Please Keep Off the Nation

Last year, in one of its more understated cultural assaults, His Majesty's Government renamed England's areas of outstanding natural beauty as "national landscapes," in recognition that they are not merely beautiful but an asset of the master race. There are thirty-four such areas in England, of which the majority are more than ninety per cent out of bounds to the public, who must rest content with residing for the most part within a convenient travelling distance of the proud patriotic vistas. Nevertheless, certain elements protest that the right to roam should be assumed, despite the obvious dangers to our ever more robust British democracy; for there are, as we forget to our peril, right and wrong ways to want your country back. There is the sensible and moderate, legitimate and understandable way of wanting borders controlled, migrants deported, foreigners reminded who won the war, and reality in general put in its proper place; and there is the extremist way of demanding that the plebs be granted more or less unlimited access to the geographical resources of their betters.