The National Trust is fighting its corner against a pincer movement. One phalanx is the government and its mass deregulation plans for the countryside. The other is a group of agitators from within called Restore Trust.
Restore Trust claims to have an apolitical ethos but a brief glance at the team tells another story, and suggests that once again, as with our membership of the EU, and the Tory party itself, Tufton Street has spread its tentacles to induce rot from within.
Make the National Trust great again!
In September 2020 the National Trust published a report entitled ‘Addressing our histories of colonialism and historic slavery’. The idea of this report was to inform the public as to the connections that exist between 93 historic places in the care of the National Trust, and the British colonies – including the slave trade, abolition and protest, and the East India Company.
This report directly contradicted the zeitgeist preoccupied with identity politics imported from across the Atlantic. Just four months earlier, the death of George Floyd ignited the Black Lives Matter movement in the States and anti-institutional racism protests exploded globally including in the UK. Seen through the prism of a wider culture war in which all nuance and exchange is excluded, the National Trust slavery report triggered a response from sections of its membership and beyond, who saw it as a step too far in the ‘woke’ direction. A complaint was even lodged with the Charities Commission, although it was dismissed.
This disenchanted group set themselves up as a forum where supporters and friends can “…discuss their concerns about the future of the charity and lobby for change”.
Who’s behind Restore Trust?
The group is being openly accused of having links with right-wing think tanks, though members deny this saying that it’s just the day job of one of the group’s founders. But it’s more complicated than that.
The founder concerned is Neil Record. He is chair of both the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) and the Global Warming Policy Foundation. These are two climate change sceptical and opaquely funded right-wing libertarian think tanks, the former of which effectively trained Liz Truss for her role as PM. But it doesn’t stop there. Record is also chair of Net Zero Watch, an organisation diametrically opposed to the National Trust’s plans to be Net Zero by 2030.
Another founder – Zewditu Gebreyohanes of Conservative Friends of Ethiopia, a young ambassador for the International Churchill Society – is also a research fellow at the Policy Exchange think tank.
These three think tanks are enormously influential in Downing Street and often direct government policy. They are behind more than a dozen of Truss’s pledges and are blatantly against any so-called green agenda. For example, Policy Exchange, after taking $30 ,000 from Exxon Oil, advised the British Government to pass anti-protest laws aimed largely at climate protesters. The controversial Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2O22 effectively does what they asked.
These organisations are known to attract high levels of funding from fossil fuel and tobacco industries who pay them to lobby against some of the National Trust’s founding tenets of protecting the natural environment. This is particularly the case with the Trust’s recent objectives such as the 25 year plan for nature, announced in 2017, which aims to restore nature to 25,000 hectares of its places and for 50% of its farmland to be nature friendly by 2025.
Restore Trust has set up a limited company called RT2021Ltd. This company receives donations which it uses to fund events and social media campaigns with hashtags such as #empirestrikesback.
Aware of this, a National Trust spokesperson said, “Paid for campaigning on aspects of our work would be a concern for any charity”.
A bumpy start
In Autumn 2021, Restore presented its first slate of six candidates for the National Trust council elections. Things got off to a bad start when one of them, Stephen Green, turned out to be a Christian fundamentalist who wanted to legalise marital rape and introduce the death penalty for certain homosexuals. Another, Michael Goodhart, immediately disassociated himself from the group as soon as he became aware of its objectives. However, candidates Guy Trehane, Andrew Powles and Min Grimshaw won three out of the six available seats.
This year the group is campaigning against voting procedure and candidate selection. Restore objects to the Trust recommending that members vote for their preferred candidates. That having been said, Restore has published its own list.
When asked, a National Trust spokesperson told me:
“Our Council will recommend certain candidates, in line with our constitution and would not recommend any candidates who do not share the Trust’s values or who oppose our charitable objectives.”
They went on to say
“Under our democratic governance arrangements, any National Trust member has the right to stand for election to the Council. This regulation is in place to ensure that our members have a say in the running of the organisation. The National Trust does not accept or reject candidates based on their personal views.”
Having narrowly lost two proposals at last year’s annual general meeting (AGM), Restore is presenting resolutions to this year’s AGM to change voting procedures.
Why would the IEA interest itself in the National Trust?
Initially, stoking a culture war would have been typical activity for a think tank like the IEA, but this particular prime minister presents new opportunities. As has been established and indeed boasted about by the IEA, Truss and her government are promoting a libertarian agenda honed by the think tank over several decades and have put forward a programme for unprecedented mass deregulation.
A major part of this concerns the huge amount of (as yet) unbuilt-on land that is owned or managed by national parks, charities and trusts. The present government policy of investment zones and freeports, which between them are set to cover ever increasing areas of England’s countryside, will liberate this land from the restraints of typical regulations whether it’s tax, workers’ rights, or planning.
But the National Trust is protected by a more complicated formula than, say, the national parks, most of which have found themselves in freeport zones without their knowledge. The Trust, which is the nation’s largest farm owner with over 1,500 tenant farmers, owning 775 miles of coastline and 250,000 hectares of land, is protected by a ring of steel. Section 21 of the 1907 National Trust Act and section 8 of the 1939 Act declares National Trust land as inalienable. This means it cannot be voluntarily sold, mortgaged or compulsory purchased against the Trust’s wishes.
The Trust literature claims that this protects the Trust forever, but does it?
A Trojan horse
Just as UKIP used the lack of participation of the British public in the European elections to win their candidates seats, so Restore can use the same tactics. The National Trust has a membership of 5.7 million, yet only around 2% vote in the council elections. Unless the membership is galvanised, it’s not too complicated with a well-funded social media campaign for Restore to get their supporters to turn out in high enough numbers to win some or all of the seven seats up for election. This is certainly what they are hoping for.
Restore candidates themselves may not have a deeper agenda than nostalgia for a bygone age or being fed up with what they see as ‘woke’ policies gone too far. But they represent, and will likely vote according to, the policies of an organisation, some founders of which are high ranking members of right-wing think tanks which are subject to increasing scrutiny concerning their funding and true aims.
What better way to bypass the statutory protections of the Trust than by infiltrating its governing body with candidates who will use their votes to achieve ends, the true aims of which they may, or may not be, aware?
Voting for National Trust council candidates closes on 28 October.
