The British countryside is once again being targeted by the diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI) brigade, with plans drawn up by the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) to make it into a less “white environment” in a bid to attract more minorities to rural areas.
As reported in The Telegraph, these plans are being created following Defra-commissioned reports which claim that the countryside would become “irrelevant” in a multicultural society, as it was a “white environment” foremostly enjoyed by the white middle classes.
National Landscapes – previously called areas of outstanding natural beauty (AONB) – and their local councils have since committed to a series of diversity targets. Malvern Hills National Landscape said in proposals: “Many minority peoples have no connection to nature in the UK because their parents and their grandparents did not feel safe enough to take them or had other survival preoccupations.”
Meanwhile, Nidderdale National Landscape in North Yorkshire warned that ethnic minority communities may face barriers to access and have “concerns about how they will be received when visiting an unfamiliar place”.
In an era of racial identity politics and the proliferation of DEI thinking across public, private, and third sector institutions, the British countryside has increasingly been subjected to unfair attacks.
Take, for example, a report published by the University of Leicester last September, which found that racist abuse is too often “tolerated or even normalised” in the English countryside.
However, the two-year ‘Rural Racism Project’ spoke to only 115 people and twenty community groups for its research – not a comprehensive nor representative sample by any stretch of the imagination.
Gaslighting Britons into believing the countryside is racist is an extremely cynical ploy - Rakib EhsahThe Countryside Alliance, a campaign organisation for rural communities, said any suggestion that racism was more pronounced in the countryside was “not supported by the evidence”.
Truthfully, it is remarkable that the University of Leicester would invest so much into exploring so-called ‘rural racism’ when it has witnessed subcontinental-style communalism spill over onto its streets.
The August-September 2022 riots, a watershed moment in British social cohesion, were primarily between Hindu and Muslim male youths from ‘new and emerging’ communities.
In October 2024, the Policy Exchange think-tank published a report on the changing ‘portrait’ of modern Britain, finding that more ethnic minority people are spreading into England’s rural towns and countryside.
A good number are opening family-run businesses. If the English countryside were such a racist hellscape for Britain’s ethnic and racial minorities, would we be experiencing such changes in terms of human geography?
The countryside is one of the main sources of national pride in modern Britain, which is no surprise, considering the pivotal role it plays in our national history, heritage, and traditions.
Perhaps because the English countryside has such a special place in the hearts and minds of traditional-minded citizens, which is why it is all too often the target of radical-progressive activism.