The English countryside isn’t racist

I don’t know what your plans are for Easter. Mine generally include a nice walk in the English countryside. There is something incalculably consoling about our landscape. I might even find myself leaning on a stile and looking at some Easter lambs while they do that sudden vertical jump thing, as though they have suddenly found they are standing over a geyser.

But perhaps I should instead scour the rolling hills for signs of racism which I could then report to the relevant authorities.

What am I going on about, some saner readers might be wondering. Well, I have been reading reports in the British press that the English countryside is about to be ‘studied’ by ‘hate crime experts’ to find out whether ‘rural racism’ is lurking. This deeply rigorous academic exercise is going to be led by academics ‘specialising in British colonialism and hate studies’, seeking to record the ‘lived realities’ of ethnic minorities who live or hike there.

There are times when you can feel all of your fingers and toes being trodden upon. This is such a time. Consider the least of the irritations here. What exactly is a ‘hate crime expert’? And what’s with that bumf about ‘lived realities’? What other type of reality is there? Might these deluded experts look for entirely imaginary realities?

Maybe they will, as it happens, because it is clear from the wording and the aspirations of this study that it is not a study, but the usual firing squad. I doubt that even one of the ‘experts’ commissioned by the idiot Leverhulme Trust has any knowledge of the English countryside or its history. In fact I would bet that none of them knows anything about colonialism either. All will simply be propelled by the usual list of grievances against our country and everything in it, right down to the last hedgerow.