Rural Englishness and the Extreme Right

The idea of the rural has long played a key role for the extreme right. It symbolises the nation as a site of beauty unspoiled by the degeneration of the modern world, or echoing the Third Reich notion of Blut und Boden – blood and soil – signifying a sacred link between people and their native landscapes.
In both regards, the urban world and immigration represent invasive pollutants: urbanism and industrialisation physically erode the countryside and, in so doing, spread urban, cosmopolitan values into rural areas. Immigration brings non-nativist bodies into native spaces: non-white bodies that are seen as not belonging in the English countryside.
This geography of exclusion sees the countryside as the last bastion of Englishness, which must be protected from liberalism and modernity, which are inevitably traced back to conspiracies involving malign Jews.

One post-war tactical result of this, imported from the US, has been attempts to establish white enclaves in the countryside, small settlements where neo-Nazis (for example) can form communities and live independently of modern, multicultural England.

Whilst these attempts have met with little success, their aims retain an emotive pull for many of the extreme right: the hope of experiencing genuine belonging and working and living rooted in the English landscape, fulfilling the link between the individual, the ideals of nation and race, and the landscape. Such enclaves represent the pursuit of an authentic life. Living in the countryside will make you a better, more ‘English’ person and extreme right groups have often met or trained in the countryside for the same reason.
Whilst these extreme right positions might seem radical, how different are they from conservative or ‘Little Englander’ ideas? Since the advent of popular motor travel, conservative voices have bemoaned the intrusion of urban dwellers into the countryside. C. E. M. Joad, writing in the interwar period, complained about the invasion of noisy vehicles, and, more pointedly, the ‘sounds of negroid music’ issuing from ‘gramophones in meadows’.

The countryside is still extolled as a desirable destination for the wealthier to move to, a place somehow safer and more morally wholesome than urban areas, where children can experience an idyllic childhood. The history of the Country Code represents a moral geography where certain behaviours are legitimate in the countryside, and others are not. So, the rural visions of the extreme right, much like their antisemitism, are often based on more mainstream, conservative historical views of Englishness.
For the extreme right, rural England is an imagined landscape. This is Johannes Zechner’s term, which argues that landscapes can ‘function as projection screens for … political agendas’. This is where historians of fascism can puncture holes in extreme right visions of the rural as representing something eternal and essential about Englishness. After all, the patchwork quilt fields which are used to represent England’s beauty in everything from political party broadcasts to holiday adverts are not remotely natural, they represent the dividing up of common land for private ownership, enabled by various Enclosure Acts over the last 400 years.

The fascist English rural is therefore another example of a myth created from a cherrypicked version of the past and developed in the pursuit of a vision for fascist rebirth.

(Image used under Create Commons license here:ITookSomePhotos, Countryside near Mid Lavant, West Sussex, England, CC BY 4.0)

Clive Henry

Clive Henry is currently a PhD student at the University of Northampton.