Yesterday, at the Trust’s AGM, Restore Trust – the body which wants to stop the dumbing-down and politicisation of the Trust – didn’t win.
But it has made an enormous impact for a body which was only set up last summer and now has 20,000 members and a £60,000 war chest.
Restore Trust put forward three resolutions. It won one of them: a proposal to disclose in full the pay of the National Trust’s senior staff. It lost the other two: one regretting the loss of expert curators; the other deploring the recent treatment of volunteers.
The scale of the loss, though, was small – by 54,708 votes to 57,164 on curators; by 56,267 to 59,015 on volunteers. In both cases, the Trust only won because they used their 20,000 or so discretionary votes.
I must confess that I am a member of Restore Trust.
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