This article was published in the daily newspaper, The Plymouth Herald, on 29th August 2023. The title above is my original, but the Editor decided that “Workplaces Lack Humanity Now” was more fitting. The article had originally focussed upon the case of Lucy Letby, the nurse convicted of multiple killings of new born babies. Ghastly as that is, the parallel issue has to be that senior managers at the hospital overrode the medical concerns and linked professional whistleblowing of consultants and others. In our privatised NHS the quality of service is secondary to budget lines and performance indicators. My unexpurgated draft is below:

There is general support for the doctors’ strikes, despite the immediate challenges they cause. Most of us recognise that the recent strike days haven’t caused the crisis across the health service. We also know that medical consultants do not go on strike without good reason, and that junior doctors average an 80-hour working week for around £14 per hour, after paying big money for their first 5-years of specialist education. 

Alongside privatisation of our public services, the ideological destruction of the Welfare State, we’ve suffered the rise of managerialism.

Unaccountable management based upon budgets not human need. The case of Lucy Letby exposes, amongst many horrors, the absolute power of higher Management. The unimaginable pain of the parents of the babies she killed or maimed is only amplified by the fact that some would have been saved had the whistleblowers been listened to.

Consultants with more than ten years of specialist education and medical training, each focussed upon birth and the new born, identified Letby as a cause for concern quite early on. By all accounts, they were shut up and shut down, under threat of not only disciplinary action as employees of the NHS but the humiliation of deregistration as doctors.

There is a rather nasty level of authoritarianism in our medical establishments, hospital staff stratified from low to high grade, each wielding power and authority against those of lower status. Consultants are party to this wretched system, one that prevents effective teamwork and any holistic approach to illness and recovery. 

Yet it was always considered that, if a consultant says something is so, it is taken seriously if not as gospel. The consultants who came together to put concerns about Letby in writing would understand both the seriousness of such an act and the power of their document.

Except, in this privatised and de-regulated National Health Service based solely upon budgetary controls, Medicine takes second or even third place. The patients are of even lower importance. Of primary concern has to be the public status of the establishment – the reputation of the hospital outweighs any and all other issues. 

There is a set of analytics to be used by Human Resources to monitor and assess the in-house effectiveness of the organisation’s Reputation Management. Highly paid managers, many higher paid than doctors tho’ so very less qualified, are employed only to ensure Agency Protection. 

The strata, the over-paid layer within The Management, has grown exponentially in recent years with the conjoint aims of minimising costs and maximising the positive corporate image to the outside world.

The high salary costs paid to ensure absolute allegiance of those Colonels and Majors dishing out the orders have been paid for by cutting staff at the other end – the providers, we who do that actual work. Their pay is mirrored by their level of unaccountable and unquestionable power within the system. This is corporate fascism, devoid of any democratic challenge.

And so the Consultants at the Countess of Chester Hospital were forced not only to shut up about their concerns for the safety of babies under their care but to apologise to a serial killer, in writing. All this is so far in the public domain, reported through nine months of court hearings. The Inquiry will undoubtedly uncover even more evidence.

This is no isolated case. Across all human services – Health, social welfare, child protection, public transport, schools and education establishments, local council services, Policing, Courts and legal advice, disabilities centres and recreational facilities – the reputation and protection of the service from challenge or law suit a greater motivator than the quality of the actual service they exist to provide.

Across private sector manufacturing and production businesses, employees are expected to cover-up mistakes, overlook product faults and at times falsify documents in order to keep the business running smoothly and the reputation intact. Just think of the diesel emissions scandals across the car industry as a case in point, or those sealing cracks in nuclear reactor pipes using superglue. If you don’t know, you can find out.

The only way we get to know is through whistleblowers, the most hated of all people by Capitalist entrepreneurs and business owners. These are people, probably overwhelmed by their own social conscience and moral compass, to speak-out despite the consequences. Most are the true working class martyrs of the current age, likely to experience the modern equivalent of burning at the stake or deportation on prison ships.

The legal protection of whistleblowers should be a fundamental element of democratic systems. Even where their accusations are found to be false, at least we can be reassured that checks and balances have taken place as a result of their allegations. What’s not to support?

The Capitalist system cannot manage whistleblowers. The dog-eat-dog competition inherent to the system ensures that all production and purveyance is subject to short-cuts, rough-cuts and petit-corruption. The survival of every business is dependent upon image over content, brand recognition more than quality control, propaganda over proper provision. 

What we can be sure of is that every hospital has this class of management, bullying and covering-up. We can also conclude that we don’t need them. Whilst the Consultants should never be allowed to be a law unto themselves, they should be entrusted to own their decisions subject to collective peer review.

And this is true for the entire working class. It is generally the case that those who actually produce the goods best know what it takes to ensure a positive and high quality outcome. If treated like idiots and paid like serfs we are likely to learn to not give a damn. But when recognised as having the skills of our trade, workers choose to excel, to go home feeling we’ve worked well and achieved high standards.

Britain’s current low-pay, long working hours, excessive charges culture requires the fat strata of uniformed and badged managers to keep us in our place. We should unite to expose them all as the charlatans they are and fight to see the back of the lot of them. Strikes are by far the most effective way of reclaiming workers’ power.