Right-leaning group fails to wrest control of National Trust

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A right-leaning campaign aiming to wrest control of the National Trust from an alleged “political” takeover has criticised a new voting feature after all of its candidates for council seats were defeated at the trust’s annual general meeting.

Restore Trust failed to secure a single win and immediately attacked the soundness of the charity’s democratic system after results were announced at the National Trust’s Grade I-listed Bath Assembly Rooms.

It had put up seven candidates amid complaints about how the 5.4 million-member charity has been addressing historical links to the slave trade and its approach to gay and transgender rights.

Resolutions against National Trust participation in Pride events – described as “divisive and an unaccountable waste of members’ subscriptions” – and the “fad” of rewilding were also not carried.

In tweets, Restore Trust alleged a “Quick Vote” system allowing members to agree with all the preferred choices of the charity’s trustees in a single click had been introduced “surreptitiously” and claimed that “there is a real crisis of democracy and accountability at the heart of the National Trust. Our questions have been avoided; our pleas ignored; our votes undermined.”

Its unsuccessful candidates included Philip Gibbs, a fund manager and Conservative party donor, who said the trust should be “less political”, Bola Anike, a Brighton-based campaigner who said it was “a mistake to present the past through the prism of race” and Jeremy Black, a former Exeter University professor who said its “judgmental presentation of some properties” had caused “unnecessary controversy”.

After one of the largest ever turnouts, the chair of the trust, Ren? Olivieri, thanked so many members for voting and quoted the historian Neil MacGregor, who said of the National Trust’s variety: “The great challenge is to allow as many of those histories as possible to be told – and by as many different voices as possible.”

National Trust elections allow its nominations committee to recommend preferred council candidates to members, and trustees to give preferences on motions about the management of the trust’s 250,000 hectares, more than 500 historic properties and nearly 1m works of art.

This year the charity introduced the Quick Vote system to allow members to assent to all of those recommendations. This was suggested by Civica, the firm that runs its annual elections, as a standard feature of member organisation ballots, it said.

But Restore Trust tweeted: “This year, having surreptitiously introduced Quick Vote, the National Trust management have magically managed to get all their candidates elected and every single member-led attempt at reform quashed! Coincidence?”

The defeat of the candidates will not be the end for Restore Trust, said a leading member, Cornelia van der Poll, who told the Guardian: “Clearly it’s disappointing and Quick Vote worked against us, but we will just keep soldiering on and keep trying.”

The vote share of its candidate slate was up on last year, she said. Restore Trust denies claims it is an “astroturf” group – which presents itself as a grassroots campaign but relies on hidden donors. But it declined to reveal who funds the group and by how much.

A spokesperson for the National Trust said the charity had “a long tradition of democratic governance” which “gives our members the opportunity to have their say on the direction and focus of the charity”.

“Over 127,000 members voted in this year’s AGM [annual general meeting], making it one of our highest ever election turnouts,” they said.

They said that “members are entirely free not to use Quick Vote and can vote for whichever candidates or resolution response they wish”.

After the Guardian asked Restore Trust about its tweeted criticisms, it deleted the posts, but only after they had been commented on, retweeted and liked more than 1,000 times.

Van der Poll could not provide any evidence that Quick Vote was introduced “surreptitiously”, as one tweet claimed. The National Trust had included a section about the system in a voting booklet sent to members.