From any perspective that clearly demonstrates a hugely dysfunctional organisation. This is a minute from the Board of Trustees (BoT) meeting of 15 September 2023
Finance – the August 2023 management accounts showed that the positive trend from July was continuing. The current operating deficit is REDACTED better than budget. The overall bottom line is significantly better than a year ago, although this improvement was largely driven by improvement in the value of investments. Membership network subscription income is now REDACTED ahead of budget.
Now I’m no accountant but that doesn’t strike me as an overly downbeat assessment of finances, yet just over two months later these draconian measures are proposed. There are hints, though (from the same minutes)
Trustees discussed the proposed drawdown from reserves. Trustees were asked to approve a drawdown of up to REDACTED. It was hoped that a smaller amount, REDACTED, would be needed. The drawdown is for general expenditure rather than specific items and relates to the need to balance cash flow through the end of the year. Most membership income is received in January and February.
The overall financial objective is to achieve break-even by the end of 2024. Further work will be needed on cost reduction, to keep the plan on track. The proposed drawdown would leave reserves close to the prudential level approved by Trustees of 9 months’ income
Delving back to the BoT meeting before that, we read
A number of financial indicators are positive. The apparent increase in direct income as at April 2023 is linked to a systems/anniversary issue causing a gap in recorded income in early 2022. Accurate figures are now available. It is too early in the year to predict the full year outcome for 2023 but early indications are satisfactory.
and
Trustees noted progress on plans to increase income and reduce costs.
Again, no acknowledgement (except that bland phrase “…reduce costs…”) that there is any problem.
From the minutes of the BoT for 21 April we read
Trustees discussed whether the organisation is making sufficient progress in improving the financial position. It was noted that headcount and discretionary spending are areas that organisations often look at when seeking to cut costs in the short term. There are currently 8 vacancies, albeit not a blanket freeze on recruitment. The SMT review staffing on an ongoing basis, balancing the financial demands on the organisation with the need to continue to provide core member services, and ‘extreme’ cuts may be more harmful in the long term.
So, within the space of two months the BPS has to “reduce costs” by pushing thirty two people out despite this phrase in the extract above
and ‘extreme’ cuts may be more harmful in the long term.
It raises serious questions about the financial management and reporting systems in the BPS – yet again. How much have the Trustees been told? After all they are legally responsible for the financial health of the Society. Why is there a sudden need for such major cost savings? It must seem a bitter paradox that the BPS has blown £6 million on the Change Programme (to what effect?, the interested reader may well ask). Why are members being deprived of critically important information (note the redactions) about the future viability of the Society which they pay for? These are not ‘commercially sensitive” data nor does it relate to named individuals. It is yet another example of the wilful and deliberate withholding of key information from the membership. Let’s have some honesty, please.
Will it be any of those 18 staff members, with their grandiose (and largely meaningless) job titles whose combined salaries are around £1.5 million? After all, it is these people who must take the overall responsibility for the operational management of the Society. Call me an old cynic but my guess is that they will stay and, as in all organisations, it’s the “poor bloody infantry“ that bears the brunt.
It is just those people on whom the BPS is absolutely dependent. Without them the Society simply would not work. Remove the odd highly paid Director of [fill in your own ostentatious new management-speak title here] and I doubt would we would notice the difference. Note that during the 12 month suspension of the CEO the BPS still functioned (presumably he was still paid during his gardening leave). But lose those hard working and committed people who do the donkey work and where are you. Without a paddle and hopefully not up a creek managed by Southern Water.
Back in the day (OK nearly 25 years ago now) I held three posts in turn (Chief Examiner, Chair of the Board of Examiners, Chair of the DCP – and no, I am not a BPS junkie) which had a degree of responsibility. They also made serious demands on my time – and, no, I am not asking for your sympathy here as I gave that time willingly and freely. But the point of this is not to self-aggrandize but to emphasize that I simply could not have done these jobs without the helpful, willing and kind people in the middle ranks of the BPS bureaucracy. Not only were they well-versed in the reality of how the organisation worked in general and their subsystems in particular, they often gave much more than their position and salary indicated. They were tolerant of my naivety, subtle in their advice and always, but always, had the best interest of the membership at the centre of what they did. Sometimes, I think that their close identification with their particular sub-grouping with the BPS meant that they attracted management censure for having (to use a politically and culturally inappropriate phrase in these post-colonial times) “gone native”.
So, if this is where the axe will fall, then who is going to guide and support those volunteer office-holders which the BPS so desperately needs? Who will provide the continuity, the hidden knowledge that the manuals don’t include? Who will provide the services that members pay their (soon-to-be-increased) subscriptions for? Who will do the actual day-to-day work?
But this is a selfish perspective. I write this at the start of December – three weeks or so before Christmas. Thirty two people – and let’s not distance them by calling them members of staff – these are real people with real families, real mortgages and energy bills to pay, real mouths to feed – will be facing the festive season with dread and foreboding. Their New Year will be uncertain, unpredictable, filled with fear as to whether they will be able to find another job or they will be subject to the cruel vagaries of the benefit system. Uncertainty about your job is bad at any time but there is cruel irony about the timing of this news.
Perhaps the BPS, rather than spending its time and scarce resources chasing whatever current cause triggers its need to virtue signal, might spare a thought for those people on whom it depends. But perhaps it simply doesn’t care.
Editing a book on the crisis in the BPS was in one sense easy. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. The Society is so dysfunctional and corrupt that the facts just spoke for themselves. I did hit some problems though. I had to lose some important contributions for reasons of sub judice. This was not because the claims to be made were untrue and without an extensive evidential basis. It was because the victim of a gross injustice, President-Elect Nigel MacLennan, was pursuing his legal right to redress, which I could not jeopardize by going public too soon with every damning fact known to me and other writers in the book.
In continuing their own desperate defence of past actions, the BPS leaders will take even more money from a currently uninformed membership. The latter deserve a detailed list of the costs involved in the campaign to persecute MacLennan. We are probably talking not tens of thousands of pounds, as was the case in relation to the fraud perpetrated by the PA of the CEO (see below) but hundreds of thousands, with the bill still mounting. Whose interests exactly have been served in this expensive campaign of disparagement of an individual, who was acting in good faith to improve governance in the BPS? When the dust settles on his case the costs to members entailed should be made known, given that to date the leaders have been coy about their accounting practices.
In my view, looking at the arc of this story and the evidence we have, it was because MacLennan was an incipient whistleblower that the cabal went out to get him, a process that had started early on in his tenure. The SMT and the Board of Trustees spotted a troublemaker in their midst, who might spill the beans on what was wrong in the Society and whose moral and legal culpability might be exposed. He was probably seen initially as an agitator for governance reform (his candidate statement for President forewarned them). When he moved from agitator to whistleblower (with Charity Commission interest becoming more evident) then his days looked numbered and his expulsion could soon be contrived. Whistleblowers blow the cover on dubious practice and there was much of this waiting to come out.
The problem of opaqueness and the cant in the BPS about its claimed ‘transparency’ have recurred in our critique of the BPS culture. Although the facts do indeed speak for themselves, secrecy and spin, ensured by the censorship role of the Comms Team and the silence of The Psychologist, meant that they were by no means all that easy to either come by or broadcast (Harvey, 2023).
When writing my history of the BPS across chapters in the book, I cautioned that the full details behind our criticisms were still patchy and shrouded from view. We may have got it wrong in whole or part: who knows for certain? The long standing organizational malaise in the BPS could all have been a set of innocent human errors, made by people of good will. On the other hand, the Machiavellianism could be much worse than even we have described. Indeed it is because leaders in the BPS have covered their tracks with such assiduous effort that we may never know, for certain, what has really happened in the Kafkaesque Leicester HQ.
We await a rebuttal of the arguments in our book from BPS officialdom but no effort has been made to date to offer a celebratory history of the Society, maybe for very good reason. Where would that celebration start exactly? How about the twice President and dodgy eugenicist Cyril Burt during the Second World War? How about the failure to set up an independent Board of Trustees in 1966 and missing a second bite of the cherry in 1988? How about the crash down of British empiricism and positivism in the wake of the postmodern turn in the discipline during the 1980s and 90s? How about the departing CEOs and other senior officials in the wake of financial crises, after the turn of this century? How about the New Public Management model and its consequences for a bloated economy in the Society? How exactly would this sow’s ear picture be turned into a proud silk purse for posterity? Spin in the present understandably does not welcome historical candour.
The spin is what has been said but the main strategy to keep members in the dark has been silence, ‘Keeping schtum’ has served self-interest at the top well. Call it what you wish (‘cover up’ ‘mystification’ ‘spin’, ‘bullshit’) the outcome is the same: the BPS is not and has never been transparent. Its ordinary members and the general public have been shielded from anything other than good news stories.
The surviving and still extensive contributions in the book were certainly damning enough. They demonstrated that the BPS has never had a fit-for-purpose Board of Trustees since it was recognized as a charity in British law. That lack of independent oversight has ensured organizational dysfunction, a lack of membership democracy, a lack of transparency, recurrent policy capture, the abandonment of freedom of expression and academic probity at the altar of modish identity politics, as well as of course financial mismanagement and then the corruption, with a prison sentence eventually attached. Thus, the lack of proper governance has triggered more than financial concerns alone.
I expand this point now more by looking at junkies, fraud and Pollyanna spin doctors as symptomatic aspects of the BPS organizational malaise. Together they have constituted a ‘kakistocracy’. The ugly but apposite term comes from the old Greek ‘kakistos’ meaning ‘worst’ and ‘kratos’ meaning ‘rule’.
BPS junkies
When then President Ray Miller quipped that he was a ‘BPS junkie’ we will never know why; the claim was fair comment but his motive for making it could reflect guilt, pride, either or both. The context was important though. He was in conversation with an early representative of the New Public Management approach, the CEO Tim Cornford, flexing its muscles at the turn of this century (Miller and Cornford, 2006). These two leaders of the organization ‘in conversation’ reflected a tentative hand over of power between the old regime of oligarchs and the new managers. Many of them, as was to become apparent, were not psychologists but some were. Together they shifted the organizational emphasis from academic values to those of a managed bureaucracy; a wider feature in the UK in the 1990s. (Third sector organizations, like those in the public sector, became both more marketized and more bureaucratized.)
With a shift from the traditional power of oligarchs with their recycled names to the controlling role of new management class with their invented new Orwellian titles, a struggle for who was top dog ensued. The controversial ‘Change Programme’ and the spiraling costs at the centre of the organization were symptoms of an insidious shift to unaccountable managerial power and financial profligacy. Fifteen years after Miller’s confession, President David Murphy made much of this popping financial bubble in his resignation letter, placed for all to see on social media. Seemingly, in his eyes, not only the crooked PA had been on a self-indulgent spending spree (see below).
Miller may have confessed his guilty secret but he was by no means the only recycled name at the top. Some, such as Ann Colley, upstaged him by being both the BPS President and CEO. Some took on the sinecure of ‘Honorary General Secretary’. Grand in its title, what it was, when the payment for it stopped, and for what reason, are like many things in the BPS lost in the haze of time. Hypnotized by personal cunning plans or seduced by old fashioned vanity, so much still remains unknown about these recycled names. Maybe they did it just because they could and it would always look good on their CV. ‘Junkies’ may be a metaphor for personal addiction to bureaucratic status and power in this context. However, the governance vacuum created by a lack of an independent Board of Trustees opened the door very widely to such personal craving and it then rewarded addicts. The latter could readily rationalize their overly-long involvement as service, but who were they serving?
One lesson we have learned in our campaigning is that some senior colleagues with long term involvement in the Society we have spoken to manifest degrees of ‘Stockholm Syndrome’. They counter our criticisms by arguing that if only this person rather than that took over as the Chair of this or that sub-system, or could join the faux Board of Trustees, then the BPS dysfunction would soon be rectified. Another aspect of this quick ‘fixit’ mentality is the idea that a quiet private word with individuals at the top will ensure that a particular grievance or inefficiency will soon be resolved. We should stop our negativism and look on the bright side, curry favour with those in power now or prospectively, and it will all be OK. This theme of a new world coming in a BPS with bushy tailed innovators recurs over and over again (see below).
One ex-President we contacted was shocked by our sleuthing saying that she thought that she had, like Hercules, successfully ‘cleaned out the stables’ during her tenure. She accepted what we said but really believed that she had fixed the problem. Such defences of the old regime by senior colleague are, to put it politely, highly irrational. How precisely would individuals in their efficiency and integrity singlehandedly solve a structural problem? This naïve assumption could be a function of psychological reductionism and vain individualism but we know that other organizations can be oligarchical and lacking in insight. The shock here though is that psychologists are expected to at least reflect on their problems; they are allegedly experts on that reflection about individuals and groups. In practice this reflexivity has been notably absent in the culture of Leicester.
Fraud
Even today I meet BPS members who are unaware of the major fraud in the BPS. This is because it was not reported in The Psychologist or announced by the SMT or Board of Trustees. It was reported though in the Leicester Mercury (as was an arson attack at BPS HQ). So if a member wants to understand their professional organization they would do well to take this local newspaper rather than rely on BPS statements and publications.
The gist of the unedifying main story is that a woman who had numerous previous offences of the same type had used the BPS credit card for over £70K of spending (on amongst other things a cruise and Jimmy Choo shoes). After the fraud was eventually discovered and reported the offender was tried and sent to prison for 28 months. In court she reported that it was like being a ‘kid in a candy shop’.
A naïve outsider faced with this picture may well assume that those responsible for appointing her would be disciplined or sacked. They might also assume that as she was the PA of the CEO, the latter would have signed off fraudulent claims. They might also assume that oversight of financial probity would be the responsibility of the Finance Director. They might also assume that as well as the end-point offender being held to account in a court of law, that the legal liability or ethical culpability of other key players would be under scrutiny. These are all fair assumptions. So this is what happened in practice.
News of the fraud was buried in a line or two of the annual accounts as a minor irrelevance. No report of the organizational background to story was supplied to the membership. The CEO and Finance Director were suspended and placed under investigation. The former stayed suspended for a year and then returned and is still now in post. The latter went off to be employed by the National Lottery Community Fund within a month of his suspension (presumably with a reference dutifully given by someone in the BPS). He remains employed there. To date no one in a leadership role has offered a transparent (that word again) account to the world of what went so badly wrong about financial probity. Thus the only disciplinary consequence on public record has been the imprisonment of the PA. None of this drama has been reported or discussed in The Psychologist or any other BPS outlet. Silence has been the main cover-up tactic.
Here are the loose end questions that members and the general public may be interested in. Did the ‘Board of Trustees’ discuss the termination of employment of the CEO and FD? Were they unanimous in their decision to suspend them both? Did they examine the evidence related to the CEO’s sign offs of multiple fraudulent claims and the due diligence of his FD in overseeing those sign offs and confirming their legitimacy? Did they put in place plans to investigate who was responsible for the appointment of a convicted fraudster? Did the BoT suspend the two senior employees at once or did several months elapse between the fact of the fraud being known and their eventual suspension? If so why? Did the CEO return to post after a year because he was totally and unambiguously exonerated of any negligence or wrongdoing? Instead might his retained role be explained by another reason? Why have the members been given no answers to these questions? Does that silence reflect a norm of mystification in the BPS, which it turn reflects a failure of governance over decades?
And there is more. If the FD and CEO have had their salaried posts and reputations left unscathed by the fraud, what of the parallel drama at the time of the expulsion of Nigel MacLennan? Did he commit a criminal offence or was any form of illegality committed instead against him in relation to employment law, personal disparagement and his human rights? Soon we will find out the answers to these questions but not before the BPS leadership will pour even more into the legal costs sustaining their attack on MacLennan. Where will that money come from? (That question is rhetorical not open.)
Where is the evidence that he actually did anything wrong? Why did the video about his expulsion appear as an act of deliberate public humiliation on YouTube, fronted by the Acting Chair of the BoT, before MacLennan even had the time to appeal the decision (McGuinness, 2021)? Were those appointed to investigate the charge against him truly independent of vested interests in the BPS leadership? Do they today stand by their decision and approve of the YouTube posting? Any fair minded outsider would surely smell a rat about this scenario, unless all of the questions I posed above were answered in a convincing manner (rather than being spin or bullshit). This cues the next and final section.
Pollyanna spin doctors
The unreal culture of the BPS is fascinating. On the one hand its ‘officers’ send po-faced letters marked ‘private and confidential’ about minor bureaucratic details pertaining to an investigated complaint, which has typically run into the sands, as if they are gravely concerned about standards. On the other hand, they are quite happy to publicly trash people like Nigel MacLennan with impunity, as I have just noted. What ethical ‘standard’ was being applied precisely in his case? On the one had they say that complaints against individuals are not investigated by the BPS but on the other hand they deploy self-declared BPS junkies to pursue such an investigation, when it suits the interests of those in power. On the one hand they boast that ‘transparency’ is a key value of the organization and on the other hand they fail to report any event that might get in the way of the narrative that everything in Leicester is just fine and, if it is not, then improvements are just around the corner.
Whistling in the dark and pretending everything is fine and under control have attended the demise of the BPS in recent decades. Silence in The Psychologist and the weasel words of the anonymous apparatchiks of the Comms Team have always been on hand to maintain this madness with its underlying method or aim, but there are other key players. One group are those manifesting variants of ‘Stockholm Syndrome’, noted above. However, at the top of the pyramid are the SMT and the Chair of the Board of Trustees. The latter used to come with the job of being the President. That is no longer the case as the role has now become merely ‘ambassadorial’.
This tweak might have passed the average member by but it is important. Now we have a new and independent chair and three independent colleagues. At last there has been some sign after years of Charities Commission pressure of a shift for the first time towards an independent Board. For now the majority are still old school appointees from the sub-systems, there by Masonic-style nod and a wink trickery. They still have conflicts of interest but this new picture is at least a start. A fully independent BoT would be a necessary but not sufficient condition for confronting the gross mismanagement and misdemeanors of the past, but note that it is a necessary condition.
Under this shift towards independent scrutiny, the old habit of Pollyanna spin from the SMT and Presidents is potentially now open to challenge. Maybe the stop button on the BPS bullshit generator might at long last be pressed by these newcomers. Sadly that is not what appears to be happening. The neophytes seem to have ‘gone native’. I have been in correspondence with David Crundwell, the new chair and he has been polite and he has replied at length. (This is an improvement on being totally ignored or threatened with disciplinary action, which was the stance of the SMT in recent years since BPSWatch emerged.)
I sent Mr Crundwell a copy of our book, at his request. He was concerned to anticipate what he called ‘accusations’ and I preferred to call ‘empirical facts’. I asked him to report any factual inaccuracies about the claims being made in the book but he declined on the grounds that it was all before his time. This is a bit odd, given that any of us can offer a view about anything that has happened in the past and drawn to our attention now in evidential detail (that is how the jury system works). I also asked him to join a panel at a launch of the book but he declined the invitation. Nobody from the SMT or BoT have yet complained about the facts recorded in the book, which is relevant for the historical record. Their silence is telling and a full debate with them would be intriguing for any listener.
On the positive side, Mr. Crundwell has agreed that the high rate of redactions still common in BPS Board meetings is incompatible with a spirit of transparency. He truly appreciates that claiming transparency and being transparent are not the same thing, which was an insight clearly lost on the old regime. And a certain degree of caginess is understandable, given that he has had to work with a dysfunctional leadership which was not of his choosing. However, sadly that caution has now tipped over into Pollyanna spin and so is compounding, not challenging, old bad habits.
Reasons to be cheerful with no rear view mirror
Ian Dury’s long shopping list of ‘reasons to be cheerful’ was tempered at the end by the wise caution of ‘perhaps next year or maybe even never’. Pollyanna managers are less sophisticated about the complex relationship between past, present and future. Patterns connect through time and old habits die hard. Stock-taking about the legacy of the past for naïve optimists is threatening to them because it gets in the way of their current rhetoric of shiny future prospects. It is dangerous for them because they are wrongheaded and so they will be prone to mismanage and be exposed for their folly. It is dangerous for others because it is misleading about unrecognized risks for the general good.
‘Reasons to be cheerful’ rhetoric means not having to deal with the grim reality of what has been inherited but living instead in a comforting imaginary world. Who can object to good intentions even if they may risk paving the way to hell? They sound plausible and are an example of the power of positive thinking but they are actually profoundly illogical at times. In Peter Barham’s poignant account of psychotic patients going ‘over the top’ in the First World War, oblivious to the dangers they were facing, being out of touch with reality meant making their vulnerable lives more, not less, risky (Barham, 2004).
A theme in my correspondence related to Mr. Crundwell’s preference not to look in the rear view mirror (his chosen metaphor not mine). In response I noted that a car minus a mirror will fail its MOT. My metaphor seemed to cut no ice. He wanted instead to look only optimistically to the road ahead. He even invited me to get in the car and enjoy the ride with other BPS members about ‘exciting prospects’ envisioned but not elaborated in any detail.
What Mr. Crundwell does not seem to understand is that in the rear view he is choosing to ignore, there are not only shocking past events but also impending and foreboding consequences. The reality of the past and the present and the future are bound up together in all open human systems. Any manager ignoring that truism is, to say the least, unwise. I did point this out to Mr. Crundwell (boringly and repeatedly) but my view was ignored. ‘Line drawing’ is just magical thinking. Forget complexity and focus on comforting future fantasies. The contempt this shows for the importance of history is jaw dropping.
Of course we have heard this ‘drawing a line’ sort of argument recently from Crundwell’s new colleagues. It came from the CEO and the then new President installed as a safe pair of hands to replace the expelled MacLennan, following the nifty imposed rule change that only allowed Senate members to be candidates. Carpenter and Bajwa (2021) then were singing the same refrain as Crundwell is now. I have no idea whether they coached him in a ‘party line’ or he came to the same unwise stance with no help from them (our correspondence was polite but not a mutual confessional).
The ‘drawing a line under the past’ management cliché undermines three linked imperatives for a healthy organization. The first is justice. Justice requires truth. Without truth there can be no redress for, and reconciliation about, historical wrongdoing. Hiding the detailed facts of the fraud or MacLennan’s kangaroo court expulsion helps few, other than those with the self-interested need to cover up the evidence of their past culpability.
Second, when those in power go into hiding, then trust is broken in them. If the BPS leaders do not report adverse events to members, why should the latter have any trust in them? When that trust breaks down some members stay and fight (as we have done), some become passive cynical onlookers and some resign in contempt for their professional and disciplinary body. New psychologists will be wary of joining a discredited organization. A measure of this in applied psychology has been the formation of others splinter groups (the AEP, ABP and ACP), where greater trust is invested. Another has been that now most psychologists registered with the HCPC are not BPS members.
Third, future improvements only come about as a result of organizational learning. That is why I have attacked the BPS for being an ‘organization without a memory’ (Pilgrim, 2023a; cf. Donaldson, 2002). A necessary outcome of that contrived amnesia is its need to produce organizational bullshit (Pilgrim, 2023b; Spicer, 2020). For example, those working in the NHS understand from painful experience the importance of critical incident reporting and constant reflection about lessons learned. When that duty (and it is a duty) of learning is evaded about the past, then we tend to have unnecessary deaths in the future. The consequences for critical incidents in the BPS may be less dramatic but they still implicate risks to the public, as we know in relation to policy capture.
Conclusion
The BPS is a kakistocracy. Those addicted to status, those using it as a cash cow and those expert at spin and bullshit to defend the indefensible, have aggregated in its culture in the past decades. They have been joined by a self-interested expansive management class. None of these have had any inclination to come clean about all of the matters that we in BPSWatch have insisted on unpicking in the past couple of years.
The next phase of decline, and maybe fall, awaits with leaders driving with no rear mirror. Tailgating the jaunty BPS car is a juggernaut of legal reckoning and the prospect of a scattering loss of those psychologists who have simply had enough of an implausible charity and professional body that has lost academic credibility. Any members left behind will continue to fund the antics of the kakistocrats. They would do well to ask for a detailed receipt.
References
Barham, P. (2004) Forgotten Lunatics of the Great War New Haven: Yale University Press.
Carpenter, K. and Bajwa, S. (2021) From the President and the CEO The Psychologist November.
Conway, A. (2023) BPS Policy Capture (2): selective ‘memory science’ and the betrayal of victims of abuse. In D.Pilgrim (ed) British Psychology in Crisis: A Case Study in Organizational Dysfunction Oxford: Phoenix Books.
Donaldson L. (2002) An organisation with a memory. Clinical Medicine Sep-Oct;2(5):452-7
Harvey, P. (2023) Resisting the silence of the cabal: resorting to social and alternative media. In D.Pilgrim (ed) British Psychology in Crisis: A Case Study in Organizational Dysfunction Oxford: Phoenix Books.
McGuinness, C. (2021) The Society is at a Crossroads The Psychologist June 34, 4-5.
Miller, R. and Cornford, T. (2006) Double top – Ray Miller in discussion with Tim Cornford: The Society’s new President in discussion with the Chief Executive. How do their roles work together, and where do they see the Society going? The Psychologist April, 19, 20-21.
Pilgrim, D. (2023a) An organization without a memory? In D.Pilgrim (ed) British Psychology in Crisis: A Case Study in Organizational Dysfunction Oxford: Phoenix Books.
Pilgrim, D. (2023b) BPS BullshitIn D.Pilgrim (ed) British Psychology in Crisis: A Case Study in Organizational Dysfunction Oxford: Phoenix Books.
Spicer, A. (2020) Playing the bullshit game: how empty and misleading communication takes over organizations Organization Theory 1, 1-26
The new independent chair of the faux Board of Trustees, Mr. David Crundwell, and his three colleagues from outside the BPS face a task which is, to use the preferred management euphemism, ‘challenging’. He and the other newcomers have been parachuted into a dysfunctional and corrupt organization. We do not know who sent them or how they were chosen for their ‘challenging’ jump. Was it the Charity Commission directly or did the cabal itself choose them for their particular crisis management skills to placate the demands of the former? As with most of the decision making about, and within, the BPS this matter has been kept hidden from the scrutiny of members and the public.
Despite this opaqueness, which immediately becomes pure cant given that the Society has a purported core value of ‘transparency’, something might still happen for the better. Small changes in systems, even in relatively isolated ones like the BPS, can potentially at least trigger larger improvements. Family therapists know this about their chronically ‘stuck’ clients. However, the objective character of that closed culture, embedded for over fifty years, is still worth recalling because any measure of success must use it as a yardstick. Whatever ‘perspective’ (that great postmodern fudge) we take on the legitimation crisis of the BPS, it remains a legitimation crisis. The facts we keep restating about corruption and dysfunction remain the facts.
What is the ‘challenge’?
This is the score. The BPS has never had a proper Board of Trustees. The group calling itself by that name was initially a self-perpetuating oligarchy. Those on it at any moment in time not only tended to hang around for years on end but when it became a ‘slow open’ group, newcomers were let in by grace and favour. Sometimes chairs of other Boards and Divisions waited their turn, like status obsessed MPs in the queue to enter the House of Lords. This quasi-Masonic tendency was neither democratic nor transparent.
Newly appointed ‘trustees’, in exchange for a taste of power or influence, were expected to toe the line. If they did not, then they risked punishment. The latter claim has been evident in relation to the one sub-group of ‘trustees’ with any sort of democratic mandate: the Presidential triumvirate. However, although this three person steer at the top was elected by the membership, even they were still not proper Trustees, according to the expectations of charity law. They were not members of the public, who could at any time walk away from the role without career, financial or status implications. Moreover, the elected Presidential role has now been neutered, with those elected by the members only having an ‘ambassadorial’ role, instead of becoming the Board Chair. Let us be honest, who would now want be an ambassador for a banana republic?
Outsiders create proper oversight. Insiders, even at their benign best, act out their conflicts of interest. We have witnessed this over and over again, especially in relation to two matters: the struggle to sustain sub-group interests and the opportunities for policy capture. An example of the first was when the third Divisional departure emerged in 2017, with the formation of the Association of Clinical Psychologists; prior splinters away were the Association of Business Psychology and Association of Educational Psychologists. These schisms reflected the struggle of groups of applied psychologists to escape both the shackles of oligarchical control and the iron cage of bureaucracy.
Examples of the second, which we have explored at length on this blog, have been the capture of policies on gender by transgender activists and the alignment of the BPS policy on memory and the law with that of the British False Memory Society. Governance failure has meant that these biases have accrued, and other legitimate voices from within the Society have been systematically excluded. This culminates in an organization that is not learned but captured. It has become a legitimizing policy platform for activists with particular vested interests. The latter displaces full and proper academic reflection with propaganda. That process has been aided and abetted by the ‘Comms Team’ and ThePsychologist, as well as a recent cultural proclivity in the BPS for censorship.
Facing this ‘challenging’ scenario
Given the above, how will the new small broom start to discharge its onerous responsibilities? This is an unenviable but interesting scenario for anyone. Remember that Mr. Crundwell and his colleagues are the very first genuine Trustees of the BPS, so this is a recordable historical moment. Will they take stock and then opt to distance themselves from the past chicanery and bullshit, which we have documented extensively on this blog? Will they demand full transparency for the membership about the fraud, the arson and the kangaroo court expulsion?
However, before jumping in with those blunt questions, there are the information gathering advantages for them to consider about very cautiously engaging with the extant ‘leadership’. The newcomers need to gauge the scale of damage of the organizational wreckage and its realistic prospects of repair. A watchful period might also allow the new broom to hold the old guard to account for their sins of omission and commission, before telling the story of that experiment publicly and without resorting to redacted minutes (O to be fly on the wall of the current ‘Board of Trustees’ meetings!) For the newbies there are clear grounds then for a ‘wait and see’ engagement stance. However, the very real risk is that it becomes quickly routinized and the new broom is then rendered completely ineffective. At the time of writing, Mr. Crundwell and his colleagues are on the cusp between wise caution and mistaken collusion. This is a tricky time for them.
Their cultural absorption would be a replay of the pattern of incorporation we have seen so often in the past. The more it changed the more it stayed the same. What impact did some well-meaning new Presidents have? The answer is very little. Did the New Public Management model lead to a rectification of organizational inefficiency? The answer is that it led to atleast one major fraud and a profligate £6 million ‘Change Programme’; ‘changing from what to what?’ we might all well ask. This shambles culminated in a fiscal crisis, summarised well in the resignation letter of Vice President David Murphy, we previously re-printed in full.
Since then, the highly redacted minutes of the ‘Board of Trustees’ are beginning to hint at an impending meltdown; what more is there to hide from an already hoodwinked member audience? The answer may well be ‘quite a lot’. Neither the old oligarchs nor the new managers, since 2000, with their poor understanding of academic values, prevented the fraud. Who in either group has taken responsibility for that scandal? The answer is ‘no one’. Who has apologized for the kangaroo court expulsion of Nigel MacLennan? The answer is ‘no one’. Given this lack of evidence about personal integrity or a culture of learning from experience, the old guard has no legitimacy or ‘rational authority’, to use an old notion from Erich Fromm.
In light of these points, we have approached the new Chair to open up a channel of communication with him. This offer of free highly researched, albeit highly critical, feedback to date has not been taken up fully by him. The relevant context of our offer is that we have had no fancy fees like the management consultants and lawyers paid out from members’ money by the SMT, to save their skins. We have zero ambition for power within the BPS but as career-long members we can see it for what it is, warts and all.
Faced with our guerilla campaign, the SMT have ignored us hoping we might give up or die (both of course might have happened, so from their tactical position it was worth a try). But our presence or departure is not relevant to what we have been drawing attention to about corruption and dysfunction, which is either true or not true. We were just the messengers to be shot or ignored. Accordingly, the newcomers with their fresh eyes and lack of loyalty to the old regime might be wise to take what we are saying seriously. That is their choice.
Our elaborated case is set out in the just published British Psychology In Crisis: A Case Study of a Dysfunctional Organisation from Phoenix Books. I have arranged for a free copy to be sent to Mr. Crundwell, at his request. He will use his own judgement about its contents, in comparison to the obfuscations, rationalisations and silences likely to be heard from his advisors from the SMT, depicting us as a small disaffected and unrepresentative minority. As Robert Thouless noted in his classic 1930 text, Straight and Crooked Thinking, the strength of an argument, which mixes logic and evidence, is not how many people say it but whether or not it is more plausible than competing arguments. The path less taken is sometimes the wisest one.
Mr. Crundwell has written back very politely to us recently. Knowingly brief (he is a communications expert according to a click on Google), he is keeping his cards close to his chest about his appraisal of the organizational madness so far. But at least he replied, which is more than was the case so often in the past, when a host of members sent letters of concern and complaint to the ‘leaders’ of the BPS and were blanked. This culture of contempt, when letters and complaints were systematically ignored by the CEO and other senior managers, is a norm that the newcomers may be wise to disrupt and eschew.
So Mr. Crundwell has replied quickly and politely, albeit guardedly. He has invited us to meet with him and the CEO. Maybe he wants to nail the CEO to his side to make him face the music. However, our interest was in talking directly to the new and authentic Trustees about their oversight role, not having meetings with employees. This lack of administrative separation, even today, of the CEO and the Chair is highly problematic. All communications to the Chair still go through the office of the CEO. In a well-run Charity a Chair should be interested in feedback from any source (minority or not). Given that the CEO and the SMT have been the focus of substantial disappointment for BPS members, there ought to be an opportunity for Mr. Crundwell to listen to voices of concern about them from anywhere. How can that happen with the remaining norm of administrative enmeshment between the CEO and the Trustees, including the Chair? This does not augur well for a new regime of oversight.
Moreover, why would any BPS member trust a CEO, who was suspended for a year on full pay and who then returned with no explanation for the world about how his fraudster PA, with past convictions, ended up stealing members’ money with impunity and is now, once again, in prison? However he was using his time when not replying to members concerns, it was clearly not on hiring and managing his own subordinates to ensure financial probity. Teflon tactics of leaders may lead to personal survival, even if temporarily, but they rarely provide the survivors with genuine and historically vindicated credibility or the respect of others. This leaves just a few stalwart loyalists to defend the indefensible. Our Boris Johnson zeitgeist is permeating more than the culture of Westminster. Applying this point to the BPS, why would any member any longer want to talk to the CEO – what is the point given his track record?
Conclusion
The BPS is under immediate existential threat. Poor governance, financial corruption, policy capture, censorship and academic incoherence point to an organization that may now be fatally wounded. The current CEO has no legitimacy as its most senior manager. The ‘Board of Trustees’, now reformed for the better, is still a sham. It needs to be scrapped fully and a new one installed, where every single member is truly independent of the operational aspects of its staff and its competing membership interests. The resolution of tensions between the latter now require careful and separate reflection, given that the discipline of psychology remains so contested in terms of its theories and methods. That matter of academic hygiene, underpinned at all times by academic freedom, has been lost in an organization in which secrecy and censorship have become management norms. A truly independent Board of Trustees could oversee the rectification of these signs of both organizational and academic malaise. For their part, psychologists must take collective responsibility for dealing with the latter.
If the Society is now on the brink of extinction then the current reforms at the top are a start but they are not enough. Finishing where I began with the unique historical installation of proper and so credible Trustees, and to use another managerial cliché, ‘our door is always open’ for them. However, whether they listen to us or not, maybe the BPS is going to collapse from its own contradictions about poor financial control and grossly inadequate governance. New leaders, even if well-meaning, honest and open to feedback from all-comers, may be doomed to fail because maybe the Society is now doomed to fail. Hero innovators may only now be offering palliative care rather than a cure.
A bloated, incompetent, arrogant discredited learned and professional body is determinedly destroying itself. This post will assert that the BPS has passed a point of no return. It suffers from severe and seemingly intractable organisational dysfunction. There have been many signs of the body’s “organ failure” but much has also been hidden in the recent decade. What follows are some hints of what we know and what we have yet to find out. If and when there is an autopsy, hindsight will no doubt allow a fuller picture than members were ever able to piece together, and key players who have been silent may spill some beans.
Two and a half years ago I was one of the three alarmed colleagues, supported by a recently formed network of similarly frustrated long term members, who formed BPSWatch.com. We have posted nearly 70 blog articles examining instances of BPS dysfunction. We were immediately threatened with legal action when we reported something all subscribing members were entitled to know – that the CEO was suspended. The Head of Legal and Governance who made that threat to us formally in writing is no longer in post and has removed all reference to their employment by the BPS from LinkedIn. There is a back story there that cannot yet be told, but hopefully will emerge from the “wheels of justice that grind exceeding slow”.
There is another, as yet untold, back story as to why the CEO was subsequently able to return after a year’s gardening leave to his very highly paid post with apparent impunity. This was somewhat surprising since his Executive Assistant, appointed via expensive recruitment outsourcing, happened to be a fraudster with numerous previous convictions. They hadn’t done the checks. She proceeded to sneak through under his nose over a thousand fraudulent uses of a credit card for which he was responsible. Misconduct or gross misconduct on his part? Apparently not. She, however, was jailed. Thanks are due to the Leicester Mercury for reporting all this, since we were never given the basic facts by the BPS, let alone any lurid details of her £70k+ spoils of underwear, Jimmy Choos, hairdos, cruises and a new kitchen. The newspaper noted: “The prosecutor said it led to others being criticised for not correctly following procedures that may have prevented the fraud.”. Astonishing. And has there been any recompense sought from the clearly incompetent recruitment agency? We should be told.
It was also the Leicester Mercury who had previously reported that the BPS Offices were subject to an apparent arson attack being investigated by the police. Members were not told of that, neither by the tight-lipped BPS website nor by the treacly, sycophantic Fanzine that is The Psychologist. BPS News in the Round has been covered beyond local press by sporadic articles in The Times, The Telegraph and Third Sector, all behind paywalls, but it has required more regular updates from social media on my @psychsocwatchuk to give members some continuity of ideas about what is going on. I had to circumnavigate the suspensions of our first attempts at Twitter accounts owing to complaints that we were “impersonating” the BPS (truly LOL). So we have an active feed that puts out almost daily content to a following which is evidently much larger than the 1000+ prepared to be visible. Despite frequent appeals, The Psychologist has refused to remove its petty, petulant pointless block, which only serves better to make our case against its raison d’être. Frustrating. Silly. Childish.
This is just some of the very recent evidence of individual frailty and incompetence. But there are so many other back stories that members do not know about. These we will endeavour to pursue as the BPS heads towards the self-destruct coded into what can be read from the recent highly redacted minutes of the Board of Trustees. The stories are interesting because they demonstrate core psychological concerns about personality, motivation and group processes/dynamics. Obviously in play are power, ambition, defensiveness, hubris. Maybe a reductionist would be citing the three pillars of Money, Sex and Status. Here are some more of the back stories we have mused upon.
The tempting BPS credit card
Credit Card Story (1) – the really lurid tale of the first CEO. “Shush, we don’t talk about this”. Was there a non-disclosure agreement?
BPS Credit Card Story (2) – unbeknown to the Board of Trustees, someone senior leaves under another cloud, not long before…
BPS Credit Card Story (3) – the extraordinary spree of the fraudster whose card-work evaded not only the current CEO but also the Finance Director (FD). What fancy footwork was involved in this latter jointly suspended senior officer moving swiftly on and out of his suspension by the BPS, directly into a finance post in – wait for it – the National Lottery Community Fund? The same person who reassured the Board of Trustees that greater safeguards were in place after previous concerns.
“A kid in a candy shop” was the term used by the fraudster to describe to the court the temptations of laissez-faire easy access to credit card sprees. CEO and FD appear to have suffered no financial or status detriment.
There are the untold stories of a number of presidents (and a DCP chair) that we know about over the last decade. These volunteer leaders, who were undermined, even threatened with legal action, had been forced to resign early and latterly one was expelled. The National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO), recruited as consultants, recoiled and ran away from a toxic climate where there was serious conflict between senior managers and post-holding volunteer psychologists. Status and power battling it out?
Lashing out on lawyers
Members will be aghast if they ever finally find out how much has been spent on Betsan Criddle, Elena Misra, Newby Castleman etc, and how much is still being, and will be, spent on litigation relating to silencing and defaming a publicly expelled would-be reforming elected President. Costly defensiveness turbo-charged?
The Change Programme (heavy irony)
Or how to squander £6 million. The back story is how this was procured and how real benefits for members have NOT resulted. Suspicious?
Bloating
The back story here is how reckless overstaffing/salary escalation was achieved and how presidents were thwarted in questioning this. Resigning Vice-President David Murphy (he cites “rising staff costs resulting from increases both in staff numbers and senior staff salaries”; “staff costs risen by 73%”; “operating deficit”; “approved budget will be higher than the total income from basic membership and member network subscriptions combined”) has sounded the alarm on this to no apparent avail. A story lies behind the changing profile of more staff, less members, more political activism, less core concern about psychology. Narcissistic grandiosity?
Outsource, Outsource, Outsource
Get in consultants willy nilly. In some instances, get heavily criticised by them (NCVO, Korn Ferry). Get more defensive. Make heavy use of the Comms approach. Back stories will reveal how spin, denial and obfuscation trump reflection and learning. Transparent lack of transparency. PR Rules – OK?
Problem, what problem? Complaint, what complaint?
We have heard dozens of similar back stories from individual members who have persisted with concerns and have been ignored or worse – ominously threatened with having Member Conduct Rules used against them if they persist with “bullying and harassment”. DARVO is the acronym which describes what happens when you complain and the tables are turned against you. Deny. Attack. Reverse Victim and Offender. In 2020, the Charity Commission wrote to me “We are currently engaging with the society over a number of issues and have found deficiencies in some areas of operation. Whilst I would expect the charity to have a robust and well managed complaints process, this may have not been the case in the past.”. When I challenged the BPS with this, they complained to the Charity Commission about their response to me. They DARVOed the Charity Commission.
Clearly there is also a back story of why and how the BPS subsequently revised the complaints procedure the way they did, so that now they will not investigate complaints about the content of a Society publication, a Society policy position, a Society decision to take, or not take, a particular course of action. A great society if it were not for the nuisance of members?
Not “sticking to the knitting” and becoming a society focussed on activism
There will be many back stories about policy formation when we come to understand in hindsight how loss of core purpose and defining philosophy took the BPS into trans activism, false memory campaigning and demands about the amount of Universal Credit the government should be giving to poor people.
Meanwhile, as indicated above, you won’t have been able to make a formal complaint about the political stances the Society took. Fundamental core purpose and philosophy of the BPS subverted?
Evidence leaking out – the Board of Trustees’ recent minutes
Members who understand the serious deficits in governance of the BPS may be holding out hope that the recent changes which have brought an independent chair of the Board of Trustees and 3 new independent trustee appointments will rein in the worst of organisational dysfunction and resultant cronyism and capture. Will those independent leaders be able to resist the machinations of the cabal still in residence, perceive and undo enough of the mess referred to above. Or is it too late?
If you are a BPS member you can read the minutes of the Board of Trustees but you will discover that they are remarkably like documents wrested from Whitehall, redacted on the grounds of national security. Members of our network who are/have been trustees of other charity organisations say that the level of redaction is extraordinary and clearly unjustifiable because there are usually clear and very limited grounds for deciding what needs to be redacted.
Taking the last two sets of minutes available since the independent chair was appointed, it is ascertainable (despite multiple unexplained redactions) that there are now being considered matters which should, in the current situation, raise very serious anxieties about the viability of the BPS. Below are listed some of the non-redacted matters from those minutes:
Consultant use; some implication of less engagement and more judicious use than previously.
Contentious policy issues. How the society should engage with contentious issues on which “there will be strongly held divergent views among members and beyond”. BPS doesn’t always have to take the lead in order to reduce its risk, i.e. take cover with others?
Reputational Risk referred to and clearly related to the above
Poor customer care: concerns from members
Sustainability of the Organisation: Responsibilities to staff (implies overstaffing at the level it is now?)
Membership loss: membership down significantly
Finance: “October management accounts show an income shortfall of £1.26m (13%) against budget. Over 90% of this is due to member subscriptions. Costs are being tightly controlled. Operating deficit at year end is expected to be about £1.9m. Overall deficit is currently £3.9m. Investments are currently £10.6m after withdrawal of £1.7m to repay the CBILS loan and realised and unrealised valuation losses of £1.1m.”. Not healthy at all. David Murphy’s resignation letter had sounded the warning.
Possible HQ Property Sales: maybe London office because they refer to Peldon Rose, a specialist London firm. Minutes refer to “the need for a ‘visible and physical presence’ for the organisation, and that the future of the properties should be seen as part of a wider coherent strategy for the organisation. Any decisions about use of assets should be aligned to the charitable objects, and the Charity Commission guidance on property disposals. The Chair observed that a number of issues had been raised which were linked to the broad question of sustainability of the organisation; and it was good practice to review all assets and whether they are being utilised in the most effective way for the benefit of members and the organisation’s said charitable objectives.”.
The Future, Any Future?
In our forthcoming book British Psychology in Crisis: A Case Study in Organisational Dysfunction Editor: David Pilgrim (2023) https://firingthemind.com/product/9781800131842/ I express a pessimistic view about the survival of the BPS, believing it fails to meet the needs of its existing and potential future membership and membership is confirmed as significantly falling in number. As existing members register discontent by voting with their feet and removing their subscriptions, the organisation is showing no signs of becoming more transparent and receptive to the expressed concerns of its remaining subscribers. It has pursued a number of high profile and contentious policy positions outwith the balance and authority expected of a learned and professional body. It has attracted bad publicity accordingly. Its shop-front magazine The Psychologist has failed to properly inform readers about BPS matters, remains highly conflict averse and clearly captured on one side of current contentious debates, suppressing discussion of alternative views. It is, in a word, “boring”.
At the end of the day, however. It will be The Money that “does for the BPS”.
On this blog we have often noted an irony or paradox. The legitimation crisis now facing the BPS is taking place in a psychological society. At first glance we might expect psychologists, more than other professional groups, to have some insight into their conduct. However, just as doctors all get sick and die, the old adage of ‘physician heal thyself’ was always an accusation and never a realistic expectation.
Our book length analysis of the crisis (Pilgrim, 2023) points out that it is constituted by a few dimensions. Prior to 2000 the same names were recurring at the top of the BPS (oligarchical trend). After 2000 new general managers arrived with no necessary understanding of psychology or of academic norms. Recently a culture of self-protective deceit has emerged to protect this amalgamated cabal. This has culminated in the past ten years in an arrogant leadership culture, seemingly indifferent to its own amoral norms. A broken complaints process and wilful blindness have been used to avoid organisational transparency. Multi-signed letters of complaint from senior practitioners to the CEO and Presidents have been contemptuously ignored.
In some ways the pay-offs of power (and in the case of managers, their salaries as well) might explain in simple terms why the BPS is in the mess it is. This formulation requires little more than a Skinnerian account or its extension into social exchange theory (Homans, 1958). However, there is a layer of functioning which this would miss out. Whilst we might say of the cabal now running the Society ‘Well they would do and say that wouldn’t they?’ many other questions remain.
How have they got away with it for so long? Why have heads not rolled? Why is the CEO still in post when he should have gone the very day the fraud was revealed about expenses paid to his PA which he signed off? Who in HR has been held to account for hiring a fraudster with past form? Why did The Psychologist fail completely to report the crisis in the Society to the membership and general public? Why were they not informed of the damning findings of Korn Ferry and the National Council of Voluntary Organisations (Korn Ferry, 2021; Farrow and Potkins, 2020)? In terms of governance, who actually appoints members of the Board of Trustees, or recently, and for the very first time, three new trustees, and an independent lay chair, from outside the BPS? What criteria are used and why is the process not transparent? Why them and why now? In terms of BPS policy making who made the decisions to defend and perpetuate heavily criticised BPS policies that put children at risk and betray the victims of child sexual abuse (Conway and Pilgrim, 2022)?
Why does the BPS claim not to investigate complaints against individual members but it made a convenient exception, when expelling a brave and honourable reforming President-Elect, Nigel MacLennan, on trumped up charges? How come that the chair, at that time, of the Board of Trustees (BoT) rationalised this kangaroo court purge of a critic very publicly on YouTube, and before he had even had his appeal? Who appointed those hearing the appeal, using what criteria of independence? There have been no repercussions for either her or her supportive cowardly colleagues on the Board (McGuinness, 2021), whilst their victim has suffered severe effects as so many whistle-blowers continue to do.
All of these questions go on and on, unanswered or unanswerable, for one simple reason: for the past fifty years at least, there has been no transparency of decision-making at the top of the BPS. The BoT has been appointed from within and those appointments have been made on a grace and favour basis by the oligarchs already running the Society. Some of those self-serving oligarchs, such as Ray Miller, have operated in plain sight and admitted that they were indeed ‘BPS junkies’ (his own phrase) (Miller and Cornford, 2006).
In an episodic ritual of fawning self-congratulation they claim that they have been servants of others, rather than serving their own career interests. For example, we find this from one oligarch about another. Ann Colley, was unique as both a CEO for a while and also BPS President. This appeared in The Psychologist (always on hand for a PR exercise for the oligarchs)about Colley in 2017, when she was retiring from the role of CEO. It was offered by another oligarch, ex-President Carole Allan, herself by then the Honorary General Secretary of the Society:
Ann served twice as Honorary General Secretary. The first time was for three years from 1989, when membership of the Society stood at 13,000. The second time was from 2003 to 2008. In between she was elected to serve as President, which office she held in 1993/94.https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/always-cheerful-and-positive
In light of the clear evidence of dysfunction and corruption in the BPS the word ‘served’ is replete with many possible meanings. Have these ‘BPS junkies’ served the public interest or that of membership democracy? In what way were they everaccountable, to either the public or the membership? Why over decades of being in power at the top have they all failed totally to bring the governance of the Society in line with expectations of a well-run charity? Did this problem even cross their minds, until the Charity Commission challenged them about legal compliance and good governance? These important questions also seem to have rarely crossed the minds of those they claim to have ‘served’. Thus, while the self-interest of the ‘BPS junkies’ is easy to discern, what is psychologically intriguing is the largely silent and complicit role of the membership.
A timid and docile membership
We have explored the above problem of lack of accountability at different times on this blog and have garnered much praise privately for our efforts. We have repeatedly been sent new ‘bullets to fire’ from angry and disaffected members. This layer of support reveals another psychological aspect of the drama or black comedy of the BPS and its organisational dysfunction. But again more questions are prompted. Why are moremembers not angry about the disrepute into which their Society has fallen? And why are those who are so angry and vociferous privately not publicly firing their own bullets?
If we take the self-serving role of the cabal for granted (or for our purposes bracket it for now) and turn to the active collusion and passive complicity of the membership, there is certainly a moral dimension to all of this. Cowardice, but more importantly indifference, are part of the picture, as is the barely veiled tendency of some to simply give up in despair and leave the Society, often quietly no longer renewing their membership subscriptions.
In some cases, those departures have been explicitly organised on a collective basis. Examples of this molar fragmentation occurred in 1963 with the formation of the Association of Educational Psychologists (which is also a trade union), with the formation of the Association for Business Psychologists in 2000 and in 2017 with the formation of the Association of Clinical Psychologists. The explanation was the same: the BPS was out of touch with its members and its processes were arcane and served the interests of a few at the expense of the many.
As for those remaining, their non-critical passivity, which is for now giving the cabal a political free pass, might in part be explained by factors other than selfish motives. For example, if The Psychologist does not report key events or permit discussion of difficult policy matters, which include policy capture by some members at the expense of others, then ignorance is abroad in those paying their fees. The cabal and the editor of ‘the magazine of the British Psychological Society’ have very knowingly kept the membership in the dark.
An example of this was when The Psychologist dutifully posted the Pollyanna piece from the CEO and the President installed selectively to replace MacLennan. This did not mention the fraud, the arson, the shameful YouTube piece fronted by McGuinness or the damning reports from Korn Ferry and NCVO (Carpenter and Bajwa, 2022). ‘Forget the past’, they were saying but why did members not question this glib bullshit? Or if they did, why did they not do so publicly? However, many have told us that they fail to get their views/letters published in The Psychologist. The BPS publication was castigated by David Murphy, when he resigned as Vice-President, complaining that his reasons for going were not reported in full. In response to this block, he took to Twitter to explain and publish there his resignation letter in full (https://twitter.com/ClinPsychDavid/status/1491509477794799620?s=20). Murphy has subsequently resorted to Twitter to make other damning criticisms:
The expenses scandal at the BPS is shocking and sad on so many levels. Now the trial has concluded, the press have published the details, but still no apology from BPS to members. This is the case I mentioned in my letter of resignation as Vice President. (https://twitter.com/ClinPsychDavid/status/1491508896095219712?s=20)
and
The BPS AGM is Weds 27th July. The annual report appeared on the website at the end of last week with no mention on the homepage, no email to members, nothing on Twitter. Even if you managed to find it, the deadline to submit a question for the AGM was the previous week! (2/3) (https://twitter.com/ClinPsychDavid/status/1551193990741037056?s=20)
Murphy ends this Twitter exchange with the comment “I am seriously thinking this might be my last year of membership.”.
Apart from ignorance in the membership, to some extent perpetuated by the lack of transparency and occasional outright censorship, there is also the role sometimes, of fear. Individuals have contacted us to report how their persistent attempts to engage with the society have been shut down along with implications that they were “bullying staff”. Some of those running courses reliant on BPS validation have offered us support privately, but they have demurred from speaking out about their points of sympathy for our critique. Many were appalled by the way in which MacLennan was expelled but their views were not publicly available. This was also the case in relation to our specific critiques of policy capture in relation to the gender document and the policy on law and memory. Both have put the public at risk and any honest scrutiny of these documents confirms that point (Harvey, 2023).
Many members know that, when taken in the round, this is a scandalous scenario but they either leave or they stay, but typically their voices are not heard. We do not know how many people are resigning from the BPS and sending a note of their dissatisfaction, and as things stand, the BPS will never tell us. Our wider zeitgeist reflects this. From the election of Donald Trump or Boris Johnson, to the arrest of anti-monarchy supporters and self-censorship in the academy, we are living in a time in which healthy protest and deliberative democracy are being actively suppressed time after time. It is as if most ordinary people are living through a period of learned helplessness and those in power are the grateful beneficiaries. Self-interested elites, including those claiming to protect democratic integrity, are also now part of the problem, cuing the next section
The Charity Commission
BPS Watch and many other members (including several elected Presidents) have, in the past few years, sent screeds of material to the Commission, with evidence that the BPS is being poorly governed and that it lacks transparency. Those in the Commission know that the Society has had no proper public oversight since 1965. They know that censorship is common in the Society; they were told this before the Korn Ferry report also relayed evidence of it. They know that the fraud was not the first symptom of poor financial control. They know that Presidents trying to effect needed governance reforms have been punished.
For a while the Commission was ‘engaged’ with the managers of the Society but that has now petered out. What did it achieve? The answer is that a few new independent trustees have now been appointed, still leaving the rest of on the Board as faux trustees. The term ‘faux’ is appropriate here because they are calledtrustees but they are appointed in a non-transparent way and they have conflicts of interests by being Society insiders not independent of its operations and goals . As I noted above, how were even the newcomers appointed (who are now from the outside), using which criteria? And, for that matter, how have all and any of the faux trustees been appointed onto the Board since 1965? Who knows the answer to these questions? It is certainly not the average member of the Society or the general public.
There is widespread evidence that regulators including the Charity Commission, but also those which relate to the media and the public utilities are themselves, like the organisations such as the BPS that they are meant to regulate, “captured”. It is a depressing scenario. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
Conclusion
The future of the BPS remains precarious. Its legitimation crisis is unresolved. Some needed reforms to governance have been installed following Charity Commission pressure, resisted by the cabal for a good while, but they do not go far enough. The old guard remain largely in charge on both the SMT and BoT. We will now be interested to see whether the small new broom of a few independent trustees are powerful enough to resist becoming apologists for a body that is neither a learning or learned organisation. The next few months will tell us.
References
Carpenter, K. and Bajwa, S. (2022) From the President and Chief Executive. The Psychologist January 4-5.
Conway, A. and Pilgrim, D. (2022): The Policy Alignment of the British False Memory Society and the British Psychological Society Journal of Trauma & Dissociation 23, 2,165-176.
Farrow, A. and Potkins, J. (2020) British Psychological Society: Strategy Consultancy Set Up Phase Report November 2020 London: NCVO
Harvey, P. (2023) Policy Capture (1) at the BPS: the Gender Guidelines. In Pilgrim, D. (ed) British Psychology in Crisis: A Case Study in Organisational Dysfunction Oxford: Phoenix Books.
Homans, G. C. (1958). Social behavior as exchange. American Journal of Sociology, 63, 597–606.
Korn Ferry (2021) British Psychological Society: Member Network Review Leicester: British Psychological Society
McGuinness, C. (2021) The Society is at a Crossroads The Psychologist June 34, 4-5.
Miller, R. and Cornford, T. (2006) Double top – Ray Miller in discussion with Tim Cornford: The Society’s new President in discussion with the Chief Executive. How do their roles work together, and where do they see the Society going? The Psychologist April, 19, 20-21.
Pilgrim, D. (2023) (ed) British Psychology in Crisis: A Case Study in Organisational Dysfunction Oxford: Phoenix Books.
Quite soon students in management schools will be offered on a plate a perfect example of a dysfunctional organisation (Pilgrim, 2023a). After two years of our campaign to expose poor governance and corruption in the BPS, telling the world what its leaders have preferred to keep under wraps, what have we experienced and concluded?
A short answer is that it feels like moving constantly between Alice in Wonderland and 1984. The vertigo this creates is partly because of the complexity of what we are dealing with. That is a legitimation crisis (Jost and Major, 2001; Habermas, 1975), with its roots in both history and a reproduced leadership legacy culture which survives, albeit precariously, by routinely evading transparency and denying pervasive conflicts of interest.
A sketch of the legitimation crisis
Those members who engage with what is wrong with the Society now distrust its managers and for very good reason. Most others either do not bother being critical, leave in despair, or they are kept in the dark. Accordingly, we have a largely docile membership, which is reflected in the poor turn out for Presidential elections.
The CV advantages of passive membership is a collusive factor, which has given a free pass to the old oligarchy and the newer management class controlling the BPS. The rise of this class, between capital and labour, is not new. However, its power has been amplified by neoliberalism and the norm of the New Public Management (NPM) approach to organisational leadership for now (Smith, 2014; Gruening, 2001; cf. Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich, 1979).
The oligarchical norm, post-1965, merging uncomfortably with NPM, post-2000, intensified rather than solved the legitimation crisis. Over the past few years there has been Charity Commission ‘engagement’, which has triggered some small reforms in the Board of Trustees, though even they are regressive (see below).
The BPS managers do announce their decisions, post hoc, on the website, which is labyrinthine. The members have few direct mailings about important headline matters and the The Psychologist is light touch. The President and CEO get to portray their view of the world but ordinary or extraordinary events in Leicester are simply not reported. As the editor has told us for emphasis in the most recent edition, it is proudly, ‘the magazine of the British Psychological Society’. Always loyal to the SMT and BoT, it does a version of that job very well indeed.
In all honesty, the BPS is basically a joke: it is neither a learned nor learning organisation. In fact the organisational state of the Society is so laughable that it recalls the Monty Python sketch from 1969 about the funniest joke in the world. It was so hilarious that one might die laughing on hearing it, as Eric Idle’s mother and the constables did, first on the scene. Eric Scribbler died laughing writing it, which might be prescient for the authors of their own demise in Leicester.
If the enormity of the tragi-comedy which the BPS has become was grasped in its entirety, we risk the same mortal inevitability. Here though we have no single authorial source like Eric Scribbler, merely several key players and in turn this recalls Pirandello’s absurdist Six Characters In Search of An Author. These could include its surviving CEO and his partner in Pollyanna optimism, turning our attention away instrumentally from a corrupt past (Carpenter and Bajwa, 2021).
They could include its oligarchs who, with no insight, have confused hanging around for longer than is healthy, for either membership democracy or the public good, with ‘serving’ the Society. See for example Professor Ann Colley, who was unique as both a CEO for a while and also BPS President. On her retirement another oligarch Professor Carole Allan (President and appointed Honorary General Secretary for while) said this of Colley in The Psychologist 2017, without a hint of irony or insight:
Ann served twice as Honorary General Secretary. The first time was for three years from 1989, when membership of the Society stood at 13,000. The second time was from 2003 to 2008. In between she was elected to serve as President, which office she held in 1993/94. Ann was circumspect about what Presidents can achieve in their short term of office when she was interviewed for The Psychologist, pointing out that initiatives usually only bear fruit after two or three years.
Colley’s modest ambitions for Presidents made sense as a survival strategy in an incorrigibly dysfunctional organisation. Other self-confessed ‘BPS junkies’ (see Miller and Cornford, 2006) offer us no real evidence what to ‘serve’ actually means: serving whom, about what and to what end?
The re-purposed Pirandello play could include the Society’s bombastic leaders from the past, who confused the ego-inflation that came with becoming a professional regulator with organisational probity, while failing to spot that they had created a faux ‘Board of Trustees’. This was not even vaguely independent but was instead awash with conflicts of interest (Newman, 1988).
Maybe it could also include the renegade leaders, who went off on their own to form the Associations of Educational Psychologists, Business Psychologists and Clinical Psychologists in 1963, 2000 and 2017 respectively. They were tired of an arcane self-serving oligarchy that held membership democracy in contempt. And then there are the authors of BPS policies who have betrayed victims of child sexual abuse (Conway and Pilgrim, 2022). Or how about the twice President Cyril Burt, with his mixed posthumous reviews? How about his student, Hans Eysenck, in the eugenic UCL tradition, who is still subject to an unresolved investigation (Burt, 1912; Craig, Pelosi and Tourish, 2021; Galton, 1881; Marks, 2019; Pearson, 1904; Pelosi, 2019; Pilgrim, 2008 and 2023b)?
To be fair Eysenck was not a BPS oligarch, though he was a character of both notoriety and adoration. For anyone missing this one, the first to blow the whistle to the BPS was the psychiatrist Anthony Pelosi in 1995, but his request for an inquiry was ignored. This inaction was also evident from Kings College London (Eysenck’s legacy employer) but eventually they got their act together to set up an independently chaired review of the dubious research. Spin forwards to 2019, when KCL eventually acted. The BPS was still silent. The CEO was asked to deal with the Eysenck ‘problem’ by the editor of the Journal of Health Psychology, David Marks, who had successfully pricked the conscience or at least the utilitarian wisdom of KCL. Bajwa did not even bother replying to Marks, which was a common stance of wilful blindness at the time (we have a record of other, multi-signed letters he simply ignored from members).
Some of us now know the context of this weird obliviousness of the CEO, as he had other fish to fry at the time. Without detective effort, the membership were simply left bemused by the absence of common courtesy from the CEO. Three years later, yes three years later, Dr Rachel Scudamore, his subordinate, issued an apology to the complainant for the non-reply but no explanation was offered. Marks has now resigned from the BPS after being a member for over fifty years and has just launched an excoriating attack of the organisation in print (Marks, 2023).
A final Pirandello-style inclusion might be the ex-President, David Murphy, who with two others leaving over a two month period in 2021 felt moved to put his resignation letter on Twitter. Here it is for those who missed it:
This lengthy account from Murphy speaks for itself. However, given that he was arguably an insider in the oligarchy (note his allusion to his 35 year involvement and continuous roles for over 20 years), it is significant that he resigned so publicly and was so critical of his colleagues on the BoT. Damning the organisation with faint praise, while simultaneously washing its dirty linen in public in one defining public performance, reveals the legitimation crisis that leaders in the BPS were denying existed. ‘Problem what problem?’ was the norm, though we were told tantalisingly, with no detail attached, that it had been a ‘challenging year’ (McGuinness, 2021).
At the time of Murphy’s resignation the BoT were adopting a ‘damage limitation exercise’, with its ‘Comms Team’ in overdrive. Managers resort to this particular version of bullshit when the going gets tough, as it does fairly regularly in the BPS. In early 2021, they had to deal with the fraud and so the The Psychologist was dutifully silent. There was at the time an ongoing police inquiry, a suspended CEO and a Chief Finance Officer who had hastily departed, while under investigation. He now works for the National Lottery Community Fund.
The public and ordinary members at the time were oblivious to all of these machinations, until the local, and then eventually the national, press reported and commented. As noted above, the Chair of the BoT pleaded for sympathy, understandably, about a ‘challenging year’ in The Psychologist (McGuinness, 2021). The details of why it had been challenging were, of course, glossed over though MacLennan’s public trashing on Youtube – before his appeal was even heard – was pompously retained, so we all got the message. Whistle blowers tend not to fare well after doing their public duty, so the BoT of the time may look now to their consciences about this intervention, which they approved knowingly (Morgan, 2014).
Unlike the Pirandello play, maybe the dramatis personae for the sad tale of the BPS need to be more than half a dozen, as there are quite a few contenders. The oligarchical culture that keeps reproducing itself seems to be beyond the awareness or defiance of particular actors. It really is not easy to identify those who have been singularly or disproportionately responsible for the legitimation crisis today. However, one thing that is absolutely certain is that Orwell’s ‘doublethink’ applies in buckets in the culture of the BPS.
Indeed the level of hypocrisy is so bizarre that, unwittingly, the rhetoric of official BPS policies becomes a checklist of interest to prospective whistle blowers and to students of dysfunctional organisations. The bullshit culture now running through the BPS, like Blackpool rock, beggars belief. Three illustrative examples will be given in relation to its policies on conflicts of interest, values and the investigation of complaints. All of these worthy documents, when tested out for their actual practice, demonstrate that the leaders in the BPS say one thing and do another with consummate ease.
Conflicts of interest and the good sense of the NCVO
The National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) withdrew from offering advice on future strategy for fear that its own consultants might be at risk of harm from the toxic culture in the BPS (Farrow and Potkins, 2020). Again few members will be aware of this damning verdict. However, the NCVO does give us all free advice on its website on how a Board of Trustees (bearing in mind that this is still a misnomer in the BPS) should deal with conflicts of interest.
“Identifying, dealing with and recording conflicts of interest/loyalty
The board understands how real and perceived conflicts of interests and conflicts of loyalty can affect a charity’s performance and reputation.
Trustees disclose any actual or potential conflicts to the board and deal with these in line with the charity’s governing document and a regularly reviewed conflicts of interest policy.
Registers of interests, hospitality and gifts are kept and made available to stakeholders in line with the charity’s agreed policy on disclosure.
Trustees keep their independence and tell the board if they feel influenced by any interest or may be perceived as being influenced or to having a conflict.”
The Society’s own conflict of interest policy is aligned with these broad aspirations but here is the rub. The conflicts of interest that are embedded in the appointment norm since 1965 mean that the BoT is rife with them and yet no one on the Board seems to be aware of that fact or is wilfully blind to it. Moreover, despite news of the recent appointment of an independent chair, old habits die hard.
Recently the advertisements for Chairs Board, with short periods of notice for applicants allotted, still include the assurance they will be appointed automatically onto the BoT. The appointment norm and its implicit celebration of a conflicts of interest is so ingrained in the culture of the BPS that the beneficiaries will tend to experience pride not angst or guilt about their role. This lack of insight means membership democracy and public accountability are given barely a glance.
After pressure for reform from the Charity Commission, the BoT, being the wounded dinosaur structure it is, began to realise slowly that the game was up on the old model, with its total lack of independent oversight. Bajwa (November 2022) made this emollient announcement to accommodate the problem, tucked away on the BPS website:
Traditionally, our Board of Trustees has almost exclusively been made up of members, who bring the in-depth knowledge of the organisation and psychology that is needed to make big decisions about the society’s future.
Unlike many similar organisations, however, we have not recruited externally for trustees, and we haven’t specifically looked for people with expertise in areas which are crucial to the organisation’s success but not necessarily directly related to psychology.
Bullshit is about all that is said and not said to disguise the reality of what those in power are up to (Frankfurt, 2005). Note how Bajwa acknowledges (so does not query) the dysfunctional, and at times catastrophic, lack of independent oversight from the past. Instead this is turned into a sort of traditional wisdom, not a confessed foolhardiness.
The old regime of power allegedly entailed ‘in-depth knowledge’, not the vested interests of oligarchs and their fellow travellers. They made ‘big decisions’ (wow!). This Trump-like phrasing signals gravitas (heavy is the head that bears the crown) but it is conveniently short on detail. In truth these ‘big decisions’, included keeping the legitimation crisis under wraps and using a kangaroo court to expel an internal critic. They included the norm of persecuting any incoming President who attempted to change what was rotten in the state of Leicester (MacLennan was not a one-off case). The comparison with other third sector organisations by Bajwa implies some sort of respectable or unremarkable option appraisal, rather than a total failure to comply with charity law expectations of good governance. The BPS have been out of step and out of order in the third sector landscape for decades.
So, Bajwa tells us, three new independent Trustees are to come in but the majority will still be appointees from within the BPS. And it gets worse. The one and only part of the BoT that traditionally has been elected not appointed, the Presidential triumvirate, is now to be removed; again most of the membership will become aware of this after the event. The President will now only provide an ‘ambassadorial’, not a leadership, role on the BoT. This means a regressive not progressive reform to embed, not break up, the cabal.
On this note, remember that after the expulsion of Nigel MacLennan, the BoT simply invented a new rule that excluded candidature from the general membership. This ensured a safe pair of hands (Carpenter) because only BoT members or Senate members were now eligible. This pre-empted a new version emerging of a turbulent President like MacLennan, who might, heaven forbid, ‘say “no” to power’ (Fromm, 2010).
Another example of the bullshit character of the Society’s conflicts of interest policy in practice relates to the CEO himself. If anyone, member or public, wants to complain about him to the BoT they encounter the invented rule that all communications to the BoT are received and dealt with by……the CEO. Bear in mind that a CEO should be accountable to a BoT, not be an arbitrating gatekeeper deciding the relevance of business presented to it. At this point maybe Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 should be added to our list of literary resonances.
Espoused values
Part of the killer joke of the BPS is its capacity to posture about organisational values. Here is the virtue-signalling posing, on the record, which was applicable at the time of the fraud, its cover up and the deafening silence about organisational learning since then:
“Our values are central to the way we work to achieve our core purposes. We aim to work in a culture of:
• rigour and fairness;
• honesty and integrity;
• transparency;
• respect for a diversity of viewpoints;
• the highest standards of professionalism and ethical behaviour, attitudes and judgements, as laid out in our Code of Ethics and Conduct.”
There is nothing wrong with this Kantian checklist at all. The problem is that the BPS culture in practice is at total odds with its spirit and detail. The best hoodwinks are the ones that brazenly claim the very opposite of reality, which is a hallmark of our ‘post-truth’ era (Porpora, 2020).
Would rigour and fairness describe the selective investigation of Nigel MacLennan, while members of the public contacting the BPS were told that it does not investigate complaints against individual members?
Would honesty and integrity apply to the fact that not a single person at the top of the organisation has been held responsible for appointing a serial fraudster, who is now in jail after being appointed to be the PA of the CEO?
Would transparency cover the complicit silence of The Psychologist about both routine BPS business and the scandals that abound in the recent and distant past?
Would respect for a diversity of views cover the policy capture by some groups, at the expense of others, in relation to the controversial gender document and that covering memory and law?
Would the ‘highest standards’ claim extend to the BoT and SMT? In what sense have they behaved honourably in this regard? When answering that, just look at the beans spilt by Murphy in his resignation letter. This checklist is fine in theory but in practice it is simply bovine ordure extraordinaire (Hardy, 2021).
The vagaries of trying and failing to make a complaint
Recently this matter has gone backwards (rather like the BoT membership one) not forwards. Here is what Dr Rachel Scudamore (‘Head of Quality Assurance and Standards’) has just told us about the new, allegedly improved, complaints procedure, which states in Section B.3 that:
“ 3. The policy is not appropriate for addressing the following issues:
a. disagreement with the content of a Society publication;
b. disagreement with a Society policy position;
c. disagreement with a Society decision to take, or not take, a particular course of action.”
So, if a BPS publication contains material against the public interest or at odds with academic probity, then members cannot complain formally. If a policy endangers vulnerable people or is at odds with ethical practice, then members cannot complain formally. If those leading the organisation make questionable or unwise decisions (such as employing someone with a publicly known history of fraud), then members cannot complain formally. The new document is another cabal stitch up in order to block transparency and accountability. It is one of innumerable current examples of organisational bullshit, which permeates the BPS (Spicer, 2020; Christensen, Kärreman and Rasche, 2019).
Members will not be able to make a complaint about BPS policy, as they did in the past, even if it was then typically ignored. The CEO was a master non-reply role model but that wilful blindness will no longer be even required, because some complaints will simply will not be investigated in principle.
Indeed one wonders what anyone can now complain about formally, given the self-serving exclusion clauses. The members were never well served by the old policy on complaints (this was a central concern of the Charity Commission) but now the cabal are being boastfully unaccountable. Elements of the killer joke just keep emerging to threaten our wellbeing and the diminishing prospect of a learning organisation and democracy in the BPS.
We wait to see how the BPS will partition off its new and proud recapture of its regulatory powers. This is now about to be extended to a tranche of mental health workers, who may not even be psychology graduates. This will require the BPS doing something it did prior to ceding its disciplinary powers to the HCPC after 2003: it must reconstruct a credible investigatory and disciplinary infrastructure. That must be rule-bound, truly transparent and credible to the Professional Services Authority, who I believe have unwisely blessed the new regulatory powers of an incompetent and dysfunctional organisation.
If this happens, as surely it has to, will that infrastructure now be applicable to all of the BPS membership? Will those complaining, say against academic psychologists, no longer be batted away with the advice to contact the employing university? Will all those self-employed practitioners confecting ways of working around HCPC registration now come under a new investigatory process?
As they say, “don’t hold your breath”. My hunch is that the managers will think selectively and instrumentally, which they do with great ease. There will probably be one rule for the new tranche to tick the box for the PSA and the rest will be left alone but under the straight-jacket of the new complaints procedure, with its exclusion clauses. And how about complaints against BPS managers themselves? (I have already rehearsed the Joseph Heller and Lewis Carroll rule about the CEO receiving complaints about himself.)
The bullshit checklist of the values noted above finishes on an ambiguous note. Its focus is actually about members but do the staff have another code of practice and can we see it please? Is it the same as the final values point or a different one? How about the conflicted role of the editor of The Psychologist and his understandable selective attention to scandals in the BPS and his routine noticeboard of Pollyanna news about the future from the BPS leadership? He is employed by the BPS, which explains much. Anyone trying to complain about his editorial policies, favouring BPS propaganda, is faced with an uphill task (Harvey, 2023).
Concluding advice
Watch this space, as the absurdist play unfolds. Keep reading the Leicester Mercury.
References
Burt, C.L. (1912) The inheritance of mental characters. Eugenic Review IV, 1-33.
Carpenter, K. and Bajwa, S. (2022) From the President and Chief Executive. The Psychologist January 4-5.
Christensen, L.T., Kärreman, D. and Rasche, A. (2019) Bullshit and organization studies. Organization Studies. 40(10):1587-1600;
Conway, A. and Pilgrim, D. (2022) The policy alignment of the British False Memory Society and the British Psychological Society, Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 23:2, 165-176
Craig, R., Pelosi, A. and Tourish, D. (2021) Research misconduct complaints and institutional logics: the case of Hans Eysenck and the British Psychological Society. Journal of Health Psychology, 26, 2, 296-3
Ehrenreich, B. and Ehrenreich, J. (1979) The Professional Managerial Class. In P. Walker (ed) Between Labor and Capital, South End Press, Boston.
Farrow, A. and Potkins, J. (2020) British Psychological Society: Strategy Consultancy Set Up Phase Report November 2020 London: NCVO
Frankfurt, H. (2005) On Bullshit Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Fromm, E. (2010) On Disobedience: Why Freedom Means Saying ‘No’ To Power London: Harper
Galton, F. (1881) Natural Inheritance London: Macmillan
Gruening, G, (2001) Origin and theoretical basis of new public management, International Public Management Journal 4, 1, 1-25,
Jost, J. and Major, B. (2001) (eds). The Psychology of Legitimacy: Emerging Perspectives on Ideology, Justice, and Intergroup Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Habermas, J. (1975) Legitimation Crisis Boston: Beacon Press.
Hardy, N. (2021) Catcher in the lie: resisting bovine ordure in social epistemology Journal of Critical Realism 20, 2, 125-145.
Harvey, P. (2023) Resisting the silence of the cabal: resorting to social and alternative media. In Pilgrim, D. (ed) British Psychology in Crisis: A Case Study in Organisational Dysfunction Oxford: Phoenix Books.
Marks, D. F. (2023). A catalogue of shame: the British Psychological Society as a dysfunctional organisation. Journal of Educational and Psychological Research 5,, 1, 575-587.
Marks, D.F. (2019). The Hans Eysenck affair: time to correct the scientific record Journal of Health Psychology, 24, 4: 409-20.
McGuinness, C. (2021) The Society is at a Crossroads The Psychologist June 34, 4-5.
Miller, R. and Cornford, T. (2006) Double top – Ray Miller in discussion with Tim Cornford: The Society’s new President in discussion with the Chief Executive. How do their roles work together, and where do they see the Society going? The Psychologist April, 19, 20-21.
Morgan, J. (2014) Life after whistleblowing. Times Higher Education Supplement July 31st
Newman, C. (1988) Evolution and Revolution Charter guide, occasional paper. Leicester: British Psychological Society
Pearson, K. (1904) On the inheritance of mental and moral characteristics in man. Biometrika IV, 265-303.
Pelosi, A.J. (2019). Personality and fatal diseases: revisiting a scientific scandal. Journal of Health Psychology, 24(4), 421-439
Pilgrim, D. (2023a) (ed) British Psychology in Crisis: A Case Study in Organisational Dysfunction Oxford: Phoenix Books.
Pilgrim, D. (2023b) Verdicts on Hans Eysenck and the fluxing context of British psychology History of the Human Sciences Online January 5th.
Pilgrim, D. (2008) The eugenic legacy in psychology and psychiatry. International Journal of Social Psychiatry 54, 3, 272-84.
Porpora, D.V. (2020) Populism, citizenship, and post-truth politics, Journal of Critical Realism, 19, 4 329-340.
Smith, D. (2014). Under New Public Management: Institutional Ethnographies of Changing Front-line Work. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Spicer, A. (2020) Playing the bullshit game: how empty and misleading communication takes over organizations Organization Theory 1, 1-26
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. (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.
A couple of years ago, we sent a dossier of case studies to the Charity Commission, enumerating our concerns about governance failures in the BPS. At that time they noted that they were ‘engaged’ with the Society, which was clearly not compliant with charity law. It did not have, and still does not have, a truly independent Board of Trustees and it repeatedly denies relevant information to its members. Our list of postings on this blog has made these points over and over again, with evidence.
Little or nothing has happened since then. We now have one bureaucracy (the BPS) ostensibly under the legal jurisdiction of another one (the Charity Commission) showing the same problem: neither can be trusted to assure the public about probity. As far as governance and accountability are concerned they are both about as much use as a chocolate frying pan. This is not to say that individuals in both organisations, who deal with concerns put to them are not pleasant and well meaning, but the upshot for anyone trying to complain about problems is that inaction is the name of the game.
The norms and culture of both organisations are at odds with reasonable expectations of democratic accountability. It might be better if the Commission did not exist at all – at least then complainants would seek other forms of redress. But it does exist and so we are left with a double problem: the BPS is still poorly governed and the body responsible for rectifying that state of affairs has been ineffectual. I am making strong claims here which might be thought of as nihilistic. However, below I lay out why that is not the case.
This empirical summary of the fix we are all in about reforming the dysfunction in the BPS, with its toothless regulator becoming a ‘passive bystander’ in the face of wrongdoing (Cohen, 2001), is fair comment. We have tried and failed to go through the proper channels. The use of the broken complaints procedure in the BPS failed because it persistently fails all of its members and the general public.
Our campaign for visible and credible reform has run into the sands as well because of the gap between the rhetoric of the Charity Commission and its lack of regulatory potency in practice. My understanding is that it is not even going through the motions any longer of ‘being engaged’ with governance failures in the BPS. It could be that the tinkering on the margins by the BPS (i.e. the laughable sop of a couple of independent Trustees now to be appointed) was enough for the Commission to declare ‘mission accomplished’. Who knows in this mysterious world of public bodies claiming to value transparency but actually offering us bullshit in practice (Spicer, 2020)?
Accordingly, both BPS members and the general public expecting a regulator of charities to, well, regulate charities, are now betrayed twice over. Moreover the relationship between the BPS and the Charity Commission bears scrutiny for two particular reasons, beyond the general failures of each one. I now explain those two points.
‘Engaging’ with Mermaids
The reader may have seen some important recent news, in the wake of the interim Cass Report and the closure of the Tavistock GIDS clinic. That closure remains important because of its ambiguity. Gender critics have invested it with the hope that the castration of children, in the name of medicine, will now come to a halt and exploratory psychological therapy will not be criminalised. However, those promoting the ‘affirmative model’, despite its lack of empirical evidence (Biggs, 2022), look to diverse service providers carrying on with the aspirations of transgender activist organisations. One of these is Mermaids.
News broke recently that the Charity Commission is to investigate its role in providing girls with breast binders. The timing is important. The fact of the supplying of the paraphernalia for young people to deny their immutable natal biological state is not new. Mermaids have not suddenly leapt into action, but have encouraged this and other related practices for years. Thus, the Commission may be blowing with the political wind, for now, post-Cass.
My point here is that this ‘engagement’ initiative raises the prospects for those welcoming the news that this will lead to a dramatic regulatory intervention. Given the track record of the Charity Commission to prefer ‘engagement’ and to rarely close a charity, or take it over as its new statutory managers, the gender critics would be wise not to hold their breath. This intervention from the Charity Commission may work in disrupting the breast binding supply chain, but it may not.
Mermaids may well defend what they consider to be good practice – what will the Charity Commission do then? Analogously, the BPS ignored the advice and directives of the Commission for years with no detrimental consequences for the cabal running the Society. If a regulator is toothless or is perceived to be (which is as important in this case) then the public purse paying for it is being depleted for no plausible reason.
The ubiquity of conflicts of interest
One of the complaints we have made to, and about, the BPS is that it is riven with conflicts of interest at the top. Charity law, amongst other things, intends to minimise or eliminate such a tendency. As I noted, the Commission has failed to put the BPS house in order in this regard and now seems to have given up the effort completely. However, there is a particular twist in the tail of this failure, which neither the BPS membership, nor the general public, are likely to be aware of; being kept in the dark is par for the course in BPS-land.
When the fraud in the BPS came to the attention of its ‘leaders’, the Board of Trustees, there was probably wailing and gnashing of teeth, as threats to personal interests were dawning and scary legal liability might auger a grim future. Some probably favoured keeping the scandal under wraps, whereas others knew the cat would soon be out of the bag and maybe amongst the pigeons.
The fraudster, now in prison, was the PA to the CEO. Multiple sign offs of fraudulent claims (coming from the coffers supplied by members’ fees) were made by her managers. The CEO and the Finance Director were duly suspended, pending the internal and police inquiries. The former is for now ‘back in his office’ but the latter disappeared within a month of his suspension. He found immediate employment elsewhere in the National Lottery Community Fund (NLCF). Yes this is absolutely true folks.
That story deserves more scrutiny elsewhere by critical historians of the Society. However, my concern here is more about a different point about a particular conflict of interest, which demonstrates that the BPS is not the only public body that resists public accountability. As a member of the public and a critical observer of the machinations in the BPS in recent years, I tried to make some inquiries about how this rapid and effortless ‘moonlight flit’, implicating a very senior financial operative occurred. Did the BPS provide him with a reference and, if so, did it mention the investigation and his suspension? Was there due process of checks by the NLCF?
These are pertinent questions in their own right but another aspect of the story emerged while pursuing them. I attempted to contact Helen Stephenson, who has been the CEO of the Charity Commission since 2017. In 2022 she was also appointed as a Trustee of the NLCF, raising an immediate question about a potential conflict of interest. I wrote to her pointing out that prima facie conflict of interest. Her office refused to engage with me about the inquiry (Stephenson was on holiday they said). They also said this was a matter for the NLCF and not the Charity Commission. The buck was being passed.
Accordingly, I sent an email to the Customer Services of the NLCF (the only contact point available), who refused point blank to pass on the concern to the CEO or Chair, as I had requested. Nor would they deal with the concern directly. Basically, I was told to go away in a firm British manner, in which those in power are used to dealing with the public when under threat. I have now written to my MP telling the sorry tale, but am still travelling more in hope than expectation.
So there we have it. Not one, not two but three public bodies are indifferent to the rights of the general public and are happy to swat away or ignore public interest inquiries. Those at the top of all three organisations should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves, though this is not a likely scenario. In the meantime, the mystery of the ex-Finance Director of the BPS and his equivalent role in the NLCF may encourage journalistic interest, as might the clear conflict of interest implicating Helen Stephenson. Please write to your MP about this. Any update from mine will be posted on this blog.
References
Biggs, M. (2022) The Dutch Protocol for juvenile transsexuals: Origins and Evidence. Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy (online 19th September).
Cohen, S. (2001) States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering. Cambridge: Polity.
Spicer, A. (2020) Playing the bullshit game: how empty and misleading communication takes over organizations. Organization Theory 1, 1-26.
Viola Sander, languishes at Her Majesty’s pleasure. The BPS Board of Trustees (BoT) languishes in a complacent and denialist miasma of self-indulgence whilst the organisation for which it is accountable slips further and further into an abyss. As yet another crisis hits an already tottering and failing society (see here) the membership – to which the BoT is accountable – is left bewildered and confused at yet another resignation from the Presidential team. As David Murphy (ex-President who resigned as Vice-President) notes, only one of the past six Presidents had completed their full 3-year term. As Oscar Wilde didn’t say “To lose one President, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune, to lose two looks like carelessness, but to lose any more is sheer incompetence…”. And now another one has gone – in record time.
But to return to the fate of the ex-Executive Assistant to the CEO whose fraudulent use of a BPS credit card landed her a custodial sentence (full details here). Clearly she had broken the law (again) but are there others who should shoulder some of the responsibility if not the blame? The Charity Commission states
As a trustee you must take steps to make sure that your charity’s money is safe, properly used and accounted for. Every trustee has to do this. Even if your charity has an expert to manage its finances, you are still responsible for overseeing your charity’s money.
Further
Make sure that money is only spent on what is allowed by the charity’s governing document and policies. If it is not, you and the other trustees need to put it right.
It could not be clearer – trustees have a responsibility and they are accountable. So how has the BPS BoT taken these edicts? They have not. No Trustee has resigned about this critical failure (I do not include David Murphy of Hazel McCloughlin here as they had many other reasons) and, as far as we know (see later for a view on information blackouts) no member of the Senior Management Team has been disciplined. Whilst the CEO was suspended for a year whilst this was subject an investigation (again no details about how this was done), the then CFO was allowed to resign and immediately took up a post with the National Lottery Community Fund.
In an attempt to clarify matters, I wrote to the then President (Katherine Carpenter) prior to this year’s AGM as follows
Dear Dr Carpenter,
I was pleased to see your statement about the encouragement of debate, as I was to read of your commitment to openness and transparency when the CEO was re-instated. In the light of this I hope that you will take the opportunity at the AGM to give the membership a fuller account of the recent fraud than has been given up to this point – it is appalling that we have more information from the local media than we do from the Society or its own house journal.
In particular, I hope that you will be able to clarify the following:
1. Why has no-one from the Board of Trustees resigned? It is a clear (and statutory) responsibility for Trustees to be accountable for the financial health and probity of an organisation. Why has no-one taken their responsibility seriously?
2. Why has no-one on the SMT been (as far as we know) disciplined or held accountable?
3. How was the then CFO able to resign whilst still (as far as we know) suspended pending the outcome of the internal investigation and gain another senior post with another charity?
Members are entitled to answers to these questions – you and your colleagues are accountable to them. And we need more than bland clichés that “lessons have been learned” and that “systems are now in place”. Financial mismanagement is not new to the BPS and it is clearly a significant failure of systems and accountability that the fraud went undetected for so long.
I look forward to your reply.
To this I got no reply, not even an acknowledgement.
And these are not the only outstanding questions surrounding this scandal. Viola Sander’s appointment was handled by an external agency. Why? Despite the fact that members pay a significant amount of money to service a bureaucracy which cost nearly £7 million in 2021 (which presumably includes HR), why wasn’t this done in-house? The BPS has a significant membership of occupational, business and other applied psychologists who are likely to have considerable expertise in selection procedures. Perhaps some of them actually run businesses which specialise in selection. Why not use this expertise? And what recompense has the BPS sought for this gross and crass incompetence on the part of the “external agency”. I would have thought that the BPS has a prima facie case for not only asking for their (i.e.members’) money back but a considerable sum in reputational damages.
I referred earlier to the information blackout. Whilst accepting that some material may be confidential, there is nothing to stop the BPS issuing a carefully worded statement to the membership – isn’t that what the Comms Team is there for? And perhaps a statement to be printed in The Psychologist – but that is an extremely unlikely event considering that such basic information about the Society doesn’t fit its virtue-signalling, identity-politics, activist-placating agenda.
So we are none the wiser, the same old faces sit on the BoT in their self-satisfied smugness whilst the Society for which they are responsible crumbles around them.
For those new to the chaos in the BPS, its organisational vulnerability today is multi-layered. The Charity Commission has, until very recently, been ‘engaged’ with the Society about lack of compliance concerning governance arrangements. Slowly, maybe resentfully, the leadership in Leicester has tinkered around the edges.
The Society’s ‘Board of Trustees’ has been a phoney structure since the 1960s, but now a few public invites are to be issued, to appoint nominally independent members. All trustees in a charity should have no conflicts of interest, not just a couple of tokens. As with other matters, the BPS leadership seems to lack insight about even the most basic principles of organisational probity (see below).
But compliance with charity law is the least of the problems for the current BPS leadership or, note, past leaders with their ongoing legacy liability. We were told via YouTube, when Nigel MacLennan was expelled kangaroo-court-style, that this has been a ‘challenging year’. This of course was special pleading from those running the Society. The wider membership had been kept completely in the dark about the corruption and misgovernance, so they experienced the lock down, oblivious to any personal pain suffered by the leadership, with its ‘challenges’.
This glib ‘challenging year’ trope in BPS propaganda has persisted, both vague in its detail and directed at sympathy from anyone taking it seriously. Covid-19 had been a safe cover story of collective bad luck and victimhood. Whichever way the challenges in Leicester are spun to the outside world, the reality is that the BPS is in serious legal trouble.
Three imminent legal threats to the reputation of the BPS
Here are three points to consider seriously:
1 Nigel MacLennan’s Employment Tribunal will require that the BPS must now take the dirty washing it has stuffed in a bin bag and put in a cupboard somewhere, and empty it out on to the floor of the courtroom for all the world to see. The evasions and snail-pace adjustments, which might have worked in response to the Charity Commission, will not be tolerated in a court (which is the formal status of an Employment Tribunal). Much more could be said on this, but a sub judice caution comes into play here, so I am just reporting the material fact of what is about to happen in 2023.
2 Post-Cass Review and Post-GIDS closure, the BPS guidance on gender has now been withdrawn. The leadership are not responding, in a timely manner, to a dilemma shockingly new to them. In the autumn of 2019 criticisms I made of Tavistock Clinic GIDS were censored by the BPS. In the summer of 2020, representations from many BPS members about the serious inadequacies of the 2019 guidelines on gender were simply ignored. In the autumn of 2020, a detailed formal complaint concerning the form, content and context of 2019 revision of the gender guidelines was made but not upheld. Also in autumn 2020, further representations about the risks of extending prescribing rights to psychologists (which would have included hormones) were ignored by BPS leaders. In the spring of 2022, yet another multi-signed letter to BPS leaders about the risks posed to the public by the gender guidelines was simply ignored. This did not even receive an acknowledgment, let alone a considered response.
Only when the world outside was telling Leicester in stereo, and at full volume, that the game was up on the ‘affirmative model’, was action triggered. Over the recent years, its own members had been treated with total contempt, when lobbying for the withdrawal of the trans-captured gender document. The wise have kept a copy of the policy document now removed. It cannot be deleted from history, no matter how convenient that would be for all of those, from the Board of Trustees and the Practice Board to the ‘Comms Team’ and The Psychologist, who were complicit actors in a flawed policy.
The credibility of their group-think will now fracture in the full public glare of legal scrutiny. Recently The Times reported an incipient class action, involving up to a thousand ex-patients of the Tavistock Clinic (in truth that figure may be larger or smaller). Whatever their number, the legal bill will be picked up by the NHS Litigation Authority (NHSLA). Its work is supported by top-sliced money from constituent local Trusts, so it is supplied ultimately by the tax payer.
The Tavistock Clinic will survive, albeit embarrassed. It will be rid of a capricious historical deviation, which held the proven tradition of cautious exploratory psychological therapy in complete contempt, confusing a passing and modish social trend with a genuine ‘social revolution’. The medical sterilisation of healthy children is shaping up to be yet another ‘great and desperate cure’ in the murky biomedical history of psychiatry (and now, more importantly, psychology) (Valenstein, 1986). These children, who cannot vote, give consent to sex, buy alcohol or even have a piercing or tattoo at their own request, has been put forward by adult identity politics activists as a harbinger of social progress.
In the censored exchange in 2019 and noted above, between me and Dr Bernadette Wren, that assumption of political and ethical worthiness was debated. As a champion of the now discredited GIDS, Wren actually described the explosion in referrals as reflecting a ‘social revolution’ (sic). I am sure she believed that, but history will surely not vindicate her position, given that her claim is already unravelling and there is a service policy push back, here and in other countries, about the ‘affirmative model’. Social contagion, yes. Social revolution, very doubtful. A passing postmodern phase of anti-realist madness, most probable.
Many liberal and left leaning people (this is not just a Daily Mail editorial frothing at the mouth) simply never bought the GIDS progressive claims. Nor did they fail to spot the trans-capture in the BPS and elsewhere, including in the Royal medical colleges, which should have known better. For example, a group have just written to The Observernoting how the leadership of the Royal College of Psychiatrists had fended off representations, similar to our own in the BPS (see under heading Trans Concerns) https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/commentisfree/2022/aug/14/why-surprise-when-wealthy-capitalist-makes-large-donation-to-oxford-college
This span of dissenting voices has now been vindicated. Complex existential challenges, each with their unique biographical context, cannot be cured by crass interference with the body, but it seems that mental health professionals are still slow learners. Their organisational leaders, fawning for popular support in an age of identity politics, have for now often lost their rational capacity to assess evidence or accept material realities that are immutable (Pilgrim, 2022).
Faced with this historical moment of reckoning, the BPS does not have the luxury of a legal fund, like the NHSLA, to fall back on. The grateful medical negligence lawyers, who are now welcoming ‘regretters and detransitioners’ through their shiny doors, will inevitably take an interest in the professional advice that supported the ‘affirmative model’, now defunct at the Tavistock. The cabal in Leicester would be wise to take their own legal advice about what is in the pipeline. It will of course be paid for by members’ fees. It may well entail very large amounts of money.
3 And then there is the contentious memory and law group, which has been the other main arena of policy capture, afforded by weak governance. The enmeshment of the BPS and the British False Memory Society is now clear (Conway and Pilgrim, 2022). However, in 2014, the editor of The Psychologist made this definitive and untenable statement: “Neither The Psychologist nor The British Psychological Society has links with the British False Memory Society.”
This denial was at odds with the fact that the Chair (now deceased) of the BPS Memory and the Law Group was on the Advisory Board of the British False Memory Society, during the time that Elizabeth Loftus was on the International Panel of Associate Editors of The Psychologist. She was also an advisor to the US and British False Memory Societies (The first was closed down after the Jeffrey Epstein case.) Loftus testified in defence of both Ghislaine Maxwell in 2021 and Harvey Weinstein in 2020. In the first case she asserted, with no evidence, that the prospect of financial gain could distort the memories of complainants. This line of speculation in legal settings is not peculiar to Loftus. It has been used by convicted individual abusers, as well as those claiming that child sexual abuse is a moral panic.
In this context of the serious legal considerations of sexual abuse, the biases in the BPS policy to date are very important, as is the supportive role of The Psychologist. In May 2014, its editor provided a short hagiographic account of his interview with Loftus (he met at a conference dinner), who had ‘been voted the most influential female psychologist of all time’. It goes on, ‘Her wit and creativity shone through as she rattled through real-life stories, wrongful convictions and ingenious research that all illuminate the faulty nature of memory…. One thing seems undeniable: whatever the future brings for memory research and practice, Professor Loftus will be at the forefront of it for many years to come.’
Because the BPS is an organisation without a memory, others have to recall the origins of its partisan policy focus. The BPS line, from their highly biased report, considering only the matter of false positive decision making, has fed defence teams hired by those accused of sexual abuse. It has offered absolutely no balancing advice about false negatives, in order to support prosecution teams. Those in the BPS, who have been concerned to expand the policy on memory, to include evidence of the social epidemiology of child sexual abuse and its proven mental health impacts (e.g. Cutajar et al. 2010) have been systematically excluded from a new working group looking at the topic.
This scandal of biased policy formation then is ongoing. It is not just a part of BPS history, now regretted. The group recently appointed to update the document remains shadowy and has only included (unnamed) so called ‘memory experts’, from the closed system world of experimental psychology. All attempts by those BPS members interested in the clinical and epidemiological evidence (an open system feature of the world outside of the laboratory) to join the group have been blocked repeatedly. Moreover, all attempts to ascertain who exactly is on this group have been met with refusals on grounds of data privacy. It seems that the older biases to consider false positive decision making may well remain. The implausible claim that the BPS is guided by the organisational principle of transparency is also obvious here.
Meanwhile, the BPS, as with now withdrawn gender document, seems to have no capacity to reflect on the child protection implications entailed in a lop-sided and partisan, form of policy formation. The only sop that excluded critics have been offered is to submit papers to a minor journal, which is under the editorial control of FMS supporters. As with the case of the gender document, the temporary capture of a weakly governed Society, by a particular interest group, has to await external scrutiny to expose its bias and the dangers this poses to the public. Once again, internal dissent has been quashed at the expense of both membership democracy and academic integrity.
As the evidence now accumulates from historical inquiries into child sexual abuse, both in the UK and Australia, the BPS policy is a new potential target for angry survivors, seeking personal justice. Their lawyers will have spotted that line of attack. The current BPS position, to date, has colluded with the idea that child sexual abuse has been a trivial moral panic. The truth of the matter is that its scale has been strongly under-estimated, as is now becoming clear, in both the statutory inquiries and clinical research (Pilgrim, 2018; Children’s Commissioner’s Report, 2016).
Conclusion
The BPS leaders are in for another ‘challenging year’. Hiding in the dark, under the security blanket of group-think, will not make the lawyers disappear by magic. They will still be there, rubbing their hands, when the blanket it whisked away. Critics of all the three forms of BPS failing, noted above, may have been easy to ignore by the cabal. The rule of law is a different matter. If those in Leicester are not worried by now about imminent legal threats to the reputation of the Society, then they clearly do not understand what is going on.
References
Children’s Commissioner’s Report (2016) Barnahus: Improving The Response to Child Sex Abuse in EnglandLondon: UK Children’s Commissioner’s Office
Conway, A. and Pilgrim, D. (2022) The policy alignment of the British False Memory Society and the British Psychological Society Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 23:2, 165-176,
Cutajar, M. C., Mullen, P. E., Ogloff, J. R. P., Thomas, S. D., Wells, D. L., and Spataro, J. (2010). Psychopathology in a large cohort of sexually abused children followed up to 43 years. Child Abuse and Neglect 34(11), 813–22.
Pilgrim, D. (2022) Identity Politics: Where Did It All Go Wrong? Bicester: Phoenix Books.
Pilgrim, D. (2018) Child Sexual Abuse: Moral Panic or State of Denial? London: Routledge.
Sutton, J. (2014). BPS – obsessed with the false memory syndrome? Editor’s reply. The Psychologist 27, 5, 303.
Valenstein, E. (1986) Great and Desperate Cures: The Rise and Decline of Psychosurgery and Other Radical Treatments for Mental Illness New York: Basic Books.
Administrator’s note
All of these topics have been subject to comments on the blog. By clicking on the category immediately above the title you will find the relevant posts.
psychology UNREDACTED 