In the last few years dog attacks on sheep have increased considerably. The NFU paid out £1.8m in 2022 to settle claims. This also happened to be the worst year ever for dogs attacking people, with large numbers bitten and 12 actually killed. Hardly surprisingly, this coincides with an almost doubling of the number of dogs kept as pets in the UK from 7.6 million in 2011/12 to a fairly accurate estimate of more than 13 million currently.

While the pandemic puppy goes some way to explain this increase and lockdown might have something to do with the attacks on people cooped up with their frustrated pooches, there is something else at play here. People have forgotten, although it is doubtful if many of the recent owners ever knew, that dogs are dogs. They are not friends, or child substitutes, or fashion accessories. They are pack animals which establish and maintain a hierarchy (often through fear). They are not amenable to reason. And they don’t have a conscience. Dogs need discipline, routine and boundaries with a steady relationship with their owner whom they should respect as the top dog in the hierarchy. This is not achieved through violence, but by the owner’s self-restraint and self-discipline. As one tremendous sheepdog handler said to me, ‘you’ll never beat sense into a dog; you’ll just beat out whatever sense it might have had’.

A dog must be allowed to be a dog. There is a tendency of many modern owners to want total physical control by never allowing their dog off the lead – or the body-harnesses that seem to be increasingly popular. These are a sure sign that the owner is trying to make friends with the canine and remind me of those reins that mothers used to attach to their toddlers. Of course on one view, people are just obeying the ubiquitous exhortations to keep their dog on a lead in public places. This is not because the dog is better behaved on a lead, it is simply a pragmatic solution to the owner’s lack of control. It recognises that he doesn’t have a working relationship with his charge, and means that the dog is continually testing the physical restraint of the lead rather than behaving under discipline. A trained dog, walking to heel without a lead, is under control. Whereas a dog on a lead is, in fact, out of control, living in permanent reaction, waiting for the opportunity to do whatever takes its fancy rather than what will please its master.

There was a man who moved into our village with his wife and four children. Believing a dog would be an addition to the family, he bought a Labrador pup which he and the family treated as another child and a friend. As the dog grew bigger it began to assert itself first by biting the smallest child, then over the following weeks it worked its way up the family hierarchy biting each of the children in turn, until it had a go at the wife. The man did nothing until it bit him, when he had it put down. That dog found each member of the pack up the hierarchy unworthy of respect and wanting, so it made a bid to be top dog. Had it been treated as a dog, it might well have made a decent dog. But once a dog knows it can get the better of humans, it is spoiled for all future purposes.

We had another neighbour who lived on his own and acquired a powerful Springer spaniel which he let get away with all manner of bad behaviour progressing to sleeping in his bedroom. Gradually it insinuated itself onto his bed which it came to believe was its own. If it managed to get upstairs before him it refused to allow him to get into his own bed. Then it stopped him coming into his own bedroom, snarling and bearing teeth which it had every intention of using. If the dog got upstairs first, he was reduced to sleeping in an armchair in the kitchen. If it got into the car before him it would defend its territory to the death and he could neither get the dog out nor get in with it. He had allowed the dog to become top dog.

Time was when people kept dogs for a specific purpose: farm dogs for shepherding or cattle droving; terriers for ratting, hounds for hunting, gundogs for shooting, guard dogs for guarding and so on. Hardly anybody kept a dog as a pet for amusement or companionship. In any case many people couldn’t afford to feed a dog kept only as a pet, nor could they see the point. Although a bond of affection undoubtedly could grow, especially if master and dog spent their lives together and became mutually dependent, as did a shepherd and his dog, any fondness would be incidental to the reason for keeping it. These owners would have known that dogs can bite.

As our society has become more atomised, there are many lonely people looking to bestow affection upon another living creature and as human relationships are either too difficult or not available, they light upon their canine friend and like to believe it is reciprocated. This seems to stem from a kind of narcissistic need for admiration, which they mistakenly think they are getting from their dog, when in fact the dog is lapping up (so to speak) the attention coming from its owner. They find it hard to accept that the dog they love and that admires them so much is capable of embarking on a killing frenzy when it comes across a flock of frightened sheep. And because the owner has no control over the dog and anyway feels good about indulging it and does not have the capacity to discipline it, because he has not developed the sense of responsibility needed to have the dog’s respect, it is let free to ‘play’ with the sheep. After all a dog has a much right as anyone – especially a farmer who is rearing the sheep to kill them anyway – to enjoy the benefit and pleasure of being in the country. And don’t you dare say otherwise, or I’ll have you prosecuted for discrimination.

Beavers disappeared from Britain about 500 years ago because they cannot co-exist with people in a settled landscape. These energetic, powerful rodents can quickly bring down quite large trees with their orange iron-reinforced front teeth and are a tremendous pest to farming and highly destructive of woodland. The beaver-people know this. They gleefully describe them as ‘natural eco-system engineers’, capable of quickly transforming flowing streams, woodland and fields into strings of ponds and marshland. Part of their nonsense is to give the impression that beavers use their ‘engineering’ skill strategically to build dams that will somehow reduce flooding, when in fact, their dams create flooding. They gnaw trees erratically, almost at random, some they fell and abandon, while others they leave to die looking like a giant pencil balanced on a stump. The rest they jam haphazardly across the watercourse, adding mud and stones, until the water is dammed to create the lake in which they build their lodge with more felled trees, branches and mud.

Recently, the National Trust’s ‘Wilder Wallington’ team held a few public relations events to soften us up for the imminent release of beavers – part of their ‘re-wilding’ – which also involves planting a million trees on 1,250 acres of farmland by 2025. They are fencing 50 acres – part of a farm they took in hand last year and left unoccupied – with over a mile and a quarter of wire-netting, into an enclosure for ‘a family’ of beavers – up to six – which includes woods, a large grazing field and a river and some streams. The grassland itself would have supported 40 or 50 ewes, but dedicated to aquatic rodents it will soon revert to the marshland it was 300 years ago. The fencing has to be strong and chest-height, because beavers can gnaw and climb, and angled out at the bottom and pegged down, because they can dig. Grilles are to be installed across the watercourses and will have to be cleared regularly of debris. Every tree in a stand of ancient oaks has to be protected by wire netting to save them from the new residents. It’s a mystery how they can reconcile beavers’ tree felling with their own tree-planting. Anyway, beavers can only be confined until they find a way out. The Wilder Wallington people freely admit their escape would not be unwelcome. Start them off in a ‘secure’ enclosure and when they inevitably get out, there’s nothing can be done because they’re protected by law. It’s all really clever. No land with a stream running through will be safe from the eco-warriors who will have penetrated every part of the British countryside by their agents of destruction.

The NT admit that their original plan, now modified, was to ‘re-wild’ all of Wallington’s 13,500 acres, to create a ‘carbon sink’ to ‘sequester carbon’ to offset their ‘carbon emissions’ on the rest of their properties nationwide. They claim this would increase ‘biodiversity, air quality, soil health’ and ‘prioritise opportunities that also deliver wider co-benefits for climate change adaptation’ – whatever that may mean. Wallington would no longer be ‘emitting carbon’ by 2030, instead, it would be ‘sequestering’ carbon and playing its part in the NT ‘achieving net zero’ by 2030.

This is straight out of the playbook of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that has decreed 20% of farmland will have to be ‘released’ before 2050 to keep the increase in global temperature to 1.5 – 2.0C. It’s fully supported by the British government, directed by the WEF and such global panjandrums as Bill Gates. Almost all British government policies now have an ‘environmental’ element, with a particular antipathy to farming, which is now secondary to ‘nature’ – and the NT is well up with this, achieved by the state bribing farmers not to produce food. Instead they are to be park-keepers and nannies for the ‘biodiversity’ intended to displace crops, livestock and ultimately farmers themselves. It’s yet another mystery how they can reconcile ‘eating local’ with their scheme that will produce little that’s edible to humans from their estate.

But then none of what they’re doing makes sense. If you point this out they fall back on the ultimate justification for nearly every idiocy – ‘climate change’. Beavers, bogs and trees are somehow going to reduce ‘global warming’. They make the vague and mendacious claim that farming ‘degrades’ the soil, so farmland must be made ‘nature friendly’ by 2025 to ‘allow plants and animals to thrive’. Why doesn’t that include sheep and cattle and the grassland that feeds them? Because the animals and plants they want to ‘thrive’ are, almost by definition, of no direct benefit to humanity. Rather they are, like the beavers, emblems of the insanity that has the Western world in its grip, symbols of everything going wrong in the British countryside – and in the wider Western world – and part of an apparent global campaign to reduce our capacity to feed ourselves.

Those NT farming tenants who know how to grow things on their land and

don’t want to live off state bribes and are less than sanguine about beavers and re-wilding fantasies, are to be subject to re-education by the NT. It is going to ‘work in partnership with [its farming] tenants … to support long-term behaviour change’. In other words, their farmers will have to compromise their farming in favour of ‘restoring nature’. One pernicious (perhaps intended) effect of this is to create discord where none existed. Farmers are cast as ignorant, even wicked, despoilers of ‘nature’, who must be made to see the error of their ways by virtuous ecologists and environmentalists. And if they don’t fall into line, they will be replaced by a new type of pliable tenant who will combine the NT’s version of ‘farming with nature’ with obeisance to ‘net zero’ and ‘combatting climate change’.

They have made a start with replacement, by letting part of one of their farms to West End Women and Girls Trust from Newcastle. They proclaim that at their ‘beautiful smallholding in the wilds of Northumberland … women and girls (and anyone who identifies as a woman) can grow and harvest together, have fun and be free in the wilds … while [they] joyfully smash the Patriarchy together’ and … er …‘re-home donkeys and goats’.

A beaver came in the night (for they are secretive and nocturnal) and felled that ornamental tree in your front garden? You should be honoured that you’ve been chosen to support this ‘fascinating species’, as the Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals describes them, despite the Scottish government having to cull over 200 of the 1,200 that have proliferated across Scotland since their release in ‘a trial’ in 2009.

When the beavers inevitably escape and colonise somebody else’s land, only the state can authorise ‘trained’ and licensed ‘experts’ to move them, or as a last resort, cull them. Of course that raises an outcry from kindly animal lovers who form a considerable majority of the British urban population, but they don’t realise there is nothing benign about beavermania. It is a blow aimed directly at the heart of our civilisation.

© Philip Walling

March 20^th 2023

  

IN November last year, the Northumberland Woodland Creation Partnership launched its great plan to plant millions of trees across the county by 2030.  

In November last year, the Northumberland Woodland Creation Partnership launched its great plan to plant millions of trees across the county by 2030.   This is part of the eco green deal which the Government is bribing farmers and landowners and deceiving the public into accepting. Its proponents have come up with the catchy mantra ‘planting the right tree in the right place for the right reasons’.  

So what are the ‘right reasons’? Northumberland County Council leader Glen Sanderson gave a speech at the launch of this scheme in which he said the reasons for planting trees are ‘to tackle the big challenges facing society, such as climate change and biodiversity decline, while promoting health and wellbeing and supporting a thriving local economy’. 

Councillor Sanderson didn’t mention the primary reason for the state promoting and paying for (through grants) the planting of new woodlands – their value as ‘carbon credits’.  

Rich people and big business will be able to buy these from the owner of the trees to offset the carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions caused by their activities.  

However, trotting out that the trees are being planted to save the planet, or promote wildlife and ‘health and wellbeing’ and to ‘support a thriving local community’, is nonsense which doesn’t take much thought to see through. 

Planting trees has become necessary to supply the rapidly expanding market in carbon credits. Each metric tonne of CO₂ (tCO₂e) absorbed by trees will be worth a ‘carbon credit’ which the Government promises to buy at a set price or, if the owner thinks it more advantageous, can be sold at auction into the private market.  

Established woodland is excluded from the scheme. And only carbon sequestered by new planting is saleable, even though newly-planted trees emit more carbon in the first five years of their lives than they absorb. Don’t old trees absorb carbon? Or is the scheme limited to new trees because it’s aimed at getting trees planted on established farmland?  

In 2011, the Forestry Commission produced for the Government the Woodland Carbon Code, which regulates the types of carbon credits that can be sold. This is administered by Scottish Forestry on behalf of the various UK governments. Its cohort of ‘experts’ will assess the carbon absorption rate of woodland in tonnes.  

This whole carbon credit scheme arises from the 2005 Kyoto Protocol on climate change and the 2015 Paris Agreement, whereby Western governments made pledges to achieve ‘net zero’ CO₂ emissions by certain dates.  

Our government chose 2050 for the whole economy to go ‘net zero’. But ‘net zero’ doesn’t mean no CO₂ emitted anywhere. By this ingenious system of ‘carbon credits’, those individuals and large companies whose activities emit carbon dioxide will be able to offset their emissions by buying from the owners of woodland the carbon that their trees are calculated to have absorbed over a period of time.  

But if saving the planet from ‘greenhouse gas emissions’ is as vital as we are told by the eco-zealots and their acolytes, then surely we shouldn’t allow the global elite to criss-cross the world in their private jets, or big business to continue their CO₂ emitting activities?  

However, so long as they can persuade national governments to get landowners to plant trees, the elites and global businesses will be unaffected if they can afford to buy a share of the carbon stored in somebody else’s trees and pass the cost on to us.  

It gets worse. Most of the carbon credit agreements are to last for 30 years. Which means that for the duration of the agreement the landowner will have given up the ownership of his woodland and be unable to do anything with it contrary to the terms of the agreement.  

He will have ‘monetised’ the natural assets on his land so that one or more of the roughly 12,000 large companies in Britain (and others across the world) that are required to undertake ‘greenhouse gas monitoring’, will own the substance of the trees growing there, but similarly be unable to do anything with them. And if the owner sells the land, the obligation will pass to the buyer.  

So what is a carbon credit worth? Where there is a commodity, a market will arise to trade in it, complete with its own jargon and complicated rules. The carbon credit market has become a fine example.  

The value of a carbon credit is based on validation by the high priests who keep the secrets of the Woodland Carbon Code. Even though, as mentioned, trees under five years old emit more carbon than they absorb, they still have a value based on the carbon they are expected to absorb after they have passed the five-year mark.  

The market has come up with two types of carbon credit. A Pending Issuance Unit (PIU) is an advance payment on the landowner’s promise to let the trees grow to five years and beyond. These are selling for between £7 and £20 per expected tonne of carbon.  

The second type is a Woodland Carbon Unit (WCU), which is a payment for carbon that the trees have been assessed as already having absorbed.  

As the scheme is in its early stages, too few of these have come up for sale to fix an accurate price, but ‘Vintage PIUs’ (note the jargon) which are PIUs in the process of being verified by the experts as worthy to become WCUs, are selling at a premium of about £30 above the PIU price.  

On average, say the experts, one acre of new woodland can sequester about 2.5 tonnes of carbon annually. So its worth in carbon credits after it has been established for five years is roughly between £37 and £50 a year. 

But do not be deceived. None of this has anything to do with saving the planet from ‘climate change’. Even if planting trees would reduce the rate of global warming, the evidence is that permanent pasture is just as effective at absorbing carbon.  

Moreover, pasture feeds grazing animals that feed us, keeps farmers on the land and supports a thriving local economy and gives us the English landscape we love.  

No, the real purpose of this tree-planting is to change the use of our land and to cleanse it of independent farmers – those who produce the food from the land we live on.  

It will destroy local communities as well as creating wilderness and desolation. Because, unlike current forestry practice, the owner of a stretch of newly-planted woodland will not be allowed to manage it or remove any trees without a corresponding repayment of the price of the carbon credit he has taken.  

His land will be subject to the whim of someone he probably won’t even know. He will have to deal with government bureaucracy if he wants to do anything to manage his land. Effectively, although he will still be the nominal owner, the value of his land will have been transferred to some faceless corporation, via the state. 

This is what they want. It has been sold to the credulous as necessary to save the planet, whereas in effect it is a gigantic scheme to transfer the land from individual private ownership and control into the hands of the state and international big business.  

Northumberland County Council ought to be ashamed of its involvement in this deceit. To be fair, though, the terms are set by central government, which in turn is controlled by international forces. But every one of the assertions in favour of this tree-planting is misleading and will have the opposite effect to that claimed.  

For example, it is hard to see how planting woods that cannot be touched for upwards of 50 years on previously productive farmland that has been created by the skill and sweat and muscle of our forefathers, will ‘support a thriving local economy’. In fact, it will clear the local community from the land.  

How will creating a trackless wilderness reverse the ‘biodiversity decline’, whatever that is? We are not told. These are good modern examples of Orwellian Newspeak: War is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength. 

That the leader of Northumberland County Council can swallow all this shows he either doesn’t understand what he’s dealing with, or he is careless about misleading the Northumbrian people whose interests he’s supposed to look after. It would be interesting to know which it is.  

© Philip Walling

This article first appeared in TCW on March 22 2022

It was before 6am and still dark when I was awoken by the faint, persistent ringing of the phone downstairs. I dragged myself out of bed and padded the full length of the house down to the kitchen.

‘Hello’ I croaked.

‘I say! My water’s gorne orff!’

‘It’s Mr Allday, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. Of course it is. What are you going to do about it? I can’t have my baarth.’

We had only moved to the farm a few weeks earlier and I knew that the Alldays, who lived across three fields, about a quarter of a mile away, drew their household supply from our water tank, but I knew nothing about the way the arrangement worked.

Cyril Allday was an 84 year old retired farmer from Gloucestershire. But not just any old farmer. Between the wars he had established the best herd of Dairy Shorthorns in England, as he was happy to tell anyone he thought interested. He was the son of a bank manager from the Midlands, who had fought in the trenches and been used to commanding a large staff and getting his own way. He loved fell walking, was an accomplished amateur photographer and lived in retirement with his late-married younger wife and unmarried sister in a delightful house across the fields, called Turnerhow. It was formerly Tannerhow, just along the road from where the medieval Brackenthwaite corn mill had once straddled the Liza Beck. The house had been gentrified in the late eighteenth century and all traces of its workaday origin covered up. Both the house and gardens were entirely surrounded by my fields and were reached by a narrow track that ran between drystone walls.

Our water supply came from a pipe in the Liza Beck into a stone cistern sunk into the ground and covered with huge slabs. It had originally been fed from a low sluice built at an angle across the little beck, but it had been washed away long ago and replaced with a makeshift collecting vessel in the form of an aluminium box dug into the gravelly bed and encased in copper gauze that acted as a filter.

That part of the Lake District (indeed all the Lake District) gets more rain that almost anywhere else in Britain and it often falls over a short time. As it drains a large area of the high fells, the Liza is subject to violent flooding. After a deluge on the fell tops the water runs off quickly, transforming it in an hour or two from a little beck chattering over shallow gravel beds and meandering around boulders, into a roaring dun-coloured torrent tearing at its banks and tumbling stones and gravel down to its confluence with the Cocker.

On one tremendous August day in 1760 that was still remembered two centuries later by the few people whose families had lived in the valley for ages, an intense rainstorm caused a waterspout to sweep down Gascale Ghyll, between Whiteside and Grasmoor, which set off a landslide on the front of Grasmoor and sent a wall of water down the Liza that washed all before it. It is likely that the corn mill was destroyed in this torrent and never rebuilt, probably being redundant by this time anyway. But the main effect of the cataract was to deposit a bed of silt and gravel, many feet deep, across all the flat fields adjoining the beck. When the sun came out after the rain the surface of the fields was said to look like a cross between a pavement and a cobbled street. Crops were destroyed and the pasture fields covered with so much gravel that it would have been impossible to cart it all away. So the farmers left the silt and small stones spread out and only took away the bigger stones to break up to repair the roads. Over the following summers the gravel grew over with herbage and the flat land gradually regained a covering of soil. But in a dry summer the grass often turned brown over the gravel beds where its roots could not penetrate to the water in the subsoil.

‘What do you expect me to do?’ I asked him.

‘Find out what’s wrong. And get our water back on so we can at least boil a kettle! It’s no good at all! It’s most unsatisfactory. It never happened when George and Willie were here,’ he shouted.

Bearing in mind that it was not yet daylight, blowing a gale and, when I put my head outside the kitchen door, lashing with rain, I was not too happy to trudge across three steep fields to find out what was wrong with the water tank. But I didn’t know what was expected of me. For all I knew, it had been an incident of the Mackereth brothers’ previous tenancy that they were to ensure the Alldays had water.

‘Right. I’ll go and have a look.’

He clicked the phone down without replying. Rude old sod, I thought.

I went back upstairs, where my wife was still sleeping, unaware of the tempest raging outside, or the dressing-down I had just received from our neighbour. The ancient stone walls of the house were so thick that with the little windows closed, a terrorist bomb (had there been such things in those days) could have exploded in the yard and we would probably not have heard it. In fact, we were so oblivious to one memorable storm that raged while we were asleep, that a huge limb broke off the ancient yew tree that overhung the back of the house and crashed through the roof. We woke up to a jagged branch sticking through the ceiling into our bedroom, directly above the bed, showering us with the debris of three centuries’ of broken lath and plaster.

I slipped into yesterday’s clothes, tiptoed downstairs to the back kitchen and struggled into my waterproofs. Grabbing my most powerful torch from its hook by the back door, I ventured across the yard, yanked open the workshop door, took a spade and set off into the howling wind driving the stinging rain. The black leafless branches of the massive sycamores that sheltered the farm thrashed and cracked above me in a wind that snatched at my breath. Dark shapes flitted amongst the trees. I could hear nothing but the fury of the gale and the rain slashing against the walls of the house, and I began to believe I was being followed by malevolent forces, keeping their distance, and waiting for an opportunity to attack. The faster I went, the harder they chased me and the more terrified I became. I pressed on, bent into the howling wind, daring to glance from time to time over my shoulder and occasionally wheeling round whenever I imagined their breathing came too close. I was damned if I was going to let them play grandmother’s footsteps with me, so I forced myself to slow down. Running only encouraged them to come on faster and they were certain to be able to outrun me.

Just stand out in the open, I reasoned, where they have nowhere to hide, and face them down. So I stopped in the middle of the little steep croft behind the house and shone my torch wildly around, peering into the wet darkness, back down the slope where I had come from. Whenever a particularly savage buffet shook my resolve, I spun round to confront the demons pursuing me. It was hard to stand upright against the wind and I could see nothing in the lashing rain but the black branches threshing wildly in a storm that had become so violent I was half-surprised the drystone walls could stand against it.

Reaching the little wicket gate in the wall from where the path led down to the road beside the beck, I passed into the arcade of branches from the hedgerow trees that overarched the road. The wet black surface was strewn with sticks culled by the cleansing storm.

Before I got near, I could hear the roar of the water above the violence of the gale, and as I got closer my torch beam illuminated the violent gravy-coloured cataract rearing and tumbling down its bed. I dared not approach too close for fear of slipping into the broiling waters and being carried away. This was a beck that I could normally skip across dry-shod from stone to stone. I pointed my torch beam at the place where the water intake box ought to have been, but the torrent scouring the bed of the beck and pouring across the fields, was so violent that I could only conclude the intake box had been washed downstream. I went to the cistern and shone the beam through a little crack in the great slabs covering it. It was almost empty. The water just came up to the middle of the outlet pipe in the bottom and the little that remained was a placid oasis unruffled by the tumult of the hundreds of thousands of gallons of flood-water crashing down the beck twenty yards away.

There was nothing I could do. Dawn had started to seep into the valley, back-lighting the tracery of black branches against the brightening sky. I hurried back to the house across the empty fields, regretting the frisson of terror that was now evanescing in the growing daylight and feeling a bit stupid for being so terrified. I flung open the back-kitchen door and slammed it shut against the storm, the quietness was like plunging underwater. The phone was ringing in the kitchen and with water dripping from my coat and trousers, I hurried to answer it.

‘Well? Have you got it back on?’

‘No, I’m afraid not. The beck’s in tremendous spate. I can’t get near it.’

‘Have you tried?’

‘Look, the water’s five feet deep and roaring down its bed. I couldn’t stand up in it even if I tried. We (I wanted to say you, but didn’t quite dare) will just have to wait until it subsides.’

He put the phone down with a ‘humph’.

It had stopped raining by the time I was eating breakfast and spotted through the kitchen window the determined figure of Cyril Allday struggling along the lane towards the house, relying painfully on a stout walking stick. In his old age he had become victim to arthritis which had deformed his hands and feet and many of his other joints. It was painful to watch him struggling along, walking over on his insteps, with twisted ankles and misshapen legs, but he was damned if he was going to let it get the better of him. Bad-tempered old sod that he was, I felt sorry for him. The pain can’t have helped him control his temper, although that was not the whole cause of his irascibility. In fact it was more likely the pain was the result of it.

Every step of his beloved fell-walking had become exquisite torture so that by this time, he could no longer climb the fells and photograph the wild places he loved. He made his final ascent of the 2,900 feet of Grasmoor (which was almost at his back door) on his 80^th birthday on a spectacular October day. The photographs he took were his last and some of his best. From the summit, looking out west across the Irish Sea on a clear day, in a certain condition of light, it is possible to make out the white houses on the coast of the Isle of Man; while far off to the north west, across the Solway Firth, the coastline of the Mull of Galloway stretches out to the horizon and merges with the sea. Cyril’s photographs captured all this in the fading light of an autumn afternoon. They turned out to be his swan song and a requiem for the Lake District and the natural world he loved.

His affliction put me in mind of Beethoven’s deafness and Milton’s blindness, ‘the one talent which is death to hide, lodg’d with [him] useless …’ forced to the realisation that those ‘who best bear his mild yoke, they serve him best …They also serve who only stand and wait.’ Cyril Allday bore with great fortitude the far from mild yoke that prevented him from doing what he loved and what he had retired among the fells to do. It was even more poignant that it was not in his nature to ‘only stand and wait’.

I went out to meet him as he hobbled into the yard. He was brusque.

‘This is no good at all. We haven’t even enough water to boil a kettle. You’re going to have to sort it out.’

‘I’m really sorry, but there’s nothing I can do while the beck’s in spate. The intake box has been washed out.’

‘What box?’

He had no idea what I was talking about because he readily admitted that he had never actually been to the water intake box, nor had he the slightest idea how the water system worked. He had relied for nearly twenty years on George and Willie Mackereth, my predecessors, keeping it clean and the water flowing, despite his household being entitled to draw as much water as it needed from the tank.

‘The aluminium box covered in copper mesh that sits (or probably sat) in the bed of the beck and which collects the water that flows into the tank. I thought you would have known how the system worked. I had supposed you would have shared the maintenance with the Mackereths.’

He knew what I was getting at, because he was lost for words for a few moments, until he recovered himself, and said, ‘You cheeky young bugger!’

I feared I’d gone too far and didn’t know what to say to row back from my apparent insubordination. We stood looking at one another. I noticed his glasses were spattered with rainwater and I remember thinking that I would have wiped the lenses clean because I would have found it annoying to see things opaquely through raindrops. It was one of those things that old people seemed to stop noticing. Despite his irascible rudeness and self-absorption, I felt a pang of tenderness towards this old man whose body no longer obeyed his formidable will.

It would have taken more effort than he was capable of to climb down the river bank, dig the box back into the gravel bed of the stream in freezing water and re-lay the pipe. He was no doubt feeling vulnerable, afraid that his house would run out of water and that he would be unable to do anything about it. His wife and elderly sister depended on him, the man of the house who had once been capable of tackling anything. Although he was losing his physical strength, his pride would not let him ask for help, although it would let him force someone else to do what he no longer could. I promised to get his water back on as soon as the flood abated and in the meanwhile I offered to carry some water in jerry cans to keep them going.

In the afternoon, when I went over to see if the water had receded enough to get the water flowing into the tank, I encountered him, picking his way along the bank and surveying the scene.

‘I see what you mean,’ he shouted above the roar of the still swollen beck, ‘I thought I would come along and see what I could do, but it’s impossible!’

When I took the jerry cans of water to his house his wife, Jean confided that he had been secretly a little impressed I was prepared to stand up to him and he saw in me a little of the stubborn young man he had once been. I told her I thought he was being too generous – after all it was me who found myself a day later, my arm up to the shoulder in freezing water, digging a hole in the bed of the beck to re-site the intake box and get the water back on.

Sometime later the Alldays invited us round one evening for sherry and a slideshow of Cyril’s photos, and very good they were too. The next morning Jean rang to say that Cyril had died in his sleep. I wondered if the evening had been too much for him, but she was characteristically matter of fact, ‘he was old and ready to go. He could no longer do what he loved doing, walking the fells with his dogs, gardening and taking photos.’ She told me he wanted me to have his Home Guard issue .22 Browning sniper rifle that he used to shoot rooks from his bedroom window.

One of his more irascible incidents gives a flavour of his character. I was driving a large woolly mass of sheep which filled the road between the stone walls, when Cyril came up behind in his Austin Allegro and impatiently pip pipped his horn. I walked back level with the driver’s window and explained that I wasn’t going far, there was no way he could get through and asked him just to hang back for a few minutes. He replied he was in a ‘tearing hurry’ and besides he knew how to push through a flock of sheep. As he drove into them some of the frightened sheep broke back and my dog Tess doubled back in front of his car to stop them escaping. Cyril couldn’t see what was happening, so he kept going and ran over Tess, who was rolled under the middle of his car and came out standing on her feet behind. I shouted, ‘Hey, you’ve just run over my dog!’

He must have seen her in the rear-view mirror standing in the road apparently unharmed, but a little dazed, because he shouted, ‘No harm done!’ waved an arm out of the driver’s window and kept going until he had pushed through the flock and sped off down the road.  

We ought not to be surprised at Canada’s treatment of the truckers and those who oppose vaccine mandates. Canada has form for the kind of repressive measures we’ve seen recently that would once have been the preserve of a totalitarian state.

For over 25 years, the Our Farm Our Food group have been campaigning for the freedom of people to eat what they want. Since 1994, a co-operative of about 150 families, has owned a farm in Ontario from which Michael Schmidt, an outspoken advocate of unpasteurised milk waged a campaign to be allowed to sell to the public the milk the farm produced. It is unlawful in Canada to sell any dairy produce that has not been pasteurised.

Schmidt and the co-operative tried to get round this by using the fiction of ‘cow-sharing’ agreements. A person could buy a share in a cow, have it looked after by the farmer, who milked it for the owners who then consumed the milk from their own cow. This arrangement had been accepted in various US states as lawful and the rather naïve Schmidt believed it would work in Canada. He had underestimated the repressive instincts of the Canadian state which turned its full force against Schmidt as the figurehead of this defiance of the Canadian ‘health’ regulations.

In 2010 he was acquitted by a magistrate of 19 charges of distributing unpasteurised milk. But the Canadian authorities did not accept the magistrate’s decision and instructed the prosecution to appeal to the Ontario Court of Justice. The higher court found him guilty of thirteen charges of breaching the ban on selling and distributing raw milk, fined him $9,150, put him on probation for a year and issued a perpetual injunction preventing him from distributing raw milk in the state. The Ontario Court of Appeal dismissed his appeal.

He embarked on a five-week hunger strike in 2011 to protest against the injustice of his treatment. In 2013 he was found to be in contempt of court for breaching the injunction and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment suspended for a year. Again an appeal was dismissed.

Schmidt refused to keep his head down, making it quite clear that he believed people ought to be free to eat and drink what they want, particularly if it is good for them. The authorities raided his farm numerous times, seized computers and business records and destroyed milking equipment. The health enforcement agencies even installed secret CCTV cameras in trees around the farm and bugged Schmidt’s house.

 One particularly oppressive raid and stand-off in October 2015 resulted in a trial of four of the owners of the farm. The police put on a great show of force with four heavily-armed police officers in court during the ten-day trial and three more stationed outside. Eventually, after various adjournments over nearly two years, the court found Schmidt guilty of obstructing a ‘peace’ [sic] officer and sentenced him to 60 days which he was allowed to serve at weekends. This was later reduced to a month’s house arrest.

The police did their best to blacken the defendants’ reputations by wrongly claiming (deliberately, the defendants said) they were members of the Freemen of the Land, a libertarian organisation classed as ‘extremist’ by the Canadian state. The Freemen are treated as a serious threat to the state’s increasingly repressive totalitarian grip, probably because in their hearts lives the same yearning for liberty that originally attracted their forebears to the New World. Smearing them in this way caused a great deal of trouble for them and their families. Their names were added to a national database of people, such as jihadists, who pose a violent threat to the state. All the state agencies and enforcers were alerted to their dangerous proclivities, which affected their lives in a host of damaging ways. The authorities were determined to make an example of them.

The onslaught against unpasteurised milk producers has not abated. On October 27 2021 Schmidt’s farm, along with two others, were subjected to a great show of force in pre-dawn raids by armed police. Although Schmidt’s wife bravely refused entry to the police who wanted to search the house and seize computers and records, they broke into the locked dairy barn anyway and seized some dairy products and other things. So far no charges have been brought.

Even though there is a strong demand for unpasteurised milk in Canada and considerable support for Schmidt, the state will go to almost any lengths to prevent its distribution, even if it has been tested for pathogens and proved to be safe. The embargo is necessary, say the authorities, to ‘maintain a strong food safety system’. Unpasteurised milk ‘may contain harmful bacteria and cause serious health conditions’. The state is determined to treat untreated milk as if it were poisonous. Anybody producing it risks more oppressive treatment and heavier penalties than if they were busted for drugs. Just as they have done with the truckers, the government threatened to take the farmers’ children into care if their parents gave them unpasteurised milk to drink.

Until Trudeau’s state set about destroying the lives of the ‘extremist’ truckers one might have been forgiven for believing Canada to be a less violent, more benign version of its southern neighbour. But in its government’s response to events of the last two years it has bitten with the teeth of repression that it has been sharpening for a long time. Just like Australia and New Zealand, the Canadian state’s inclination to force conformity on its people reveals the dark side of the Anglophone countries’ obedience to the rule of law.

I am writing to express my extreme disquiet at the decision of the court to allow Julian Assange to be extradited to the US.

I would like you to pass this letter to the Home Secretary to ask her to overrule the court and prevent his extradition.

I have no axe to grind for Julian Assange. My objection to his treatment is entirely based on principle and has nothing to do with him personally.

This is a wholly political case which should have been rejected on that ground alone as contrary to Article 4 (1) of the 2003 Anglo-US Extradition Treaty.

But it goes much further than that. The Treaty, agreed during the Blair era is unfair, weak and almost wholly one-sided. It allows the US to demand the extradition of UK citizens and others for offences committed against US law even if the alleged offence was committed in Britain by a person living in the UK. In effect it allows the US authorities to demand that we hand over anyone they want to punish, whether or not the alleged offence is unlawful in Britain.

This is a violation of our sovereignty and in Assange’s case amounts to a threat to the freedom of the press. It is unimaginable that the US would hand over to the British state one of their own citizens accused of publishing leaked documents. But any British journalist who embarrasses the US government by exposing any of the truth that the US state hides from its people faces the same fate. It must be remembered that he has committed no crime according to our law. The real reason the US government wants Assange’s extradition is to extract revenge for his having embarrassed the state and shown its government to have lied to the people and to Congress.

Assange revealed many things the US state did which were in themselves illegal and, frankly, wicked: injustice, brutality, secret imprisonment, torture and ‘extraordinary rendition’.

Publishing large numbers of confidential US government files is not illegal under US law. He was acting as a journalist when he published the documents he had received. Had he been a US citizen he would be immune to prosecution because of the First Amendment to the US Constitution which protects the freedom of the press.

If extradited, Julian Assange will be tried in the US and,if convicted (which looks almost certain) faces a US style prison sentence, which could last the rest of his life It is repugnant to any fair-minded person’s sense of justice that Julian Assange should face the rest of his life in the US prison system, first as an unconvicted person and then almost certainly as a convicted criminal. He is neither a terrorist nor a spy nor a murderer. None of his actions has harmed anyone. That he should face the prospect of spending the rest of his life in an American prison with terrorists, murderers and other violent criminals amounts to unimaginable cruelty and cries out for clemency.

I beg the Home Secretary to exercise her power to prevent this injustice and overrule the decision of the court.

22 April 2022