ON A dull November Saturday a couple of weeks ago I found myself among a hundred or so country people – ageing farmers and others along for the show – at Elf Hills on the National Trust’s (NT) Wallington estate in Northumberland, where the tackle and equipment of nearly four decades of livestock farming of one of their tenants was going under the auctioneer’s hammer. Two years ago the NT took in hand Newbiggin, a 350-acre farm not all that far away, to plant trees. I wrote about it here. Now that the Elf Hills tenant is retiring, they are at it again with another 350 acres, where they are planning to plant trees and ‘re-wild’.
As was obvious to anybody with the slightest understanding of land and farming, abandoning Newbiggin to ‘nature’ has quickly turned once-productive fields into wasteland. All husbandry has ceased. Drains and gutters are silting, riverbanks eroding, fallen trees are left where they lie, and weeds and scrub proliferate. What was until recently farmland supporting families and producing livestock and crops has become the preserve of carrion crows and magpies while the songbirds they prey on have largely disappeared.
Now Elf Hills is about to suffer the same fate. Its land is to be cleansed of human life; no longer will the labour of men be employed in making this land fruitful. There will never again be a family farming here; never again will people learn to love these fields by living on and working them through the seasons. The strong stone house and eighteenth-century basket-handle arch hemmels may survive, but they will never again shelter cattle from Northumbrian storms.
As I walked round the yards and the field where the items were laid out for the inspection of buyers, listening to the white-coated auctioneer coaxing bids for everything from a bucket of nails to an almost-new tractor, I was overcome with gloom. This was the end of 250 years of farming at Elf Hills. Land that had been claimed from bog and wild moorland, walled round, drained and laid out in convenient fields, at great expense, with considerable determination, was about to be reclaimed by the wilderness. It was hard to avoid the feeling that I was witness to a terrible transformation that is sweeping our country – and probably every other country in the Western world. Although what is happening to our land is but one aspect of civilisational collapse, it does not make it easier to bear. Once these farms and the families who know how to work them go, they will never come back – at least not in any foreseeable future. These places are being made desolate. Here, at this sale, was the future: comfortless, barren and destitute of people.
The abandonment of hard-won farmland to the wilderness in the worship of the pagan gods of nature and ‘climate change’ is the modern-day abomination that will result in the desolation of our land and our people. The NT say they are doing it to ‘sequester carbon’ to ‘combat the climate emergency’ as part of our race to ‘net zero’. It is not only a whole way of life that is to be sacrificed to appease these new gods, but a living countryside and a people’s connection with it. To ‘save the planet’ it must be cleansed of the people who live and work there.
The farmers I spoke to at the sale were bewildered by what the NT is doing. ‘It’s stupidity.’ ‘These eco-people are crazy. What are we going to eat?’ ‘Don’t they realise we can’t eat trees?’ They could have let these farms to any number of keen young farmers who want an opportunity to have their own enterprise. I know of two on Wallington estate who were refused by the NT. Even though that’s what used to happen on agricultural estates. The landowner felt an obligation to the people living there, farming his land and did his best to maintain the community. Some traditional landowners still do, but many have been corrupted by the influence of the state and big business which bribes them to get rid of farmers – or at least farming. It’s much more profitable to claim the subsidies for planting trees and selling the ‘carbon credits’.
But the forces behind this are far from stupid – they are not crazy. When I suggested to some of the farmers that what is being done is wicked – devilish even – and that evil stalks the land, they looked at me as if I were the one who is crazy. The very idea of the devil being behind it was a step too far for them. They preferred to believe the forces pushing these measures didn’t know what they were doing and once it dawns on them that it is a stupid policy and that ‘climate change’ isn’t happening, good sense will prevail and things will return to normal. Many of them pinned their hopes on Reform reversing these ruinous policies. Good luck with that.
They couldn’t see that the world has changed; that individual farmers working their own land are a doomed species. That nobody is coming to save them. The climate change scam may have run its course and be starting to unravel, but the state will not cease taking land from farmers and out of food production. Farmers are one of the most powerful groups who stand in the way of state-enforced neo-Marxist fascism. And the state is fighting farmers on numerous fronts of which, bad as they are, tree-planting and the imposition of inheritance tax are not the most dangerous. Something much more ominous is about to become law.
Having passed through the House of Lords on November 24, 2025, the Planning and Infrastructure Bill is almost certain to receive Royal Assent in a week or two.
Amongst other iniquitous changes to the ownership of private property, the Bill gives local councils the power of compulsory purchase of land from the owner, for all kinds of development, at ‘current use value’, removing ‘hope value’ – the value with planning permission – but allowing the acquiring local authority to re-sell the land at ‘hope value’ and pocket the profit. This is a perfect example of an unholy alliance between huge corporations (foreign and home-grown), big house-builders and cash-strapped local councils. It is simply confiscation of private property and its transfer to the state, and a further huge step along the road to the abolition of private land ownership. And we thought they couldn’t achieve their boast that we would ‘own nothing and be happy’. What an ingeniously sinister way of rescuing local councils from the consequences of their corruption and inefficiency. It will also go to pay for many of the things central government has dumped on to councils.
The bill is stuffed with platitudes about ‘restoring nature’, but the truth is it allows developers to absolve themselves of responsibility for biodiversity improvements on the site they are developing by paying ‘a nature restoration levy’ into a central fund. Natural England, or another state-approved body of ‘experts’, will formulate Environmental Delivery Plans (EDPs) that will mandate what must be done to mitigate what will be necessary to ‘support nature recovery’. There is nothing in the Bill about protecting farming.
Coming on top of the all-but abolition of the right of farmers to hand on their land to future generations, this Bill will prevent a hard-pressed farmer from even using the lifeline of selling an acre of his land for building to pay the inheritance tax. It quietly, but effectively, assaults private ownership of land and hastens the end of a people’s ancient connection with their soil.
