Peter Harvey posts….
The decision to expel the properly elected (now ex-) President Elect, Nigel MacLennan, by a process opaque to the membership, highly dubious in procedural terms and quite contrary to any principles of natural justice was appealed in proper fashion. As with most appeals, grounds are narrowly defined and rest on the appellant finding procedural irregularities strong enough to convince an appeal panel. We believe that Dr MacLennan had more than adequate grounds both to appeal and for the original judgement to be, at the least modified and, at best, overturned. To nobody’s surprise this hasn’t happened and the Appeal Panel, hidden behind a shroud of anonymity, has chosen to reject the appeal in its entirety. This shouldn’t be a shock to us. The cabal responsible has invested far too much, politically, emotionally and financially (your money, people) to simply roll over, hold their hands up and admit that they were wrong.
We remain deeply sceptical about the whole process. We have yet to be convinced that there has been any independent oversight either of the initial ‘investigation’ or of the appeal. It is more than likely, going on past experience, that all those involved in making these judgements are stalwart serial office-holders, all with some sort of deeply embedded history within the BPS – hardly neutral.
Where does that leave us – or, more precisely, you, the wider membership? Our small group of ‘troublemakers’ and malcontents are well distanced from the everyday practice of being ’a psychologist’. Our income does not depend on being employed and having a strong, healthy, honest and decent organisation representing psychology in the UK. The BPS clearly fails on all those four criteria. It is up to you – the membership – to change this.
BPSWatch 