It’s time something was done about the National Trust. The problem lies not in its campaigns against the government’s pretty dubious proposed changes to our hapless planning laws, nor even to the fact that the National Trust campaigns, but to the fact that it exists. Simply put, the limited goal of historical preservation was a good one, but the NT has long since lost sight of that founding raison d’être. Instead, we have today the foremost landowner in the country having the ethics of the Disney Corporation allied to the dead hand of a museum unable to alienate any of its possessions. This is the very worst fate possible for what where, in the main, buildings built to be lived in.
Take the NTS’s absurdist campaign to raise funds for Culzean. A thoroughly good cause, surely? Well not in the ludicrous terms set out by its chief executive, Kate Mavor, is whose mind Culzean could ‘fall into disrepair and eventually [crumble] to a graffiti-ridden hulk’. Unless the NTS gulls lots of gullible spondulicks out of the Downton Abbey-adoring public that is. Yet this is palpable nonsense. The problem with houses like Culzean is precisely that they’re not homes. Or rather because, once the NT (and NTS) laid their hands upon them, such places will never be homes again. And how did the NT get by far the vast bulk of its empire? by the confiscatory taxation of estates that prevailed in the UK for most of the last century. If the state hadn’t taxed such homes out of the hands of their lawful, private owners, that’s exactly where they’d still be. Not, perhaps, in every case, in the hands of the same owners they were in when they were ‘handed over’ [sic, so often] to NT. Though what of it? That’s just how the world worked for all the centuries of private home ownership before the twentieth. If you couldn’t keep your big house, you sold it. Were Culzean a private home belonging to anyone other than the NTS who, by their own admission, currently can’t afford to maintain, on assuredly it would be sold to someone who would and could.
The National Trusts exists in the form it does today by act of parliament: it’s long past time that that place took a pair of pruning shears to this bloated, ignobly acquired empire of ever more trivialised, theme park entertainments. Who knows, do it at the right time, and it might even do something for the national debt?