Last post on The Book of Trespass by Nick Hayes is about this racist anti-gay divide-and-rule propaganda from page 333: "Thomas Beckford was the richest man in Europe as a direct result of the African people his father enslaved. To the binary judgement of the fence, he was a villain. But lift that definition from his life and you can see a more complex picture: in the gay community, he is celebrated as a hero, an icon."

1. Which "gay community"? Because "the" gay community includes Black descendants of enslaved people who don't "celebrate" Beckford either at all or as a man who inherited his extreme riches from racist enslavement.

2. The reason Beckford might be "celebrated" by "the gay community" is that he was gay, not that he was rich through racist enslavement.

3. Why is Hayes trying to conflate a celebration of gayness with a celebration of riches/racism/enslavement? This is vile racist propaganda on behalf of racist enslavement and the rich inheritors of enslavers, falsely conflated with "gay" "celebration".

4. Hayes is a Cambridge educated communications professional. I find it difficult to believe his repeated propaganda against multiple disprivileged and oppressed social groups in this book isn't as deliberate as it is consistent.

Conclusion: I've posted my reservations about this book. If you want to read The Book of Nick Hayes then this is it, with his personal experiences and opinions of trespass in England, and he expands on these at length, but don't be fooled by that length into believing this is a serious piece of social history or a comprehensive work of any type. That said, populist nature writing is often framed as memoir and this is in the genre, but it also fits into the mould of nature memoir being written by and for posh white men who exclude other perspectives. There are other options available. I'm just saying.

#trespass #TheBookOfTrespass #reading #books #racism #BlackHistory #LGBTHistory #SocialHistory #UK #DivideAndRule

I've now read to page 332 of The Book of Trespass by Nick Hayes and realised there's a 100% chance this was written by a public school "educated" person so I googled and, yes, he's "public school and Cambridge".

On page 332 Hayes berates the poors for "dehumanising" the rich, without giving any relevant examples, and in the same paragraph dehumanises the non-rich as "robotic" in his characterisation of plans for fair taxation as "tired, robotic resentment". Then in the next paragraph he dehumanises the culture of English poors as a "stagnant pool of loosely defined resentment" to erase our humanity and intellectual culture, as he has done throughout the book to the working classes, GRT people, Black people, women, and everyone else who dares to deviate from the permitted straight and narrow path of Posh White Men Like Nick Hayes.

Hayes also claims that what he acknowledges as a humorous slogan, "Eat the Rich", is an unfair "focus on the character of the rich"... I mean, yes, if the characteristic is "rich" because that's the point, lmao. How else can we focus on the fact that extremely "rich" people shouldn't exist in a fair society without describing the fact of their economic privilege? Another example of Hayes trying to ban useful words and terms, exactly as he tried to erase "patriarchy" and "racism" earlier in the book (antizygonist racism against GRT people first, which he claimed is about "mobility" not racialisation/ethnicity, and then anti-Black racism, which he claimed is about the economics of enslavement - erm, yes, that incentivised codifying anti-Blackness but anti-Blackness already existed in medieval European culture and before, just read the literature). I don't want, for example, Richard Drax taxed fairly because he's an unpleasant character, I want him taxed because it's fair and reasonable to tax the rich. (And a solution to overconfidently ignorant ex-public school boys is to tax public schools as businesses and tax businesses fairly.)

This book is poor-hating classist propaganda which erases whole groups of disprivileged and oppressed people. Hayes has been employed as a "communications" professional and presumably knows what he's doing when he dehumanises working class people as "robotic" "stagnant pools", while he reaps rewards from the interests he's serving: bestselling book and media jobs (and probably an Order of the British Empire if he stays on this career path).

P.S. For some reason these 386 pages of propaganda notably fail to record successful challenges to the status quo... almost as if the author doesn't want you to know change is real and we can make it ourselves together.

#trespass #TheBookOfTrespass #RightToRoam #reading #books #WorkingClassHistory #SocialHistory #UK #classism #ClassWar #EatTheRich #taxation #dehumanisation

I've read up to the Greenham Common section in The Book of Trespass, which begins on page 176. On 173 Nick Hayes mansplains to feminists why "patriarchy" is the wrong word to describe the "rule of the father" and what he believes we actually mean is "paternalism" "Because what characterised these witch-hunts was not just gender but this particular structure of power." Lol, no shit sherlock. Hayes then imposes his own paternalism on the women who protested at Greenham Common, amongst others. He truly believes he knows more about patriarchy/paternalism than several generations of feminists. And having introduced his ill-defined term "paternalism" on page 173 he then manages to crowbar it into the remaining 213 pages 11 more times, to reinforce his power of defining other people's experiences (which, ironically, is the power he pretends to be opposing).

Greenham protest: "The camp became a howl against the paternalistic hierarchy" (Greenham's "patriarchy" = 4 syllables, Hayes' "paternalistic hierarchy" = 8 syllables). Protesting: "a world that had defined and confined women into roles written by men" [... oh the irony...] "Theirs was a space where womanhood was self-defined". (Who's going to tell him what he's done there? Lmao.)

While I'm critiquing, I'll also mention that I find his knowledge of the social history subjects he's tackling inadequate to the task he's set himself. I note his repeated descriptions of ruling class people as individuals with personal histories while he elides working class people into an undifferentiated mass of "commoners" in opposition to the central and centred ruling classes. And, of course, "The" Book of Trespass exclusively covers England, mostly the south east of England (Hayes is a child of Berkshire and it shows). The one true subject of this book is Nick Hayes, and his intended audience appears to be men like himself.

#trespass #TheBookOfTrespass #UK #books #reading #mansplaining #patriarchy #feminism #FeministHistory #WomensHistory #semantics #SocialHistory #WorkingClassHistory

I was suspicious of The Book of Trespass by Nick Hayes because of the positive blurbs on the front cover from Spectator magazine and right-winger Robert Macfarlane and I was regrettably correct. This is the most middle class, white, male take on trespass I can possibly imagine. By page 21 Hayes is dismissing the 1932 Kinder mass trespass as irrelevant to the ruling and middle classes, who are the author's exclusive interests. He doesn't mention the larger 1896 Winter Hill mass trespass at all. By page 70 Hayes claims legislation against the people he wrongly calls "Roma", i.e. people who name themselves Romani and Kale and Gypsies, is based on their physical mobility not racism or cultural differences, although he does subsequently give a brief acknowledgement to "social mobility" (there's another dodgy GRT claim too, that I don't have time to deconstruct now). Oh, and until page 98 the "trespass" he personally participates in is all either permitted or semi-permitted by the legal power-holder and is an optional leisure choice, never a geographical or social necessity.

Not looking forward to reading his takes on Greenham Common tbh. Should I just stop reading and donate the book now? Or read that section first to find out if I can tolerate another 250 pages of this?

#trespass #TheBookOfTrespass #UK #books #reading #GRTHistory #WorkingClassHistory #RightToRoam