David Pilgrim posts…..
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 Bullshit In 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
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