotherapist Beth Collier told Countryfile, stem from a persistent strand of rural racism: previous generations of ethnic minorities in Britain felt intimidated on encountering countryside communities who had never seen non-white faces. Once their children were raised with the belief that it would be unsafe for them to venture into the countryside, a ‘generational disconnect’ severed non-white Britons from rural spaces.

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