The Resistible Rise of Restore Trust

 ‘Tis the season for National Trust voting again. And once again Restore Trust have posted their very helpful list of people not to vote for.

Restore Trust thinks the National Trust has a problem. Or, to be more accurate, Restore Trust wants the rest of us to think the National Trust has a problem. On the face of it, Restore Trust are very nice people. But there is a not so very hidden agenda.

First of all, they claim to be independent. They claim that having an office at 55, Tufton Street is just coincidence. 55, Tufton Street houses a bunch of opaque organisations with right wing libertarian and climate sceptic agendas. Their common feature, apart from their very right wing politics, is their opaqueness. Restore Trust claimed not to be connected to any other organisation there until it was pointed out that board member Neil Record was chair of the IEA and climate change deniers Net Zero Watch. Restore Trust’s director, Zewditu Gebreyohanes, previously worked at Policy Exchange, which is described by George Monbiot as “a dark money lobby group, and one of the most deadly anti-environmental organisations in the UK”. They claim that all their funding is from small donors without revealing any of the sources – in common with most if not all the other tenants of Tufton Street.

They rely on imprecision, impression and deniability. For instance, the X (Twitter) handle RestoreTrustNT mimics National Trust practice, such as ClandonParkNT, SheffieldParkNT, giving the impression that they are connected to the main body. When pressed they will deny it, "Of course not, don't be silly", but the impression is there in the background.

They have a mantra - a form of words that gets repeated and repeated and repeated. In this case it is "get back to its original purpose". They provide little evidence that it has strayed from its initial purpose, and the evidence they do provide is very low quality. (More of that later.) They couch the idea of "original purpose" in their own language, without referring to the formal objects of the National Trust, which might not help their cause.

Such evidence as they use tends to get reused and repurposed over and over again, and is of very poor quality. The most notorious is the Hanbury Hall torchères, which they alleged had been removed because of a "woke agenda". Hanbury Hall corrected them, saying that the torchères were in a fragile state and had been removed from public view for protection and renovation. The inaccurate tweet has not been deleted, which would be standard practice for an organisation that respected the truth. (The tweet is here - checked on Sept 8th 2023.)

You might wonder what would happen if the National Trust did all the things Restore Trust wants. But culture wars, such as the campaign Restore Trust is waging, are not about results. They don't care if the National Trust changes or not; what they want is to keep their audience angry, like Dacre's Daily Mail, just angry enough to keep supporting Restore Trust. If the National Trust changed everything to be the way Restore Trust says it wants them to be, Restore Trust would find something else to complain about. What they want is a constant state of pre-emptive resentment.

What is the end game? They don’t say. Apart from abolishing woke. But I have a notion. It comes in two forms. One is to be a permanent thorn in the flesh - that would suit them quite nicely, so that they can push Tufton Street's exploitative agenda in the culture sphere. The second is more ambitious, and, frankly for me more frightening. They would enjoy being in charge of the National Trust. They would enjoy having a majority on the Council, appointing a chief executive sympathetic to their aims. They could claim to have won and no doubt all reference to slavery would disappear from all NT properties. And Restore Trust would have a direct line to the minds of the National Trust's membership: nearly six million thoughtful British people (thoughtful, but mostly "unpolitical" hence ripe for cultivating). What might they do with publications like the NT magazine to push their right wing exploitative agenda? Restore Trust, in my opinion, does not have the interests of the National Trust at heart at all. What they want is disruption and control for their own agenda. I would urge all National Trust members to resist. The immediate way to resist is to vote for the Council’s recommended candidates, and nobody else.

Covid is not over

 First published on LibDemVoice.

The UK’s response to Covid has been, and still is, characterised by delay and indifference. This is largely but not wholly because Boris Johnson was Prime Minister when it struck. Johnson made being irresponsible fun, and we all paid the price for it, as the Covid inquiry is now slowly and painstakingly beginning to make clear. The British electorate was shallow enough to fall for it, and resistant enough to taking responsibility seriously to make it very risky for a political party to advocate it. But sometimes it is right for political parties to say unpopular things.

A liberal response to Covid would start from the basic principle: we should be free to do everything we want, provided we do not infringe other people’s freedom. Conrad Russell noted that that proviso is far more of a limitation than most people realise.

During the crisis we did all the things we were asked to do (unlike Johnson et al). Once it was over, most of us embraced our “freedom”, and stopped counting the cost to other people. More than a million clinically extremely vulnerable people remain effectively trapped in their own homes because they cannot count on the rest of us to keep them safe. The population at large (including, unfortunately, a lot of medical practitioners) embraces the fictions that it’s over (while the aptly named FU.1 variant is spreading globally 50% faster than previous variants) and that it’s just like flu. But currently 200+ people die every week with Covid on the death certificate (this is known to be significant underreporting). Flu doesn’t kill people in the summer. Flu doesn’t cause the long term sequelae that Covid does. People don’t get Long Flu, whereas currently in the UK alone two million are suffering from Long Covid (ONS figures).

80% of Japanese people still mask in public. The instant reaction will be they’re different, they’re more conformist, we believe in freedom. But it doesn’t have to be about ideology or culture. It can and should be about common sense. I am free to not wear a mask; but my not wearing a mask increases the risk of you getting Covid. And that is a much worse fate than the tiny inconvenience of a mask. Back to the key principle that we are free to do whatever we want provided it does not impact on other people’s freedom. This principle says that we must take responsibility for the effect we have on other people. Going about unmasked and not taking other sensible and barely inconvenient precautions puts other people at risk. To be liberal, we should take account of that and act responsibly.

It is time for the Liberal Democrats to say, “Hey, this is our core principle. It’s time to be sensible about this. People are suffering dire long term consequences, or even dying, because we refuse to take responsibility for the effect we have on others.  People are suffering dire long term consequences, or even dying, because we won’t press the government to do sensible things like allocating meaningful budgets for air filtration in schools and public buildings. ‘Living with’ Covid actually means dying with it.”

It seems to me that this would be the liberal way, despite the public’s impatience with it.

Embrace the Elephant!

 First published in LibDemVoice Sat 27th May 2023

The elephant is of course that big, and growing, elephant in the corner of the sitting room: Brexit. Now that Project Fear has become Project Here, it is time for us in the Lib Dems to be much more open about our belief that Britain’s place lies back at the heart of Europe.

Ever since the Brexit vote I’ve been reasonably sure this time would come. Voting to leave was a mistake, and its costs would sooner or later become apparent. The ideological nature of the vote was such that many people would cling stubbornly to their belief that it was right – for some years, I thought. But once it began to crumble, it would crumble quickly. I was right about the trajectory, wrong about the timing. I thought it would be at least another couple of years. (I didn’t allow for the damage to be so deep, or the government to be so negligent.)

As long as the bulk of Brexit voters held to their beliefs, and, equally, as long as the bulk of the British population continued to be hoodwinked by the idea that to campaign for our beliefs was somehow undemocratic, we were probably right to soft pedal on it. I have thought for a long time that the backlash would outweigh the potential gains; but I believed we only needed to be patient.

Our policy has become clear with  “Rebuilding Trade and Cooperation with Europe”, though the mainstream media have been, as usual, exceedingly quiet about it. Our leadership on the whole has remained reticent, but now the time for reticence has passed. There was some indication of this at the spring conference – the European passages of Ed’s speech were highly optimistic and were loudly and enthusiastically applauded. (Not reported in the mainstream press of course – maybe Ed was counting on that.)

That shows that popularity within the party is high, and now opinion polls are regularly showing solid majorities saying Brexit has failed, the costs are too high, it was the wrong choice. Opinion is with us. We have to contend with the right wing media and the Rees-Mogg Tendency: but we always will have to. But now is the time to make it bold. The time is now for us to embrace the elephant.

It remains a technically awkward policy to sell. It’s difficult to make a catchy slogan out of “repair, rebuild confidence, trade, single market”. And a great deal of prior work needs to be done in this country, as I’ve said before, to make us fit for them to accept us. Perhaps there is a slogan available: coined in an inspired moment by Sally Burnell: “from Brexit to Fixit”.

I have about twenty years left

 First published on LibDem Voice.

I have about twenty years or so left on this planet. I very much hope that before I shuffle off, the UK will have rejoined the EU. I think it will be touch and go whether we manage it. Apologies to our more enthusiastic Europhiles if that disappoints you, but I think it is realistic.

The EU needs to see a steady majority in favour of joining over a period of time. We don’t have that stable majority yet, though I expect we will. It will then need to remain stable for a number of years (particularly important for us, given Britain’s current and immediate past tendencies towards exceptionalism and fascism). Then the process of accession will take several years even if, in the meantime, we have laid the groundwork by joining the EEA, rejoining the single market, rejoining Horizon, or whatever we choose to do.

It will take a lot of work, and although we are enthusiastic about this ourselves, it is very difficult to persuade other people of an objective that may be fifteen or twenty years off. So it is not necessarily helpful to make a greater noise about wanting to rejoin, as some would have us do. It may make more sense for us to stand for an intermediate objective, one which is necessary for this country, as well as necessary if we are to have any realistic prospect of rejoining.

If we are to hope to rejoin, we need to make this country different to what it is now. We actually need to do that anyway. Regardless of our chances of joining the EU, I do not want to live in a country where millions rely on foodbanks to fend off starvation while the Prime Minister changes the grid to have electricity delivered to his swimming pool; a country where a previous Prime Minister seeks to ennoble his wife-beating father; a country where the Home Secretary uses language about asylum seekers reminiscent of 1930s Germany (yes, I will say that, because it is true); a country where the heroism of NHS staff is rewarded with applause but not with a pay rise.

So I propose a slogan: “Let’s fix this country”. Let’s fix things so that they actually work for the people and not just the elite.

• fix the voting system so that everybody’s vote actually counts
• fix the tax system so that wealth pays its fair share
• fix the benefit system so that people are treated with respect, not with contempt
• fix the housing system by allowing councils to build green affordable housing where it is actually needed
• fix energy use and storage so that we will genuinely be green in the foreseeable future
• fix all the privatised public services so that they are forced to put citizens before profits

There are many more fixes, I am sure, that others will want to add to this list, and it can be as long as you like because the idea is for a radical approach to changing this country to work for everybody. Putting it this way focuses the voters on what we’re doing for them. If we achieve it, or anything like it, over the lifetime of two or three parliaments, we will have made this country democratic, warm, respectful and liberal. And, almost as a by product, we will have slid into being a really good candidate to join the EU.

ICO, OFCOM, please do your jobs

 Dear ICO, dear Ofcom

I got a call today from a company saying my solar panels were overdue a service. We have solar panels so the call was almost plausible, but in the end they rang off.

I looked up the number the call came from. 02033760447 if you want to know. It's been looked up on Who Calls Me more than 300 times. If 300 people have bothered to look it up, how many thousands do you think have had calls from it?

It is very clearly being used for scam calls and has been reported and known about for months. Why have you not shut it down? 

We get calls like this over and over again. We look them up and the numbers have been checked and reported over and over again for months. Our privacy is being invaded over and over again by people who we know are scammers, yet you do nothing.

Brexit has worked

 Everyone who is saying Brexit hasn't worked is wrong. It has worked. It did exactly what it was supposed to do.

It didn't do what they said it would do - of course it didn't. They were lying.

The aim of Brexit, what they were working towards for forty years and more, was to turn the UK into a plutocrats' playground.

The only reason that we haven't actually become that yet is that governments led by May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak have proved too incompetent, or possibly too pusillanimous, to follow through on the initial breakthrough which was to get Britain out of the EU.

(In my view, the involvement of Russian influence could be seen as coincidental. The Russian regime undoubtedly did its bit to secure Brexit and was delighted when it happened, but its influence was limited in the context of forty years of dedicated work by plutocrats and their enablers. In another sense, Russian involvement was not a coincidence because Russia re-emerged from the collapse of the USSR as a plutocratic state, and was therefore completely in tune with the Brexit plot.)

Getting us out of the EU was only one step in the plan. Once out we could much more easily be turned into a low wage, low security, high risk, high profit and toxically filthy countrywide freeport.

While we haven't got there, we're well on the way, more by luck than judgement. Behind the terminal dithering of the May-Johnson-Truss-Sunak axis, the plutocrats' aims are still in sight - removing our human rights, removing our right to protest, making voting more difficult, etc, etc.

And the argument about whether Brexit has "worked", or making Brexit "work" is nothing more than a massive shell game, which the Tories know and Labour have fallen for. Brexit was never meant to work for ordinary people, but Brexiters have to keep pretending that it was meant to until it's too late for us to do anything about the destruction of our rights and our democracy.

Luckily the British public is proving to have some common sense, and Brexit regret is beginning to take hold. There is now only one constituency in the country where a majority of voters still think Brexit was a good choice.

But common sense has to be turned into action, and we are now in a race. Either we move decisively towards the defence of our democracy and our rights, or we will have reached a point where so many of our rights have been dismantled that it won't matter any more. We have to fight and to keep fighting, now and into the foreseeable future. The battle will be long because the plutocrats will not give up; our determination has to be at least as long as theirs.

Polly Toynbee on Christians

 I admire Polly Toynbee greatly, so it was disappointing to find her falling for the same inaccuracy as lesser commentators with regard to the reporting of Christian identity in the census.  “This is the first Christmas since time immemorial that most people in this country are not Christians.”  This is not true. Ticking a box about Christian identity in a census is very different from “being a Christian”. The vast majority of people in this country have not been Christian for a very long time, and it shows.

While I  accept completely Toynbee’s strictures about the damage done to the world and to the country by people who use Christianity to cover for their violence, I would observe that the country has not actually been Christian for a very long time, and does not appear to be much the better for it – the need for food banks (many of them run by Christians); the adulation and protection of wealth; the complete acceptance of lying and venality among the country’s leadership; the vicious racism and sexism promoted by the tabloid press (Clarkson); the vilification of strangers in the Rwanda policy. These are thoroughly non Christian developments.

Christianity – real Christianity – still has a role to play in this country, notably in speaking truth to power, as Jonathan Gullis seems to realise (“Too many people are using the pulpit to preach from.”!!).

As a Christian, I welcome the fact that fewer people are inaccurately self identifying as such. Honesty is a Christian value. More people being honest about having no religion is a step in the right direction.