On Saturday my wife was working so I decided to go for a good long walk in the Hampshire countryside near my house. I planned my route using an Ordinance Survey map and off I went.
Within 200 metres of the start of the walk I came across my first “PRIVATE PROPERTY – KEEP OUT” sign. More or less everywhere I went I saw similar signs. “NO PUBLIC RIGHT OF WAY”, “KEEP OUT”, “CCTV IN OPERATION”, “YOU ARE BEING WATCHED”.
Now I am a country boy and have also worked for the ministry of agriculture and a Wildlife Trust. I know the importance of the rural economy. I know about the problems of theft farmers face. I know about how carelessly leaving a gate open can ruin a farmers day when his livestock wander off into a crop and damage it. I know about the importance of not disturbing pheasant pens too as the shooting might well bring in more money than the farming. I also appreciate more than most the importance of not disturbing wildlife.
What I did object to was seeing a “NO RIGHT OF WAY – KEEP OUT” sign placed in the middle of a ride through a wood that was clearly marked as a right of way on the map. I thought “fuck it, I know what I am doing.” and walked down the track anyway. Within a few hundred yards I came across a huge pheasant pen with high fences completely blocking the path and had to turn around and make a huge detour to get where I wanted to go. Including walking a few hundred yards down another track with big KEEP OUT – NO RIGHT OF WAY signs that wasn’t marked as a right of way on my map but it would have meant an additional mile or more added to my already lengthy detour.
I kept thinking as I walked of Woodie Guthrie’s song “This Land is Your Land” and the lyric about the other side of the signs being for you and me. It is not just about the right to walk down a path of course. It is how the rich keep all the good shit for themselves and leave us with less and less.
Most people in the world are taxed, spied on, have to work to please their employers not themselves (if they have a job), have to cope with rising food prices and shrinking wages, increasing energy costs, erosion of liberty, failing health care, worries about retirement costs (if you can afford to retire at all). The list goes on and on.
Then there are the rich fuckers who are so insulated from all this by virtue of their wealth that they might as well live on a different planet. There are several big houses / estates near me where the house cannot actually be seen at all. They own and control so much land around the house that you cannot even get close to it. The electric gates open and the Range Rover drives out, or the helicopter flies out and that is all you know of the people living there.
This was always the case of course. Jane Austen set most of her books in the North Hampshire countryside. Mr Darcy and the like lived in the big house then and went around in closed carriages their balls and parties just like the rich bastards of today. They didn’t work either.
What has changed is the way technology has made it even easier for rich fuckers to keep the good stuff for themselves. It’s also even easier to make money if you are already rich. The gap between these bastards and the rest of us is increasingly wide.
It’s time something was done about that. The other side of the sign is the side for you and me.
shoutybloke 
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