What's Happened to the National Trust
andrewhowells.substack.com
andrewhowells.substack.com
Although positioned as a recent development, in reality this is absolutely nothing remotely new. The same class of commentators have been railing against 'PC gone mad' for decades. It's the same mix of fear of change and chinese-whispered 'you couldn't make it up' urban legends e.g. Baa Baa Green Sheep and Banning Christmas.
Linkedin:
https://uk.linkedin.com/in/mark-schneider-12b4927 (moved over to run it)
https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewjamescole (still in the States).
I think its important to recognise that all these groups, from GB news to the brexit campaign are NOT ground swells of public opinion. They're moneied interests, often foreign, using cash to change politics and bypass democracy...
There was a referendum recently that proved you wrong. Perhaps reflecting on why the EU was so unpopular would be more productive than blaming fictional foreign interests and low information voters.
Decades of fake news about the bendiness of bananas, pushed by loss making media made enormous numbers of people honestly believe the EU wanted to eat their babies...
And yet it had the whole mechanism of a right wing government working against it.
So to summarise your position:
Vote goes your way: This is the authentic will of the people
Vote doesn't go your way: Obviously this was caused by big business and foreign interests.
No it didn't. The only reason the vote was called was because the majority of that government demanded it. The current Conservative PM campaigned for it. There are a long list of senior tory party members who pushed it, dozens of former ministers etc.
>So to summarise your position
Please don't strawman my position for me.
Fyi, I have no problem admitting Bojo won fair and square despite thinking he's a disgrace.
And yet the Conservative Prime Minister at the time campaigned against it, and even got the UK Government to send out a leaflet to every household in the UK advising to vote remain: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
I'm not sure how that equates to "the whole mechanism of a right wing government working against it".
If that were the case why call the vote? Why fund leave at all? Why not make some effort to dispel the fake news and foreign interference?
The weird need to pretend this was an underdog/rebel/persecuted minority? The same happened with trump supporters. What's the deal here?
That's obviously untrue, unless you think the UK Government sent out a leaflet recommending Leave as well as Remain?
>> The weird need to pretend this was an underdog/rebel/persecuted minority
I wouldn't say persecuted and obviously as it turned out a majority as they won the referendum, but they can certainly be classed as the underdog when you have the government of the day, the BBC, big business, the Bank of England all against Leave.
Conformation the state was paying for the Leave leaflet:
https://fullfact.org/europe/whos-getting-taxpayers-money-eu-.... (£7m in postage alone!)
In all your comments you have been confidently wrong. Maybe take a few minutes and go back to the facts?
And again you've made the disproven claim that the government were against brexit. Only now the BBC, big business, BoE and Big foot were all also against you?
I don't get this. The more facts contradict your claim, the more you double down.
So what's really going on here? Is brexit really just a giant troll brigade? Because it clearly isn't about reality...
>> https://fullfact.org/europe/whos-getting-taxpayers-money-eu-.... (£7m in postage alone!)
The page you linked to actually contradicts what you said. Both campaigns got £7m, but the government spent an additional £9m on it's own pro-remain leaflet titled "Why the Government believes that voting to remain in the European Union is the best decision for the UK."
From the webpage you showed: "The government is spending an estimated £9 million sending pro-Remain leaflets to all UK households. This is on top of what the official campaign groups on either side of the debate will get in public money, which includes a free mailout."
£7m+£9m is more than £7m.
>> And again you've made the disproven claim that the government were against brexit.
Quoting from the leaflet PUBLISHED BY THE GOVERNMENT:
"The Government believes the UK should remain in the EU. This leaflet sets out the facts, and explains why the Government believes a vote to remain in the EU is in the best interests of the people of the UK."
>> I don't get this. The more facts contradict your claim, the more you double down.
See above for actual facts.
I just wanted to butt in about this point. The Lib Dems at the time also wanted a referendum on EU membership if they won, the theory being that if the Lib Dems won, it would signal that a referendum would pass remain very easily and would give a strong mandate to the pro-Europe types for further integration.
Over the last 60 years the Tories and Labour have had a wide range of views on Europe, and with euroscepticism and europhilism and euroantipathy present in both of them in meaningful measures. Certainly some of the tories in government at the time were eurosceptics and wanted the vote because voting out was the eurosceptic wet dream(which came to pass). I don't know David Cameron personally but my impression of him is that on balance he was probably closer to Nick Clegg on Europe than Bojo, else he wouldn't have left so immediately after the vote. I think like Democrats who were rooting for Trump to be the Republican nominee, he was blissfully overconfident in the result and asked a question he really didn't want the actual answer to.
I have seen a strong response to them by a group "Stop Funding Hate" who have put pressure on advertisers to boycott the channel.
Given how little time the channel has been running, and that it includes former BBC presenters such as Andrew Neil, I find this fairly censorious.
If they abide by the rules by Ofcom, where they are required to maintain "due impartiality", I don't mind if people want to talk and investigate what is important to them.
Because it seems there is more to it than that, as some people, after all, want to bankrupt them on the account they are spreading hatred.
If they are occupied by trivial matters, then why are they attracting such a strong backlash?
a. Haven't done
b. Are strongly against
... on the belief that wokeness and cancel culture is nothing beyond generic "fear of change", despite the fact that they were on air less than 72 hours before a malicious radical left organization started trying to destroy them completely by lying to their advertisers. IKEA has by the way now recognized that they were lied to.
That seems like a pretty large mis-understanding of the situation. When people rail against wokeness and cancel culture, they mean things like this.
Advertisers withdrawing their custom isn't censorship. GB News can still remain on air if they find some other source of funding.
One of the advertisers, COOP, recognise this is an issue, so they have a policy to "Not seek to affect the editorial independence of publications or channels".
They declined to withdraw their custom, as they knew to do so would be censorious.
Other companies might find it expedient by acting as censors in the short term, but others, like COOP, seem to realise it's unwise to withdraw commercial contracts under pressure from an activist group campaigning against alleged speech that they don't agree with.
It's crisis time and both "sides" are loosing.
Demanding statues remain up so "history is not forgotten", then making moves to ban the discussion of unfavourable history, such as the legacy of empire and such, Churchill's policies during the Bengal famine being the classic example.
Britain’s imperial past and present provide a perfectly adequate explanation for the UK’s relative prosperity. It seems entirely understandable that proponents of the ideology only want some of the history to be remembered.
Otherwise, too many voters might get the idea that the UK is some kind of dishonest, nasty little island nation built on, and still benefiting from, slavery and imperialism. It’s probably a bit harder to remain in power with a program of advancing domestic inequality to the descendants of the beneficiaries of that imperialism.
I don’t think that this is a problem that just the UK has – many industrial imperial powers have the problem of how to contextualise their relative wealth. Once you start asking if it is right for the beneficiaries of those policies to have kept their wealth, solutions like serious wealth redistribution start to get proposed. It’s just that in the UK, there is a tendency for reactionaries to look almost comical to even their deepest opponents.
Absolutely, and the class structure in the UK is very still prevalent and cohesive. I also add that the beneficiaries of the slave trade and imperialism were predominantly one class, with a few crumbs dropped.
In the context of the comment and this article, imperialism and slavery are central. I think you understand why there is a backlash against any kind of redress for slavery, you only have to consider what is at stake: it’s not such a great leap from tackling race inequities to tackling class inequities – and didn’t those ideas get buried already?
I also believe this is true in the US, and why there is similar reaction to race inequities being raised: it’s no coincidence civil the rights movement and socialist movements were interlinked. In the US, the lives of poor white people don’t matter so much, either; that is not to deny that there is not and has not been a substantial race element too.
There is this idea that the US is a classless society, but it still has a class of wage labourers and a class of bourgeois – along with the inevitable class that mediate between the two but are actually the former. It looks remarkably like the UK class system today, with the key difference being the aristocratic remnants in the UK.
> The roots of class are in land ownership. And how far back must we unwind that to achieve equity?
Land ownership, inheritance and distribution are fascinating topics, especially when considering equity on a global scale and how the utility of natural resources has changed.
Land reform in the UK was itself a substantial political theme throughout the 20th century, and we still see elements of it resurface in debates on housing policy and environment, even if the blatant inequities are conveniently ignored.
Litigating history to try to work out who is benefiting from a historical injustice is almost infinitely complex.
Race and class and other identity categories have extremely fuzzy edges. Everyone will have a bad actor somewhere in their group. Nobody is pure victim or pure oppressor.
I don’t think you can unwind – you can create a more unfair or less unfair society, but even how you measure fair is to be debated in a context where money buys both influence and reach.
It’s not just the class- or race-inequities – it’s the whole ideology: the alternative explanations, the justifications and what look like churches surrounding it.
> Litigating history to try to work out who is benefiting from a historical injustice is almost infinitely complex.
It’s also very backward-focused, and very subject to interpretation. Not to mention it is taking place in a world where the publishers tend to be owned by members of the class that stands to lose the most.
It’s also not just a historical injustice: it is perpetuated and maintained to this day. Some would argue that the maintenance of such statues is offensive. To me, statues have always marked people who were important to the state – and slave traders and colonisers were. A friend once remarked that there was seldom a statue that didn’t deserve all the abuse it got from birds.
> Race and class and other identity categories have extremely fuzzy edges. Everyone will have a bad actor somewhere in their group. Nobody is pure victim or pure oppressor.
Absolutely – in fact they’re largely abstract when you factor in phenomena like albinism and environmental changes for race alone, without even getting into "scientific" racism. Defining class results in substantial reports that have a few interesting observations, but don’t really provide a definite result.
I have almost certainly directly benefited from the imperialism. I don’t think it agrees with my values, but I don’t really see an alternative beyond a sort of tolerated hypocrisy.
Citation needed. Slavery does not explain the industrial revolution. In fact, expensive labour, plus cheap coal, does a better job. My citation: Robert Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective.
I don’t believe that the policies were unenlightened, or accidental, or coincidental. I think they were the result of immense effort and cunning, driven by a different set of values that are intrinsic to and still maintained by a certain class today. I believe they originated in the class system as a way to justify the privilege, and I don’t think they ever went away.
The level of ingenuity to pull off what was done, and then to create an ideology and a set of scriptures to justify and entrench it for centuries is absolutely fascinating at both a historical and anthropological level. It’s also a in a context of immense human suffering and loss of life that it cannot be separated from.
I find the woke culture an almost comical clash between the overt and implicit values of globalism and neoliberalism. I view it with a fascination, and it’s not from some position of superiority. I’d like to believe in the ideology, because I think I’d be so much happier, but I’ve always asked too many questions. Again, I consider the possibility I’m intellectually incapable of understanding some fundamental truth. The supremacist angle – not meant as a pejorative – seems the closest I can get to it, but I find that nearly all paths rely on post hoc ergo propter hoc, and it again puts me in a position of being better than others. And yet, fundamentally, do we all not have a sense of superiority: does our own individual survival not come ahead of another’s – outside of kin?
I don’t believe we are qualified to know the impact of imperialism without knowing what the world would have looked like without. From a cybernetic point of view, imperialism appears as though it can only have reduced the variety of the planet, and seems to me a negative – but this is assuming that industrialisation would have happened by another means. Imperialism also arose in multiple forms, leading me to believe it was inevitable, and I suspect other imperialist powers may have seized the opportunities left behind – but this seems a weak justification for what I consider amoral behaviour.
I wonder, however: if the asymmetry were reversed would maintain your position? Were you on the receiving end of might-is-right imperialism, would it still be a position you would hold? Kudos if so, but it’s not for me.
I realise that I was fortunate to be born into an imperialist country, and to be able to be an immigrant in another imperialist country. I drive a car. I can live with that and not agree with the things that ostensibly led to what I benefit from, and put me in the position of privilege to be able to even think about these things.
And the relative prosperity of countries that were colonised? Is this an argument in favour of colonisation?
GDP seems a flawed metric when discussing plunder: of course country A forcing country B to mine or farm will increase the GDP of country B.
I believe it requires either supremacism, inconsistency or hypocrisy to argue that land ownership at home should be sacrosanct whilst the rest of the world is fair game.
I’m actually not arguing for one thing or another, but I do have a side. I’m fine with overt supremacism or racism, though both run counter to my values.
Where is this British establishment trying to ban discussion of the British Empire?
Those MPs are complaining about the National Trust, but so what?
The answer to the question "What's happened to the National Trust" is "Nothing. It continues to operate as usual."
They have recently installed ticket machines at a isolated beach car park near me, the car park and beach has no facilities, not even a dog poo bin!
I let my membership lapse several years ago and have no intention of renewing it.
It’s extra charged in the UK because ‘PC gone mad’, please don’t show me inconvenient truth types, map neatly onto Brexit supporters.
Indeed, I woke up this morning...
That usage is surely far older than the '20s and I doubt that would surprise anyone.
But I don't think that is the usage in 'Stay Woke Ball': Wiktionary lists obsolete usage of 'wake' as 'To sit up late for festive purposes; to hold a night revel'; to me 'stay woke' there sounds like 'stay sat down' and similar, which is dialectal (British, at least) English for essentially the same as 'stay sitting down'.
What I meant was just that it's another example of seemingly ungrammatical 'stay <verb in simple past>', but one that's in reasonably common modern usage, and thus that the meaning of 'woke' in 'the stay woke ball' is in the 'to stay up revelling' usage, not (merely, obviously it's necessary) 'wake up and stay in that state' usage.
I realise the section heading is talking about the very modern adjectival slang usage - I just disagree that the 'older than you might think' argument that follows is correct, or that if so it has any value (since even the article seems to acknowledge its a different usage to the modern slang).
Yes, but it uses it in "stay woke" not "I woke this morning".
> I just disagree that the 'older than you might think' argument that follows is correct, or that if so it has any value (since even the article seems to acknowledge its a different usage to the modern slang).
I agree, it's not the modern usage as it doesn't have the same meaning, but I think the article means that its usage as an adjective is old, not that the usage with its current meaning is old. Which I guess makes it very debatable if "the word" has been around for that long.
It seems you're right though, it's a 'predicative' adjective, as in 'he is sat over there' or 'he is awake'.
Anyway, Wiktionary's first entry for it is literal adjectival usage, in the 'African-American vernacular, or slang', which assuming correct would make for a more compelling (to me anyway) 'older than you might think' argument, if it presumably just crossed over from that into the figurative usage, and only that took off more broadly.
With regard to previous owners of some national trust properties having committed deeds we are no longer comfortable with. I know. I don’t need that pushed down my throat when I’m trying to enjoy a nice family day out in a pretty place. I see no purpose to that. I think most people feel the same.
The whole “give one inbred family billions of dollars per year to maintain their long-since-neutered monarchy” scam always impresses me. As if the Trump family convinced tax payers to give his family a couple of billion dollars every year for the hell of it.
In the end, the taxpayers are forced to keep ensure you and your heirs remain billionaires without having to do more than wave your hand at a public appearances and attempt to stay out of the tabloids.
(I prefer using dollars because it has a more vague meaning of currency whereas the word “pound” has 30 meanings and uses on Wordnik. The English language sucks, but I digress.)
It looks like millennials (including me) are grasping the nettle of our history. It is partly because of ubiquitous university education, and partly because of the simple fact of distance from the cold war. The National Trust will come with us eventually, it is just a matter of whether or not it is held hostage by bunting-and-pints nationalists for decades first. I hope its board remains brave enough to present our history as facts rather than costume drama.
[1] Chaim D Kaufmann and Robert A Pape, "Explaining costly international moral action: Britain's sixty-year campaign against the Atlantic slave trade", International Organization 53, 4 (1999), pp. 631--668.