Mick Hartley

It gets sillier and sillier. From the Telegraph – National Trust boss: Ethnic minorities don’t know what to wear in countryside;

Non-white people do not feel welcome in the countryside because they do not know what to wear, the head of the National Trust has claimed.

Hilary McGrady said it was the heritage and conservation charity’s job to stop ethnic minorities feeling the outdoors was “not a place for them”.

The trust’s director-general said research found minorities did not feel welcome and that the organisation had a duty to respond because it was “here for everyone”.

How very patronising.

Listing a “whole raft of reasons” which she said showed the countryside was not welcoming to non-white people, she told LBC: “Everything from: it’s not culturally something that they necessarily feel as if it’s part of what they do when they go there.

“They don’t necessarily know ‘what am I meant to wear, how do I behave? What’s a countryside code? I’ve never heard of it’.

She thinks ethnic minorities are stupid. “Them” as opposed to “us”. In need of guides and subtitles. Just look after the National Trust properties, you ridiculous woman. If people want to come they’ll come: if they don’t, they won’t.

In 2024, the charity Wildlife and Countryside Link claimed the countryside was a “racist colonial” white space “governed by white British cultural values”.

It prompted, Suella Braverman, the former home secretary, to say such claims were dangerous, adding that “we need to stop making white people feel guilty for being white”.

The previous year, academics specialising in British colonialism and hate studies were commissioned to record the “lived realities” of ethnic minorities living, working, or hiking in the country to gather evidence of “rural racism”.

They were clearly determined to find it.