Like a bad penny the allegation of rural racism keeps turning up. This week it was a group of academics from Leicester University who set up the Rural Racism Project to ‘challenge the dominant depictions of rural England as peaceful, neutral and apolitical’. Now I am no academic, but it does seem to me that more than a few minds seem to have been made up before the project even started. It was no surprise, therefore, that when its report was published on Tuesday (2 September 2025) it concluded that racism is rife in the countryside.

The problem for the researchers is that anything that might conceivably be described as objective data suggests that their conclusion is nonsense. The lengthy report contains almost no statistics, but the one number it does quote is the 98,799 race hate crimes recorded by the police in England and Wales in 2024. Unfortunately, however, it ignores the readily available breakdown of those statistics by police force, presumably because they show an almost perfect inverse relationship between rurality and racial incidents. Both in terms of total and per capita incidents, the more rural a constabulary the fewer racial hate crimes were recorded.

If the researchers had taken a slightly longer view, they would also have found evidence on comparative levels of racial tolerance in voting patterns for the British National Party during their electoral peak in the 2000s. It is sometimes forgotten that an overtly racist party had two MEPs elected in 2009, won council seats for a decade and polled over half a million votes in the 2010 General Election, but it does not take much research to discover that its support base was overwhelmingly urban. The BNP never even gained a foothold in rural politics, despite its attempts to piggyback on the Liberty and Livelihood March and other demonstrations against the hunting ban.

The fact that all the evidence suggests that racism is not a particular issue in the countryside is presumably why the report instead relied for its conclusions on “115 semi-structured interviews and numerous informal conversations” and stretches to defining the overwhelmingly white make up of rural communities as racist in itself. It even suggests that pub culture and rural customs are racist because they are exclusionary.

This would be laughable if it did not have the potential to cause actual harm. There is a serious issue for some members of ethnic minorities in navigating what is a very white - and to them a sometimes alien - culture in the countryside. Most of us are striving to overcome this perception, but unfounded allegations of rural racism only create further barriers. This is a point that the Countryside Alliance stressed in its contribution to the project, which is sadly not referenced anywhere in the report.

Had the academics behind this report relied on evidence, rather than anecdote, they would have found plenty to support the depiction of rural England as peaceful, neutral and apolitical. Branding rural communities as racist is not just untrue, it is also unhelpful in encouraging people of all backgrounds to enjoy the countryside.