The British pastime of gardening is rooted in “racial injustice”, a professor who has been active in a BLM-style iconoclastic push in the National Trust has claimed.
In a book entitled the Green Unpleasant Land, the Professor of Post-Colonial Literature at the University of Leicester, Corinne Fowler, pronounced that the British “countryside is a terrain of inequalities”.
As a result of this, the left-wing professor declared that “it should not surprise us that it should be seen as a place of particular hostility to those who are seen as not to belong, principally black and Asian Britons,” the Daily Mail reported on Saturday.
Professor Fowler argued that because many British estates were financed in part from colonialism and slavery, “knowledge about gardens and plants, in particular botany, has had deep colonial resonances.”
“The scientific categorisation of plants has at times engaged in the same hierarchies of “race” that justified empire and slave and slavery,” she said adding that “inevitably, then, gardens are matters of class and privilege.”
In her book, the title of which is an inversion of British poet William Blake’s description of the British countryside as “green and pleasant land”, Fowler said that “Rural Britain” is “rarely peaceful”.
“The elderliness of the maids is incongruous with the many itinerant female East Europeans who, before Brexit, picked the fruit and vegetables that grace our tables,” she wrote.
Professor Fowler does admit in her book that she is guilty of benefitting from the British Empire, as her own family had connections to slavery on sugar plantations in the Caribbean.
“I make no claim to neutrality… Our relatives either profited from empire, or were impoverished by it,” she wrote.
In response to the latest attack on British identity, former Brexit Party MEP Martin Daubney wrote on social media: “Will this crap ever end? Or is this now our destiny: to forever bang our heads on tables at the sheer stupidity of humanity?”
London Assembly Member Peter Whittle added: “Like our other cultural institutions, the National Trust is now infested with the Britain-haters.”
“What chance of pushback from this ‘Conservative’ government?” Whittle wondered.
Professor Fowler was one of the co-authors of a review for the National Trust, Britain’s leading heritage body, entitled Connections between Colonialism and Properties now in the Care of the National Trust, Including Links With Historic Slavery.
The paper, which was commissioned and published by the National Trust in September targetted 93 properties including Sir Winston Churchill’s former home — Chartwell in Kent, for their supposed ties to the British Empire.
Fowler is also part of the Colonial Countryside project, which recently came under fire after it was revealed that primary school-aged children were tasked with ‘reverse mentoring‘ National Trust staff on the alleged evils of the British Empire.
Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka
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