Power hides by setting us against each other. This is never more true than in the countryside, where the impacts of an extreme concentration of ownership and control are blamed on those who have nothing to do with it. Rural people are endlessly instructed that they’re oppressed not by the lords of the land, but by vicious and ignorant townies – the “urban jackboot” as the Countryside Alliance used to call it – stamping on their traditions.
Near Bridport in Dorset right now, an entire village is facing eviction, following the sale of the Bridehead Estate for about £30m. The official new owner, Bridehead Estate Ltd, is registered to the same address, with the same officers, as a company called Belport. The Telegraph reports that the estate “was bought by Belport, a private equity firm, on behalf of a wealthy client last autumn”, but no one knows who the client is. So far I’ve received no response to the questions I sent to Belport.
The people of Littlebredy, a village of 32 homes, wholly owned by the estate, say they have been ordered to leave from January. At the beginning of this month, access to parts of the 800-hectare (2,000-acre) grounds, widely enjoyed by local people, was terminated, with red signs to this effect and padlocks on all the entrances. No one knows who is doing this to them. The sense of powerlessness is overwhelming.
One person has been evicted already, to make way for an estate office. When she complained about her treatment on social media, the first reply stated, without a shred of evidence: “You’re being evicted so that young fighting age male refugees, who are escaping war in France, can have somewhere safe to live, who, as far as our government is concerned, have priority over you … VOTE REFORM!” That’s how divide and rule works: never mind the anonymous plutocrat evicting her, the true culprits, somehow, are asylum seekers.
We are lectured by rightwing parties and the rightwing media about the need for “integration”. But that word is used only as a weapon against immigrants. It is not they who rip communities apart, tear people from their homes and shut us out of the land, causing social disintegration. It is the power of money.
But look, a spider! The cosmopolitan city, swarming with immigrants and trans people, is coming to get you! It will terminate the traditions country people love and impose its own culture instead. It is drummed into our heads that what rural people want is different to what the oppressive urbanites desire. But it’s not true.
Embarrassingly for the self-professed guardians of the countryside, some of the evidence comes from their own surveys. Future Countryside – which tells us it is “powered by the Countryside Alliance Foundation”, the charitable arm of the Countryside Alliance – commissioned polling in 2023. Its question about a wider right to roam in the countryside was phrased in a way that made it sound threatening: “To what extent do you agree that the public should have the ‘right to roam’ meaning that anyone can wander in the open countryside regardless of whether the land is privately or publicly owned?” Even so, there was almost no difference between the responses of urban and rural people: 55% of urban people and 54% of rural people agreed it was a good idea. Even more strikingly, when asked which political party “would do the most to prioritise/protect/promote the countryside?”, only 9% each of urban and rural people named the Conservatives, while 38% in both categories said the Green party.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, these answers failed to find their way into Future Countryside’s public presentation of the results. Instead, the only mention of a right to roam was a comment from an anonymous rural respondent: “They weren’t brought up in the countryside. They think they can wander across all the fields with the right to roam.” Links to both the raw polling data and the public presentation on the organisation’s website currently show a “404 error” when you try to open them.
Strangely, writing a year after these results were published, the chief executive of the Countryside Alliance, Tim Bonner, claimed that a wider right to roam is “completely contradictory to what the public actually wants”. With admirable chutzpah, he accused those calling for it of waging a “culture war in the countryside”.
When YouGov framed the question more objectively, for a poll commissioned by the Right to Roam campaign, it found that 68% of urban people and 68% of rural people supported it. It also discovered, in stark contrast to the claims of certain rural “guardians” who call it “the social glue that keeps rural communities together”, that opposition to hunting with dogs is strong everywhere: 78% of urban people and 74% of rural people are against it. As the access campaigner Jon Moses points out in an article for the Lead, “the issues over which we’re told we’re most divided are often the issues on which we actually most agree”.
That view is supported by some fascinating research published in the Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties. It found that while in several other western countries there is a stark political divide between urban and rural people, this does not apply in Britain. “We do not find any evidence that rural Britons are more resentful, dissatisfied or ‘left behind’ compared to their urban counterparts.” On cultural issues, it found, “ruralites are often less – not more – authoritarian than urbanites … and are less likely to support an undemocratic leader”.
We are fundamentally the same people, despite the best efforts of the culture warriors to divide us. But we must be persuaded that other people don’t want what we want: that we are the outsiders, the interlopers, the weird minority, pushing against the social current.
In reality, the weird minority are the 1% who own half of all the land in England, and the subset of that group who hide their ownership behind front companies and opaque trusts. If the government’s proposed changes to the Land Registry go ahead, it may become easier to discover the true owners of places such as Bridehead, though I suspect we will still struggle.
On 5 July, the Right to Roam campaign will organise a peaceful trespass at Bridehead, to draw attention to the almost feudal powers blighting rural life. The real conflict is not town v country, but money and power v people. That holds, regardless of where you live. Never let powerful people tell you who you are.
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George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
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