Just to be clear, the BBC demeans itself with the ridiculous suggestion that the National Trust has gone ‘woke’ (please stop normalising this meaningless rightwing jargon!!)and it also trivialises an important topic by inviting the weapons grade moron Ben Bradley to ‘debate’ it https://twitter.com/technokyle/status/1326543328460984320

To debate something, you have to know something about it, or be willing to do some research, to know what you don’t know, and be capable of considering ideas you may not have thought of, especially when they come from people who may know more about the subject than you do.

Needless to say, Ben Bradley is utterly incapable of doing any of these things. The sole explanation for his presence is to boost his profile and provide ‘balance’ in the latest phoney culture war battle to come wafting across these septic isles with the usual alt-right stench

This is a pity, because the #NationalTrust slavery and colonialism report https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/features/addressing-the-histories-of-slavery-and-colonialism-at-the-national-trust#Download%20the%20report is an illuminating and important reflection on British history and the vexed question of ‘heritage’, which is too good to be wasted on culture war chaff like Bradley

If heritage is a route to the common good, as the historían Raphael Samuel once argued, then this report recognises that the places we regard as beautiful & iconic sometimes have complicated and darker histories than we think, w/aren’t reflected in Brideshead or Downton Abbey

The report shows the intersections between the local ‘country houses’ that we all like to visit (myself included) and the global currents of (slave) labour, trade, and conquest that made many of these places possible. It doesn’t ‘judge’ their owners, let alone their descendants

It isn’t ‘revisionist’ as the dense member for Mansfield argued. It isn’t ‘woke’ or ‘anti-British’. On the contrary, it widens and deepens our understanding of British history, and reminds us that the shared history of all the people in these isles is not a BBC costume drama

Or Lucy Worsley reaching into her dressing-up trunk. Contrary to Bradley’s gimlet-eyed misreading (hasn’t he heard of Google at least?’), the report dates some years back before the Black Lives Matter protests. It’s a serious piece of work that deserves serious attention

And a serious contribution to the debate about who we are as a nation, who we came to be who we are, and who is included and excluded when we talk about our common heritage.

And if that isn’t useful, right now, then I don’t know what is.