The National Trust Goes To War - Is Tufton Street Planning A Land Grab?

4th November 2022

An interesting article in Yorkshire Bylines illustrates the problem of Think tanks pursuing goals when they see that the public at large are not paying attention.

This article is all about the National Trust and a battle for control with a right wing organisation Restore Trust who are trying to get their people elected to the board of NT.

Mentions of Liz Truss the ex prime minister should be noted. For those of you not really aware of Think Tanks they come in a wide and growing range of politics. Pressure groups are all very well but who is funding them and for what purposes are the questions that should be asked. They get on tv and radio more and more often as experts on a wide range of topics. Upton Street is fast becoming well know for some of them

Read the article HERE

From the Good Law project
This Saturday it's the annual general meeting of the National Trust - an organisation that has been protecting and celebrating places of historic significance and natural beauty in the UK for the last 127 years.

The meeting has been of particular interest to a right-wing pressure group called Restore Trust, who want to drag the National Trust into the culture wars and criticise them for efforts to be mindful of race issues, for example.

Using paid-for social media adverts, Restore Trust has been trying to sway the voting decisions of National Trust members towards its raft of candidates for the Trust's council. But while Restore Trust presents itself as a grassroots organisation, acting on widespread concern, its funding, structure, and supporter base is not clear.

This practice is known as ‘astroturfing'- i.e. fake grassroots - and is too often used by powerful interests who want to influence policies, or even elections, without transparency or accountability.

To help uncover who is behind ‘astroturfed' websites like Restore Trust, we are working with expert data rights agency AWO, to ask questions about Restore Trust's data handling on their website. Asking questions about data handling might seem dry and technical, but it's about the nuts and bolts of how these campaigns influence our democracy using public data. That makes our data rights a potentially powerful tool for challenging these campaigns and those behind them.

We asked AWO to write to Restore Trust on behalf of our Legal Manager and National Trust member, Ian Browne, asking for a full explanation of who is behind their data analysis and targeting, and why they carry it out.

If Restore Trust's reply isn't satisfactory, we will explore steps towards court action to get them to comply with data protection law.

A list of UK Think Tanks

Think Tanks issue a large number of articles and social media items on a wide range of issues The Guardian has helpfully gathered and updates a few at https://www.theguardian.com/politics/thinktanks