Paul Kingsnorth, Real England: The Battle Against The Bland (Portobello Books, 2008) (excerpts):
“Leaving things alone these days is a sign of failure. Control, utility, is all, and progress means having fewer and fewer places to hide.”
“This report [The State of the Countryside 2020, Countryside Agency, 2003] is worth remembering because it is an excellent reflection of how farming and rural life are viewed by the office-bound political and business classes who are deciding its future. The underlying assumptions of this report, and of this class, are so huge that they are, paradoxically, almost hard to see.
“They assume that the business ethos of the city is applicable to the country side. They assume that people are prepared to accept a countryside in which the barns are empty of cows but full of ‘choice managers’. Above all, they assume one huge and untrue thing: that, in essence, the countryside is the same as the town. It is a green business park, with the same pace of life, experiential framework, morality and ethos as the town. It is the city with more trees, less pollution and a lot more free parking, and anyone sufficiently sentimental to imagine otherwise is just not being competitive enough.”
“‘I’ll tell you what scares the shit out of Tesco,’ says Peter [Lundgren, Lincolnshire farmer]. ‘It’s not the farmers – they can squash us. It’s not the government – they’ve bought them. It’s the consumers. If they decide to go somewhere else, Tesco is stuffed, and they know it. That’s where the power is. I wish more people would realise it.’”
“I am told by those who want to improve me, and direct me, that my standard of living has increased in the last thirty years – I have the benefit of new roads, runways, street lights, wheelie bins, health centres, houses and cars, as well as access to more gadgets and electronic wonders than apples on a tree. But ironically, as my ‘standard of living’ has increased so the quality of my life has dramatically decreased because of noise pollution, light pollution, air pollution, traffic jams, no policemen, the disappearance of the family doctor, litter, agitation, regulation, speeding lorries, junk food, supermarkets, dumbed-down television, political correctness, mindless development, materialism out of control, and the number of career politicians who clearly have never done a proper day’s work in their lives.” [Robin Page, The Decline of an English Village (Bird’s Farm Books, 2004 (30-year edition))]
“‘There can’t be a rural culture without farming,’ [Page] says, decisively. ‘There would be culture, but it wouldn’t be a rural culture. It would be a suburban and an urban culture. I call it urban colonialism. We are having urban values imposed on us, which I don’t like at all. When white people go up to black people and impose their views on them, that is said to be not wanted and culturally and racially objectionable, and then you tell me that you’re doing me a favour by doing that to me. It’s a version of ethnic cleansing, is what it is. I think it’s a disgrace.’”
[Other groups – both rural and urban, and in between – fighting “regeneration” in the book also use the term “ethnic cleansing”: the erasure of everything outside of the homogenized money culture (run by a ministry).]
“… [M]ore and more people seem to feel themselves part of a minority. Some of them, like London’s Chinese community, or other ethnic minority communities, genuinely are. England’s traditional farmers are too. Yet your average white-skinned, mainstream English person often feels beleaguered too. …
“They can close down a hundred pubs, build on acres of green fields, destroy entire industries, raze meaning from the landscape and call it investment. We are in the grip of the tyranny of this minority [‘of the chain stores, the developers, the agri-businesses, the big landowners’]: not a minority defined by its race or religion, but by its power and wealth. They run the show, and their lack of accountability makes all those who don’t share their bounties feel discriminated against.”
”‘They're fucking gangsters in suits.’” [Danny Woodards, grocer, Queen’s Market, Upton Park, East London]
“Preserving these things, ensuring that they continue to live, would not help us in our slavish and unquestioning journey up the global economic ladder. None of them makes quick bucks, and some make no bucks at all. And when we finally become a nation in which that is reason enough to shrug our shoulders and let them all go … well, you decide whether that makes us a global success or a local failure, or whether the two are strangely interdependent.”
“Across the country, we are confining real life to the margins; pushing it beyond the balance sheet; dismissing it; destroying the valuable and the irreplaceable.
[cf. the unverified in Joanna Kavenna’s novel Zed (Faber & Faber, 2019)]
“We are doing so because we must grow. We must develop, and regenerate, and push forward. We must consume and profit and invest and the end goal, while unclear, must not be discussed, and must certainly not be questioned. We are in competition with other nations who must do the same things, and there is not time for questioning. We are UK plc, and we compete in a global marketplace. We are serious people now, with no time for whimsy. Whimsy does not pay, and never has.
“As we move forward in pursuit of the siren of growth, we unleash a flattening of our history, heritage, landscapes and cultures. We tear up our orchards, bulldoze our markets, sell off our farms and our public squares. Big government and big business combine to steamroller people and places, for the good of the country, and those who object are pushed out to the margins, to cling to what remains of colour and character. That character clings on where it is not, yet, worth the time and effort it would take to extinguish it. But its time will come. It will be regenerated, because there is no other way.
“As I pointed out in the first chapter, the changes that are affecting England are no accident, and neither are they anything unusual in global terms. Global consumer capitalism is unleashing the same forces on every nation on Earth, and each of them, in its own way, is experiencing the same sandblasting of the special, the same razing of the real.”
“Delhi, England, Beijing, Prague, Melbourne, anywhere else you care to look … this ‘development’ – this beast which crushes all before it and calls that crushing progress – is the real enemy now. It existed before Marx, before Adam Smith, before trades unions, before the stock market. Back in the 1830s, [William] Cobbett called it simply ‘the Thing’, but it was ancient even then.
“This is not about Left versus Right. This is about the individual versus the crushing, dehumanising machine, whether that machine is represented by the profit-hungry corporation, the edict-issuing state or – today’s global reality – a powerful alliance of the the two. The machine may come at us from ‘Left’ or ‘Right’; the twentieth century has given us many examples of both variants. But wherever it comes from, it always overshadows any mere individual who stands near it.”
“The Thing has dehumanised us, and we are all increasingly dependent on it for succour. We expect. We demand. We are like children.”
