Meanwhile in Leeds, to the apparent surprise of some, 90% of respondents to a questionnaire about statues don’t want any removed or altered in any way.
Alison Lowe, an historian commissioned by Leeds City Council to review the status of statues in the city in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests. She was clearly expecting to find a lot of public unhappiness with the statues, even though none of them were of individuals who were central to the slave trade. But in fact over 90% of the people surveyed said they didn’t have a problem with them and didn’t want them to be taken down. The Yorkshire Evening Post has more.
Well, if the NT persists in going full Woke, then it will be a case of their members not coming – and cancelling their standing orders. The same fate as the Church of England looms.
Indeed… All I want from the NT is that they maintain their/our properties well and make them available (not something that they’ve managed recently) for visitors. I don’t want to be preached at with the latest in woke ideology. I’m giving serious thought to whether I continue my membership, and I suspect that I’m not the only one.
I looked at their website and most of their properties remain closed. I would have thought opening them safely should be their priority, not the witterings of American student politics.
Obviously the good people of Leeds need to be “re-educated” so they can give te right answer! Also from the person leading the review:- : “For black people we live in a world where white voices and white faces and white names predominate. We don’t like it but there is too much for us to spend our lives looking back saying why is that like that. What happened is, people were much more interested in looking forward. Is it just me who finds this a bizarre statement
A lot of the white privilege matra is majority ‘privilege’ but it is imported from countries where white people are relatively recent colonists and where there is a long history of ‘forgotten’ black people, who have been in the US nearly as long as Europeans.
Half our culture wars are based on North American histories that massively overstate race and gender oppression, whilst understating class. This is due to very different histories in these areas.
It’s actually a rather racist statement that reveals the binary “black = good / white = evil” mindset that lurks behind many of these superficially reasonable demands for so-called racial justice. “White voices and white faces and white names” don’t predominate in overwhelmingly black sub-Saharan Africa. Yet they seem genuinely appalled that “white voices and white faces and white names” predominate in the still (for now at least) overwhelmingly white Western world. Just shows you what their real end-game is, and how much they actually hate white culture and white people. This person even admits “We don’t like it”. Their very words!
Well white voices, faces and names would predominate in a country whose population is 87% white. Why would a black person be surprised by this or find it worthy of comment?
Indeed. It’s impossible to imagine a Vietnamese man moving to Uganda and then complaining that he sees no Vietnamese faces on Ugandan television. And yet we read equivalent nonsense concerning western countries incessantly.
One of the most disturbing parts of the ‘woke’ movement is the complete abandonment of a class understanding of history. Whilst it’s almost certainly true that a 20% of the great houses in the UK were built on the evils of slavery and empire, it is also true that the remaining 80% were built on the slavery, serfdom and suppression of the indiginous Brits. There’s a reason they didn’t let poor people vote until 1918.
The reason for this is obvious, rich people like a revolutionary movement that doesn’t challenge them. Rich powerful non-whites love playing at being victims, rich whites whose family gained from empire, slavery etc love to share the blame with the 99% of white people who didn’t.
I don’t know any women who were ever denied the right to vote, All women alive today in the UK have always had the right to vote. And the well-balanced majority are certainly not grumpy.
I don’t get YOUR point either. Any one aged 21 in 1928 was born in 1901. No one born then is still alive. Some people love to create problems where none exist.
No, there are plenty of women born in before 1928 still alive today! Since you have to be 21 to vote then are you referring to women born before 1907? Or the mentally ill, prior to 2007? Or the Queen? Please be clear.
Spot on-and to attribute “white priviledge” to a white working class who were not only disadvantaged on every level but provided the majority of bodies who fought in 2 world wars is just plain insulting.
Actually, I have noticed that rich people (and even merely well-off people) are happy to cheer on a revolutionary movement that challenges other rich people who they despise/hate/resent.
Perhaps it is just a question of hiding your stash behind a wall of conspicuous virtue then blending in with the lynch mob.
A “class understanding of history” would be as mind-numbing as a Woke understanding of the same clearly is. Shoulders are best cleared of chips before reading.
Geoff Cox
3 years ago
A well written piece and long overdue. I understand many members and volunteers have resigned from the National Trust – I hope it is true. But when middle class, patriotic people like me are wishing ill on an organisation like the National Trust and other pillars of our country now devoted to wokery, we really are in trouble. The march through the institutions is complete.
So I’m turning over a new leaf – I’m not going to wish ill on these institutions any more – even the BBC – what we need to do is complain and campaign to replace the people at the top.
I’m afraid I wish even more ill of the BBC, having discovered that one of the main reasons for the imprisonment of women in England and Wales over the 10 year period 2007-2017 – was non payment of the TV licence. ( women more likely to be at home than men when the bailffs call) according to the Ministry of Justice statistics on women and the criminal justice system 2017 published 29/11/2018
agree about the march through the institutions. if I was an NT member, I’d resign pronto.
I haven’t had a TV for 20 years at least. That means I have not paid a licence for that time. That is my protest.
By the way, beware of calls to scrap the TV Licence. In Aus, that is exactly what they did and replaced it with a Gov subsidy. We can at least refuse to pay a TV Licence.
I wrote to the National Trust during the BLM storm informing them that I had cancelled my direct debit after 25 years’ membership. I will not be going back until such times, if ever, that they have stopped trying to subvert my history.
Ditto-if enough people do it – and lets face it,when the full impact of the “lock down” economic armageddon is felt a lot of people will be looking at their discretionary direct debits-they might-just might-wake up
A couple of years ago I complained to NT about the creeping politicisation, and said I would not be renewing my membership. Absolutely no dialog, joined NT for Scotland instead with a cheaper membership, and still visit NT England.
“At the cricket club, our aim and purpose is to become the best cricketers we can be, and to build fellowship with others through that process. It is not a failure of a cricket club’s purpose if it does not have a position on Black Lives Matter or the nationalisation of utilities.”
As it happens, I quit my cricket club’s Whatsapp group a couple of days ago, precisely because of its politicisation.
Well done. There was what was meant to be a heartwarming piece of news in the national press recently about a couple of black people in east London who had created a birdwatching club…. Open only to blacks. It was called “Flock together”, because it was confined to “birds of a feather”. I can well imagine the reaction if there were to be a Whites only birdwatching club. Mind you, it would be interesting to see what happened if someone suggested a “Black Police Officers’ Association”, to mirror its black counterpart in the Met.
The national trust will only change when its board is replaced when they run out of other peoples money. Glasgow women football team can virtue signal as much as they like because no one watches them. They are not a commercial venture but a virtue venture.
Fraser Bailey
3 years ago
Well, yes, but we have known all this for some time. Anyway, it is further evidence of my maxim that one should never trust any organisation whose title contains the word ‘Trust’.
Albireo Double
3 years ago
We cancelled our membership and told them exactly why in no uncertain terms. This is not just a step too far, it is quite outrageous. We will never visit another Trust property again, unless the Trust publicly recants this particular strand of policy.
It’s a shame, as we enjoyed our Trust membership and were very supportive of it. But that is no longer the case. By toadying to the vicious repressive and dishonest ideology of BLM and insane extreme Left, the national Trust has put itself beyond my support and my understanding, as are any equivalent set of thugs on the extreme political right.
Ted Ditchburn
3 years ago
Good article…. the politicisation of everything is probably disliked and distrusted by around 90% or ordinary people, it’s basically a totalitarian impulse, and alongside that way we seem unable to disagree these days—everything gets elevated to a matter of overwhelming importance that must be argued and never debated.
Ben Hazard
3 years ago
Our town (in New, not Old, England) instituted a community preservation fund whereby all residents are taxed for a special fund and the money used to preserve historical buildings, pretty views etc. I was ok with it because fixing the steeple on a majestic church right in the middle of town would benefit everyone, for example. But that lasted about a year, and now the fund is used almost exclusively to give money to poorer people from out of town wanting to buy houses in town that they can’t afford so that we increase the socioeconomic diversity of our small village. So what used to benefit the entire town now goes to one resident to enable them to sell their house at a higher price, and in return we get more poor people.
A perfect example of mission creep illustrated from the article. I guess u all need to stop ur payments together to force change.
Basil Chamberlain
3 years ago
One of the defining features of recent decades has been the colonisation of institutions with a defined purpose and remit by people hostile to that purpose and remit. My feeling about museum curators who advocate returning artefacts to former colonies is that they shouldn’t be museum curators at all; they are behaving like doctors who repudiate the Hippocratic Oath. Similarly, the politicisation of academia (now almost exclusively in a left-wing direction) is, as Lucien Benda argued more than ninety years ago, a act of treason against the basic vocation of the intellectual: dedication to dispassionate reason and reflection.
But I don’t think this behaviour is unique to the left. The behaviour of free-market ideologues among university administrators and their enablers in government, who have decided that the goal of education is not disinterested learning, but training for the workforce and the earning of a advantageous qualification, also shows a basic hostility to the essential purpose of academia. And surely the first and arguably most influential example was the colonisation of the state in the Thatcher-Reagan era by politicians who fundamentally didn’t believe in the state and were pledged to curtail and inhibit its functions. They too, surely, were doctors repudiating the Hippocratic Oath.
I think all of this is underpinned by predominantly middle-class people in organisations churning out unnecessary initiatives to make themselves look important, in an effort to justify their overblown salaries.
Indeed – it’s the administrative dictatorship. Most institutions need drastically to prune their senior administrators and to have many more junior administrators and clerical staff, directly answerable to their core staff who could thus be facilitated more usefully to discharge their functions.
Precisely. The problem is, the senior clerical staff are the ones that make the decisions. They have the time to ‘liaise’ with senior management, while those on the shop, hospital, school or whatever floor are getting on with the important work. To refer back to the National Trust, the most important staff are the cleaners, volunteers, and those who staff the cafe! Who gives a stuff about the Equality and Diversity Officer sat in some back room somewhere, getting paid twice what those doing the real work are on?
Curators are also important. They’re getting rid of lots of those. Haven’t seen the redundancy figures for equality and diversity officers, not holding my breath…
One of the defining features of recent decades has been the colonisation of institutions with a defined purpose and remit by people hostile to that purpose and remit
Colonisation is exactly the right word. Political colonisation: the attempt to change the political and physical landscape without any democratic mandate.
Jonathan Oldbuck
3 years ago
Let’s hope NT members have been cancelling in their droves.
A typically brilliant summation from Niall of exactly what we’re missing these days. Part Scrutonism, part Hegelianism, part Aristotelianism.
Christiane Dauphinais
3 years ago
A very well written article, one of the best I’ve read on this topic. Thank you.
bsema
3 years ago
I’ve always thought the National Trust’s primary aim is to cut down healthy trees. It certainly looks that way,
Eric Baskeyfield
3 years ago
I was a NT member years ago, and had actually been thinking about re-joining. But once they decided to virtue-signal and genuflect to the BLM mob, I decided not to bother.
Pete Kreff
3 years ago
Seek out the National Trust’s Strategy to 2025, and the first words you read are:
It’s the equivalent of the situation in communist countries where every organisation, whatever its focus, size and importance, must first and foremost extol the virtues of communism and work towards achieving the goals of communism.
Paul Carline
3 years ago
That “healthy and vibrant civil society” is being demolished before our eyes. Civil society is healthy when it allows and encourages the free mingling and interaction of all its members – precisely what is being attacked and undermined by politicians and others who have a very different agenda: one which thrives on the creation of fear and suspicion of others, even of those who were closest to one: family and friends. I found this quote which I’d jotted down years ago: “The best political weapon is the weapon of terror. Men may hate us. But we don’t ask for their love; only for their fear”. (Heinrich Himmler)
William Gladstone
3 years ago
The equality act allows for state sanction discrimination too. It is a genuinely evil piece of legislation designed to make us all more miserable an divided and yet 10 years of mainly tory government and they have left it in place and embraced its ideals. Perhaps they think we have no alternative but to vote for them or get Equality act 2 the sequel or worse with a labour government.
We need a Farage led party or similar to campaign to repeal this nasty divisive act and at the very least force the tories hands.
That act is a bit of a tricky one to deal with. The devil is not so much in the details as in the openly declared purpose. How do you repeal an equality act without avoiding the accusation that you are in favour of privilege?
Maggi Wilson
3 years ago
Got a feeling Beatrix Potter would not have held this view of her project.
Wulvis Perveravsson
3 years ago
I enjoy using National Trust car parks in the Lake District without paying.
Wow, I didn’t have to wait 7 hours for my comment to appear! Hallelujah!
Dave Weeden
3 years ago
I pleasantly surprised that Glasgow City Women’s Football team is prepared to wear shirts adorned with Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s name as I don’t believe the important for Glasgow question as to whether she was a Protestant Jew or a Catholic one has been satisfactorily settled.
When a police force in Wales can insist that a male-voice choir made up of police employees should no longer officially associate itself with the police because they do not accept women as members, it is not unduly alarmist to think that we might have a problem.
Even in the Land of the Woke, I don’t believe the City of New York has gone so far as to disown “The boys [sic] of the NYPD choir” but I suppose there are a couple of months before “the bells [are] ringing out for Christmastime.”
Lydia R
3 years ago
I hear the Charities Commission are reviewing the National Trust now it’s decided to become a mouthpiece of BLM.
Paul Hunt
3 years ago
National Trust has an image problem and it is not going to change the preservation of listed buildings and heritage gardens (protected in law) to put this in a mission statement for the attention of sponsors and trustees, sorry if that means a shift in marketing that you don’t like but (to be acerbic) Poirot and Midsomer Murders will always be on UKTV Gold for the 1940’s nostalgia lovers. More and more people are valuing being outside and that is the big change you see when you visit NT properties. Fewer coaches of elderly people, more families out with dogs in the woods.
And then we swing to what you’re actually cross about- left wing revolutionary protests. Black Lives Matters went worldwide because ethnic minorities are structurally discriminated against, the system is still b****cks and too many people in the tent baulk at the idea that it needs fundamental change that will take generations to achieve. Taking a knee is a call back to the 1960s Civil Rights Movement and has nothing to do with me- I find it reactionary and short-attention span idea. But BLM was different and pervasive- it was about life for people, not an interest group with a political position, real people, and something needed to be done to say This Is Not On.
Politics is not government, it is power, making people do things your way, and there is no denying that odds are against non-white people in the UK, ignoring America (and note the slave trade was established and designed by us and we seem to be forgetting that just because we abolished slavery first. Saying Politics can only be done formally is a political position and saying your entertainments are in no way political is a political choice- you didn’t have the power to keep People’s Lives out of your football- diddums. So thats all fine, we can debate and debate. I think though that it is a pathetic position to say that National Trust cannot influence the world by how they do things, recognise their position in the world and try to do proper Corporate Social Responsibility; that is, frankly, archaic stuffy conservatism.
This article is spot on in a very simple way. Keep politics out of the NT. I’m not buying any more Yorkshire tea for the same reason many on here are boycotting the NT. People hate what is happening in society. And its all down to a minority who use twitter and other social media. Civil war is coming to America and it looks like we will follow in a sort of half assed way. BLM are going to end up creating the opposite of what they would like to see. People are not going to stay quiet and take it forever. You can see it coming. As Lawrence Fox said on Question time last year, we are a lovely welcoming island. This is the real reality, and the NT better understand this.
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Meanwhile in Leeds, to the apparent surprise of some, 90% of respondents to a questionnaire about statues don’t want any removed or altered in any way.
Alison Lowe, an historian commissioned by Leeds City Council to review the status of statues in the city in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests. She was clearly expecting to find a lot of public unhappiness with the statues, even though none of them were of individuals who were central to the slave trade. But in fact over 90% of the people surveyed said they didn’t have a problem with them and didn’t want them to be taken down. The Yorkshire Evening Post has more.
thanks – good news indeed
First they came for the statues, but I said nothing, because I was not a statue.
Well, if the NT persists in going full Woke, then it will be a case of their members not coming – and cancelling their standing orders. The same fate as the Church of England looms.
Get woke go broke indeed.
Indeed… All I want from the NT is that they maintain their/our properties well and make them available (not something that they’ve managed recently) for visitors. I don’t want to be preached at with the latest in woke ideology. I’m giving serious thought to whether I continue my membership, and I suspect that I’m not the only one.
I looked at their website and most of their properties remain closed. I would have thought opening them safely should be their priority, not the witterings of American student politics.
Obviously the good people of Leeds need to be “re-educated” so they can give te right answer! Also from the person leading the review:-
: “For black people we live in a world where white voices and white faces and white names predominate. We don’t like it but there is too much for us to spend our lives looking back saying why is that like that. What happened is, people were much more interested in looking forward.
Is it just me who finds this a bizarre statement
A lot of the white privilege matra is majority ‘privilege’ but it is imported from countries where white people are relatively recent colonists and where there is a long history of ‘forgotten’ black people, who have been in the US nearly as long as Europeans.
Half our culture wars are based on North American histories that massively overstate race and gender oppression, whilst understating class. This is due to very different histories in these areas.
It’s actually a rather racist statement that reveals the binary “black = good / white = evil” mindset that lurks behind many of these superficially reasonable demands for so-called racial justice. “White voices and white faces and white names” don’t predominate in overwhelmingly black sub-Saharan Africa. Yet they seem genuinely appalled that “white voices and white faces and white names” predominate in the still (for now at least) overwhelmingly white Western world. Just shows you what their real end-game is, and how much they actually hate white culture and white people. This person even admits “We don’t like it”. Their very words!
Well white voices, faces and names would predominate in a country whose population is 87% white. Why would a black person be surprised by this or find it worthy of comment?
Indeed. It’s impossible to imagine a Vietnamese man moving to Uganda and then complaining that he sees no Vietnamese faces on Ugandan television. And yet we read equivalent nonsense concerning western countries incessantly.
Because being a victim brings status, sometimes even subsidy.
You wouldn’t think so when you look at the BBC.
One of the most disturbing parts of the ‘woke’ movement is the complete abandonment of a class understanding of history. Whilst it’s almost certainly true that a 20% of the great houses in the UK were built on the evils of slavery and empire, it is also true that the remaining 80% were built on the slavery, serfdom and suppression of the indiginous Brits. There’s a reason they didn’t let poor people vote until 1918.
The reason for this is obvious, rich people like a revolutionary movement that doesn’t challenge them. Rich powerful non-whites love playing at being victims, rich whites whose family gained from empire, slavery etc love to share the blame with the 99% of white people who didn’t.
Women didn’t get the vote on the same terms as men until 1928.
No wonder they are grumpy.
I don’t know any women who were ever denied the right to vote, All women alive today in the UK have always had the right to vote. And the well-balanced majority are certainly not grumpy.
What an odd reply. Which bit of 1928 did you not comprehend?
Grumpy is, I am sure you will agree, a subjective judgement.
I don’t get YOUR point either. Any one aged 21 in 1928 was born in 1901. No one born then is still alive. Some people love to create problems where none exist.
I think we may just be talking at cross-purposes, I was reminding Mr Loze that not all “poor people” got the vote in 1918.
You stated correctly, that you didn’t know of any woman denied the vote, and if you had done, it would be a miracle indeed.
Anyway no harm done, but your final sentence seems to indicate you got the ‘hump’, as they say, which is a great pity.
..
No, there are plenty of women born in before 1928 still alive today! Since you have to be 21 to vote then are you referring to women born before 1907? Or the mentally ill, prior to 2007? Or the Queen? Please be clear.
..
Spot on-and to attribute “white priviledge” to a white working class who were not only disadvantaged on every level but provided the majority of bodies who fought in 2 world wars is just plain insulting.
Actually, I have noticed that rich people (and even merely well-off people) are happy to cheer on a revolutionary movement that challenges other rich people who they despise/hate/resent.
Perhaps it is just a question of hiding your stash behind a wall of conspicuous virtue then blending in with the lynch mob.
A “class understanding of history” would be as mind-numbing as a Woke understanding of the same clearly is. Shoulders are best cleared of chips before reading.
A well written piece and long overdue. I understand many members and volunteers have resigned from the National Trust – I hope it is true. But when middle class, patriotic people like me are wishing ill on an organisation like the National Trust and other pillars of our country now devoted to wokery, we really are in trouble. The march through the institutions is complete.
So I’m turning over a new leaf – I’m not going to wish ill on these institutions any more – even the BBC – what we need to do is complain and campaign to replace the people at the top.
I’m afraid I wish even more ill of the BBC, having discovered that one of the main reasons for the imprisonment of women in England and Wales over the 10 year period 2007-2017 – was non payment of the TV licence. ( women more likely to be at home than men when the bailffs call)
according to the Ministry of Justice statistics on women and the criminal justice system 2017
published 29/11/2018
agree about the march through the institutions. if I was an NT member, I’d resign pronto.
I haven’t had a TV for 20 years at least. That means I have not paid a licence for that time. That is my protest.
By the way, beware of calls to scrap the TV Licence. In Aus, that is exactly what they did and replaced it with a Gov subsidy. We can at least refuse to pay a TV Licence.
I wrote to the National Trust during the BLM storm informing them that I had cancelled my direct debit after 25 years’ membership. I will not be going back until such times, if ever, that they have stopped trying to subvert my history.
Ditto-if enough people do it – and lets face it,when the full impact of the “lock down” economic armageddon is felt a lot of people will be looking at their discretionary direct debits-they might-just might-wake up
Ditto here. My message on my cancellation letter was brief and to the point, though sadly not original, ‘Go woke, go broke.’
A couple of years ago I complained to NT about the creeping politicisation, and said I would not be renewing my membership. Absolutely no dialog, joined NT for Scotland instead with a cheaper membership, and still visit NT England.
You can also join Heritage New Zealand for £45 (individual membership, compared with £72 for NT) and that gets you free entry to NT properties
Only totalitarians believe that everything should be political.
Spot on.
“At the cricket club, our aim and purpose is to become the best cricketers we can be, and to build fellowship with others through that process. It is not a failure of a cricket club’s purpose if it does not have a position on Black Lives Matter or the nationalisation of utilities.”
As it happens, I quit my cricket club’s Whatsapp group a couple of days ago, precisely because of its politicisation.
Well done. There was what was meant to be a heartwarming piece of news in the national press recently about a couple of black people in east London who had created a birdwatching club…. Open only to blacks. It was called “Flock together”, because it was confined to “birds of a feather”. I can well imagine the reaction if there were to be a Whites only birdwatching club. Mind you, it would be interesting to see what happened if someone suggested a “Black Police Officers’ Association”, to mirror its black counterpart in the Met.
Are they only allowed to look at black birds?
Please! That would be ‘birds of colour’.
The national trust will only change when its board is replaced when they run out of other peoples money. Glasgow women football team can virtue signal as much as they like because no one watches them. They are not a commercial venture but a virtue venture.
Well, yes, but we have known all this for some time. Anyway, it is further evidence of my maxim that one should never trust any organisation whose title contains the word ‘Trust’.
We cancelled our membership and told them exactly why in no uncertain terms. This is not just a step too far, it is quite outrageous. We will never visit another Trust property again, unless the Trust publicly recants this particular strand of policy.
It’s a shame, as we enjoyed our Trust membership and were very supportive of it. But that is no longer the case. By toadying to the vicious repressive and dishonest ideology of BLM and insane extreme Left, the national Trust has put itself beyond my support and my understanding, as are any equivalent set of thugs on the extreme political right.
Good article…. the politicisation of everything is probably disliked and distrusted by around 90% or ordinary people, it’s basically a totalitarian impulse, and alongside that way we seem unable to disagree these days—everything gets elevated to a matter of overwhelming importance that must be argued and never debated.
Our town (in New, not Old, England) instituted a community preservation fund whereby all residents are taxed for a special fund and the money used to preserve historical buildings, pretty views etc. I was ok with it because fixing the steeple on a majestic church right in the middle of town would benefit everyone, for example. But that lasted about a year, and now the fund is used almost exclusively to give money to poorer people from out of town wanting to buy houses in town that they can’t afford so that we increase the socioeconomic diversity of our small village. So what used to benefit the entire town now goes to one resident to enable them to sell their house at a higher price, and in return we get more poor people.
A perfect example of mission creep illustrated from the article. I guess u all need to stop ur payments together to force change.
One of the defining features of recent decades has been the colonisation of institutions with a defined purpose and remit by people hostile to that purpose and remit. My feeling about museum curators who advocate returning artefacts to former colonies is that they shouldn’t be museum curators at all; they are behaving like doctors who repudiate the Hippocratic Oath. Similarly, the politicisation of academia (now almost exclusively in a left-wing direction) is, as Lucien Benda argued more than ninety years ago, a act of treason against the basic vocation of the intellectual: dedication to dispassionate reason and reflection.
But I don’t think this behaviour is unique to the left. The behaviour of free-market ideologues among university administrators and their enablers in government, who have decided that the goal of education is not disinterested learning, but training for the workforce and the earning of a advantageous qualification, also shows a basic hostility to the essential purpose of academia. And surely the first and arguably most influential example was the colonisation of the state in the Thatcher-Reagan era by politicians who fundamentally didn’t believe in the state and were pledged to curtail and inhibit its functions. They too, surely, were doctors repudiating the Hippocratic Oath.
I think all of this is underpinned by predominantly middle-class people in organisations churning out unnecessary initiatives to make themselves look important, in an effort to justify their overblown salaries.
Indeed – it’s the administrative dictatorship. Most institutions need drastically to prune their senior administrators and to have many more junior administrators and clerical staff, directly answerable to their core staff who could thus be facilitated more usefully to discharge their functions.
Precisely. The problem is, the senior clerical staff are the ones that make the decisions. They have the time to ‘liaise’ with senior management, while those on the shop, hospital, school or whatever floor are getting on with the important work. To refer back to the National Trust, the most important staff are the cleaners, volunteers, and those who staff the cafe! Who gives a stuff about the Equality and Diversity Officer sat in some back room somewhere, getting paid twice what those doing the real work are on?
Curators are also important. They’re getting rid of lots of those. Haven’t seen the redundancy figures for equality and diversity officers, not holding my breath…
Indeed, wasn’t an exhaustive list.
bullseye!
And predominantly middle-class people who don’t find the organisations they work for sufficiently interesting per se.
Colonisation is exactly the right word. Political colonisation: the attempt to change the political and physical landscape without any democratic mandate.
Let’s hope NT members have been cancelling in their droves.
A typically brilliant summation from Niall of exactly what we’re missing these days. Part Scrutonism, part Hegelianism, part Aristotelianism.
A very well written article, one of the best I’ve read on this topic. Thank you.
I’ve always thought the National Trust’s primary aim is to cut down healthy trees. It certainly looks that way,
I was a NT member years ago, and had actually been thinking about re-joining. But once they decided to virtue-signal and genuflect to the BLM mob, I decided not to bother.
It’s the equivalent of the situation in communist countries where every organisation, whatever its focus, size and importance, must first and foremost extol the virtues of communism and work towards achieving the goals of communism.
That “healthy and vibrant civil society” is being demolished before our eyes. Civil society is healthy when it allows and encourages the free mingling and interaction of all its members – precisely what is being attacked and undermined by politicians and others who have a very different agenda: one which thrives on the creation of fear and suspicion of others, even of those who were closest to one: family and friends.
I found this quote which I’d jotted down years ago:
“The best political weapon is the weapon of terror. Men may hate us. But we don’t ask for their love; only for their fear”. (Heinrich Himmler)
The equality act allows for state sanction discrimination too. It is a genuinely evil piece of legislation designed to make us all more miserable an divided and yet 10 years of mainly tory government and they have left it in place and embraced its ideals. Perhaps they think we have no alternative but to vote for them or get Equality act 2 the sequel or worse with a labour government.
We need a Farage led party or similar to campaign to repeal this nasty divisive act and at the very least force the tories hands.
That act is a bit of a tricky one to deal with. The devil is not so much in the details as in the openly declared purpose. How do you repeal an equality act without avoiding the accusation that you are in favour of privilege?
Got a feeling Beatrix Potter would not have held this view of her project.
I enjoy using National Trust car parks in the Lake District without paying.
Wow, I didn’t have to wait 7 hours for my comment to appear! Hallelujah!
I pleasantly surprised that Glasgow City Women’s Football team is prepared to wear shirts adorned with Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s name as I don’t believe the important for Glasgow question as to whether she was a Protestant Jew or a Catholic one has been satisfactorily settled.
Even in the Land of the Woke, I don’t believe the City of New York has gone so far as to disown “The boys [sic] of the NYPD choir” but I suppose there are a couple of months before “the bells [are] ringing out for Christmastime.”
I hear the Charities Commission are reviewing the National Trust now it’s decided to become a mouthpiece of BLM.
National Trust has an image problem and it is not going to change the preservation of listed buildings and heritage gardens (protected in law) to put this in a mission statement for the attention of sponsors and trustees, sorry if that means a shift in marketing that you don’t like but (to be acerbic) Poirot and Midsomer Murders will always be on UKTV Gold for the 1940’s nostalgia lovers. More and more people are valuing being outside and that is the big change you see when you visit NT properties. Fewer coaches of elderly people, more families out with dogs in the woods.
And then we swing to what you’re actually cross about- left wing revolutionary protests. Black Lives Matters went worldwide because ethnic minorities are structurally discriminated against, the system is still b****cks and too many people in the tent baulk at the idea that it needs fundamental change that will take generations to achieve. Taking a knee is a call back to the 1960s Civil Rights Movement and has nothing to do with me- I find it reactionary and short-attention span idea. But BLM was different and pervasive- it was about life for people, not an interest group with a political position, real people, and something needed to be done to say This Is Not On.
Politics is not government, it is power, making people do things your way, and there is no denying that odds are against non-white people in the UK, ignoring America (and note the slave trade was established and designed by us and we seem to be forgetting that just because we abolished slavery first. Saying Politics can only be done formally is a political position and saying your entertainments are in no way political is a political choice- you didn’t have the power to keep People’s Lives out of your football- diddums. So thats all fine, we can debate and debate. I think though that it is a pathetic position to say that National Trust cannot influence the world by how they do things, recognise their position in the world and try to do proper Corporate Social Responsibility; that is, frankly, archaic stuffy conservatism.
This article is spot on in a very simple way. Keep politics out of the NT. I’m not buying any more Yorkshire tea for the same reason many on here are boycotting the NT. People hate what is happening in society. And its all down to a minority who use twitter and other social media. Civil war is coming to America and it looks like we will follow in a sort of half assed way. BLM are going to end up creating the opposite of what they would like to see. People are not going to stay quiet and take it forever. You can see it coming. As Lawrence Fox said on Question time last year, we are a lovely welcoming island. This is the real reality, and the NT better understand this.
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