The Battle for the National Trust

Why the Latest Tory Culture War Matters

Anyone who has kept more than half an eye on the UK’s headlong descent into a reactionary backwater over the last six years will be aware that history is, politically speaking, not what it used to be.   Or perhaps I should say ‘heritage’ isn’t what it used to be, because for too many people, there is no distinction between heritage and history, and in the Tory imagination both concepts are part of an ‘island story’ narrative that is largely the tale of  great men performing the great deeds that have made us what we are today.

Once upon a time at least, heritage used to be like this.  It came in nice packaging, like those chocolate bars wrapped in fancy paper that you can buy in certain gift shops.  It was something to be savoured and enjoyed at leisure. You consumed heritage on a family day out at Sudbury Hall or Chatsworth. You admired the paintings, the grandeur and good taste, the enormous hallways and ballrooms, the costumes and the four poster beds, and you stared at the portraits of  great men and women, before hiring a tandem bike to explore the grounds.

Or maybe, if you wanted something grittier – not too gritty! - you could go to the Liverpool Docks and imagine all the ships coming and going as you shopped or ate an ice cream or drank a flat white.

Heritage also pervaded our imaginations though tv shows like Downtown Abbey, or the latest Jane Austen adaptation, or another BBC costume drama, or Lucy Worsley dressing up in period costume.  All this was part of the past-as-spectacle, ready to be exported to other countries that didn’t have our heritage, but could at least watch it, the way they watched Beefeaters and the Changing of the Guard

And then suddenly all this fell apart, like everything else. Suddenly ‘Maoists’ and Black Lives Matter activists were toppling the statues of slave traders, calling the names of streets and monuments into question, accusing Churchill – Churchill I tell you! – of racism. 

All this was bad enough - the ingratitude of it! But then last year the National Trust published a report entitled an  Interim Report on the Connections between Colonialism and Properties now in the Care of the National Trust Including Links with Historic Slavery

Barbarians at the Gates

If any Tory had ever doubted that civilisation was on the edge of collapse, that was the moment when their eyes were opened. Because here was the custodian of ‘our’ national heritage actually suggesting that some of the buildings we visited had once been connected to colonialism and the slave trade.

This was the moment you knew how bad things had really become, and if you didn’t there were MPs like Ben Bradley and Andrew Bridgen, or the tarantula on the wedding cake Nigel Mosley-Farage to tell you that the citadel of Englishness had been infiltrated by the woke virtue signalling ‘cultural Marxist’ hordes in order to ‘divide’ us or ‘erase’ our history and our heritage.

What were these ‘historians’ (ha!) trying to do with their ‘woke agenda’?  If you read the introduction, you would quickly discover that the report had explored the historical connections to colonialism and slavery of 93 properties in its care. As the report pointed out, this research challenged

the familiar, received histories, which both exclude the vital role that people of colour have played in our national story and overlook the central role that the oppression and violence of the slave trade and the legacies of colonialism have played in the making of modern Britain.

This translates in Toryspeak into ‘they want us to feel guilty.’ Never mind that the report states quite clearly:

 No one alive today is responsible for the iniquities of the period in question and consequently, we should feel confident in acknowledging the positive and the negative factual evidence of the past as part of our shared histories.

In a normal country it shouldn’t be necessary to say this, but post-Brexit Britain is very far from normal, and such confidence is distinctly lacking. For those who insist that ‘our’ history is nothing but a history of (white) greatness,  there can be no acknowledgement of where the wealth was obtained that made these buildings possible,  nor can any aspersions be cast on the men who had them built.

As a result, the National Trust was attacked for publishing the report, and some of its authors, most notably the report’s lead author Dr Corinne Fowler, Professor of Postcolonial Literature at Leicester University were viciously vilified, to the point where Professor Fowler was warned against going out in public. 

The report resulted in the creation of a new faction of National Trust members entitled Restore Trust, whose stated aims include the restoration of ‘ a sense of welcome for all visitors without demonising anyone’s history or heritage’, and which also aspires ‘to use history as a tool for understanding, not as a weapon.’

The bad faith and intellectual dishonesty of these aims is not nearly as pretty a sight as Capability Brown’s gardens at Chatsworth. I read the report last year, and there is no evidence whatsoever of any attempt to demonise anyone or use history ‘as a weapon.’ On the contrary, the report is a fascinating and illuminating piece of work, which places the British institution of the country house in a wider historical context and shows the linkages between the local and global, in ways that I had not thought of before. 

Nor does the report exclude anyone. It reminded me of the line in Tony Harrison’s poem ‘National Trust’: ‘The dumb go down in history and disappear/And not one gentleman’s been brought to brook.’

By widening the historical scope of the ‘country house’ motif, the report brings some of the voiceless ‘dumb’ back into the history of British greatness, and includes the people who have generally been excluded. In doing so it deepens our understanding of our national history and shows that ‘our heritage’ is not pristine, and cannot be understood without considering the wider context in which our history was produced. 

Such aims do not sit well with an insecure, resentful, and sclerotic nation in which fantasies about past greatness are fuel for a deluded sense of national grandeur in the present.

That is why the battle for the soul of the National Trust is being fought. Only this morning, on the BBC Today programme, Neil Bennett, the former Telegraph journalist and representative of ‘Restore Trust’ attacked the report and accused the National Trust of ‘going down a very politicised line…of actually standing against the nation’s heritage.’

Asked whether he was referring to last year’s report, Bennett called it  ‘a bad report… littered with inaccuracies’ and ‘produced very much for political motives’ which he insisted amounted to ‘trampling on our history.’

These base lies were not refuted by the BBC’s other interviewee Simon Jenkins, who said ‘I don’t think anyone who’s ever read history could regard it as an outstanding report…I think gamma minus is probably what I’d give it.’ Jenkins followed this condescension by insulting the report’s authors, who he described as ‘a frankly dire group of people’.

Why they were ‘dire’ was not spelled out. It’s a measure of the BBC’s craven complicity in the government’s ‘antiwoke’ agenda that no one was asked to defend the report.  

All this matters, because these attacks are not just another manufactured ‘culture war’.   What is at stake here is how we remember ourselves as a nation and how we imagine our common future on these islands, one which recognises how the many people who live on it came to be here, and how we might go forward together.  It matters because for all the right’s endless insistence on left-wing ‘cancel culture’, academics and institutions that challenge the government’s reactionary agenda are now being bullied and intimidated.

It matters, because history really does matter, and it is history that is being attacked here - by this monstrous government and its supporters.   As Stuart Hall argued, the British (English) have never recognised and acknowledged their own imperial history. In a country in which ‘colonial relationships were essential ingredients of Britishness’ yet remain ‘ unpurged,’ Hall argued ‘ the imperial moment remains the discursive shadow of the nation’s self-image.’

The National Trust’s report is a courageous contribution to that ‘purging.’ The disgraceful attacks on the report’s authors, and the institution of the National Trust itself, are one more example of how far we are from coming to terms with what Hall called our ‘long, unfinished history.’