Acorn to SUV - Consume & Be Damned

by Chris Draper

THE NATIONAL TRUST proclaims itself “Europe’s Largest Conservation Charity” but its eco-credentials are as exaggerated and dishonest as its interpretation and presentation of Britain’s history.

Founded by Christian socialists in 1895 to protect threatened countryside and promote public access, NT has been re-engineered into a powerful corporation preserving Britain’s aristocratic legacy and promoting the vicarious enjoyment of an uncritical middle class. Whilst maintaining the myth that it’s a democratic organisation committed to ecological aims, in reality NT regards members as little more than cash cows buying into a “country house experience”, targets for as much ancillary marketing as it can muster. Some excellent environmental work remains but as NT has grown it’s become less radical, more Establishment, more Corporate and more Consumerist, and consumption is killing the planet.

LOGO?

The National Trust’s logo is no longer appropriate; my abiding memory of NT visits isn’t the ubiquity of “leafy oak branches dotted with acorns” but the depressing sight of seemingly endless acres of car parks that once were fields and meadows. 'Enter via the car park, exit via the gift shop.' Replace NT’s oak leaf logo with the more appropriate silhouette of an SUV, or possible a cash till. Although, to be fair, I learn from the website that, 'The National Trust has produced a car “badge” of some sort for 70 years and we know that many members love displaying their car sticker.'

Fair enough but don’t then claim to be, 'Europe’s largest conservation charity' whilst acting as, 'Europe’s largest Jeremy Clarkson appreciation society.' Even Clarkson’s rampant eco-vandalism is eclipsed by the Trust’s ability to annually generate fifty million environmentally destructive car journeys through visits to NT properties.

Carriage Trade not Charabancs

The National Trust has given no consideration to whether any of the grand country houses it eagerly acquired were accessible by public transport. Even where visitors were initially able to arrive on foot, by bicycle or via public transport NT closed off that option by sealing off minor entry points and channelling visitors down carriageways monopolised by motor vehicles. “Enter via the car park, exit via the gift shop.” I’ve often alighted from a bus and been forced to walk along a main road bordering NT land before turning into the sole permissible entry point and then walking another mile or so down NT’s drive as motorised visitors sped by. Adding insult to narrowly avoided injury, NT ticket offices, inevitably sited adjacent to the car park, frequently offer buggy transport to convey motorists those last few yards to the front door of the country house.

'Europe’s largest conservation charity' marginalises everyone who arrives on foot and does nothing to facilitate connections to bus stops or railway stations. Where buses do pass near National Trust properties the Trust doesn’t erect shelters or cooperate with local authorities to ensure that they do so. The Trust ensures signage directs motorists from far and wide but the un-motorised are ignored although 25% of households don’t own a motor vehicle.

Click on any National Trust website and see for yourself how little information, help or concern is shown for pedestrian. Now compare the Harewood House website – what a contrast! Harewood positively encourages public transport users who are offered live transport timetable links, half price entry and are even met by golf buggies at the entry gate and conveyed free of charge down to the house but then Harewood is run by an independent trust not the National Trust.

In Bed with BMW

As if the National Trust’s general promotion of private transport isn’t bad enough it’s now climbed into bed with car manufacturer BMW. The National Trust won’t disclose the terms of the deal and in response to my email requesting specific details the Trust sent me an uninformative press release. Curiously this didn’t mention that in February 2019 BMW was fined 8.5 million Euro for selling vehicles that breach EU permitted emission levels nor that two months later, after raids on the company’s headquarters, BMW was further charged with 'having colluded with other motor manufacturers to limit the introduction of clean emissions technology'.

The National Trust claims that its partnership is eco-friendly as BMW also makes electric cars but using tons of precious resources to move private motorists around in a vehicle that’s stationary for approximately 95% of its lifetime is inherently wasteful. Some studies suggest that over the complete cycle of such vehicles, from construction to disposal, electric cars cause even more environmental harm than petrol engine equivalents. The batteries are especially damaging as lithium is found in only a few arid countries and its extraction consumes vast amounts of water. Cobalt, another essential ingredient, generally comes from parts of central Africa where widespread “artisanal mining” operates with notoriously low standards of safety and pollution control. The disposal of batteries is also hazardous and potentially explosive but on the plus side, the Trust’s backing for BMW brings in the cash, helps 'greenwash' a powerful polluter and reassures self-deluding National Trust members that they can enjoy guilt-free motoring.

Three in a Bed

The National Trust’s bedsheets were already soiled by its long-running affair with junk-food giant Cadbury. Every year for more than a decade the Trust pocketed approximately £7 million to host and promote a “Cadbury Easter Egg Hunt” although in 2017 when Cadbury excised “Easter” from the billing the Archbishop of Canterbury, Teresa May and Jeremy Corbyn all joined the chorus of critics, with Corbyn observing that the Trust’s 'commercialism had gone too far'.

The claim that 'Cadbury’s Easter Egg Hunts are the perfect way to unleash your inner explorer and connect with nature' is absurd as junk food produces unnaturally fat kids with rotten teeth. Cadbury was reminded of this in 2018 by the Advertising Standards Authority who found the firm guilty of breaching junk food advertising regulations.

Internationally, Cadbury is widely recognised as an environmental vandal for the parent company’s role in deforestation, particularly in central Africa and in Indonesia, causing critical habitat loss, to chimpanzees and orangutans respectively.

Greed is Good

Unsatisfied with partnering eco-villains, the Trust also has millions of pounds invested in oil, gas, mining and similar industries whose core activities are environmentally devastating. Exposed by the Guardian in 2018 the Trust responded by promising to limit the extent of such investments in the future but insisted that the trustees of its pension fund must be left to operate as they wished. One might expect 'Europe’s largest conservation charity' to lead the way in such matters but the Trust does nothing until caught out, then there are grudging excuses followed by token improvements. NT should play an active role in managing its billion pound portfolio, directing fund managers to intervene, vote and report back on AGM’s of its invested companies instead, 'Investment managers are given the flexibility to achieve maximum returns on investments'” The Trust boasts of installing a few solar panels on toilet blocks but is morally derelict in permitting Black Rock and its other fund managers to invest its vast wealth in raping the planet.

Countryside to Command Centre

Ignoring protests from members, the local Parish Council and CND, in the 1980’s NT backed a NATO scheme to build a military command centre on eleven acres of Trust land in the Chilterns, along with a twenty acre spoil heap. Despite the Braddenham Estate having been donated as 'inalienable' the development went ahead and in the 1990’s this Command Centre functioned as Headquarters of the UK’s Gulf War operations, it also played a key role in directing the RAF’s bombing of Iraq and Kosovo.

At National Trust’s 1937 Annual General Meeting a member, Mr J L Cather, proposed the banning of hunting and shooting from Trust land but his resolution was vehemently opposed by NT bosses and the motion was lost. This pattern was sporadically repeated over the following half century – members proposed and bosses opposed, employing increasingly sophisticated measures to get their way. Even after the membership won the vote in 1993 it wasn’t implemented. When Parliament eventually legislated against fox hunting the Trust still went along with the farce of permitting 'trail hunting' where riders purport to follow an artificial scent as terriers rip to shreds foxes that 'just happen to break cover'. When members backed a ban in 2017 the Chairman employed the dubious device of proxy votes to “conserve” the killing.

Giant Eyesore

I saw the Giant’s Causeway for the first time in the 1970’s as I rambled along the spectacular Antrim coast. It wasn’t long after NT took over the site and ever since I’ve retained a powerful visual memory of an awesome array of hexagonal basalt columns set against a beautiful, simple, unadorned natural seascape. Returning in recent years I was shocked by the utter despoliation caused by NT’s commercial exploitation of the site. The Trust boasts that it now attracts more than a million visitors a year to its 'Causeway Car Park', shops and appalling 'visitor centre'. To anyone with respect and love for nature this is desecration. A place for quiet contemplation has been transformed into a theme park for the uniformed and little interested who clamber all over the stones, take selfies and then drive off to the next advertised attraction. Anyone sufficiently concerned to properly prepare themselves for a visit would at least consult a map and realise that it’s more appropriate to approach the site via the footpath which also offers free access. The Trust prefers to fleece the ignorant and channels tourists through its airport terminal-style building as they’re relieved of £13.00 each.

What do we Want – More Car Parks!

Ruskin inspired the National Trust’s founders and warned of the environmental threat to the Lake District posed by the coming of the railways – what would he think of what the magazine Private Eye recently described as 'The National Trust’s rampant enthusiasm for car park building.' As I write, residents of a tiny picturesque Oxfordshire village are campaigning to 'Save Buscot' from the National Trust. The National Trust’s money-making Buscot proposal is to transform one of the village’s buildings into eight business units and create a 24-space car park.

At Devon’s, Woolacombe Down, the National Trust's planned to turn a redundant sheep pen into a 30-space car park together with signage and a pay-and-display ticket machine. Rather than come clean on yet another act of commercialism, NT bizarrely claim 'a purpose which will allow the public to enjoy the biodiversity improved wider landscape.' Savaged by local critics, NT have apparently backed down and withdrawn the planning application – at least for the present.

At Trelissick House & Gardens in Cornwall, the Parish Council are pushing the Trust to improve access for walkers and cyclists arriving via the King Harry Ferry but the Trust is only interested in creating a new 266-space car park. NT outlined their proposal for the Council who recently expressed its concern at 'the visual impact of the car parking areas on the landscape character of the AONB and the setting of the historic parkland and buildings'.

Meanwhile, 'Hidden away in a secluded Kent valley is this perfectly preserved medieval moated manor house. Created in the natural landscape almost 700 years ago, Igham Mote is built from Kentish ragstone…' (NT Handbook) except NT is determined to end the seclusion by creating an enormous gravel car park for more than 300 vehicles. Situated in a designated Area of Natural Beauty (AONB) the local planning authority recently rejected the scheme but the Trust are undeterred and ominously assured the local press they don’t regard this as defeat but merely “feedback” from which they will 'learn'.

Unfit for Purpose

The National Trust’s original aims have been irretrievably corrupted and its power structure is beyond repair. In the next and final instalment of this 4-part polemic I’ll analyse how the hierarchy maintains its control, how members are effectively disenfranchised and along the way I’ll reveal some more inconvenient truths.

(CMD August 2020 – part 3 of a 4-part NT series)

Beggar's Opera* Or Comic Opera?

Strangling Civil Liberties on a United Front
by Brian Bamford

Tonight, at Rochdale Town Hall's Full Council meeting of the Rochdale Town Council, it was more like watching a stage show of Bertold Brecht's 'Threpenny Opera' than serious politics.  It was like viewing a tribe of back-patting gangsters as both the Tory and Labour politicians vied with each other to heap on the praise.  Talk about cosy council politics!

Councillor Liam O'Rourke even pontificated on how often the local Tories would join up with the governing Labour lads and lassies to proclaim and pass proposals and present a united front, no matter the perverse political origins of the proposals.  At one stage we were left wondering if the bashful Councillor Blundell was having an affair with one of the Tory lassies, so intimate was their demeanour.

There is much of the tragi-comedy about politics in Rochdale these days, which even in its own petty way rivals Brexit and Trump on the stage of national and international politics.

A major asbestos scandal has dogged the town for decades, the site of the former asbestos factory is now fast becoming a dump for waste which is being fly-tipped on an industrial scale; buildings surrounding the town centre neglected for decades are now cracking and disintegrating to such an extent that recently the trams to the town centre had to be stopped and buses diverted; travelling people now threaten Cronkeyshaw Common; market traders disappointed with the poorness of their trade in groceries have formed a co-op and are threatening to leave the town and now the Greater Manchester Spatial Strategy threatening the Green Belt around Rochdale.

But recently, it has been the proposals for issuing Public Space Protection Orders with on-the-spot penalties that has been causing consternation.  And this seems to be where the Tories and labour parties are uniting most.  Tonight, Councillor Sullivan and Councillor Howard moved and seconded a motion for extending the imposition of Protection Orders to the proximity of schools.  The motion stated:
'This Council welcomes the future consultation on potential use of Public Space Protection Orders in the Town Centre and recommends the introduction of similar Orders to enhance road safety outside schools.  As a Council we are committed to protecting the safety and welfare of the Borough's children, which is often put at risk by irresponsible parking outside schools.  The Council calls upon the Cabinet to develop proposals to trail Public Space Protection Orders around schools with known parking problems to tackle the associated risk to children, parents and carers; and following a period of monitoring to establish the success of this intuitive, the Council should explore options to roll out a programme of Protection Orders around schools.'
What this means is that extra unnecessary laws will be brought in by the law-makers of Rochdale to duplicate laws that already exists.  Natural justice, it seems, will now be binned in Rochdale!
What began with a Labour Party campaign to clean-up Rochdale Town Centre of beggars and other  'wrong-uns' , is now moving relentlessly on to a campaign against improper parking around school yards.  To get support for the motion one councilor last night even invoked images of car-keys being snatched by an angry schoolmaster trying to restore order and cat-fights by parents outside the school gate over parking spaces as mothers hung up their handbags to freely sally-forth in a fiery frenzy claiming the right of place to a space nearest to the school gates.
Bring on the 'On-the-Spot' Fines for Rochdale's disabled beggars and down and outs! 
Let's have more 'Public Space Protection Orders' against irate parents who park badly! 
The good Councillor Jane Howard, the Shadow Portfolio Holder for Adult Care and seconder of the motion relating to good order at School Gates, even whinged last night about not just swearing, but about one councilor actually 'blaspheming in this Council Chamber' she said, as had happened at the last full council meeting. 
With such examples of innate wickedness, the good councilors of the Metropolitan Borough of Rochdale couldn't vote the motion through quick enough!  The band-wagon to corral the public is underway!  Bring on the Zoo-Keepers!



*  The Beggar's Opera is the story satirised politics, poverty and injustice, focusing on the theme of corruption at all levels of society. Lavinia Fenton, the first Polly Peachum, became an overnight success. Her pictures were in great demand, verses were written to her and books published about her..   Elisabeth Hauptmann (with Bertolt Brecht) and Kurt Weill adapted the opera into Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera) in 1928, sticking closely to the original plot and characters but with a new libretto and mostly new music.

Answer to Councillor Cecile Biant in Fly-Tip Row

from Mick Coats:

JUST a few thoughts on Cllr Biants email to you:
First and foremost, the reply to my request for information has not been properly answered.
My original email was sent at the beginning of February, seven weeks ago.  That's a long holiday.
I never said, sorry 'proclaimed' that I was an expert. What I said was that Save Spodden Valley (SSV) have access to international experts.
Incidentally, untill my recent retirement I was a Chartered Member of the Institute of Safety and Health (CMIOSH) with my own health and safety company. You say that you are
'Familiar with (my) employment over many years' - what does that mean?
The piles of rubbish have littered the site for over 6 months and it is not possible to ascertain whether they are a threat to public health without due examination. What does 'mainly inert' mean in this context? 'Mainly' is not reassuring!
I am surprised at your description of councillors - Cllr Farnell, Cllr Brett, 'positive, knowledgeable, friendly, relaxed, and diligent.' Really?
Which (and who's) emails are 'hell-bent on nastiness or self indulgence'?  Examples please.  With regard to councillors, you say -
'Most (not all, name the ones who haven't) of us have a great deal of common sense, wisdom and experience'.
So why do you want to see 250 houses built on a highly contaminated site?
More substance, openness and cooperation would benefit resolution of the problems of this highly contaminated site which has been responsible for blighting, and ending, the lives of so many residents of Rochdale.

Blacklist Company & Rochdale MBC

LAST night, there were two demonstrations outside Rochdale Town Hall for the full council meeting.  One was an ongoing protest by citizens and council workers again the Labour and Tory councillors who at the last full council meeting awarded themselves a rise in stipend of 34%, but the other was a challenge by residents who are anxious about the Northern Economic Gateway which proposes to build posh houses on the Green Belt in Rochdale and other areas of Greater Manchester.

The Rochdale Council leader, Richard Farnell, did his best to justify the rise in the councillor's stipend of which he is the chief beneficiary*.  What was more interesting last night was the debate about the Green Belt, which resulted in cat-calls from the packed public gallery.

Councillor Farnell promised a full consultation which the public over the next 20-years in which the project will be rolled out.  He also predicted a vision of an economic utopia for the people of Rochdale and beyond when the project goes ahead.

A Tory councillor suggested that only Brown Field land should be used in the first place and that areas of Green Belt should only be used if and when necessary.  But the Tory councillor then said that obcourse the building firm 'Balfour (Beatty) will not agree to this!'.

This was stating the obvious, because the contrators want the cream first and foremost , and the Green Belt offers the most profitable land for development.

Yet, Balfour Beatty is no ordinary company it was one of the prime movers of the Blacklist in the British building industry and was an affiliate of the Consulting Association operated on its behalf by the now deceased blacklister Ian Kerr, before it was closed down by the Information Commissioner in 2009 it damaged many lives of working men.

If Rochdale Council, a Labour Council, is now going to get into bed with a gang of blacklisters who have inflicted tremendous suffering on workers in the British building trade this is to say the least very disappointing.

What happened to an 'Ethical Procurement Policy' at Rochdale MBC?  Or indeed in Greater Manchester?

At least Councillor Richard Farnell's predecessor former Councillor Colin Lambert  when leader of Rochdale MBC said that his council would avoid employing companies like Balfour Beatty that participate in the blacklisting of trade unionists.

For coverage of the previous Rochdale meeting of Rochdale MBC filmed by Carl Faulkner, and how the Rochdale councillor's voted through their 34% rise in the councillor's stipend go to  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3c2pmv_lZFI

Ruined Lives: UCATT report on blacklisting. | UCATT

https://www.ucatt.org.uk › Campaigns › Blacklisting

ALAN WAINWRIGHT & THE CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY BLACKLIST

www.alanwainwright.blogspot.com/ 

Housing, People & Regionalism in the UK

by Brian Bamford  

AT the Green Gathering in the Methodist Hall Oldham Street in Manchester, last Saturday, Dr. Roz Fox from Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU), a qualitative analyst, said: 

'The city of Manchester is the fastest growing city outside of London, and there have been interim talks about the city needing 200,000 homes by 2030.'  The academic  argued that 'housing is not just about bricks and mortar, but more importantly 'about people; the local labour market; land availability and social facilities.'   

This all has now to be accomplished in an era of public service cuts and an increasingly ageing population.  

This has to happen at a time when devolution is becoming fashionable.  According to Dr. Fox, the challenges now are what type of properties are required, and most important how do with involve people in the decision-making.   

Meanwhile, last Tuesday, in Haringey civic centre councillors were heckled while debating plans to rip communities apart, and hand control to a private entity.  Aditya Chakrabortty wrote about the Haringey case on Friday 20th, January 2017:  'At its heart is a programme that is among the most audacious I've ever seen.  Haringey wants to privatise huge swaths of public property: family homes, school buildings, its biggest library.  All of it will be stuck in a private fund worth £2bn.'  The fear is that areas of north Manchester between Bury, Rochdale and Oldham something rather similar is in danger of happening as armies of protesters gather to protect what they perceive as the threat to the Green Belt. 
In an article about anti-social behavior in the North East, Neil Tweedie in the Mail on Saturday last November, claimed that 'Grimsby is a long way from the oak-paneled conference rooms of the government departments in Whitehall...' but that 'Cameron's project to "cure" Broken Britain (started in 2011) ' had cost '£450m' and it had 'achieved nothing-apart from exposing Whitehall incompetence, deceitful councils, the vanity of politicians... and how they squander YOUR money'.

Regions of the UK

In England, the culture of centralism dominates in a strange way of a kind of surburban relationship and attachment to London.  In 1905, the novelist Henry James declared:  'All England is in suburban relation (to London).'  
Since the beginning of the 20th Century the south and particularly London have come to dominate the English economy and culture.  The historian, Tristram Hunt, in concluding his book 'Building Jerusalem' (2004) wrote:  'The corporate and financial stampede southward was quickly followed by the political parties, the media (including the Manchester Guardian), the professional establishment (from lawyers to doctors to accountants to architects), the cultural elite, even the representatives of organised labour.' 
Centralisation is the problem confronting this country.  One or two comments last week, on this NV Blog suggested that DevoManc, as it is now being presented, is a top-down phenomena.  
The regions and localities of the England, unlike Scotland, lack the self-confidence and imagination required to promote a bold self-identity that could compare with provinces in France or the regionalism on the Spanish peninsular.  Notions of federalism seem alien in the English regions. 
I think that in Northern Voices' we have identified a broad North-South dichotomy, but the various particular regions lack confidence and up to now have had a provincial insecurity in relation to the metropolis that is London. 
This has not always been the case, Tristram Hunt again in 'Building Jerusalem' wrote:  'In the Victorian era, that metropolitan imperialism appeared out-dated as the great northern civilisations established themselves as core components of the cultural firmament.' 
Neither the Green Gathering last Saturday nor the Andy Burnham Manifesto Meeting last Thursday tackled this problem of building an awareness of regional identity, although in the workshops of the Burnham meeting it was asked 'How do we change mind-sets?'.

The Future of Federalism in the UK?

In France the French Revolution finished off the work of Louis XIV and gave France a powerful highly centralised state.  In Spain the Liberal Revolution imitated this development.  Then in both countries came a reaction to this centralisation with movements for greater local and municipal liberty. 
In France this reaction was best expressed by Pierre Joseph Proudhon, who put forward those ideas which, he believed, the French Revolution had come into existence to fulfil, but which had been diverted by the ruthless political action of the Jacobins. 
In Spain, with its intense provincial feelings and local patriotisms, one would have expected the movement towards decentralisation to be even greater,but because of the consequences for Spain after the Napoleonic Wars and the fact that Carlism drew into its ranks many of the forces of resistance to Liberal centralism, these feelings didn't for some time make their appearance among the parties of the Left.  Only as an result of the work of Pi y Margall, a Catalan, who knew and understood the social and political ideas of Proudhon, did he grasp that these ideas best suited the aspirations of his countrymen.  It was through the efforts of Pi y Margall that the Federal movement in Spain grew in the 1860s.  
Unlike France and Spain, no such popular radical movement to express the local and regional spirit in a federalist manner has yet developed in England.  This may be because as an island we have been isolated from the continental currents which are still prevalent in Europe.  It may be because anarchism and organised regionalism, have been half-baked traditions.  Marxism, even though the Communist Party itself has never caught on in Britain, has had a wider influence in the universities than anarchism or federalism.