Whistleblowers PDF

Blowing it: whistleblowers 10 years onø | Society | The Guardian https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2014/nov/22/there-were-hundreds-o...
n his former life, Dr Raj Mattu was an internationally recognised

cardiologist. On course for a professorship in London, he nonetheless
jumped at the chance to return to his home town of Coventry in 1997, to
set up a medical school at Warwick University and help turn the large
district Walsgrave hospital into a teaching facility. It was a choice he would live
to regret.
He found problems straight away. Patient safety was at risk through broken
equipment and misallocation of resources; there were factions among staff and
1 of 22 15/08/2018, 09:20
tensions with management. In the months before he arrived, senior clinicians

had narrowly failed to pass a vote of no confidence in CEO David Loughton.
Little was as it should be.
As the youngest consultant but Advertisement

one of the best-trained, Mattu
worked long hours trying to
improve things. All the same, one
issue kept returning: the so-called
“5 in 4” system of squeezing an
extra bed into cardiac wards
designed for four, a policy that
left essential services such as
oxygen, mains electricity and
suction less accessible to some
patients. Already convinced this
was quietly costing lives, staff
including Mattu pleaded for the practice to end, but management wouldn’t
listen.
When the inevitable day came, it was on Mattu’s watch. A man of 35 went into
cardiac arrest and staff could neither reach the tools they needed nor rearrange
the beds in time. They watched in shock as their patient’s life drained away;
afterwards the furious cardiologist and two senior nurses filed a serious clinical
incident report. The 5-in-4 policy was not reviewed.
Now cardiac consultants passed a vote to replace their management-friendly

clinical director with Mattu, but CEO Loughton rejected their choice. Instead,
Mattu was offered a pay rise, which the medic interpreted as trying to buy his
silence, and refused. When the Care Quality Commission (CQC) came calling in
April 2001, he was one of five clinical staff to raise the alarm. Mystifyingly, the
CQC passed the complainants’ names to Loughton. Yet when its report
emerged that September, chief executive Peter Homa spoke of the “worst ever
[patient safety report] produced for any Trust” and an “excess death rate” of
60% (against a subsequent high of 29% at the notorious Mid Staffs).
When Loughton denounced the Advertisement

CQC findings, and insisted to the
BBC that no one had died or been
harmed because of the 5-in-4
policy, something snapped inside
Mattu. After taking advice from
2 of 22 15/08/2018, 09:20
the General Medical Council

(GMC), British Medical
Association and Medical
Protection Society, Mattu
appeared on Radio 4’s Today,
revealing that, in the opinion of
medical staff, at least two patients had died unnecessarily on overcrowded
wards, and that management knew and had done nothing. So a whistleblower
is made.
***
Whistleblowers have always been with us, but this century they have attained a
kind of ubiquity, leading the news on a weekly basis. Last month, a
whistleblower reported massive accounting irregularities at Tesco; this month
it was alleged mortgage fraud on an unimaginable scale at JP Morgan Chase.
As I write, allegedly dangerously lax hygiene at a dental practice in Nottingham
has been revealed. And all this while Laura Poitras’s documentary about
Edward Snowden screens at cinemas around the country.
So why now? Partly, it’s because economic self-interest has become king. If a
senior executive earns £400k, or £1m, he or she has a lot to lose. A
whistleblower is a threat to the business – and in UK law, a threat to a
management whose first legal duty is to shareholders, rather than customers or
workers. Globalisation and the internet have further loosened the old social
and commercial ties.
Who are the whistleblowers, and Advertisement

what makes them do it when
most of us don’t? The Hollywood-
created image is of the awkward
outsider; brave, but destined for
maverick isolation anyway. In
short, not like us. But most of the
people I meet in the course of
writing this article are essentially
conservative. They spoke out
because they felt they had to. The
real story lies in what happened
next.
***
3 of 22 15/08/2018, 09:20
Last month I sat in Raj Mattu’s kitchen, eating biscuits and drinking tea. He
told me that the decision he made back in September 2001 still haunts him
every day, that his lives then and now might as well belong to different people.
At medical school, he had trained with world-renowned experts, been drawn to

cardiology, and risen through the ranks fast. Then came Coventry. After Mattu
spoke to the BBC, management moved quickly, and a disgruntled temporary
doctor levelled a charge of bullying against him. Mattu and two fellow
consultants were suspended; all were prevented from talking to colleagues or
the media, their disputes recast as employment matters rather than public
interest disclosures.
Soon, the single complaint against Mattu had become 35,

then 200, ranging from questions over his qualifications to
charges of serious criminal conduct outside of work. These
were sent to the GMC, CQC, the Strategic Health Authority
and three different police forces; by 2009, all had been
investigated and found to be false. Mattu was also subject
to three separate tax inquiries, despite having undertaken
no private work. In 2010, ill and suffering from depression,
he was finally sacked by managers who questioned the validity of his ailments
and found him “unmanageable”.
Before we met, Mattu and I spoke Advertisement

several times on the phone,
including one conversation so full
of names, dates and surreal
events that I almost doubted his
sanity. Two hundred charges?
How could there be that much
smoke without a fire? He sighed.
“You clearly come from the same
world I like to live in. But what
you describe is not what happens.
I’m not alone: there are hundreds
of whistleblowers crying out for
help. In fact, I’m almost unique in that I’ve come out the other end.”
Last April, 13 years after Mattu spoke up, an employment tribunal that ran for
six months produced a remarkable 400-page document that detailed the
systematic destruction of one man’s career by managers, some of whom remain
in the NHS and one of whom, David Loughton, is now a CBE. The report found
4 of 22 15/08/2018, 09:20
that management had created a culture of fear, and Mattu had been victimised
for raising concerns over patient safety; he will be awarded compensation. The
case against him, meanwhile, is thought to have cost the NHS £6m-£10m so
far.
Today Mattu betrays little bitterness, and says he was helped by a city-wide
campaign. Local ska band the Selecter played a benefit and at a celebration
party, attended by 1,200 people, where singer Pauline Black (a radiologist)
duetted with him on the Beatles’ Let It Be and Hey Jude. Music, he thinks, has
kept him sane. Two years ago, his wife Sangeeta secretly entered him for the
Voice; he was invited to the heats, but didn’t find the time to go.
But there were dark times, too. Advertisement

The couple had wanted to start a
family, but felt unable to while
the case was ongoing. Now they
are thinking about it. And you
know what? Theirs is the happy
story.
***
Eileen Chubb’s story reads like a

lost chapter from One Flew Over
The Cuckoo’s Nest. Sitting in her
south London garden, it occurs to
me that her apparent ordinariness is what makes her so remarkable. She
provides a window into the mechanism of whistleblowing, and also our
curious, contradictory response to those who do it.
Chubb left school at 16 and worked as a manager in a local bakery chain, before
deciding on a career switch in her early 40s, following her mother into care.
With no experience, she opened the phone book and called the first care home
she saw. Isard House was run by Bupa for Bromley council, and she was
offered a job at once, on the advanced dementia unit. “It’s hard work,” she says,
“but caring for those people was a privilege, because they were special,
priceless. The trick was finding a way through to them. And there always was a
way.”
Chubb talks about the residents she loved: Lil, a mischievous Scot in her
mid-90s with a penchant for cutlery hiding and late-night booze-and-chip
expeditions. And Jessie, who could scarcely speak and was afraid of the bath,
until Eileen discovered that if she sang Daisy, the fear would vanish and words
5 of 22 15/08/2018, 09:20
would come back as she sang along.
Chubb’s appointment as team Advertisement

leader to another unit was
bittersweet, because she had
enjoyed her own and respected
the staff. But when she returned
to check on her friends, she found
something had gone terribly
awry. A new team leader seemed
to spend most of her time
watching television, while
residents slept in their own urine
and went unfed. Several times,
Chubb found her shouting or
pushing residents, with junior carers following suit.
6 of 22 15/08/2018, 09:20
Chubb raised her concerns; nothing happened. Finally, after hearing that six
colleagues had done the same, she wrote to Bromley social services. Fearing a
backlash, she offered the other six the chance to lie low, but they all stood by
her as the horrified head of social services launched an investigation and
informed police, who raided the home and made arrests. A subsequent report
found painkillers had been withheld, unprescribed drugs dispensed on a whim
and records falsified.
Game over? No. Bupa attacked the report; a campaign of intimidation by care
home staff began, and two of the group were forced off sick with stress. A year
later, an industrial tribunal found in the seven’s favour, its report a study in
establishment fudge. It was later revealed that there had been no prosecutions
because there had been no police investigation; the problem staff, including the
team leader, had been dispersed to other Bupa homes.
Led by Chubb, the Bupa 7 refused Advertisement

to accept the tribunal’s ruling or
any compensation payment, and
rejected substantial payoffs the
company offered in exchange for
silence. After two years of fighting
and being unable to get work in
the care industry, most were in
dire financial straits, despite huge
public support: at one point, the
local paper gave them jobs as
cleaners. Undeterred, Chubb
bought the Penguin Guide To
Law, for £3.99, and set out to hold Bupa to account.
That was 13 years ago. Two of the seven are working in care again; the rest have
rebuilt their lives around other things. Chubb runs a charity, called
Compassion in Care, and is a founder of the Whistler, which fights to expose
poor conditions in care homes and to help those who speak out. A powerhouse
of citizen activism, she is driven not by ideology but by a simple sense of right
and wrong. She dates her transformation to her first meeting with Bromley
social services, when she opened her mouth to speak and was startled by the
voice that emerged – clear and ice-cold with rage.
“People who didn’t know me then never believe this,” she laughs, “but I was the
sort of person who didn’t make a fuss. I had a soft voice and if I had to say
something, I’d say it nicely and quietly.”
7 of 22 15/08/2018, 09:20
There was no history of rebellion, Advertisement

not even at school? “Oh no, I
wouldn’t get my socks dirty. I was
scared of my own shadow. But
those people in Isard House were
easy to fight for. Someone like
Jessie should have been cared for
in her old age, not dragged down
a corridor screaming.”
She was never tempted to take

the money? “Not if they’d offered
a million pounds. If the judge had
awarded us money and condemned Bupa, fine, but taking the money with no
admission of guilt would have been insulting all those who’d been abused. If
Bupa didn’t accept responsibility, then other people in other homes would pay
the price. To allow them to cover it up by paying us would have made us
abusers as well.” Almost as an aside, Chubb recalls her father, a construction
worker, being so deeply affected by the death of a young co-worker who drilled
through a mains cable that he organised a whip-round for the family, and
remonstrated so forcefully with site managers that he was out of work for some
time afterwards.
She admits her new life has cost her friends, mostly because her politicised
interest in the world leaves her easily bored by everyday, trivial concerns. In
any case, campaigning is her life now and money is still tight. As with Raj
Mattu, the most curious thing is the way former colleagues, those who had
been guilty of no wrongdoing, turned on Chubb and her small cohort after they
raised the alarm. I could see no sense in this behaviour, but it turned out to be
key.
***
C Fred Alford, professor of government at the University of Maryland, is the

author of Whistleblowers: Broken Lives And Organizational Power, a study
into the personal impact of whistleblowing. It makes for an alarming read.
Surprise discoveries include a finding that seniority offers little protection, and
that it makes no difference whether a concern is first raised inside or outside
the organisation. Of Alford’s three dozen-strong sample group, most lost their
jobs and never worked in the same field again; many also lost their families, as
court cases and tribunals dragged on for a decade and more. A majority
suffered from depression, with alcoholism common. In another study, half the
8 of 22 15/08/2018, 09:20
sample group was found to have gone bankrupt. All of this tallied with the
people I talked to: the sanctity of whistleblowing may be written into law, in
both the UK and US, but for most it will be a traumatic experience. “The
greatest shock,” Alford says, “is what the whistleblower learns about the world
– that nothing he or she believed is true.” Hence the “nuts and sluts” narrative
we find in relation even to celebrated whistleblowers such as Karen Silkwood,
Erin Brockovich, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. This is a narrative we
embrace, because it makes us feel secure: they brought it on themselves.
***
A common cry after the financial crisis of 2008-9 was, “Why did nobody see
this coming?” – but the best risk management execs had. In the US, Eileen
Foster, executive vice president of fraud risk management at the giant
Countrywide home loans company, saw and called the mortgage irregularities
that earned CEO Angelo Mozilo a staggering $470m between 2001 and 2006
(the vanity plate on his car read FUND-EM) and would play an outsize part in
sinking the US economy. She was proved spectacularly right, but claims to have
had 145 job applications turned down thereafter. Her colleague Michael
Winston, a board member, was similarly dumped and pilloried after refusing to
write a report for Moody’s credit ratings agency that he believed would be false.
Paul Moore was head of risk management at HBOS, a holding company for the
Bank of Scotland and Halifax brands. HBOS gambled on bad mortgages and
payment protection insurance (PPI) and lost £10bn in 2008. It was bought by
Lloyds, then rescued with £37bn of public money. HBOS did more than any
other institution to bring UK banking to its knees – but it had been warned.
Moore trained as a barrister and went to work for a financial services firm in
Swindon because he knew the hang-gliding would be good. From there he
moved through American Express and KPMG before joining HBOS in 2002.
Asked whether his job involves annoying managers, he admits that willingness
to deliver unwelcome truths is important, but adds, “Risk management is not
about going slowly, it’s about going as fast as you can and managing the risk.
Formula One has less residual risk than angling, for instance. So I’m the risk
management adviser, and the chief executive is the driver. It’s my job to say,
‘Hang on – if you carry on that way you’ll blow up the engine, or run out of fuel,
or make the brakes too hot.’”
Has he often been placed in that position?
“I’ve seldom said, ‘You’re going to blow the engine up!’ But I did at HBOS.”
9 of 22 15/08/2018, 09:20
Alarm bells rang in late 2003, when he noticed 12% of profits were coming
from the sale of mortgage PPI. He looked across the business and saw
aggressive managers pressuring staff to meet wild sales targets (“We’ll never
hit our sales targets selling ethically,” one told him), and non-executive
directors with insufficient expertise to apply oversight. Worse, upon asking
questions, he found “a cultural disposition to resist challenge, often
aggressively”. Regulators were worried, too: if their insistence on raising the
amount of cash HBOS had to keep in reserve had been made public, as it
should have been, negative market reaction might have forced a rethink. But
HBOS’s CEO, James Crosby, was also a non-executive director of the main
regulatory body, the Financial Services Authority (FSA).
When HBOS paid its auditors KPMG $1.2m to investigate Moore’s claims, its
report questioned not just his views, but his professionalism, integrity and
stability. Already sacked by Crosby and shunned by former colleagues, Moore
says he read the report and wept. “The auditors and accountants are at the
rotten heart of everything,” he says. “You know, I got to the point where I
10 of 22 15/08/2018, 09:20
actually thought they were right and I was wrong. I came to think I must be a
terrible person.”
In contrast to Eileen Chubb and the Bupa 7 – and more typically of

whistleblowers – Moore was on his own. For the first time in his life, he began
to sweat to the point where he had to wear sanitary towels under his arms in
meetings and – already a heavy drinker – he grew capable of downing a bottle
of vodka in half an hour, terrifying his wife and confusing his children. He
reads me a birthday card from his then 17-year-old son: “Everyone has flaws,”
it says. “I like to look past the flaws and see the good in people, and there’s a lot
more good in you than you give yourself credit for. I truly am proud of you and
everything that you stand for, which is mainly integrity and truth. Just stay
true to yourself and keep on doing what you’re doing. It’ll all work out
eventually.”
Fired 10 years ago, Moore says he has gone into recovery only this year. “When
I say it nearly killed me, it’s not a metaphor. I am a confident, resilient person.
To crush me is a serious thing.”
Moore sued HBOS for unfair dismissal and accepted a half-million-pound

settlement – in return for his silence. It was to presage the worst of his crisis: “I
remember lying on my bed, seeing duty to my family on the one hand and
knowing these people have got away with blue murder on the other. You’ve
sold your soul to the devil.”
Later I am contacted by another casualty of the banking industry, a financial

adviser in a branch who saw mis-selling by policy, reported it and was turned
upon by company and colleagues. Like Moore, Lynne Edwards accepted a
payoff and signed a gagging clause four years ago, encouraged by lawyers eager
to be paid. Like him, she’s haunted by it. “If I knew then what I know now,
about how it eats away at you and keeps going on… The bank paid their fine
and carried on as before. When I go to job interviews, they ask why I left and I
have to lie, so I’m still in limbo. What’s it been for?”
Perhaps most shocking is her contention that her former employers lied to
regulators. On reading the FSA’s report, she tried to warn them. “But they said,
the bank has been fined now, so it’s dealt with. I was referred to the
whistleblowers’ helpline. It ends up being a burden: you’ve done it, you’ve
blown the whistle, and that’s what you are from that point on. You’re a
whistleblower.”
Kate Kenny of Queen’s University in Belfast and Harvard’s Safra Centre, author
of a book about whistleblowing in the finance industry, says she has been
11 of 22 15/08/2018, 09:20
surprised by “the amount of work that goes into a being a whistleblower”,

meaning the constant reading of documents, rebutting of arguments, exposing
of lies and learning about the law, all while struggling to hold your personality
together: in short, by the fact that it’s a full-time job which – usually without
warning – takes over your life.
Of my sense that whistleblowing is on the rise, she says: “In finance it’s too
early to tell. The regulators are receiving more tipoffs, and yet no whistleblower
came forward about Libor.”
***
Why is the psychological impact of whistleblowing so extreme? David Morgan

is a psychoanalyst who works with whistleblowers, often on a pro bono basis
for clients who have lost their livelihoods. “At first, when they talked about how
paranoid they were and how many people were after them, I saw them very
much like ordinary patients and treated them accordingly,” he says. “But after
two or three months I became paranoid myself: I realised what they were
talking about was real, not just a mental health issue – their lives were under
threat.”
Is there a process of recovery, as with alcoholism or bereavement? “Yes, there

are three stages. First, ‘I’m gonna do it’ and the excitement about standing up
and being counted. Then there is disillusionment, when you realise you’ve been
left standing on your own and that colleagues who said they’d stand by you
haven’t. And the third stage is that any underlying psychological problem, to do
with a relationship, depression or whatever, is exacerbated enormously.
There’s a real feeling at this stage that they’ve lost everything.”
The therapist’s job is to help a patient find something good in their life to hang
on to. Most of us like to think we would stand up and be counted when faced
with wrongdoing, but the hard truth is that most of us don’t. What makes
whistleblowers different? Most of us, Morgan suggests, employ psychological
mechanisms such as “splitting” to manage moral conflict (in other words, we
don’t think about it too much); whistleblowers don’t. This means those most
inclined to do it are the least equipped to cope psychologically. They often also
have a courage drawn from an ideology, religion or strong set of principles,
Morgan adds, from “a sense of belonging to something greater than the
organisation they work for, whether God, humanity or some broader
community”.
Are there any who don’t recover? “I’ve seen people go mad, yes, and start to
identify with their attackers or turn in upon themselves. It’s very frightening.
12 of 22 15/08/2018, 09:20
People are suddenly plunged into a world they didn’t know existed, where the
rules they thought applied don’t. Think about it: you do something idealistic,
because you think it’s right, then you end up being seen as the corrupt one. And
one can always find some reason for blaming oneself, at which point people can
really struggle. Someone like Eileen Chubb, who has this huge ideological
underpinning, this belief in care and compassion, is at a real advantage.”
Chubb also had a group around her and a supportive husband. What if you
don’t have that? And what if you have an entire nation ranged against you?
Christoph Meili is Swiss, and was working as a security guard when, on his
rounds one night, he stumbled across a tranche of second world war era
records in a storage room at a major insurance company. Interested in history,
he looked more closely and found ledgers full of insurance policies held by
German-Jewish customers up to 1945, at which point they were unilaterally
frozen by the company. Of special poignancy were stacks of letters from
destitute Holocaust survivors and victims’ families, begging for the policies’
terms to be met – all dismissed on spurious technical grounds. Security is a
respected occupation in Switzerland and Meili could boast two degrees, but he
didn’t need them to recognise these papers as significant, so he hid a handful in
his coat and found a photocopier, but in the time it took the machine to warm
up, he lost his nerve.
Two weeks later, he found another large stash of historical documents at the
giant bank UBS, including two black ledgers detailing loans made to German
companies before and during the war. Among these companies were a maker of
chemicals used in concentration camps and others active at Auschwitz. As the
war neared an end, corporate registrations had been transferred to Swiss banks
in order to keep their assets from the Allies.
13 of 22 15/08/2018, 09:20
But there was worse, because Meili realised this was no archive store: it was a
shredding room. He looked closer and found details of profit accrued from the
“forced sale” of real estate in Berlin between 1930 and 1945 – knowledge of
which banks had always denied. He knew that the Swiss government had just
passed a law forbidding destruction of war records, but also that – technically
at least – to take them would be theft.
He took the ledgers home, parked them on his kitchen table and went out to
walk the dog. A voice in his head said, “It’s not your responsibility, this is
serious, take them back” but another voice wouldn’t let him. His worried wife
suggested handing the files to a Jewish cultural group she knew. So Meili did,
expecting that to be that.
Two days later, a Jewish community leader pulled up in a big black Mercedes,
with news that the UBS papers had been passed to financial police in Zurich.
Meili was speechless. Scared. “You’re a smart guy – you’ll be OK,” the man
said, but the next day Meili arrived home to find a lawyer there, inviting him
downtown to make a statement, just as news arrived that he had been
suspended from work. He took his wife and children (whom he’d had to scold
for scribbling on the ledgers) for a burger, then stepped into a bizarre new
future.
A press conference was called. Meili told reporters the information he had
released belonged not just to the Jewish community, but to the public at large:
14 of 22 15/08/2018, 09:20
“The Swiss people should know their banks were involved with Nazi
corporations.” Now the world’s press was on his doorstep but, as nearly all
whistleblowers will tell you, he found this comforting, because the press lent
protection and support. For three weeks, Meili was a hero and the banks
promised to set up a $200m fund for Holocaust victims. He met some elderly
survivors who would now be helped, and he felt good. But the feeling didn’t last
long.
Meili’s problems started when the US-based Anti-Defamation League arrived

to present him with an award and announce the creation of a $36,000 legal
defence fund in his name, while also launching a $28bn lawsuit on behalf of
Holocaust victims against the banks. “The problem is that what I did wasn’t
about money,” he says. “It was about history and helping the poor people
whose lives had been ruined by what these banks had done. But when money
came into the picture, so did politics.”
Now the Swiss public assumed him to be rich (he was unemployed and on
benefits), and the mood changed, emboldening an already cagey indigenous
media to weigh in with stories painting him a liar and a traitor; a turncoat who
couldn’t follow orders; a gold-digger and even a Mossad agent. Then the Swiss
authorities launched a judicial investigation into him.
As with Chubb and Moore, the rightness of Meili’s actions is so clear that the
narrative of his life from this point on is hard to credit. Following death threats
to him and his family, an Act of Congress signed by the then president Bill
Clinton granted them shelter in the US on 1 January 1997. The US Jewish
community organised a stipend to help while framing a case against the banks.
Meili claims to have been handed 35 humanitarian awards in the years after he
blew the whistle, but still he struggled to find work. His wife left with their
children; he later remarried and had another child, but struggled to support
that family and, rootless, lost them, too.
Five years ago, Meili’s mother persuaded him to return to Switzerland and he
sits in his small living room in Wil, near Zurich, as we Skype. When he arrived
home, the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation website ran a piece headed
“Christoph Meili returns – as hero or villain?” which looks bizarre from all but
a banker’s perspective. He has been on three different work programmes since
returning and attended a mental health clinic, “because I needed some help,
you know, my self-esteem was so down, I had to build myself up again.” He
says his eldest daughter, now 21 and studying at an American college, has just
been to visit, but that her brother won’t speak to him. He works part-time
selling Bosch tools, and a third marriage has been good so far, which is perhaps
15 of 22 15/08/2018, 09:20
why he’s able to laugh again. “But it’s not the same. I miss my kids. I’ve missed
them growing up, it was taken from me.”
He has an outstanding lawsuit against a Swiss newspaper, he tells me, because

every two years a tabloid returns to harass him. So he’s still a pariah? Now he
softens. “Actually, it’s getting better. Every Saturday at work I have one or two
people look at me and go, ‘Hey, you’re that guy!’ but most are nice about it
now. After the financial crisis, they say, ‘You’re the guy that first came out
against these banks.’ And then they’re happy to see me.”
Which is all to the good, but still some way short of a happy ending.
***
Why do we idealise whistleblowers in the abstract, yet turn on them so readily

in the flesh? The loneliness and isolation that comes with the territory seems to
feed our view of them as weird misfits who have merely found their natural
state. In the words of one, quoted by Professor Alford in Whistleblowers, “I
have seen the truth and the truth has made me odd.” That perception is self-
sustaining. Why do we need it?
In search of an explanation, I wind up at the door of 81-year-old Dr Philip

Zimbardo, conductor of the 1971 Stanford prison experiment, and latterly
called as an expert witness to the Abu Ghraib trials. His experiment has been
repeated countless times around the globe, with a multitude of variables, and is
soon to be revisited in a Hollywood movie starring Billy Crudup.
16 of 22 15/08/2018, 09:20
Famously, Zimbardo’s study involved dividing a group of students into

prisoners and guards, then monitoring their behaviour. But within six days the
proceedings had to be stopped, as guards grew brutal and prisoners passive
and distressed. Most surprising was the apparent fact that personality type (as
tested beforehand) afforded little indication of how particular individuals
would act; that the most important predictive factor was situation. In
conjunction with his former classmate Stanley Milgram’s eponymous and
equally groundbreaking experiment, in which test subjects were persuaded by
authority figures to administer apparently painful – even fatal – electric shocks
to people they believed also to be test subjects, Zimbardo’s research is
compelling. Stir in fellow psychologist Solomon Asch’s finding that even the
strongest-willed individuals find the burden of standing out from the crowd
unbearable over time (in this case a classroom full of peers briefed to answer
questions wrongly) and we have a clear picture of ourselves as social creatures
who, for the most part, would rather be wrong than isolated.
What does this mean? That our healthy and necessary desire to be social can be
turned against us within bad systems, or by bad leaders. Or, as Zimbardo says,
“The potential for perversion is inherent in the complexity of the human
mind.” Further, where our desire to be social clashes with our underlying
values, “we will go to remarkable lengths to bring discrepant beliefs into some
kind of functional coherence”. Which is to say, we protect ourselves by
rationalising. This is precisely what the whistleblower doesn’t do.
Zimbardo has just launched an organisation called the Heroic Imagination

Project, which aims to furnish people with the psychological skills they need to
become whistleblowers. “Stanley [Milgram] and I were interested in the same
question: how do ordinary, normal people get caught up in these awful things
that keep happening, from the Holocaust to Rwanda. And part of the answer is
to look at people who don’t, and find out what we can learn from them. For me,
whistleblowers are people who are simply more attuned to a situation, who are
able to step back, even where they’ve been closely involved in things, and go,
‘Oh my God, this is wrong. How can I stand up or speak out to try to change
it?’”
Encouragingly, he thinks this can be taught. “With the project, we’re trying to
train ordinary people to be willing to do the right thing. So we’re running
programmes, mostly focusing on high school and college students, because we
can train them in basic psychological principles that encourage them to speak
out – but to take wise and effective action, not risky, not dangerous.”
Asked for a single piece of advice, he offers: “Ideally, whistleblowers should
17 of 22 15/08/2018, 09:20
always form a small team, because when you’re a whistleblower against a

powerful system, the system dismisses you as a fanatic. But if you have three
people, what you’re saying becomes a point of view.”
No wonder professor Alford says that “everything you need to know about
whistleblowing, you learned in kindergarten”. Perversely, he goes on to claim
that this is a greater problem in individualistic western cultures than in
societies where conformity is overtly valued. “Research shows that in Korea,
say, they know how groupish they are,” he says. “What happens in America –
you know, the land of the free and home of the brave, where the lone sheriff
rides in and cleans up the town – is that we have this language of independence
and we don’t have a language to talk about how utterly cowardly we are when
faced with group pressure. We’re all afraid of stepping out of line. And
whistleblowers don’t like it, either, which is why support groups are so terribly
important.”
The good news is that whistleblower support and advocacy groups are
springing up everywhere, in the UK and abroad. While writing this, I received
daily updates from whistleblowingtoday.org. In the UK,
compassionincare.com, thewhistler.org, whistleblower.co.uk and
Whistleblowers UK all offer support to anyone courageous enough to need it.
And while the UK’s ineffective public information disclosure legislation has
been sunk further by the government’s introduction of £2,000-plus charges to
access employment tribunals (leading to a 70% drop in the number of claims),
US legislation is producing results.
Louis Clark of the Government Accountability Project (Gap) in the US, which
champions public and private sector whistleblowers, describes his
organisation’s tactics as being about replacing the lost “circle of support” with a
new one, drawing on those who might benefit from the released information.
As the aggressor agency tries to focus attention on the whistleblower, Gap
turns the attention back to the original problem. At this stage, Clark tells me,
it’s amazing how often relationships within the aggressor group start to break
down.
Better still, US law recognises whistleblowing as positive: once a worker has

been accepted into this category, sacking them becomes extremely difficult,
requiring the production of “clear and convincing evidence” that it would have
happened anyway. Just as importantly, the Department of Justice can and does
insist that a worker be given their job back pending any court case or tribunal.
“I think whistleblowing is happening more because people believe it can make
18 of 22 15/08/2018, 09:20
a difference,” Clark says. “These days we seldom lose a case when there’s a
public hearing. And it was noticeable that the argument about Edward
Snowden in the US was not over whether whistleblowing is good – it was about
whether he counts as a real whistleblower. That’s a big change and in time it
will change us all.”
@wiresmith
This article was amended on 22 November 2014 to correct a misspelling of

Stanley Milgram. The article was further amended on 24 November 2014. An
earlier version said the Royal Bank of Scotland merged with Halifax to form
HBOS. It was the Bank of Scotland.
19 of 22 15/08/2018, 09:20
20 of 22 15/08/2018, 09:20
21 of 22 15/08/2018, 09:20
22 of 22 15/08/2018, 09:20

Whistleblowers PDF

Transféré par

Informations du document

Titre original

Copyright

Formats disponibles

Partager ce document

Partager ou intégrer le document

Options de partage

Avez-vous trouvé ce document utile ?

Ce contenu est-il inapproprié ?

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Whistleblowers PDF

Transféré par

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Blowing it: whistleblowers 10 years onø | Society | The Guardian https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2014/nov/22/there-were-hundreds-o...

n his former life, Dr Raj Mattu was an internationally recognised

tensions with management. In the months before he arrived, senior clinicians

As the youngest consultant but Advertisement

Now cardiac consultants passed a vote to replace their management-friendly

When Loughton denounced the Advertisement

the General Medical Council

Who are the whistleblowers, and Advertisement

At medical school, he had trained with world-renowned experts, been drawn to

Soon, the single complaint against Mattu had become 35,

Before we met, Mattu and I spoke Advertisement

But there were dark times, too. Advertisement

Eileen Chubb’s story reads like a

would come back as she sang along.

Chubb’s appointment as team Advertisement

Led by Chubb, the Bupa 7 refused Advertisement

There was no history of rebellion, Advertisement

She was never tempted to take

C Fred Alford, professor of government at the University of Maryland, is the

Has he often been placed in that position?

In contrast to Eileen Chubb and the Bupa 7 – and more typically of

Moore sued HBOS for unfair dismissal and accepted a half-million-pound

Later I am contacted by another casualty of the banking industry, a financial

surprised by “the amount of work that goes into a being a whistleblower”,

Why is the psychological impact of whistleblowing so extreme? David Morgan

Is there a process of recovery, as with alcoholism or bereavement? “Yes, there

Meili’s problems started when the US-based Anti-Defamation League arrived

He has an outstanding lawsuit against a Swiss newspaper, he tells me, because

Why do we idealise whistleblowers in the abstract, yet turn on them so readily

In search of an explanation, I wind up at the door of 81-year-old Dr Philip

Famously, Zimbardo’s study involved dividing a group of students into

Zimbardo has just launched an organisation called the Heroic Imagination

Asked for a single piece of advice, he offers: “Ideally, whistleblowers should

always form a small team, because when you’re a whistleblower against a

Better still, US law recognises whistleblowing as positive: once a worker has

“I think whistleblowing is happening more because people believe it can make

This article was amended on 22 November 2014 to correct a misspelling of

Vous aimerez peut-être aussi