Conservation and conservatism

You've got to feel for the National Trust, dragged into the culture war for (in the words of Peter Mitchell) "daring to understand its mission as to help us understand history, rather than supply us with fantasy".

As Mitchell explains in an article for the Guardian, the organisation's "major crime was to have produced a report in September that examined Trust properties' relationship to the slave trade and colonialism". Not especially contentious, you would think - but try telling that to foaming-at-the-mouth Telegraph columnists or the so-called "Common Sense Group" of batshit right-wingers.

Let's be clear: such a report should be welcomed. Visiting Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire nearly three years ago, I was discomforted by the lack of recognition given to those who actually used to work there, and even more so by the troubling silence over the provenance of the Curzon family's fabulous wealth and possessions. It seemed that visitors were simply expected to be awed and amazed by the opulence and not ask any awkward questions.

However, in recent years there have been very welcome signals that significant changes are afoot. Take, for instance, a trip to Tyntesfield near Bristol last year. Each display board presenting information on an aspect of the house also gave an insight into the harsh realities of life in the guano trade, the means by which its most famous owner William Gibbs made his fortune. The property was literally built on shit - but also on the backs of Chinese indentured labour.

And yet now, with depressing inevitability, the Trust finds itself accused of pursuing a "woke agenda" simply for seeking to acknowledge how power, privilege and wealth were accumulated. Right-wing commentators are attempting to stir up the same sort of backlash among more conservative members that followed the organisation's programme of events celebrating LGBT history.

Mitchell is right to draw a connection to this summer's statue protests. The familiar charge is that the Trust are rewriting history and (metaphorically) desecrating monuments that are a symbolic source of national pride. In actual fact, its accusers are incapable - or, more accurately, unwilling - to dissociate the preservation of physical structures from the perpetuation of damaging myths. These patriots fervently believe in the greatness of Great Britain but refuse to face up to the foundations on which that greatness was constructed.

The Trust has a vital role to play in educating the nation about our past - but now the thinly veiled threats of slashed government funding suggest that it may be punished for attempting to do so. And that prospective loss of income, together with the catastrophic financial impact of COVID-19, threaten to further impede the organisation's ability to continue such work in the future.