Read on Twitter
I’m following up on this, reminded by the latest attacks on Professor Corinne Fowler ( @corinne_fowler) and others in The Daily Mail and in other right-wing publications, and prompted by today’s article in The Observer.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/dec/20/ive-been-unfairly-targeted-says-academic-at-heart-of-national-trust-woke-row https://twitter.com/dermotfeenan/status/1330926016739610625
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/dec/20/ive-been-unfairly-targeted-says-academic-at-heart-of-national-trust-woke-row https://twitter.com/dermotfeenan/status/1330926016739610625
While the Education Committee scrutinises the work of the Education Department, including higher education ( https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/203/education-committee/), the thrust of the letter signed by Committee members Hunt and Gullis was directed at the National Trust not academics.
Nonetheless, I’m keeping an eye on those MPs. I want here to add to points made in my initial thread, especially in light of subsequent, apparently coordinated attacks in The Daily Mail, The Spectator, The Daily Telegraph, and Express on the National Trust and academics.
There is undoubtedly in these latest attacks evidence of anxieties around English national history, culture and identity – reminiscent of concerns around the V&A’s ‘Destruction of the Country House’ exhibition in 1974. However, I wish to go further than such concerns.
The projects 'Connections between Colonialism and Properties now in the Care of the National Trust, Including Links with Historic Slavery' and 'Colonial Countryside' expose links between historical slavery and colonialism and certain National Trust property.
In turn, those linkages are connected to the creation and maintenance of signifiers of class status and social capital – which are assiduously policed by those who are most invested in their value.
Removing the façade of respectability around the quintessential National Trust estate creates anxiety for those who would wish to conceal those linkages and connections; not simply historical linkages between slavery, colonialism and what became later National Trust properties.
This concealment is not unique to some views about National Trust property. Hall et al (2014) noted that ‘[s]lave-ownership is virtually invisible in British history. It has been elided by strategies of euphemism and evasion’ (p. 1). https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/legacies-of-british-slaveownership/8750A3837D3D7F2D3E3D836250A42FC1
The linkages between the acquisition and transfer of wealth, social class, and ethnonational identity persist. Revealing those linkages also threatens the concealment of similar mechanisms regarding wealth and status today, which appears to have significant gender dimensions.
That concealment may take the form of schemes that pay income into offshore accounts so as not to pay tax in the UK or in status-achievement, such as entry to Oxbridge, on the fictional basis of merit alone without acknowledging class and racial privilege & dependency on others.
It is noteworthy that the five critics of the Trust and/or academics quoted in The Observer are white, male, middle-aged Conservatives, the majority of whom went to Oxbridge.
The authors of the articles in the right-wing The Spectator (Harry Mount, son of Sir William Robert Ferdinand Mount, 3rd Baronet) and The Daily Telegraph (Lord Moore) are white men, educated at private schools and Oxbridge. Can you see any pattern?
Of the 28 signatories to the Common Sense Group’s letter almost all (89%) are men. It is also typical of a certain type of regressive gender politics that the signatories use ‘chairman’ instead of the Trust’s own gender-neutral term ‘Chair’. https://www.edwardleigh.org.uk/news/letter-telegraph
The signatories’ professed concern with the ‘purpose’ of the National Trust is risible. The Trust's charitable objects (‘purposes’) are set out in its governing documents. The Charity Commission Register records the ‘Charitable objects’ ( …https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/charity-search/-/charity-details/205846/governing-document), as follows.
These objects refer to preservation of lands, tenements etc. ‘of historic interest’. What is of such interest can vary according to new understandings of, and interest in, history. The Register also refers to Acts, with further purposes (overlooked below). https://andrewpurkis.wordpress.com/2020/10/25/the-purposes-of-the-national-trust/
Section 4(2), National Trust Act 1907, provides broad discretionary powers to the Trust, including, that it ‘may maintain and manage or assist in the maintenance and management of lands as open spaces or places of public resort and buildings for purposes of […]
instruction and may accept property in trust for any public purposes and may act in any trusts for or as trustee of any property devoted to public purposes and may do all acts or things and take all such proceedings as they may deem desirable in the furtherance of the objects.’
‘Instruction’/ ‘public purposes’/ and ‘all acts or things and […] all such proceedings […]’ are broad enough to lawfully allow research, publication and instruction on the links between Trust properties, colonialism and slavery (and much more besides).
Rather than focus on the Trust, attention now needs to be directed at those confronting the Trust. The intervention by Baroness Stowell (Chair of the Charity Commission) against the Trust is not only legally misconceived but smacks of politicking.
In an interview on 23 October, she misrepresented the purposes of the Trust. The Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee unanimously refused to endorse her appointment as Chair of the Charity Commission. It referred to the former Tory minister’s ‘complete lack of experience’.
There was no hue and cry from Stowell, Dowden et al when the Trust produced the 2014 book ‘The Country House at War: Fighting the Great War at home and in the trenches’.
There was no criticism from them when the Trust rightly deepened the scope of its work to help explain the lives of those ‘below stairs’, as illustrated in Siân Evans’ Trust-produced book ‘Life Below Stairs: in the Victorian and Edwardian Country House’ (2011).
The Trust has always been able to engage in its primary object ‘preservation’ with reference to supporting interpretative aids; guided tours; in situ explanations from volunteers/ staff in period costume; illustrated guidebooks etc.
Much of this draws from research. Much of that research is conducted in-house; some involves external collaboration. The Trust carries out hugely important research in the UK, with international significance. It has its own research section. https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/features/research-at-the-national-trust
The Trust is recognised as an Independent Research Organisation by UK Research and Innovation: the non-departmental public body of the UK government that directs research and innovation funding. Nothing the Trust has done in supporting this research is beyond its lawful powers.
While The Observer article focuses on Professor Fowler, she also refers to other academics who've been targeted. The Daily Mail publishes the names and photos of a number of those academics: all are women.
This echoes The Sun’s recent smears against ‘celebs’ and ‘lefty lawyers’ (including photos predominantly of women) who recently opposed unlawful deportations from the UK to Jamaica – suggesting also an element of misogyny in the political right’s self-generated ‘culture war’.
Those academics are doing their job. They're seeking to reveal and understand aspects of history that have far too long been covered over in partial, distorted accounts.
The ratcheting up on the right of similar smears against lawyers has been linked to an attack on a law firm.
The ratcheting up on the right of similar smears against lawyers has been linked to an attack on a law firm.
Similar smears about academics potentially places those academics at risk. The Daily Mail accuses the researchers involved in the project of being biased, yet have produced no evidence of bias, just smears.
The Mail’s piece is a disgraceful attack on the reputation of academics. All academics need to take these smears seriously. They are also attacks on academic freedom. They threaten our colleagues, and, here, do so in a way that has disturbing gender dimensions.
