‘I do love the creatures I hunt’, writes Patrick Galbraith in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking Our Relationship With The Countryside. ‘I love snipe in sundrenched winter meadows and it’s never really autumn, I think, until the teal are in.’ Like many who take part in activities like shooting and wildfowling, Galbraith — a former editor at Shooting Times — is interested in a form of ecological conservation. These sports, after all, rely on the maintenance of certain habitats.

On the surface, Galbraith’s genuine concern for protecting birds and their habitats powers much of the book’s central thesis, which is that campaigns to increase land access, most notably Right To Roam, are destructive, because poorly informed people trample birds’ nests when they walk across the countryside. The book has been warmly reviewed across the mainstream media. But whose interests do these arguments actually serve? And to what ends?

‘The more I looked’, writes Galbraith, ‘the more it started to seem as though compelling narratives around large landowners being parsimonious bastards don’t always stack up’. And the more we look, the more transparent it becomes that Galbraith thinks the ruling class should continue to keep colossal swathes of land for their personal use — and will deploy their sense of ecological responsibility to justify it.

Uncommon Ground, and its reception, is a reminder that the ruling class knows more than anyone about class solidarity. Rupert Cabbell-Manners, who gave the book five stars in the Telegraph, is blessed with the kind of surname that makes researching land ownership easy. His family owns the vast country pile Cromer Hall in Norfolk. A Telegraph notice from 2024 reveals that Galbraith himself is soon to marry into the family that owns Norfolk’s Walsingham Estate. Perhaps they’re neighbours. 

Evidence of the author’s obvious bias is threaded through the book, sometimes revealing itself in painful inconsistencies. He describes the Right To Roam campaigners protesting on Dartmoor against Alexander Darwall’s wild camping ban as ‘terrifying the 76-year-old gamekeeper’ and ‘verbally abusing their employees’, noting in summary, that ‘from the off, the Right To Roam has felt needlessly toxic.’ But a few pages earlier Galbraith relates his meeting with the ‘terrified’ gamekeeper, who tells him, ‘we were expecting aggro but there weren’t a bad one among them’.

Galbraith’s basic argument is that good landowners do a fine job of conserving their land, and that any other ways of management, particularly ones that would involve freedom of access, threaten this work — because the public can’t be trusted. He points admiringly to examples like Holkham Estate, managed by conservationist Jake Fiennes. ‘The wildlife that the public gets to see at Holkham is there, in part, because of Jake,’ he writes, ‘and Jake is there because Holkham is a success.’ Even ignoring telling uses of language such as ‘gets to see’, this circular logic doesn’t hold water, however brilliant Fiennes might be at his job.

If Galbraith cares about ecology, does he not mind that many landowners, such as Wynyard Estate owner Sir John Hall, have made substantial donations to climate change deniers Reform UK? Why doesn’t he mind that many, such as Sir Jim Ratcliffe and Matthew White Ridley, have significant investments or careers in fossil fuel companies? What would he say if Jake Fiennes’s employer Lord Leicester, like the Duke of Cornwall, decided to sell his land to mining companies? In Galbraith’s world, ecological breakdown has nothing to do with the rampant capitalism that has rested — since the Normans — on the private enclosure of land. 

For the long term protection of lapwings, we need a lot more than conservation projects managed by people whose sense of noblesse oblige (and incentivisation by taxpayer-funded stewardship grants) could be revoked on a whim. Either Galbraith hasn’t done the thinking here, or he assumes his readers won’t. Meanwhile, he attempts to dismantle Right To Roam by casting their organisers in a derisory light, making arch observations, and leaning heavily on well-established criticisms of environmental campaigners: that they’re middle-class crusties who enjoy going for walks, dressing up and reading books.

Right To Roam is an organisation set up in 2021 to campaign for a legal right to roam across England and Wales. The books that powered it into the public consciousness — Nick Hayes’s Book of Trespass and Guy Shrubsole’s Who Owns England — do good work of showing how the fight for public access to land is inseparable from the logics of settler-colonialism, anti-immigration and rentier capitalism. They outline why this fight is strategically important: because the ruling classes know very well that without places to live, work, play, organise and socially reproduce, we are disempowered. What would become of the Church, asked Henri Lefebvre, if it had no churches?

Putting aside Galbraith’s wider argument and its prejudices, there are in fact subtler, more specific criticisms to be made of Right to Roam. While being involved in a splinter group of the organisation throughout 2023, I began to feel that certain decisions were isolating the campaign and obscuring its own ideological position, even to itself — thereby exposing it to conservative narratives seeking to undermine it on the level of identity and aesthetics. 

On the subject of the genocide in Palestine the campaign has been notably silent, despite the links it has itself identified between enclosure and settler-colonialism. Its penchant for reanimating pagan spirits as puppets in some of its protests creates a striking imagery and a strong visual identity grounded in rich folk traditions. But an organisation which understood its own struggle as one intersection in a nexus of anti-racist class struggles would surely realise that such gestures can be slightly naff and tone-deaf.

When campaigns don’t embrace the most basic available form of their own demand, they not only limit their goals, but risk isolating themselves and appearing parochial. When it comes to land justice, simplicity should be a source of radicalising potential and strategic potency, because the question at its heart is straightforward: why is this yours, but not ours? 

Obfuscating such basic questions is invariably presented as a noble application of ‘nuance’ and ‘complexity’, and this is the primary function of Uncommon Ground. Conservation, when used to justify the landowner-as-steward model, is a moot point: there are plenty of examples of democratic land management that protect at-risk species just fine. Likewise identity politics is wielded clumsily to try to muddle political clarity: Galbraith has a habit of mentioning the ethnicity of his interviewees only when these are minority identities and are in accordance with the central thesis, as though they might protect his argument.

When class conflicts like land access emerge in the political moment on practicable terrain, they can function like a reality check. Will we recognise the struggle for what it is, and grasp the opportunity to fight it? Or will we allow the nature of the conflict to be denied or confused? Uncommon Ground is the latest attempt to do this on behalf of the ruling class, and we should understand it as nothing less, whatever the author’s self-conception.