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From Oasis ticket price hikes to trying to sell off Birmingham’s art, the Conservatives’ market-first agenda still blights BritainHey-ho! It’s that time of year again when the opaquely funded Tufton Street-linked pressure group Restore Trust expends expensive effort seeding its right-leaning candidates (formerly including the evangelical Stephen Green, who denied the existence of marital rape and once supported Uganda’s death penalty for some homosexuals) on to the board of its hated “woke” National Trust. What do Restore Trust’s unnamed backers want? The National Trust’s land? Its coastlines? Its artworks? Or are they as annoyed as me that it’s increasingly difficult to buy commemorative thimbles in the gift shops?National Trust supporters combat masses of inexplicably blue-ticked social media accounts, with names full of numbers, pushing the Restore Trust narrative in idiomatically odd language riddled with strange spelling mistakes. (The democratic process is apparently “manipulated by the encumbant. Because the encumbant doesn’t like the opposition.”) The Washington Post proved that Russia deploys social media voices to shape discourse and create division. Is it Vladimir Putin, ultimately, who covets the National Trust’s delicious vegan scone recipes, despite them having been made with woke margarine for some years?Stewart Lee’s Basic Lee is on the streaming service Now and his 2025 tour Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf begins at London’s Leicester Square theatre in December Continue reading...