EVERY year, by stealth, the proportion of the UK populace living in urbanised conglomerates and apartments increases, while the proportion of Britons living in the countryside and in houses slowly declines. Humanity is being rearranged. The master plan of the powers-that-be is for zoning, on a scale far beyond that of the new town social engineers of the Sixties. Habitation, farming, industry and nature conservation are all to be ordered to globalists’ design. Forget sovereignty or self-sufficiency; there’s a new world order now. The dystopian future is the Smart City, giant solar farms and farmerless food production.
As with the start of the Industrial Revolution in Britain in the late eighteenth century, China has shown again how dramatically its people can be moved to where industry is and to where political and business leaders want them. On the backs of the masses in vast cities and their dormitories built around sweat-shop factories, China became the new workshop of the world. The rural interior, meanwhile, has been depopulated, leaving empty villages and disused fields succumbing to desertification.
In the UK, hamlets and farms, fishing villages and even recently built housing estates on the edge of towns may go the same way. Don’t think it can’t happen here, because it has happened before, in the Highland Clearances.
Sutherland, the northern-most part of the British mainland, was until the early nineteenth century the home of crofting communities, living off the land in the ‘straths’ (valleys). The story of their removal is told by James Hunter in Set Adrift upon the World: the Sutherland Clearances (2015).
This large county was mostly owned by the Marquis and Marchioness of Stafford. The former was George Granville Leveson-Gower, and the latter was Elizabeth Gordon, Countess of Sutherland, who inherited her title and land from her father, the 18th Earl of Sutherland.
The Staffords decided to clear the people from Strathnaver, Strath Brora and the Strath of Kildonan to rent the land more profitably to sheep-farmers. The ‘improvement’ plan entailed the transfer of all valley folk to the north coast, where they would be expected to eke out their sustenance by fishing. From verdant valley to barren rock in one foul swoop. Aristocrats, like the oligarchs of today, knew best.
The removals were to begin in 1813, but the communities stood firm, and their cause had some sympathy in the British press and Parliament. As Hunter notes, ‘aggressively expansionist capitalism of the type promoted by the Stafford was just as heartily disliked by conservatives as by radicals’ (try telling that to the likes of Owen Jones).
The authorities feared a rebellion against landowners as had erupted in Ireland. After the crofters were unsuccessful in their appeal to Parliament, Sheriff Cranstoun was offered a battalion of regular troops to quell the resistance. But the Highlanders had proved themselves as the strongest fighters in the Napoleonic wars, and when the sheriff and constable met at the Golspie Inn to pursue criminal charges against the rebels, they were surrounded by an angry crowd and withdrew. Sutherland would be no pushover.
Farmer, lawyer and factor, Patrick Sellar, referred to the inhabitants contemptuously as the ‘Aborigines of Britain’. These were people who could not help themselves. Highlanders, according to Sellar, ‘lived in turf cabins in common with the brutes’, and were ‘fast sinking under the baneful effect of ardent spirits’. Actually, the crofters were cleverly supplementing their income by illicitly distilling and selling whisky, after procuring copper stills from Inverness.
Some of the crofting families took the opportunity to migrate to British North America, where a new settlement was planned on the Red River in Manitoba. This was facilitated by the Earl of Selkirk, a trenchant critic of the clearances, but a pragmatist. After a perilous journey of ten months, the hardy Sutherland settlers founded what eventually became the city of Winnipeg.
Back in Sutherland, the Staffords and their commissioner James Loch were impatient. However, Sellar had damaged their reputation with his ruthless methods of eviction, which led to his trial for culpable homicide, and brief imprisonment. The court heard that when a frail woman wouldn’t budge from her home, he shouted, ‘Damn her, the old witch, she has lived too long; let her burn.’ Newspapers reported the conflagration and brutality.
In 1819, the Staffords began the final clearance of the area. Removal notices from the sheriff court pitted the obstructive crofters against the ‘rule of law’ (a favourite phrase of Sir Keir Starmer, who epitomises a remark during the Sutherland debacle that ‘law is one thing, and humanity may be another’). The beatings would continue until morale improved.
As the Sutherland townships lost their critical mass, the Earl of Selkirk aided a further exodus. In Nova Scotia, families faced harsh conditions, cutting arable land out of the thick forestry in a strange but not dissimilar terrain. At least, they were free from persecution.
Over five thousand people were removed over a two-year period, slowed by various obstructive tactics. The authorities resorted to army intervention, despite outcry over the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester in 1819, when troops attacked and killed protestors. At last, James Loch, an estate manager and later an MP, and the architect and apologist for the Countess of Sutherland’s land policies, was able to inform Lord Stafford that the ‘turbulent people’ had been completely ejected from the land.
Author Neil Gunn, from Caithness, wrote several novels on the Sutherland clearances, most notably Butcher’s Broom (1977). In Silver Darlings (1969), he conveyed the atmosphere at the desolate landscape of Kildonan, where a thriving community was uprooted: ‘we are affected strangely by any place from which the tide of life has ebbed’.
I felt this too, in my field study of vacated asylums (mental hospitals), as described in my book Echoes from the Corridors (with Peter Nolan, 2016).
Proving to be no friend of the ordinary Sutherland folk, the Church of Scotland showed itself as part of the establishment by siding with the Staffords. Understandably, much of the flock defected to the Free Church, which was often refused permission to erect places of worship in Sutherland.
The small, mixed arable and livestock farming of the crofters was replaced by the defoliating monoculture of sheep-grazing. Later in the nineteenth century, when domestic wool production was undercut by cheaper imports from Australia and New Zealand, much Sutherland pasture was given over to deerstalking and grouse-shooting.
The modern version of what the Staffords termed ‘improvement’ is ‘rewilding’ plus something else instigated by Boris Johnson – the ‘Lump Sum Exit Scheme’ for farmers reported by Sally Beck in these pages just over a year ago. The purpose is the same – fundamentally about removing people from the land. Unlike Sutherland, however, the process is more gradual and is totally instigated and subsidised by the Government. Rewilding efforts in Britain have already claimed 181,128 hectares (447,000 acres) of farm land and we can expect it to gain momentum in the years ahead.
The countryside I fear is to be depopulated, but not for the Government’s purported ecological intention. Rewilding is not merely misplaced ecology. It’s to remove farming communities’ contact with the land and to prevent proper cultivation, food production and local food security.
Farmers and large landowners successfully bribed by DEFRA to rewild will find it is for their short-term gain only. For it is they and the farmers who are the age old guardians of the land, not the government, or the ideological oligarchs and net zero fanatics government is hand in glove with. That’s why these moves must be resisted and countryside continue to be managed and farmed. Otherwise the country’s agricultural estate will fall into disrepair, the globalists all the while stepping up their ‘industrial’ insect production and hydroponic planting, as exclaimed over excitedly by depopulation advocate Sir David Attenborough.
Farmers are far from the capitalist ogres depicted by metropolitan lefties and progressive urbanites who, if they woke up, would realise they have nothing to gain by the ‘save the planet’ mob’s strictures. They should understand the bigger agenda behind the farmers’ inheritance tax and ask who the globalists are actually saving the planet for? The answer to that, is for themselves, only.
