Why is the National Trust still falling for BLM?

Ido feel for the National Trust. Its membership is falling fast, and its earnings faster. The shortfall is £227 million this year. This is not the trust’s fault, but Covid’s. Most staff – including its director-general, Hilary Mcgrady – do genuinely care for the buildings and places for which they are responsible.

I also agree with the trust that it is wrong to argue it should simply not inquire into the history of its properties lest discreditable stories emerge. The fact that some were built with money from slavery should not be – and, by the way, never has been – a secret. The same applies to other past wrongs. Who could tell the story of Fountains Abbey without recording that it was forcibly seized from the Catholic monks who owned it?

The problem with the trust is naïveté. It has been rolled over by extremists who care nothing for the membership or the collection. At the angry virtual AGM on Saturday, many NT members protested indignantly at the disrespect shown to former occupants of trust houses, such as Winston Churchill. They attacked the trust for seeming to accept the agenda of Black Lives Matter (BLM), following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. In reply, Tim Parker, the trust’s chairman, defended BLM as “a human-rights movement with no party-political affiliations”.

Mr Parker is beside the point. No one has ever accused BLM of party affiliations; and I fear that almost all pressure groups invoke human rights. The general point about BLM is that it is a hard-left campaigning organisation, committed to defeating capitalism, “defunding” the police, destroying the “nuclear” family and rejecting white people’s capacity to understand racism – a view which is itself racist. BLM is an extremist movement which flirts with violence.

The more particular point about BLM is that it bears no relation to the National Trust. It is an activist player in the American race war, not a heritage body. I bet very few of its supporters are National Trust members. Even on issues such as slavery or colonial history, BLM has no reliable body of knowledge, since it is not a scholarly organisation. It therefore has nothing to contribute to a charity whose statutory purpose is to look after “places of historic interest or natural beauty”. It has no standing on gardens, landscape, agriculture, architecture, furniture, textiles or paintings, any more than does the National Trust on policing American cities.

In a recent blog, the trust’s director of culture and engagement, John Orna-ornstein, writes: “Cumulatively they [the trust’s properties] are quite simply the nation’s most significant cultural collection. And the trust’s primary purpose will always be to care for and cherish them on behalf of the whole nation.” Yet at the AGM, he also said that the current anti-“colonialism” makeover of trust properties was “a normal part of our continually changing interpretation of our houses”. There is an unsustainable contradiction here. How can the trust “cherish” the “nation’s most significant cultural collection” and yet give in to Blm-style attacks on it?

Tomorrow, MPS will debate the future of the National Trust. I hope they do not waste time chuntering against “woke nonsense”. This is not just about verbiage. It is about whether the National Trust can be nationally trusted.

A Remembrance Day footnote. Despite the Covid difficulties, our village gathered in excellent (though socially distanced) numbers for Sunday’s customary commemoration. We surrounded our memorial, which was designed by Herbert Baker and opened by Rudyard Kipling a century ago. As usual, each man from the village killed in either of the world wars was named and an individual cross with a poppy was laid for him.

This year, however, there was a strange and moving addition to the names. We were asked to remember Stephen “Luke” Atkinson. He was a bomb disposal expert working for a Norwegian charity in the Solomon Islands to clear wartime ordnance in time for the Pacific Games in 2023. He and an Australian colleague, Trent Lee, were recently killed when a bomb they had been handling exploded.

They could accurately be described as direct, fatal casualties of the war, laying down their lives for others three quarters of a century after it ended. One hopes they will be the last. Mr Atkinson’s funeral service will take place in our Sussex parish church today.

Meanwhile, the unexploded danger of a more recent war is ending this week. When Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands in 1982, its troops laid 25,000 landmines. Experts from Safelane Global, paid for by the UK, have been working to remove them for years.

On Saturday, the islands will be officially declared mine-free. In Yorke Bay, near the capital, Port Stanley, the last mines will be ceremoniously blown up and then, weather permitting, there will be a cricket match on the beach where no one has been allowed to tread since 1982.

This achievement is one of the happier legacies of Diana, Princess of Wales. For years after the Falklands war, Britain decided that the simplest course was to fence off the minefields, which of course put thousands of acres out of bounds. The Princess’s campaigning in the 1990s, however, made the world look anew at the problem of landmines. In 1997, the Anti-personnel Mine Ban Convention was signed.

With the clearing of the Falklands, Britain has now discharged its obligations: all its territories are mine-free.