National Trust AGM

[PRAMtran]

I’ve received an email from the National Trust inviting me and all other members to vote in their AGM. Does anyone know if there are any things a woman’s rights advocate should vote for or against. Eg TWAW by stealth.

*I recall, age 10, being asked to draw an image of a slave ship - with details of how the captured were chained up in rows like cargo. We learned of the term 'trianagular trade', and what it involved.

I used to be an English teacher ( believe it or not due to my tendency for typos. ) and way back we were teaching poetry and novels which were rooted in the black experienece, including slavery and apartheid in South Africa. We read Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison.

I recall in the the late 1970's reading Alan Paton's. 'Cry The Beloved Country' in an English class.

The idea that slavery and oppression has been omitted from the curriculum is partisan fantasy*

@RebelliousCow you seem to have unilaterally decided that education to this point has been more than sufficient and any further is pushing a political agenda. This is really quite a strong position. Is there any further scope for listening to others’ opinion on this, particularly those of African and Asian heritage?

You know as well as I do that upthread several posters suggested that links to slavery should not be mentioned in materials related to a property.

Your personal actions don’t negate that.

Out of interest, what’s your perspective on the poster who asked for more “humour” when we discussing a topic involving mass rape and deaths of hundreds of thousands of people?

Upthread a poster - you can find their post for yourself suggested NT visitors were middle class and therefore did not need to be told any history of a property’s connection to slavery as they knew it already.

Do you endorse that POV?

Or do you agree it is nonsense? They, irrespective of their class, might well have some top-line knowledge of slavery, but it’s very unlikely the average visitor will know a great deal about a specific families links to specific slavery-related and colonial activity.

Is it unusual for National Trust visitors to have "small c conservative attitudes"?

I imagine you haven't had much interest in this point because we are already wise to this kind of guilt by association from the way LGB Alliance have been treated. They have held a Tufton Street address for quite some time now and despite some very dark predictions they have not morphed into a bunch of frothing nazis.

I understand LGB Alliance's rationale is that it's a useful address because they won't get evicted for wrongthink. In the current political climate that is not to be sniffed at.

The more authoritarian and censorious certain political factions become, the more Tufton Streets we can expect and the more diverse they will become because more and more people every day are becoming sick of this shit, from across the political spectrum.

My thoughts on Tufton Street chime harmoniously with BernardBlacksMolluscs' heartwarming Christmas Carol:

Oh little room in Tufton Street, how dark we see thou art
Above thy foundation and convenient location, nine sinister entities dart
Yet in the TRA’s hearts shineth, an everlasting light
The hopes and fears of all the years are met on Twitter tonight
For guilt by association is their hobby, and the LGBA can be condemned
For sharing an address with some perfectly legal organisations, for reasons I cannot comprehend

P.S. - for more heartwarming MN FWR poetry, buy BoiledBeetle's book, Under the Duvet of Darkness. All proceeds go to For Women Scotland.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Under-Duvet-Darkness-written-because/dp/B0C129WKDD/

Oh is that what's being driven at by the cries of "Tufton Street"? I'd forgotten that nonsense. I rather hoped it might be some kind of sophisticated wordplay above my station; perhaps akin to a particular joke about London street names in one of Saki's short stories. In the story I'm thinking of, a woman told a visitor that a mutual acquaintance was moving to Lower Grosvenor Street, and the visitor said "I'm sure she will if she stays there long enough".

You know, I thought I would have spotted someone asking for more 'humour' in discussions of slavery, because I would have found it pretty distasteful. And I hadn't noticed.

So (research skills, innit?) I went back through the whole thread searching for 'humour'. And the post I think GOT means is on p.19 and it says, 'Another thing that I find sad is the complete absence of humour in certain sections of society. Scolding and patronising others seems to be their main (only?) form of social interaction. Do these types ever crack a smile?'

Not quite the same thing as asking for 'more "humour" when we discussing a topic involving mass rape and deaths of hundreds of thousands of people', is it?

Rather, it was an observation that some people ('certain sections of society' - which I took to mean, certain posters) seem to be extremely joyless. Slavery is very serious topic, but there were various off-shoot discussions on the thread where humour would be entirely appropriate.

I hope your rather disingenuous attitude is not a fair guide to how you would usually handle your source material. Because if it is, that is rather concerning.

Thank you @EdithStourton I couldn't work out what that referred to.

I agree the lack of a sense of humour from the patronising scolds is very sad and I don't think it can be good for their mental health.

It's possible to think that and also not think that slavery is funny. And also to think that the misrepresentation of that post is quite shocking and revealing.

I agree the lack of a sense of humour from the patronising scolds is very sad and I don't think it can be good for their mental health.

just highlighting this lovely one for the tone policers

But, I note, totally ignoring GOT's attitude to the evidence.

Sorry, I didn't realise you identified as a patronising scold @TheHoover

@EdithStourton I’m not tone policing myself and I haven’t tone policed (other than Burnt Toast who was spectacular).

just highlighting that the tone policing is consistently one-sided

*PencilsInSpace · Today 22:04

Sorry, I didn't realise you identified as a patronising scold @TheHoover*

Pray what makes you think that I do?

@TheHoover nor was I. I was pointing out that a certain poster doesn't seem to understand how to handle sources honestly. Honesty and 'tone' are not the same thing.

You know as well as I do that upthread several posters suggested that links to slavery should not be mentioned in materials related to a property

@GodessOfThunder nope, have reread the thread and can find no poster saying that slavery should not be mentioned when the topic of slavery is relevant to the property/family/objects. That is not the same as saying slavery need not be mentioned when it is not relevant to the discussion. I can’t believe this still has to be explained to you at this point of the thread.

@EdithStourton why was I compelled to address this so that you called me out for ignoring it? Is it ok to ask you to respond to things that others have said?

white feminism ffs divisive identity politics strikes again.

My limited experience of history O level was economic history. I learned about the Rochdale pioneers and the Tolpuddle martyrs, what can be achieved when people work together, we have many things to be proud of in our history but we're supposed to choose to be ashamed.

Nobody knows everything, curriculums at school are snapshots to maybe whet your appetite to learn a little bit more of any particular vast subject. I chose a science degree because people are too hard.

Alice Morrison writes of Baltimore in Ireland, a whole village that was taken by Barbary pirates as slaves. Douglas Murray (ooh a conservative) writes that there are few descendants of black slaves in Arab states because they were castrated as opposed to being bred like cattle.
Someone, somewhere is being 'exploited', supermarkets exploit farmers, farmers exploit cheap labour. Amazon is a hideous machine but so convenient that we all use it anyway.

This is not an argument to win(!), this should be an exchange of ideas and information (which fwr & mumsnet generally is v. good at).

I remember the league against cruel sports telling us to get NT Scotland membership because they didn't support fox-hunting but their membership was valid in English properties.

My NT member vote is against identity politics.

and breathe.

@quantumbutterfly are you going to set out what exactly you feel the NT has done that is pushing identity politics and what you would like changed?

Or is yours just a generalist argument, like so many others on here. When pressed, no-one has been able to articulate this. So how can there be sharing ideas when people plop on just to make a demonstration of their own ideological stance?

This is the quote from page 19 that Edith referenced:

'Another thing that I find sad is the complete absence of humour in certain sections of society. Scolding and patronising others seems to be their main (only?) form of social interaction. Do these types ever crack a smile?'

The quote refers to 'certain sections of society' - nothing more specific than that.

So why, in response to my agreement with this quote, are you 'highlighting this lovely one for the tone policers'? Who are you defending against 'tone policing' if not yourself? Are you perhaps a patronising scold ally?

FWIW I don't tone police, I would prefer the ugliness of people's opinions to be expressed openly so I can see what I'm dealing with. If posters are patronising or scolding I might point that out but I don't want them to shut up, I want them to carry on so everyone can see it.

I’ve noticed 6-7 other people tone policing posts not directed at themselves. Your rather twatty gotcha at 22.04 didn’t work.

youve put distraction in quotation marks. Are you going to provide the actual quote where someone used that word? Scroll back and you will find that I was complaining of the continuous association of the pro NT argument with non-gc arguments

Fair enough, I misremembered distraction. People did rather hijack the thread from its original topic though, then you came in in the middle and complained that queer theory/trans was mentioned.

"I’m keen for some further dissection of the boundaries between what you describe as a political agenda and progress in advancing equality. Otherwise this is just lazy association (and even lazier attempts to dock this into GC)"

And my response to you then still stands:

"The overreach of queer theory is my main concern, I've argued other points about slavery as a general principle, mostly. Don't try to put words into my mouth, thank you."

P.S. - for more heartwarming MN FWR poetry, buy BoiledBeetle's book, Under the Duvet of Darkness. All proceeds go to For Women Scotland.

I was wondering if that was in Boiled's MN poetry anthology! Glad to see it is.

I’ve noticed 6-7 other people tone policing posts not directed at themselves

As opposed to people you approve of demanding other posters tone police others?

Great post. It's rotten how this thread has been hijacked.