The far-right’s attack on British institutions such as the BBC, National Trust, RNLI and NHS has been dubbed the “greatest paradox of our times” by Otto English.
Writing in the Guardian, Celia Richardson, the director of communications and marketing at the National Trust, has responded to an increase in hostilities aimed at the heritage conservation charity, namely from figures and media organisations associated with the right.
In her words, they have reportedly banned mushrooms, secretly made scones “woke”, cancelled Christmas and even presided over a “woke-row deer park’s kinky dogging shame” in the last few months alone.
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It is a sad account of a charity that will be 130 years old in January next year and has nearly 10 per cent of the UK’s population as signed-up, fee-paying members.
As Richardson puts it, the National Trust has been called a “peculiarly British miracle” by commentators.
“It’s been achieved through cooperation towards a common goal – securing hundreds of miles of coast and countryside, nature reserves, historic landscapes and buildings, and priceless treasures, in perpetuity, for the benefit of the entire country.”
Yet they’re not alone in receiving ire from those who purportedly espouse all that makes Britain ‘great’.
In recent years, the RNLI, BBC and NHS have also been caught up in culture wars stirred up in a bid to cause division.
What it shows, as English points out here, is the existence of a bizarre paradox in which those who profess to love our country so much “so very obviously hate it”.
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