Had I not been trespassing, I would not have seen it and had it stopped. Last week I discovered illegal quarrying in part of the River Honddu in Wales. It also threatens to turn landowners’ fences into prison walls. Its proposal to criminalise trespass would deny the rights of travelling people (Gypsies, Roma and Travellers) to pursue their lives. This government seeks not to redress the imbalance, but to exacerbate it. Yet we are forced to skulk around the edges of our nation, unwelcome anywhere but in a few green cages and places we must pay to enter, while vast estates are reserved for single families to enjoy. A large body of research, endorsed by the government, suggests that our mental health is greatly enhanced by connection to nature. Children in particular desperately need wild and interesting places in which they can freely roam. The pandemic has reminded us that access to land is critical to our mental and physical wellbeing. Those who cannot afford to travel and stay in the regions with greater access (mostly in the north-west of England) have nowhere else to go. In many parts of the country, we are confined to narrow footpaths across depressing landscapes, surrounded by barbed wire. The big estates have seized and walled off the most beautiful vistas in England. Though we give landowners £3bn a year from our own pockets in the form of farm subsidies, we are banned from most of what we pay for.
The freedom to walk is as fundamental a right as freedom of speech, but in England it is denied across 92% of the land. If we try to express dissent anywhere else, we can be arrested immediately. We are forbidden to exercise a crucial democratic right – the right to protest – on all but the diminishing pockets of publicly owned land. If you own large tracts of land, a great weight of law sits on your side, defending your inordinate privileges from those who don’t. Our legislation’s failure to moderate the claims of property denies other fundamental rights. The disproportionate weight that the law gives to property rights makes nearly everyone a second-class citizen before they draw their first breath, fenced out of the good life we could lead. Almost all of us, in England and many other nations, are born on the wrong side of the law.
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