BY QUENTIN PIGG

One of the more memorable lines from David Lynch’s Blue Velvet – perhaps because the film contains so few – is Isabella Rossellini saying: ‘You put your disease in me’. That was of course a reference to rape. So why am I reminded of that line when reading less poetic ones in newspapers detailing the National Trust’s – more leap than lurch – towards neo-Marxism?

Perhaps because the way in which the trust’s recent Director-General has ‘put her disease’ into it has not been wholly consensual either. Appointed in 2018, Hilary McGrady began her tenure by asking: ‘Why would someone in the middle of Birmingham say that’s interesting?’ Vowing to put an institution that was set up to protect Britain’s most beautiful buildings in the direction of a city which houses some of its ugliest, seems like a declaration of war against its membership.

Since then, many have announced cancellation of their membership, whether because of nauseatingly woke newsletters or plans to root out houses whose bricks are blackened by some tenuous link to slavery. Before George Floyd’s death, the National Trust already had a pathological obsession with colonialism; after his death, race became elevated to an almost religious plane and now its cretinous curators have given members another reason to quit: The Colonialism Countryside Project.

Though news has only just broken about the project, it has apparently been going on for four years now, diseasing the minds of unsuspecting children – as we know, the Left like to start with them young. Details on the project are disconcertingly vague, but the general gist is that children are subjected to the horrors of Britain’s colonial past and are then told to relay this quisling rot back to National Trust staff, something they call ‘reverse mentoring’. Hiring a historian to work on the project who wrote a book titled ‘This Green Unpleasant Land’ goes no way to assuaging members fears that the trust has lost its way.

To undermine British culture is bad enough, worse still is to offer children a crash course in victimhood. Children dream, victims dwell. What will these children be left to dream of in a country which at an early age they are taught despises them? As with most of life’s issues, in the case of disenchanted black youth, the Left offer the cause in the form of a children’s fable: the bogyman being racialised police brutality.

Perhaps they aren’t brutalised into their distrust of the state but are rather eased into it through the surreptitious suggestions of Marxist historians, the kind employed by the National Trust. A reviewer of Corinne Fowler’s foul book even claims that she is teaching children to repeat phrases such as ‘dirty as a blood pool’. Professor Corinne Fowler is a research expert at the University of Leicester but seems not to have bothered to look at child knife crime statistics.

I’m sure it will come as no surprise for our dear readers to learn that the Director-General – on £190,000 a year – is good friends with Tony Blair. It’s that sort of mindset which now pervades the National Trust, the one David Goodhart so perfectly diagnosed as ‘citizens of nowhere’.

Britain’s heritage homes and villages are unlike European ones; they are something distinct to Britain, an expression of its culture. No doubt these citizens of nowhere are faintly embarrassed by such things. The preferred globalist architecture is one of glass and steel judging the Blairite monstrosities which menace London’s skyline. Their ugliness and lack of identity act as a statement against nature and the countryside.

What’s to be done with the National Trust?

Sure, we could all campaign to defund it, but there would be about as much victory in that as turning off the life support of a loved one riddled with cancer – the citizens of nowhere still win and we are robbed of the National Trust either way. Still, if they are committed to perverting the minds of children, best put the trust out of its misery all the same. Not that campaigning to defund it is really necessary (many people are leaving unprompted). Is it not time to list and replace the Labour placers who, starting in the Brown years, infiltrated Britain’s great trusts and charities? Is there any part of our lives that the menace Blair hasn’t destroyed?

The National Trust may no longer care about the countryside, but someone who does, and who I urge all readers to follow, is Basil Seal @PutOutMoreFlags. He is a purveyor of all things heritage, posting photos of this pleasant – yes, Corinne Fowler, pleasant – green land and its fabulous old libraries. A form of conservative porn which acts if not as an antidote, then at least anaesthesia for these troubled times.