I stopped the car in a pleasant valley in West Wales last Monday and listened to Start the Week which had a very environmental content with Robert Macfarlane plugging his new book, Is a River Alive?, lawyer Monica Feria-Tinta talking about protecting habitats and plugging her book, A Barrister for the Earth, and Patrick Galbraith talking about access and plugging his new book, Uncommon Ground (reviewed here by me) and criticised here by Right to Roam.
Right to Roam’s attacks on Uncommon Ground were put to Galbraith and he did pretty well in answering them, I thought. If you are interested in access, and if you are wondering whether to read his book then listening to him talk about the issues, and being quizzed, is a sensible thing to do.
He made a good point that Right to Roam’s criticisms of him and his book are quite well hidden though quite well shared by them – that does feel slightly sneaky to me. I can’t imagine anything more likely to make a book interesting than it being attacked by ‘the other side’ – I certainly benefitted by attacks from the grouse shooting industry when Inglorious was published, particularly as the attacks were largely ad hominem and showed no evidence of being based on the contents of the book. No-one could criticise Right to Roam for not reading Galbraith’s book – they clearly have.
The Right to Roam criticism is strongly worded, ‘Falsity, misrepresentation and breaches of privacy and trust in Uncommon Ground, by Patrick Galbraith’ and centres, it seems to me, on his treatment of things said or emailed to him. I know of one other example, in relation to his first book, where someone told me they felt similar. I also know of cases where people felt completely happy about how they were quoted even though they were a bit nervous about talking to an author who was recently the editor of Shooting Times.
I’ve met Galbraith on a few occasions, including spotting him at an outdoor event in London quite a few years ago when I approached him and in a loud voice said ‘Hello Patrick, how nice to see the editor of Shooting Times at an event like this’ which tipped off a few folk as to who was mingling with them. The first time I met him properly, for lunch (he paid), I was open but guarded. He wanted to know what I thought about some things (can’t remember what exactly but probably driven grouse shooting came into it – we should ban it!) and I told him, but I did have at the back, no, actually the front, of my mind that in any meeting like this I should consider that anything I said might appear in print. Part of the reason for Right to Roam’s incandescent ire may be that they are kicking themselves for not being guarded enough (they now feel). That doesn’t excuse Galbraith for any lapses of standards that he may have committed, but it’s difficult to judge whether he has or hasn’t.
What I would like to see, and I’ve been waiting quite a while, is Right to Roam’s nature policy. When you visit their website it is said to be ‘forthcoming’ – it has been forthcoming for quite a while.
Oh, and a Wood Warbler was singing.
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I suppose you might hope that if you were to say to a journalist, for example, that someone you were in a dispute with was ‘miserable and sociophobic’ or that (in what I presume was a light-hearted quip) one of you colleagues ‘dresses like a cunt’ then it might not end up in a book. If it did end up in the book you might think that the book was a bit of a hatchet job rather than a genuine attempt to be balanced and fair. You might think that the author has recognised a significant threat to the status quo that he so enjoys and that this is his attempt at (as the Daily Mail puts it) a ‘skewering’ of his opponents. And that view might be reinforced when you read the interviews with landowners and gamekeepers where kid gloves rather than hatchets are the weapon of choice.
Skewering of a group you disagree with is fine, of course. And he’s very good at it. I just wish that more of the reviews recognised the book for what it is rather than for what it pretends to be. ‘Balanced’, ‘curious’ and ‘nuanced’ it is not, no matter how many reviewers use these words. (So far, it seems to be just the Daily Mail that is clear eyed about this.)
I wonder how easy the author is going to find it to do nuanced journalism about such issues in future. Will he be able to talk freely to people on all sides of a debate when this is how he treats them? Or will his reputation for using every trick in the book to embarrass those he disagrees with precede him? Then again, perhaps he doesn’t care. He will never run out of wealthy landowners, hunters and gamekeepers to interview.
Ian – thanks. You are right that an author may not find it easy to talk to people if that author gets a reputation for dealing badly with people he talks to. However, some of the things that were apparently said to Galbraith were things that it was foolish to say to one of your friends (who doesn’t write books or articles or anything else) unless you trusted their tight-lippedness completely, let alone some bloke from another viewpoint who you don’t know very well. That doesn’t excuse any bad behaviour that may have occurred but it does lessen my sympathy a little.
My review didn’t, may I make clear, use any of the words ‘balanced’, ‘curious’ or ‘nuanced’ as it was clearly deriding aspects of the Right to Roam views which, as you say, is fair enough, particularly because the Right to Roam views are not always ‘balanced’, ‘curious’ or ‘nuanced’ themselves and, as I point out, not clear on the impacts of greater access on wildlife at the moment (I feel). But that wasn’t the whole of the book. Where Galbraith scores over the likes of you and me is that he does talk to gamekeepers, wildfowlers and land owners of quite different sorts and relays their views (some of which seem very reasonable to me) to us, the leftie conservationists. That’s quite useful, I’d say, and who else is doing it? Not the CLA, Moorland Association or others as far as I can see – but maybe they are and I haven’t noticed because access isn’t the biggest issue in my life.
I don’t know what the big wildlife conservation organisations think about Right to Roam but I can recall the time of the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 when these issues were last very much live. Most wildlife organisations were nervous about access ‘rights’ being extended too far. I suspect they still have similar concerns but at the moment it is somewhat conjectural what the Right to Roam campaign wants to happen. And their policy on wildlife is ‘forthcoming’, and has been for quite a while.
Personally, this isn’t the biggest issue in the world for me and I will wait with interest to see the details of the Right to Roam’s wildlife policies.
But regardless of all that, Galbraith’s book is a good read (and is made all the more interesting by being attacked) and brings forward a bunch of interesting points of view. It is very well-written too.
Hi Mark,
RE: Nature policy. The broad position is that Right to Roam seeks to end arbitrary exclusion but supports justified exclusion and includes conservation in that category, especially where it pertains to at-risk species and where access cannot be reconciled with their flourishing. One of the reasons we shifted to supporting an adaptation of the ‘rules-based’ Scottish model is that it offers more flexibility in such areas than the designation model used by CRoW. You’ll have seen the campaign’s comprehensive proposals on dogs. We’ve been pretty bold, I think, in putting our head above the parapet on this issue and trying to trigger more necessary national debate. Creating detailed policy proposals takes time and involves many parties, and we don’t have the resources of an organisation like the RSPB. Your input on the issue is welcome.
I’m not going to get into a tit-for-tat on the book as the statement speaks for itself. It is not a question of anyone ‘kicking themselves’ but of basic journalistic standards. Look again at the book and ask yourself how plausible it is that those standards are being met.
Jon – thanks for your first comment here.
The various rights that we have and which we consider to be fundamental are all limited to a greater or lesser extent in specific circumstances. I have freedom of speech but it is not absolute and, for example, does not permit me to say damaging untruths about another person. In the same way, it seems to me to be perfectly possible to allow a general right to roam with a number of reasonable restrictions. These could include restrictions for reasons of privacy (not walking through people’s gardens), safety, crop protection, national security and wildlife protection. As far as I am aware the Right to Roam Campaign acknowledges that such restrictions are reasonable and should exist within an overall right to roam.
At present, in England at least, we are excluded from the great majority of the land for no good reason beyond the fact that someone else holds the legal title to the land. It would benefit many people if this exclusion were removed and it is hard to see what harm it would do (if reasonable restrictions are applied as described above). As with all of our rights, the right to roam comes with responsibilities and anyone abusing it by damaging property, disturbing wildlife or livestock, or other anti-social acts can be dealt with accordingly.