Countryside

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 7 April 2016

Squire power The village of West Heslerton in Yorkshire was put up for sale at £20 million after its owner, Eve Dawnay, died. Other villages still largely owned by a local squire: — Hambleden, Buckinghamshire, owned by the W.H. Smith family until 2007 when it was bought by the neighbouring Culden Faw estate, which owns 50 cottages in the village as well as the shop and pub. — Bantham, Devon. An estate consisting of 21 houses, a golf course and 589 acres was bought in 2014 by a businessman, Nicholas Johnston, having been advertised for £11.5 million. The National Trust wanted to buy it but were outbid. — New Earswick,

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s notes | 7 April 2016

However wicked tax evasion is and however distasteful some tax avoidance may be, people should imagine a world without tax havens and see if they really want it. The prime reason that tax havens exist is that taxes in most countries are too high. If they did not exist, the competitive element would be reduced, and taxes would go up even more. The EU constantly complains about ‘unfair tax competition’, by which it really means just tax competition itself. Tax avoidance is what most of us try to do (see next item). Resentment about it is largely because the rich find it easier to achieve than the rest of us.

Thursday

Nigel Farndale

From Hitler to girls in pearls

I’ve heard it said that the ‘countryside’ is an urban idea, a place invented by the late Victorians in order to escape industrialisation. If so, we’re craving it more than ever. Surveys suggest 80 per cent of us now dream of living in a rural idyll. Since foxhunting was banned, riding to hounds has never been more prevalent. Suddenly five million people — most of them city dwellers — are tuning into The Archers, and viewing figures for Countryfile are higher than for The X Factor. But perhaps the most revealing indicator of the allure of the countryside is the enduring appeal of Country Life magazine, which was founded in

Thursday

Simon Barnes

Of geese and men

Grumpy Gertie was killed in a drive-by shooting. This resident of the village of Sandon, near Letchworth, was shot at close range from a passing 4×4. There seems to have been no motive. Apart from pleasure, perhaps. Flowers have been placed at Gertie’s favourite spot, a reward of £250,000 has been offered for information about the killers, and the Sandon villagers are distressed and appalled. Gertie was a goose. A white male farmyard goose — the name indicates an understandable confusion about gender; geese don’t go in for pronounced sexual dimorphism. It’s a strange little parable about the confusions, contradictions, paradoxes and inconsistencies that govern human understanding of non-human life.

Thursday

Nigel Farndale

Out on the farm

If the Church of England was once the Tory party at prayer, then the nation’s shotgun-owning farmers were the party’s armed wing. I grew up on a farm in the Yorkshire Dales and must have been about 18 before I met someone who didn’t identify as TBC (True Blue Conservative). Ours was one of the safest Tory seats in the country, with the local MP being Leon Brittan and then William Hague. And Margaret Thatcher was considered a hero in our ‘community’ not because of the Falklands war or her defeat of Arthur Scargill but because she liked to greet the dawn by listening to Farming Today on Radio 4

Thursday

Simon Barnes

The wings of winter

Crisis relocation. A term from the Cold War. It means being somewhere else when it happens. When the threat of the Soviet Empire was as much a part of daily life as tea and toast, there were fixed plans to shift our leaders out of harm’s way at the whiff of the first missile. Birds operate the same strategy. When the Cold War of winter strikes, many birds cope with the emergency by being somewhere else. So you’d think that this would leave the country a little depleted at this time of year: after all, the swifts and swallows are long gone and with them most of the warblers. But

Tuesday

Camilla Swift

The SNP don’t care about foxes. It was all a pack of lies

So, it turns out that the SNP weren’t that bothered about the plight of foxes after all. Back in July, you might remember, David Cameron was forced to backtrack on his plan for a parliamentary vote on relaxing the hunting ban, after the SNP decided to vote against any changes. This, of course, came after Nicola Sturgeon wrote in February: ‘the SNP have a long-standing position of not voting on matters that purely affect England — such as fox hunting south of the border, for example — and we stand by that.’ But now we hear that just a month after blocking Cameron’s proposed changes, the SNP received a £10,000

Thursday

Claudia Massie

The Lake District

Cumberland and Westmorland Wrestling is the best thing in the Lake District. I lived near Wigton, just north of the fells, for two years and escaping the shadow of the clingfilm factory to witness generations of champions, all called Brocklebank, do writhy battle on the Cumbrian turf was a delight. Fools might think that the embroidered pants worn by competitors over their white suits indicate a camp, silly sport, but they are wrong. It is a noble art and its practitioners are heroes; legends of the Lakes. The terminology is as thrilling as the bouts: swinging hype, hank, cross buttock, inside click. (The latter is a particularly devilish move.) While

Thursday

Camilla Swift

Picnics

Strange, isn’t it, that despite having such famously terrible weather, we Brits are so fond of a picnic. It’s something to do with making the most of what sunshine we get — but if you ever plan to eat outdoors, it will almost invariably end up raining. Never mind. There’s very little that we’re better at than embracing our terrible weather, and keeping buggering on. This year’s Ascot was, for me, a case in point. Every day of the meet was blessed with excellent weather — except, of course, the one day I went. A person more sensible than I might have looked at the forecast and planned accordingly. I

Thursday

Mary Killen

Your problems solved | 18 June 2015

Q. I was at the theatre recently and bumped into a well-known Liverpudlian crooner coming out of the disabled lavatory. She said ‘Don’t worry, luv, it’s fine to use them if no disabled people are waiting.’ Often theatre interval queues are long and in some of London’s better restaurants the ‘disabled toilet’ is closer, cleaner and more convenient. Is there a ruling on this or was Cilla correct? — N.C., Stanton St Bernard, Wilts A. Common sense tells us Cilla is right — but it is only correct to use disabled lavatories if you can be certain you will not thereby stymie the – possibly more urgent — need of

Guy Dammann

Country house opera

I stole a blanket last night. Rather a nice one, in fact. I feel bad about it, of course, but guilt is less inconvenient than pneumonia; and after trying to blow-dry my waterlogged dinner jacket with the winds howling through Garsington Opera’s ‘airy’ pavilion, it seemed like pneumonia or the blanket were the options. Forgive the melodramatic, self-justificatory tone. That, too, has its roots in the evening’s diversions, which included a performance of Intermezzo, Richard Strauss’s melodramatic and self-justificatory autobiographical account of a marital misunderstanding. It’s an odd piece, lovely in some ways, trite and misogynistic in others. Some decades ago, after a May Day ball in Oxford, I learned

Thursday

Simon Barnes

The farm that went wild

It was the nightingale I liked best. Or maybe the auroch. The nightingale sang strong and marvellously sweet when all the other singers had given up, his voice filling the night. Each nightingale has a personal repertoire of 250 phrases made from 600 individual sound units. I ran into the auroch at six the next morning: enormous, uncompromising and emerging from the bush with a formidable set of horns. Now it’s true that aurochs went extinct 400 years ago; they were the wild cattle of Europe, Asia and North Africa, ancestors of all our domestic stock. But this wild and extraordinary place is full of free-ranging old English longhorn cattle,

Wednesday

Camilla Swift

Equine squatters: the topic that united the Countryside Alliance and the RSPCA

In September last year I wrote about horses being illegally grazed and abandoned, and the inability of landowners to do anything about it. Back then, the government were poised to debate the topic for two hours in a bid to find some kind of solution to the problem. It’s not an issue that gets all that much attention in the media – after all, how much of a problem can a few ponies be? But fly-grazing, as this is called – actually causes a huge amount of trouble, for the horses themselves and for the people whose land they end up on, be that a private landowner or a local

Thursday

Simon Hart

Pandering to animal rights extremists will get MPs rejected, not elected

The reasons why England and Wales voted so convincingly for a Conservative Government on Thursday will be debated forever, but one of the most obvious is the complete rejection of both Labour and Liberal Democrats in any constituency that has a hint of the countryside about it. This is graphically illustrated by the post-election constituency map. Actually, suggesting that the voters rejected those parties is probably the wrong way round. The truth is that those parties have rejected rural voters. In 2015 Labour’s policy offer to the countryside was little more than a series of threats about everything from gun ownership to badger culling and extraordinarily the Liberal Democrats, despite

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Miliband country

Imagine rural England five years into a Labour government led by Ed Miliband, and propped up by the SNP and perhaps also the Greens. If you can’t imagine, let me paint the picture for you using policies from their election manifestos and only a small amount of artistic licence. The biggest house-building programme in history is well under way, with a million new houses mainly being built in rural areas. Several ‘garden cities’ have sprung up in Surrey, Sussex and Kent, though in truth the gardens are the size of postage stamps. No matter, because having a big garden is a liability since right to roam was extended so that

Tuesday

Louis Reynolds

Rural people have been let down by both Labour and the Conservatives

In 1997, Labour could assert with a straight face that it was ‘the party of the countryside’, because it genuinely competed with the Tories for rural votes. Today, an electoral map of England is a sea of blue rural constituencies dotted with clusters of urban red. Looking forward to May, the latest polls have the two main parties neck and neck, with the Tories on 34 per cent and Labour one point behind. This reflects an unhealthy urban-rural political divide that has rarely been more extreme. Labour is as unlikely to make in-roads into rural Conservative heartlands as the Tories are to win large numbers of seats in northern urban seats, making a clear victory

Monday

Camilla Swift

Exposed: the BBC’s ‘foxhunting’ smear against David Cameron

The Prime Minister’s interview on the Andrew Marr Show yesterday showed that despite claims to the contrary, Cameron isn’t lacking in passion; the PM was full of fight and his normal self-confidence. But there was one question he did falter over. ‘You told the Countryside Alliance magazine recently that your favourite sport was foxhunting’, Marr declared. ‘Is that really true?’. Cameron looked utterly bemused, but Marr was so keen on the question that he repeated it: ‘You said: “It’s my favourite sport which I love.” Is that true?’ Perhaps unsurprisingly, a Twitter-storm erupted at the news that Cameron had apparently ‘admitted’ to his favourite sport being foxhunting. But where on earth did

Thursday

James Delingpole

I went looking for a used car – and found my inner boy racer

A bit late, I know, to put in a bid for Jeremy Clarkson’s old job. But I think I might just accidentally have rediscovered my inner petrolhead. What happened was this. We’d just replaced our old sensible family car (a Ford Mondeo) with another sensible family car (a Skoda Yeti), only to realise that it just wasn’t enough. If you live in the country you really need at least two cars. The question was: what type should it be? Well, there are all sorts of cars I would like to own — the one I covet most of all being one of those evil-bastard Range Rovers, preferably the sport model with Kenneth

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: What can I do to make couples split the bill fairly?

Q. I’m a single bloke now and for various reasons don’t foresee any change to that status. I have moved to Australia and found several convivial people of similar backgrounds who are couples. From time to time we meet up in restaurants but I find there is an expectation that the bill be settled either by dividing it in two or that I should pay in full every other meal. No one ever suggests splitting it three ways. These are people with means. I dislike broaching the subject of money so the consequence is that I meet up with these friends less often than I would like to. —Name withheld

Quentin Letts

I know just the vicar for my parish church. Pity he’s fictional

For cheap laughs you should look at the situations vacant column of the Church Times — pages of jobs for Anglican clergy. The language, with its dreary emphasis on compliance and its neglect of individualism, may help to explain why the Church of England has become the Labour party at prayer. Number one word in these adverts is ‘team’. Applicants need to be ‘team players’. Other hot words: ‘passionate’, ‘change’, ‘management’ and ‘skills’. A couple of weeks ago the Diocese of Lichfield needed a ‘team rector’ near Tamworth — ‘a visionary, imaginative and inspirational team leader, passionate for evangelism and discipleship, with experience of managing change and able to enjoy