The Lie of the Land. Who Really Cares for the Countryside? William Collins, 2024.
This essential book follows on from the author’s superb Who Owns England?: how we lost our green and pleasant land, and how to take it back, William Collins, 2019, which forensically details who actually owns our countryside. Now he explodes the nonsensical lie which we have been force-fed for centuries, that only if you own land can or will you look after it. Huge swathes of evidence show that this not the case. The major landowners do not function as custodians or stewards and very often they are the destroyers. The book opens with the case of John Price who wrecked part of the River Lugg in Herefordshire within the bounds of an SSSI in 2023. There was an outcry and he was held to account and given a custodial sentence. His partner gave the press the farming classic: “He was … trying to look after it in the way that they’ve done it for years and years, like his father and like his grandfather.” Shrubsole wonders, as I have so often done for so long, whether instead of property rights (which confer the right to destroy, to exclude others and do whatever you like), we should have a system which calls for a legal duty of stewardship. 1% of people own half of the land in England and 30% is under the control of aristocratic families. The Lugg feeds into the River Wye, which has been thoroughly polluted and degraded mostly by run-off from the adjacent giant chicken farms. The National Farmers Union denies this.* But it is people who don’t own the land, a small number of green farmers and landowners aside, campaign groups, who are actually making some positive difference. But of course it is not enough. The idea of private property rights was pretty much invented in England, so the notion that no one should own land is fiercely resisted – I have believed it though for most of my life. From the moment I was old enough to understand the concept, it seemed as alien to me as it did to certain colonised indigenous people.
Shrubsole does not mess about, especially when it comes to myth-busting. Only 8.8% of land here is built on, 73% is farmland (a good deal of it far from highly productive), 10% is forestry. “The biggest drivers of biodiversity loss in this country are modern agriculture, forestry and shooting.” People who live in towns and cities should have no say over what happens to and in the countryside, we are told, but we all massively subsidise farming and land ownership. The anti-immigration argument, that England is full, as trotted out by Tory MP Richard Drax, rather falls down in the knowledge that he owns a 14,000 acre walled estate. For more on Drax, see here:
“All wild animals have to be culled” – Animal Wild
Major landowners are rarely farmers themselves, they have people to do that for them and many have their estates run for extremely profitable pheasant and grouse shoots. “We treat no other sector of the economy with such kid gloves.” Instead we should follow Scotland’s lead and allow, fund and legislate for the purchase of land by communities for nature restoration.” It works. Grouse moors like the duke of Buccleugh’s in Scotland, acquired by the people of Langholm for the purpose, came back to life, burgeoned, really rather quickly. The philosophy is, with a certain amount of necessary management and care, to let the land do what it wants. Why do we, the people, not own our national parks? Care of the land needs to be democratised.
This is a brave, righteously indignant and explosive opening salvo. I concur with every word of it.
It is the landowners who call themselves stewards for the benefit of all, following in the footsteps of their ancestors (of course) but that is a bare-faced lie. And they do not see themselves as accountable to anyone. The public are in any case excluded from the vast majority of our countryside, including rivers. Also chiming especially with me is the quotation from the historian Lynn White, who blames Christian anthropocentricity for permitting normalising our ecological destructiveness and causing the current environmental crisis – I have written about the use of the word “dominion” in Genesis more times than I care to remember. A chapter on the history of enclosures from Norman times and the fate of such radical campaigners as the Diggers and the Levellers in the seventeenth century puts it all into context. The industrialisation of farming in the twentieth century put paid to the stewardship myth once and for all, or so one would think. These people are simply not the guardians or custodians they continually claim to be and yet governments defer to them and hand over to them enormous sums of money (£9.2bn between 1992 and 2022 in environmental stewardship schemes alone which have largely failed alongside a collapse in regulation as the bodies responsible have been deliberately weakened and starved of funds).
To summarise a good deal of this book would be to repeat what I have written before. With me, Mr Shrubsole really is preaching to the converted. But anyone who still thinks grouse moors are managed for the benefit of wildlife, as the dukes and others tell us, should read the third chapter. Driven grouse shooting was only invented in Victorian times (by William Spencer-Stanhope) and the queen and her consort were passionate enthusiasts, thereby popularising it amongst the aristocracy and wealthy industrialists. And commoners were dispossessed, once again, for the rearing of huge numbers of birds to be shot. Drain, burn and kill everything else. At our expense in every sense of the word. Our current batch of royals are still at it.
The author writes with sometimes laugh out loud wit leavening on what has obviously been a huge amount of careful research. In spite of his having attended the same school as me, Highgate, I had never heard of the pioneering botanist, author (and atheist) Professor Arthur Tansley, “the father of British ecology”, to whom we owe the concept of an ecosystem. He argued in1945 that the protection of wildlife should naturally be a duty of government. This book was published last year and in it Shrubsole is optimistic about what was then the incoming Labour government. Sadly we now know that they are doing the exact opposite of that. Dr Julian Huxley, who chaired the Huxley Report of 1947, recommended that the Nature Conservancy, forerunner of our official environmental watchdogs, “would revolve in his grave if he knew how some landowners continue to operate pheasant shoots over what are meant to be the best-protected wildlife sites in Britain.” Max Nicholson, second director-general of the Conservancy, called for a “gun tax”, a nature tax on the shooting lobby. The idea was shelved but it is hard to imagine his successors even suggesting it today. This was the start of the long war between conservationists and landed interests. The latter were of course not too keen on SSSIs either and in some cases used a loophole to destroy them. It is easy to forget that the privatisation of the water companies, for example, also meant that a very great deal of land was transferred from public to private ownership. For the past six years almost half of our SSSIs have not even been monitored by that emasculated body, Natural England.
A visit to the Fens of Cambridgeshire, drained, degraded, almost devoid of hedgerows and wildlife and heavily polluted, where the land itself is collapsing, a carbon nightmare, leaves the author depressed. It was not always thus. The draining began in the seventeenth century thanks to, surprise, surprise, royalty and the aristocracy. The original ‘frontier capitalists’ have left – the land is now owned by pension funds, the Wellcome Trust, the Mormon Church and big agribusiness with profit their only motive. The peaty soil will not remain fertile forever – not only does the high-profit agriculture fuel the climate crisis, in due course it will itself be a threat to our food security. The Church of England also owns a sizeable chunk, an institution which, as I have mentioned before, is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act. They are not eager to be held to account to say the least. Any restoration is left to just a few farmers and landowners and the likes of the Wildlife Trusts.
A chapter about Grey Squirrels reminds us of the ecological havoc wrought by the arrogance of the ruling class: it was the primarily Duke of Bedford (and a few others) at the beginning of the twentieth century who brought them here. Shrubsole warms against a xenophobic attitude to them as I did in Animal Wild, but this is not the only deeply harmful introduction by large estates, “this powerful combination of imperial ego and landed power” – rhododendron and Japanese knotweed are two, and it was Bedford again who introduced Muntjac Deer from China. At which point, to my intense delight, Shrubsole turns his attention to the pheasant, about which I have written more than sufficient already. They do incalculable damage to our native wildlife.
*Presumably after The Lie of the Land had gone to press (Shrubsole is nothing if not thorough), environmental specialist solicitors Leigh-Day who regularly act for Wild Justice, launched a claim against the polluters of the Wye, the Lugg and the Usk. First was the Cargill Poultry Group, which includes Avara Foods Ltd and whose customers include Tesco, Nando’s and Madonald’s, reportedly responsible for 75% of poultry (or more) in the Wye catchment. Second Dŵr Cynru Welsh Water, responsible for sewage treatment across the three catchments. In 2023 the company was responsible for 916,000 hours of sewage releases across Wales and England, 20% of the total across the entire UK, with allegedly 70,000 hours into the Wye catchment alone. The hope is to force these companies to clean up the rivers and surrounding land and to compensate those affected to the tune of hundreds of millions of pounds. Avara has promised to stop doing it but throws its hands in the air when it comes to undoing the damage already done. Leigh-Day’s spokesman Oliver Holland said: “We consider that the significant decline in the health of the River Wye over the last few years is clearly linked to the significant increase in intensive poultry farming in the main brought about by Avara Foods. The lives and livelihoods of those living in the River Wye area are being significantly impacted only to the benefit of Avara Foods, a subsidiary of US multinational Cargill Plc. This destruction of one the UK’s most beautiful natural areas cannot continue, which is why we are bringing this legal action.” Cargill, Inc., the parent company, was successfully sued for the pollution, by the same means, of the Illinois River in the United States. There is also a claim against the Environment Agency for its failure to enforce the rules.
This raises two questions in my mind. Will the National Farmers Union apologise for their deception? Perhaps they should also be fined for acting against the public interest. How will any clean-up be paid for? Judging by recent history and indeed my own recent water bill from Thames Water (up 38% on last year), by the consumers, the taxpayers. What I also wonder though is this: if the various companies are shown to have been acting illegally, if their profits have been generated by criminal activity, should the cost not be retrieved, retrospectively, from directors’ and shareholders’ profits and dividends? It is not hard to think of other criminal activities which, when successfully prosecuted, have resulted in bank accounts being frozen and assets seized.
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