Why have our nature charities given up on the countryside?

Charities in Britain are in trouble. Some of the bigger ones deserve to be. They tend to put government lobbying and Left-wing political activism before serving the causes for which they were founded. They become career paths for future Labour and Green politicians and quangocrats. Their top salaries easily exceed that of the Prime Minister. No wonder donations are dropping. This is noticeable in nature charities. As a country-dweller, I like the work of the Wildlife Trusts in caring for rare habitats. Earlier this month, though, I received an email from Craig Bennett, the Trusts’ chief executive, reacting to the newly announced Conservative policy to abolish Natural England and the Environment Agency, two of our most overmighty quangos. After sounding off against “Starmer’s war on bats and newts”, Mr Bennett launched into the Tories: “Now the Conservatives want to try this divisive, scapegoating tactic again, but on a much bigger scale… they will expose the UK’s economy to dangerous weather, the UK’s food supplies to biodiversity collapse and UK homes to flooding and extreme heat.” Why this angry, overblown and tendentious rhetoric? It is uncharitable. The Trusts appear to be mindlessly aligning with bureaucratic and statist interests. Mr Bennett reminded us that the Wildlife Trusts gang together for polling with the RSPB , National Trust , Woodland Trust and WWF to help campaigning. Is that charitable money well spent? I am also a member of the National Trust. Its 84-page autumn magazine, contained a message from its director-general, Hilary McGrady, which said literally nothing about its more than 200 historic houses but moans about “unfair access to green space” and campaigns for bills in Parliament. No feature concerned architecture, though there was (of course) a piece about “queer creativity” in country houses. Almost everything else is nature related. From its foundation, the Trust has had a dual purpose – to look after historic buildings and places of natural beauty, but now it ignores the first and uses the second for activism. How about nurturing the nature in its care instead of cutting down on gardeners? This Friday is the last chance to vote in the National Trust’s Council elections. I shall vote for the Restore Trust list of candidates who want to put things right. The BBC’s double standard On Sunday, we reported that the BBC had paid out £400,000 to Lucie Kon , a senior Jewish documentary-maker. She said she had suffered anti-Semitic hostility. As I read this at breakfast, I was also listening to the BBC. Its North America Editor, Sarah Smith (pictured), was talking about the Democrats’ Senate candidate in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed . Donald Trump, she said, had made “unfounded” allegations that Mr El-Sayed was a member of the Muslim Brotherhoo d. I believe her. The president makes many unfounded claims. She went on to report that Mr El-Sayed had accused Israel of genocide. Why did she not say that this claim, too, was unfounded? True, Israel killed many people in the Gaza war, but the word “genocide” describes the deliberate intention and ensuing action to exterminate a race. This is demonstrably false. The current charge of genocide is political, not evidential. Normally a BBC reporter should not opine on whether a statement by a politician is unfounded, but if Sarah Smith does so over Mr Trump, why not apply it to anyone else? Ms Kon complained that BBC behaviour towards her got much worse after the Hamas massacres of October 7 2023 . Those killings were truly genocidal. The most sinister aspect of current anti-Semitism is that it is stimulated, not reduced, by the mass murder of Jews. Has ‘health and safety’ become an excuse? Most public services, people agree, are declining. I think I detect an increasing reason why. It relates to safety. There seem, for example, to be ever more trains stopped by a person, or persons, on the line. On my regular line, this delays my journey about once a month. Sometimes it is just yobs or protestors. Sometimes it is people who have committed or are threatening suicide. Last week, away from home, I was heading for Waterloo. We were made to get out at Basingstoke, change for Reading and then change trains again, because there was “a person on the bridge at Woking”. Chaos reigned, with the public address system moving us back and forth between platforms. I have come to suspect that the safety of staff is so strictly enforced that less consideration is given to the effect on passengers. There will be occasions – an actual suicide, for example – when journeys must stop, but there will be others when all you need to do is move tiresome people away, or when better security would have prevented intrusions in the first place. Something similar applies to power cuts . We live in a heavily wooded area, a fact which seems to surprise the electricity network every autumn. In these gales, trees caused numerous power cuts. My mother, who is 94, bed-ridden, and lives on a farm in our district, had no power for over 12 hours, much of it in darkness. As a result, her electric bed’s air mattress no longer worked. Forced to sit in a chair, she slipped off, hurting her arm, though saved from worse by the quick-thinking carer. When the carer rang the generator, they said it was “too dangerous” for their men to reconnect the power. One cannot know, of course, whether that was a fair assessment. My point is that cuts like these are also too dangerous for vulnerable customers. “Stay safe” is the great modern cry about everything, but who is safer – public-service workers, or the public?