One of our contributors (Ashley Conway) has agreed that his recent letter of resignation can be made public and it identifies many of the concerns that we, at BPSWatch, have referred to in this blog.
Why I am resigning from the British Psychological Society after more than 30 years of membership.
My first ever publication was in 1978 – in The Bulletin of the British Psychological Society – the forerunner of The Psychologist, the house journal of the Society. I have published professional papers, chapters and books in every one of the decades since the 1970’s. I have spent my whole working life as a psychologist, and as member of the BPS. And now I am resigning from the Society that I have been a member of for so many decades.
I have three principal reasons:
1. The fact that the BPS has allowed policy takeover by advocates of the non-scientific False Memory Syndrome (see Sinason & Conway, 2022) for the last 25 years has directly and indirectly colluded with British psychology failing survivors of child abuse and adult sexual assault for a generation. It has acted in a way that is detrimental to genuine victims, and has been advantageous to abusers of various kinds, including paedophiles and rapists (see e.g. Conway & Pilgrim, 2022 and Conway, 2023). Its collusion with the deniers of the realities of those reporting abuse becomes a child protection issue, in which I consider the BPS is failing badly.
2. The vile and very public bullying by the BPS of our elected President, Professor Nigel MacLennan. In so doing, the Society has betrayed members’ wishes and destroyed trust in the electoral system of our Society. The members wanted a reforming president, the BPS didn’t. So they quickly got rid of him in the most unpleasant and unique way.
3. These appalling things could only happen in an environment completely failing in transparency of good governance. This failure leaves a Society that not just actively bullies, and facilitates policy capture by minority groups favoured by the BPS hierarchy, but has enabled corruption and fraud as well (see bpswatch.com for further revelations – including commentary on the NCVO and Korn Ferry reports on BPS dysfunctionality).
The BPS, a registered charity, has been operating without much regard for Charity Commission guidelines, with many Trustees in dual and conflicting roles, who cannot, in any meaningful sense, be construed as independent. In recent times there has been at least one massive fraud, the loss of which was not fully covered by their insurers – meaning that members’ subs were used to cover the additional money lost to theft, which resulted from, at best, incompetent oversight. Presumably members will be paying again for what will probably be very significant legal fees (but the BPS won’t tell us about that) and, if justice is done, huge costs in compensation to Professor MacLennan, at some point in the not too distant future, when the legal wheels finally begin to turn.
Unless it is happy to demonstrate its own gross hypocrisy, if it is keen to expel bullies, the BPS should have immediately expelled the person who made the YouTube speech and every Trustee that approved that awful bullying footage defaming our elected president. But we all know that won’t happen. The Society will protect its own, and to hell with the annoying members.
Of course we will get – “this is all in the past” etc. and probably not be reminded that six million pounds of members money has been spent on a “change programme”, which has achieved … what exactly? They don’t want to let us see the reports that we paid for, so we don’t know. Who has benefitted from the money spent on the programme? What was the procurement process? Were any of the consultants known to the elite group in the BPS, deciding who should get rich from the £6 million?
For me, any changes promised now are too little and too late. And quite frankly I have little faith that anything useful would emerge for members, and more importantly vulnerable individuals in need of skilled psychological help.
I say all this with much genuine sadness. I have been proud to be a psychologist, hoping to make a positive contribution to life, but the BPS has now become an organisation of which I am ashamed to be a member.
Ashley Conway PhD, January 2023
References
Sinason,V. & Conway,A. (Eds) (2022) Trauma and Memory – The Science and the Silenced. London: Routledge.
Conway,A. & Pilgrim,D. (2022). The policy alignment of the British False Memory Society and the British Psychological Society. Journal of Trauma and Dissociation, 165- 176. https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/HADJSG9IEXN8F5CKU4BX/full?target=10.1080/15299732.2022.2028222
Conway, A. (2023 / In press) Policy capture at the BPS: the memory and law controversy. In: Pilgrim,D (Ed) British Psychology in Crisis. A Case Study in Organisational Dysfunction.
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