A peregrine, a juvenile female with pale scalloped edges to her mahogany feathers, careened from the crag and drew with her a contrail of nervous jackdaws, their wings sawing the blue air of this brilliant morning. It might seem strange, but the moment reminded me of words published 30 years ago about this very column. To its readers, Melvyn Bragg suggested, the country diary is “one of their touchstones of sanity”. In turn, the peregrine was my reassuring shot of sanity in a world gone mad.
Beeston is a National Trust property inside a national park, yet even this place has been drained of wildlife diversity in the last few decades. Many of the most protected parts of Britain could be vastly better for nature. The ambition for a richer landscape thus became a Conservative pledge at the last election, built around an intention to devote a third of land to the billions of non-human residents that live here.
The new prime minister, however, wants a bonfire of Britain’s protective legislation for nature. This is a direct threat to the environment land management scheme of the previous administration, which was set up to deliver public benefits including greater biodiversity in exchange for public money. Liz Truss would rather revert to the old system of giving billions of pounds to landowners merely for owning land.
On top of that, 570 environmental laws, rolled over from EU directives since Brexit, are suddenly in jeopardy. No wonder the National Trust and 77 allied organisations have united to fight what they see as a blatant attack on nature.
What Bragg saw in the country diary was something that diverted attention away from “the maw and Mammon” of human self-drama to our fellow residents – plants, lichens, insects, fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals. The lives that are the indispensable common soil of these islands, and which have an existential right to persist here. Today, however, the times are out of joint.
So for the sake of this young peregrine, I summon all my fellow contributors to this column and invoke the spirits of great diarists past (Bill Condry, Enid Wilson, back to Thomas Coward 116 years ago), and reject this government’s extraordinary attack on nature.
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