National Distrust

IT’S VERY EASY TO CLAIM THE OTHER SIDE have started a culture war. That while what you’re doing is right, reasonable and well-established, what they’ve started doing is antagonistic, incomprehensible and unprecedented. But sometimes it’s true, and obvious who has started what and why. Especially when there’s an act of parliament setting out your purposes in the first place.

That is the case with the National Trust:

“The National Trust shall be established for the purposes of promoting the permanent preservation for the benefit of the nation of lands and tenements (including buildings) of beauty or historic interest and as regards lands for the preservation (so far as practicable) of their natural aspect features and animal and plant life.”

So say the various Acts of Parliament which, since 1907, have propelled the Trust beyond mere charitable status and into the East India Trading Company of British heritage, whose great houses were brought into being by private enterprise but were long