I used to volunteer at a wildlife sanctuary, counting sheep and goats on an agreeable patch of chalk downland in Kent. On hot days the goats would hide in the dense, cool woodland and it could take a long time to find them. Occasionally they broke out of the reserve because our gates were of poor quality, so I was delighted to see one morning that new gates had been installed, shiny metal ones. When I got up close, though, there was a surprise in store. All of the new gates were adorned with a picture of a woman in a burka and an injunction to abide by the Countryside Code.
This struck me as peculiar, not to say borderline Islamophobic. We had never experienced trouble with Muslim women ignoring the Countryside Code. And yet here these poor people were seemingly being singled out for censure. It was a small mercy that there wasn’t a warning: ‘Please don’t blow yourself up near the livestock.’ Or ‘Please do not sacrifice and devour any of our goats’. In truth I had never seen a Muslim woman – or man – inside the reserve, a place I visited pretty much every day over the course of five years, and very few, if any, lived nearby.
It was only later I realised the true nature of the programme: these were not micro-aggressions directed at Muslim women. They were micro-aggressions directed at the rest of us. We who are not members of the Global Majority. They were a coded message saying, essentially, this: ‘You think this is your country, you sap? It is not. It is not even your country up here among the beech hangers and the silver birch and the purple ragwort and the fluttering brimstones. Even up here, it is not yours. Not any more. Get used to this new reality, quickly.’
That was in about 2017 and I was reminded of it when reading the latest similar micro-aggressions from the hilariously named Centre for Hate Studies at Leicester University. This convocation of gibberish-spouting tenth-rate academicians has just delivered a report about racism in the countryside. The countryside is far too white, the authors contend, and this is exclusionary to people who have been ‘minoritised’. A quick note here. The people to whom the author is referring have not been minoritised. They are minorities. Maybe not in Leicester and maybe not for very long in the rest of the country, either. But still, we need to challenge this specious, disingenuous language at every step. Minoritised is a left-wing word which refers to people who have been subjugated because of their ethnic (or other) identity, rather than because they constitute a mathematical minority.
The report is riddled with micro-aggressions. An insistence that what we might want is of no importance
The precise reverse is true with our minorities, though. Far from being subjugated, our black and Asian minorities are fast-tracked for jobs throughout industry, shortlisted for parliamentary seats and are vastly over-represented on our television screens. A better word to describe what has happened would be ‘majoritised’, then. But that word doesn’t exist.
Anyway, this marvellously fatuous report suggests that black and Asian people shun the countryside because they feel they are not welcome there and that maybe a few more halal food outlets in our rural areas would make people feel more at home. Never mind that some people – including those from ethnic–minority backgrounds – might baulk at the hideous cruelty of halal slaughter, or that the rest of us, we who are not part of the Global Majority, sometimes have no choice but to eat halal–slaughtered meat because the supermarkets and restaurants find it more convenient to ignore the majority in order to keep the minority happy. (This is one of the reasons I am boycotting the burger chain Five Guys, incidentally – the Birmingham city- centre branch is ‘fully halal’, meaning that halal methods of slaughter are used and no bacon or alcohol is served. Again, the majority disdained in order to appease a particularly prickly minority. Also, like most of those upmarket chains, they are crap burgers.)
The report goes on to note the ‘monocultural’ nature of countryside pubs and the absence of places set aside for people to pray. It continues: ‘Welcoming minoritised individuals into the countryside means more than tolerance; it requires thoughtful adaptation, sustained inclusion efforts and a willingness to change.’ I have thought long and hard about this particular demand and find it impossible to construct a response more eloquent than ‘fuck right off’.
But then the entire report – and especially that sentence – is riddled with those micro-aggressions I talked about earlier. An insistence that what we might want, how we live our lives and what we might care about are no longer of any importance whatsoever. Instead we must change the way in which we live in order to accommodate the minority of a minority that will not, under any circumstances, change its own behaviour to fit in more comfortably with the host population. And the tacit assumption that those minorities should not have to change or adapt or accommodate at all. We give up everything. Why?
You will have seen the St George’s flags hanging from lampposts and noticed, too, the enormous gains made by Reform UK. Do not think for a moment that this is simply a reaction to the sheer number of people from perhaps not entirely complementary cultures coming into the country. That is there, of course – but more importantly it is a reaction to the way in which the history, culture, lifestyle and aspirations of the indigenous population have been repeatedly bludgeoned this past quarter of a century. It is notice being given that the public has had enough: that a line in the sand must be drawn.
I haven’t been back to that nature reserve in Kent for five years. I hope the goats and sheep are still there. And I wonder if on the crest of the hill, looking down over the Stour valley, there is now a halal butchers and a mosque. It wouldn’t surprise me that much.
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