This is disingenuous. What the National Trust is doing is part of a full-scale politicised 'audit' of our history and national memory to, at the very least, asterisk anything that might be considered racist https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/12/national-trust-history-slavery

History is complex, yes, and that means we literally don't have the time or space to tell the *whole* story. There's plenty of stuff that we omit. The question is what we make a point of including, and what narrative that tells. And obviously that's a political question

If it weren't a political question, this 'audit' wouldn't be happening. Nobody's gullible enough to not notice that it went into overdrive after the BLM protests in June. Clearly the people pushing this effort think it will help effect political change

When you challenge it, you get this disingenuous retreat back to ‘we just want to tell the whole story, you want to sanitise history', but we all know none of this is happening in a vacuum

The combined effect is to push an overall narrative that Britain is a systemically racist country that owes its culture and prosperity to the original sins of slavery, colonialism, and the oppression of non-white peoples. And of course that has political implications

We already know that the asterisks will be followed by cancellation and politicisation. In half a decade we've gone from Cecil Rhodes being controversial to Churchill, Rule Britannia, and Land of Hope and Glory being controversial

The effect, deliberate or otherwise, is to deconstruct our national identity. To dethrone our pantheon of national heroes. To dismiss any recognisable expression of British patriotism as either morally unacceptable, or incompatible with our multiracial society

What's so frustrating is how *easy* it is. You don't have to 'cancel' a pillar of our national identity entirely, you just have to make it a 'culture war' battleground. Then, to put it glibly, it stops being part of British identity and becomes part of Tory identity