Though periodically he continues to publish works of art criticism, his most recent publications concern social justice in rural Britain, as well as environmental conservation in the wider European sphere.

The son of former National Hunt jockey and racehorse trainer Geoff Laidlaw, Ian McKay was born in Epsom, Surrey, and studied at Chelsea School of Art.

[7] In the mid-1990s, McKay published a series of undercover reports that exposed the complex political dealings of the British Green Party's Arts Policy Working Group at that time.

[8] He also spoke regularly on a pro-censorship platform at conferences in the UK,[9] appearing alongside figures such as the media lawyer and freedom-of-expression advocate Mark Stephens and the journalist and writer Yasmin Alibhai-Brown.

The New Forest: A Gated Community of the Mind was followed by Nova Foresta Zapovednik: The New Forest at Breaking Point (co-authored with the Russian environmentalist Anna Kolchevska) in which he argued in favour of a conservation approach that broadly resembled the Zapovednik system in the former Soviet Union, where assigned areas were given the highest degree of environmental protection, often being restricted to the public.

Among his most recent English language publications are the edited anthology A New Forest Reader: A Companion Guide to the New Forest, its History and Landscape[40] (2011), which brought back into circulation several out of print texts,;[41] The New Forest: A Gated Community of the Mind;[42] Ahae: Through My Window (2011) which was an appraisal of the landscape photography of the Korean photographer Yu Byeong-eon(Ahae) (jointly authored with the General Director of the National Gallery in Prague, Milan Knížák),[43] and a second monograph on the artist Bernard Cohen, in which he contests that Cohen's complex abstract works represent an "ongoing search for meaning in its broadest, most human sense.

[46] As Language Consultant he has contributed to several academic text books, including Repetytorium gimnazjalne[47] and Slownik Nursowy: Indeks angielsko-polski[48] (both for Cambridge University Press).