Lady Jane Simkins 💜🌸🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇬🇧

HE WARNED THE BANK. THE BANK COLLAPSED. YOU PAID THE BILL. Paul Moore (@Paul_R_Moore) was Head of Group Regulatory Risk at Halifax Bank of Scotland. His literal job was to spot danger. In 2004, he spotted it. He told the board that HBOS was lending recklessly, growing too fast, and building a financial time bomb. They thanked him by sacking him. KPMG was brought in to investigate his concerns. KPMG concluded everything was fine. The Financial Services Authority @TheFCA whose deputy chair was HBOS chief executive James Crosby, agreed. Nothing to see here. Four years later, HBOS collapsed. Lloyds (@LloydsBank / @LBGplc) was pushed into a shotgun merger to absorb the wreckage, then needed a £20.5 billion taxpayer bailout to survive it. James Crosby eventually handed back his knighthood and forfeited part of his £25 million pension. He was not prosecuted. Nobody was. Paul Moore went to the Treasury Select Committee in 2009 and laid out exactly what had happened. It caused, as one journalist put it, shockwaves through the British establishment. It also caused addiction, depression, and suicidal episodes for Moore himself. He spent years warning anyone who would listen that the system was broken. He wrote a book called Crash Bank Wallop. He died in September 2020. The men who built the disaster got pensions. The man who tried to stop it got destroyed. If you think whistleblowers are protected in this country, Paul Moore's life is your answer. Sources: @BBC, @guardian, @Channel4News | @Wikipedia | @TransparencyTF

NHS HAS A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE FOR DESTROYING WHISTLEBLOWERS. Peter Gooderham was an academic lawyer and former doctor. He spent most of his working life trying to understand why @NHS staff who raised patient safety concerns kept ending up bankrupt, mentally broken, or both. Before he died in 2011, he sat down with Private Eye (@PrivateEyeNews) and documented the playbook in full. It goes like this. First, cut their secretarial support. Block their merit awards. Briefing against them informally. Tell colleagues they have attitude problems and can't move on. None of this is illegal. All of it is deliberate. Then dig up dirt. Real or invented. Allege mental illness. The stress of the process makes this self-fulfilling, which is convenient. Refuse to disclose documents. Claim it's a local employment matter. The Department of Health will back this up because they always do. Then apply to the Treasury for public money to pay them off and shut them up. Some gagging agreements require the whistleblower to sign statements saying all their concerns have been addressed. Even when they haven't. Even when people are still dying. If they refuse the money, send the lawyers. Threaten libel. Throw public funds at employment tribunals, where NHS trusts are seasoned professionals and the whistleblower is walking in alone. If the trust loses, appeal. Keep appealing until the whistleblower runs out of money. The public purse is unlimited. Their savings are not. And if none of that works, don't worry. Public inquiries are, in Gooderham's own words, belated exercises in grief management that seldom change anything. By the time one arrives, the people responsible have moved on and the problems are dismissed as historical. The Gooderham playbook was not a historical curiosity. A @Channel4 investigation found gagging clauses in 55 of 64 NHS compromise agreements sampled. Over 40 NHS organisations refused to provide information on how many they had signed. One trust wanted over £10,000 just to produce the information. Another argued you couldn't even publish their reasons for refusing. This is a system that was designed, iteratively, over decades, to neutralise whistleblowers. The public funds the mechanism. The mechanism silences the people trying to protect the public. And then a public inquiry happens 15 years later and describes the culture as disappointing. Source: Private Eye (@PrivateEyeNews) Shoot the Messenger, Dr Phil Hammond (@drphilhammond) and Andrew Bousfield