The Countryside Alliance, which represents people who kill wild animals,
demands that unless he stops speaking out against the persecution of
wildlife, “the BBC’s only answer can be to remove the BBC from Chris
Packham’s biography by refusing to employ him any more.”
I hope the broadcaster has more sense than to take this demand for
censorship seriously. But, given the terror and anticipatory compliance
with which it responds to any challenge from the elite, you never know. If
it sacked him, we’d be left in the dark. For of all the BBC’s many
failures, its unquestioning, deferential treatment of powerful rural
interests must rank among the worst.
The countryside is now the arena for smash and grab accumulation of the
crudest kind. City money is flooding in, as a number of extravagant tax
exemptions, combined with farm subsidies, make rural land one of the most
profitable speculative investments of modern times. Its price has risen
fourfold in the past 12 years
<http://pdf.euro.savills.co.uk/uk/rural---other/alms-2015.pdf>; the rise
has been much faster, and steadier, than the growth in house prices.
Many owners, both old and new, are squeezing places and people for
everything they can get. Contract farmers strip the soil from the land and
rip up wildlife habitats. The population of farmland birds and other
wildlife <https://www.rspb.org.uk/Images/stateofnature_tcm9-345839.pdf> is
crashing. Rentier capitalism runs riot: a tenant farmer I visited last week
tells me that her landlords expect a minimum of 10% return from any
investment. Their houses and cottages are leased at rates that no one
making a living from the land could afford.
But the BBC is almost silent on such issues. Its current affairs programmes
are, for the most part, simply not interested. Their journalists (with one
or two prominent exceptions, such as Roger Harrabin
<https://twitter.com/RHarrabin?ref_src=twsrc%5egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5eserp%7Ctwgr%5eauthor>)
know nothing about the countryside and care even less. As for the dedicated
programmes, there’s an occasional space on Farming Today for an alternative
voice, but otherwise, across the BBC’s output, the story is told almost
exclusively from the point of view of the proprietors. The destruction, the
rip-offs, the iniquities are airbrushed from the picture.
The worst offender is the BBC’s flagship rural programme, Countryfile
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006t0bv>. It portrays the countryside not
as it is, but as we would like it to be. Timeless, unsullied, innocent,
removed from the corruption and complexities of urban life.
Multi-millionaires in the lowlands, sitting on property that would make a
banker blush, are portrayed on Countryfile as horny-handed sons of toil,
eking a stony living from the land. Those who really do struggle – the hill
farmers – are allowed to pretend that they make their living by selling
sheep. In reality, in economic terms, sheep are purely ornamental: their
production makes a loss. The real harvest is farm subsidies, without which
there would be no farming in the hills at all. But this uncomfortable
reality is never allowed to intrude upon the pastoral idyll. Viewers are
kept in the blissful ignorance to which they are accustomed.
Dissonant, disconcerting issues are avoided like the plague, as the
programme tiptoes past the crashing contradictions of rural policy in its
insatiable pursuit of the twee. There are occasional spots of light, like
the report it broadcast recently on soil erosion. But they are remarkable
for their scarcity. Elsewhere, controversy is ignored, muffled or
misrepresented. Countryfile would fit snugly on the lid of a chocolate box.
Any attempt to propose a series telling a different side of the story is
dismissed out of hand by the BBC’s controllers, without discussion or
explanation – as I know to my cost. There is no balance here, no
impartiality, no attempt to challenge the comforting myths that shield
patrimonial capital from public view. To single out Chris Packham, as the
Countryside Alliance does, for engaging in “propaganda” is to miss the fact
that this is a fair description of the BBC’s entire rural output.
As a result, despite great public enthusiasm for the countryside, we know
almost nothing about it. Though we hand out over £3bn a year to landowners
in Britain, many of them among the world’s richest people (including oil
sheikhs and oligarchs who seldom visit, if at all), 55% of citizens here have
never heard of the Common Agricultural Policy
<http://www.fwi.co.uk/news/public-gives-thumbs-up-to-farmers.htm> (the
subsidies system). Though farming is by far the greatest terrestrial cause
<http://uknea.unep-wcmc.org/> of the loss of wildlife, destruction of
habitats and damage to soil and watersheds in the UK, 75% say they believe
that farmers
<http://www.fwi.co.uk/news/public-gives-thumbs-up-to-farmers.htm> “have a
beneficial effect on the countryside”. How could it be otherwise, when we
are so carefully protected from hearing the other side of the story?
In other words, far from heeding the Countryside Alliance’s call for the
censorship of Chris Packham, the BBC should clone him, as he’s almost the
only corrective it currently possess to the saccharine, bucolic nonsense
pouring from our televisions
www.monbiot.com
[permagriculture] Rural Idiocy | George Monbiot,
Lawrence London, 09/16/2015