By Tim Bonner

The current favourite for my epitaph is the wonderful description “a politically naïve liberal”, bestowed upon me by the British National Party after their unsuccessful attempt to hijack a rural demonstration more than 20 years ago.

This supposed slur came after I pointed out that everything the Countryside Alliance stands for is the opposite of what they believe in.

Sadly, some still assume that rural communities are made up of bigoted yokels. Academics from the University of Leicester were so determined to prove this that they established the Rural Racism Project to ‘challenge the dominant depictions of rural England as peaceful, neutral and apolitical’. Given the project’s name, it seems some minds were made up before research began. It was no surprise that the project’s report concluded rural racism is rife, by deploying torturous arguments.

Firstly, the research avoids........

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