The National Trust has expressed surprise at plans to create a parliamentary group dedicated to them chaired by a Tory MP at the forefront of criticising the charity over issues such as a report into its properties’ connections to colonialism and slavery.
While it is not unusual for all-party parliamentary groups to be dedicated to bodies such as the BBC, or have charities involved in their running, the trust said it was “unusual” for an “organisation-specific” APPG to emerge without that organisation’s knowledge or involvement.
The chair of the new APPG will be Andrew Murrison, who has boasted on his website of “leading the charge” against the trust and accused it of “tarnishing the reputation of Winston Churchill” in a report on the colonial history of its properties.
A weekly circular emailed to MPs and peers to update them on all-party groups said the inaugural meeting of the APPG on the National Trust would take place next week. It stated that the group’s purpose “is to apply parliamentary scrutiny to the operational and strategic direction of the National Trust” and invited any MPs or peers wishing to join the meeting to contact Murrison’s office.
“Sadly, we weren’t notified about the new group,” said a spokesperson for the trust, who questioned why the APPG was being set up, since a number of other APPGs already covered aspects of its work. As an independent charity, it is also regulated by the Charity Commission.
“We don’t yet know what the new APPG will be used for, but like any charity, we’re always happy to engage in good faith with politicians who have an interest in our work. We would be happy to provide secretariat for the group, as is customary for organisation-specific APPGs.”
The development comes on the back of a recent onslaught of criticism of the National Trust by MPs, sections of the Conservative press and Restore Trust, an insurgent group that has been waging a campaign against the perceived “wokeness” of the charity.
Restore Trust (which has no connection to the Restore Trust, a Bristol-based non-profit) was set up after a report the charity published in 2020 showed the connections between 93 of its historic places with colonialism and slavery.
Murrison, who has called for an independent review of the National Trust, secured a parliamentary adjournment debate on the charity’s future in 2020. The MP, whose South West Wiltshire constituency is home to one of the trust’s principal properties, Stourhead, has accused the trust of departing from its charitable purposes and seeking to “force the worldview of its leadership on the public”.
He published a statement on his website in 2020 under the heading: “Andrew leads charge against National Trust.” It quoted him as saying: “The National Trust should be a politics-free space, a great mediating institution, not an organ for promulgating a particular worldview.”
Murrison has been contacted for comment.
Hilary McGrady, the charity’s director general, told the Guardian in January that she recognised that members and visitors had been “really cross and angry with us” over the issues raised by Restore Trust, which claimed to represent grassroots opposition to what it characterised as the trust’s “woke” agenda.
But she added: “There were also people really delighted and relieved that we are finally looking at the history that they want to learn.”
