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Maggie Siviter, 56, pictured, former head of safeguarding for North Somerset council, told a tribunal that boys and girls were plied with drugs at seedy premises in Weston-super-Mare

A social services chief has claimed that she was sacked after ‘blowing the whistle’ on an alleged child sex grooming gang.

Maggie Siviter, 56, former head of safeguarding for North Somerset council, told a tribunal that boys and girls were plied with drugs at seedy premises in Weston-super-Mare.

Mrs Siviter said she was sacked from her £120,000-a-year job in November 2015 after raising her concerns with her seniors in protected disclosures under whistleblowing laws.

She is claiming breach of contract, arguing that, as a whistleblower, she had legal protection from dismissal. The hearing, which is expected to last at least two weeks, was told she will be seeking a £1.4million settlement if she wins her case.

She claimed the council and police failed to act on evidence of child sexual exploitation in buildings linked to three local businessmen who were friends with a Tory councillor.

They included a massage parlour, nightclub, bottle shop and restaurant owned or run by Alkas Hussain, Kiem Binh Mu and his brother Cam.

The three are said to have had personal and professional links with Peter Bryant, 75, a long-serving Tory councillor who lost an appeal to have his name excluded from the tribunal.

Fears about child sexual exploitation were first raised during an investigation into two houses selling counterfeit tobacco, the hearing was told.

Julian Feltwell, a trading standards officer involved in the investigation, said undercover footage of the properties, run by Cam, showed girls being lured inside. Allegations of abuse later emerged when two of the girls reported those involved.

Mr Feltwell, who was suspended soon after Mrs Siviter was dismissed, said the then safeguarding head and her team were able to link the suspected gang to other premises owned by the three men.

These included Butterflies massage parlour, Dragon’s Kiss nightclub, a restaurant and a bottle shop. Connections were then drawn to Mr Bryant’s links to the men.

Mr Feltwell told the tribunal in Pontypridd, South Wales, that Mr Bryant had asked safeguarding staff about the three men’s involvement in social services investigations, adding: ‘He used establishments which were used by these individuals and was on first-name terms. Where does patronage become protection?’

 

The three are said to have had personal and professional links with Peter Bryant, 75, (pictured) a long-serving Tory councillor who lost an appeal to have his name excluded from the tribunal

Mr Feltwell also detailed Mr Bryant’s close links to Cam Binh Mu, who was jailed for 16 weeks in February last year for producing counterfeit tobacco.

In 2010, Cam was imprisoned for a year for brandishing a shotgun at a council bailiff. In his trial, Mr Bryant produced a glowing reference for him.

Mr Feltwell said: ‘At no point did I say Councillor Bryant was involved in child sexual exploitation, but I had conversations with individuals about his being at the centre of concerns about exploitation and safeguarding.’

In a written statement for the tribunal, Tony Oliver, independent chairman of the North Somerset Safeguarding Children Board, described Mrs Siviter’s meetings about exploitation as ‘shambolic’ and based on ‘rumours and speculation’.

Avon and Somerset Police said there is no investigation into the three men but confirmed the force is aware of the allegations.

Officers were involved in meetings with Mrs Siviter about the child exploitation claims before her dismissal.

A spokesman said the force would not comment while the tribunal is being conducted.

A heart surgeon has won a six-figure payout from the health board that sacked him after claiming he was unfairly dismissed for being an NHS whistleblower.

Consultant cardiac surgeon Peter O’Keefe, 52, who went on to become an Uber driver was accused of bullying colleagues at one of Britain’s top teaching hospitals.

He was sacked from his £95,000-a-year job at the University Hospital of Wales after being found guilty of misconduct in the workplace, and now earns around £12,000 in his new career with the taxi app.

But Dr O’Keefe took Cardiff & Vale University Health Board to court for unfair dismissal, and claims they wasted £1m of taxpayers’ money by unfairly sacking him.

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Peter O’Keefe, 52, was accused of bullying colleagues at one of Britain’s top teaching hospitals and was fired

Dr O’Keefe earned £12,000 in his first year as an Uber driver, a significant drop from his old £95,000 salary

 

An out-of-court settlement was reached on the day an Employment Tribunal was about to start.

Dr O’Keefe said: ‘It’s a bitter-sweet outcome for me.

‘It’s an enormous relief not to have the pressure any more, but this has gone on so long and I can’t go back to medicine. I’ve tried to get work but I’m the wrong side of 50.

‘I came to the conclusion that the best thing was to give myself a job, so I’ve become an Uber driver, and I’m loving it.’

The health board had recommended Dr O’Keefe for a National Clinical Excellence Award in 2011 – just months before suspending him from the University Hospital of Wales for alleged bullying.

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Dr O’Keefe had been recommended for a National Clinical Excellence Award in 2011 – just months before he was suspended

It was claimed up to 40 colleagues came forward to complain about his behaviour at the 1,000 bed hospital in Cardiff.

Dr O’Keefe felt he was being victimised for raising the alarm about a patient left in a ‘vegetative state’ after becoming disconnected from a ventilator for more than 10 minutes.

An investigation of the patient’s treatment identified more than 20 safety failings.

Other doctors on the surgical wards thought Dr O’Keefe’s career was ended prematurely because of his management style.

At the time of his suspension a friend of the consultant’s said: ‘The allegations against him had nothing to do with his clinical competence as a surgeon.

‘He is a forceful and assertive character. It can be very stressful in an operating theatre, and some people have taken exception to his manner.

‘Ten years ago perhaps people wouldn’t have made anything of it.

‘A lot of people did make complaints against him, but there was a degree of rounding-up that went on, and some were more keen on complaining than others.’

After three years suspended on full pay the father-of-four was sacked in 2015.

The General Medical Council investigated and took no action but Dr O’Keefe’s suspension went on for so long he was unable to retain his licence to practice medicine.

He said: ‘I can no longer work as a doctor which is the only work I have known since I was 22. ‘My mental health has suffered also.

‘When I was working I was a resilient, dynamic, mentally agile individual undertaking a demanding job, but was doing what I had always wanted to do.

Despite his substantially lower income, Dr O’Keefe is enjoying his new career as an Uber driver

Dr O’Keefe reached an out-of-court settlement on the day an employment tribunal was about to start

 

‘I was diagnosed with anxiety straight after being suspended, I haven’t slept properly ever since.’

The out-of-court settlement has a confidentiality clause preventing either party discussing its terms.

It is believed to be a six-figure sum but not enough for the doctor to give up work – he still has two children in full-time education.

Dr O’Keefe said: ‘I had to do something and the opportunity of driving an Uber came up – it meant I could be my own boss.

‘I got my licence on August 1 and I’m enjoying it, I’ve met some interesting people and had some interesting conversations.’

The date is significant – it was 20 years to the day that he started work as a houseman in London and 16 years to the day that he became a cardiothoracic surgeon at the University Hospital of Wales.

The NHS has covered up thousands of ‘suspect’ deaths in hospitals across England, sparking calls for an urgent inquiry, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

According to the expert who helped to expose the Mid-Staffordshire hospitals scandal – where hundreds died due to poor care – health chiefs have systematically excluded up to 19,000 ‘unexpected’ deaths from official statistics over the past five years.

Professor Sir Brian Jarman says his shocking findings mean there are dozens of ‘potentially unsafe’ hospitals that should be investigated over high death rates, but which are being overlooked.

Last night, Liberal Democrat Health spokesman Norman Lamb demanded that Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt look into the claims as a matter of urgency.

Mr Lamb, who was a Health Minister in David Cameron’s Coalition Government, said: ‘These revelation are deeply disturbing. I am writing to Jeremy Hunt and to NHS England chief executive Simon Stevens asking for Prof Jarman’s analysis to be assessed as a matter of urgency and for a full response to be provided.

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 The NHS method classifies just ten trusts in England (shown in blue) as having death rates above the expected range in 2016. But under Prof Jarman’s analysis, another 24 (in red) should also be classified as having high mortality rates

Why these hospitals should be investigated over ‘avoidable’ fatalities

  His family’s lawyer described the death of Kayden Urmston-Bancroft (pictured) as ‘entirely preventable’

Avoidable death #1

Little Kayden Urmston-Bancroft died of a heart attack last year after doctors at a hospital where death rates are now under scrutiny failed to operate on him for three days. His family’s lawyer described Kayden’s death as ‘entirely preventable’.

The 20-month-old had a life-threatening hernia and was due to have an operation to rectify the problem after being admitted to Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital, above, in April 2016. His grandmother, Julie Rowlands, claimed Kayden was ‘put in a room and left’. He subsequently went into cardiac arrest and died two days later.

‘All we got, nearly every day, was, “He’s not having the operation today,” ’ she said. Surgeons claimed managers had prioritised hitting waiting-time targets for pre-planned operations over emergency care.

The Trust has been ranked as having normal death rates for the past five calendar years. But under Prof Jarman’s analysis, it should have been classed as having high death rates in 2012 and 2016.

‘Brilliant mum’: Deborah O’Hara with her daughter Caitlin, now 22

Avoidable death #2

When mother-of-three Deborah O’Hara died in June 2015, three days after a cancer operation at University Hospital Coventry – one those highlighted by Professor Jarman – her husband Andy believed his wife had been the victim of tragic bad luck.

But the 45-year-old’s untimely death had been caused by a surgical error, which hospital bosses neglected to reveal to Mr O’Hara or the coroner. He found out three months later when told by journalists.

Mrs O’Hara’s death came when the NHS Trust which runs the hospital was classed as having an ‘expected’ mortality rate. However, under Prof Jarman’s analysis, it should have been ranked as having a higher than expected death rate.

During the six-hour operation, consultant urologist Dr Andrew Blacker mistakenly clamped a large artery, causing a lack of blood supply to Mrs O’Hara’s bowel.

At her inquest last December, Mr O’Hara said he and his family had lost ‘a lovely wife’ and a ‘brilliant mum’. The Trust apologised to the family.

‘The concern is that, if Prof Jarman is right, possible causes of unexpected deaths will go unnoticed, leaving NHS patients unacceptably at risk.’

Prof Jarman reached his alarming conclusions after studying official hospital death rate figures using an internationally accepted method – a method used as standard in health systems across Europe and the United States.

He calculated that there were 32,810 ‘unexpected’ deaths in English hospitals over the past five years. But using the NHS’s preferred method, only 13,627 were classed as such – a difference of 19,183 deaths.

In addition, the method Prof Jarman used, which is recommended by the UK’s Association of Public Health Observatories, classified 34 hospital trusts across England – responsible for 87 acute and community hospitals – as having significantly high death rates last year. By contrast, the NHS method counted just ten trusts, covering 18 hospitals, as having death rates above ‘expected’ levels.

When Prof Jarman raised concerns about the Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust in 2007, he was ignored by the Department of Health – but it became one of the most shocking NHS scandals in history.

Now he says NHS officials are ‘fudging the figures’, resulting in potentially fatal problems on hospital wards being ignored. He added: ‘If you use internationally accepted criteria, then 34 hospital trusts have high death rates.

‘But because the NHS is using what might be called a “fudge factor”, they are only identifying ten.

‘As a result, we don’t know if anybody is taking any notice of these other 24 potentially unsafe hospital trusts. This is worrying because there might be serious clinical problems, and issues with patient safety, that are not being addressed.’

Prof Jarman said the NHS had used the internationally recognised system, called Byar’s confidence intervals, in the past.

Until January 2012 it was used in tandem with another method – called overdispersion – which aims to give hospital trusts more leeway before being classed as having high death rates. But the Byar’s method was then dropped, with bosses at NHS Digital, the Health Service’s statistics body, saying it was confusing to have two systems running at once.

They chose the overdispersion method – which results in far fewer hospital trusts being classed as having significantly high death rates. Under that system, a trust is regarded as having a high death rate only if its measure, called the Summary Hospital-level Mortality Indicator, or SHMI, is about 12 per cent or more above the national average.

In contrast, the Byar’s method, which Prof Jarman applied, is much stricter, classing anything with a SHMI of more than six or seven per cent above the national average as significantly high.

Disturbing parallels with the Mid-Staffs scandal

Investigator: Sir Brian Jarman 

 

Ten years ago Professor Sir Brian Jarman, sent a series of ‘mortality alerts’ to health bosses about what was then a little-known part of the NHS in the middle of England. Its name? Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust.

He and his colleagues at the Dr Foster Intelligence Unit were concerned that death rates at Mid-Staffs, as it became known, were considerably higher than average. How much higher? About 27 per cent.

‘When we published that, the Department of Health insisted that people take no notice of our data,’ Prof Jarman recalled last night. ‘We asked them, “Why not?”, but we never got a proper explanation.’

But he and his team were on to something big.

Soon afterwards, personal reports of the shocking ‘care’ that patients at Stafford Hospital had received started emerging. Added to the death rate data, the reports led to an investigation by the Healthcare Commission, the watchdog at the time.

Its report, and subsequent official inquiries, revealed a culture pervading all levels of the Health Service, where criticism of the NHS was ignored or suppressed – with lethal consequences.

NHS bosses argued the approach they chose was the more suitable of the two, as it ‘better reflected’ the difficulties in comparing death rates among hospitals which serve very different areas.

Some serve populations that are poorer and sicker than others, meaning that – if the quality of hospital care is the same – they are likely to have higher death dates.

Hospital mortality rates are adjusted to take into account these underlying demographic differences, to create a level playing field. However, NHS Digital argues that these differences produce so much statistical noise, that many more hospital trusts need to be given the benefit of the doubt.

Prof Jarman said: ‘I object to the system NHS Digital is using, because they are applying a method which really just reduces the number of high death rate hospital trusts.’ He claimed even advocates of the NHS approach admitted it was not based on ‘hard science’.

And he said that if a trust was reclassified as having a ‘normal’ death rate, then hundreds of deaths previously classed as ‘unexpected’ would suddenly be recast as normal too.

Worryingly, Prof Jarman’s painstaking research shows a clutch of hospital trusts with consistently high death rates are flying just below NHS Digital’s radar.

Among them is United Lincolnshire NHS Trust, officially categorised as having a high death rate in 2015 only during the five-year period from 2012 to 2016. But under the Byar’s system it would have been marked as a high death rate trust in four of those five years. United Lincolnshire, which runs four hospitals in Lincoln, Grantham, Boston and Louth, was put in special measures for an unprecedented second time in April, after the Care Quality Commission (CQC) found ‘a deterioration across a number of services’.

Warrington and Halton Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, officially rated ‘normal’ in four of the five years, would instead have been classed as ‘high’ in all five years under the Byar’s method.

The latest CQC reports for this trust, published in July 2015, gave it a ‘requires improvement’ notice – the second lowest ranking after ‘inadequate’.

Last night Shadow Health Minister Justin Madders urged hospitals to be open with their patients about the quality of services.

He said: ‘Jeremy Hunt has claimed transparency as his watchword. He ought to do much more to reassure the public that safety and quality at every local hospital is as good as it can possibly be.’

But Professor David Spiegelhalter, president of the Royal Statistical Society, defended NHS Digital’s approach. Prof Spiegelhalter, who was a member of the team that selected overdispersion, said it rightly gave ‘some additional leeway to hospitals, to allow for the inevitable problems of fairly comparing mortality rates’.

He added: ‘The formulaused to calculate mortality rates is meant to take into account all the real-life differences between populations served by different hospitals, such as age and degree of illness. But it can never do that perfectly.’

Ignoring these comparison problems, as Prof Jarman’s system did, was therefore unjustified, he said.

Dr Richard Andrews, associate medical director of United Lincolnshire Trust, said: ‘We don’t accept Prof Jarman’s interpretation of our mortality figures.’

Professor Simon Constable, medical director of Warrington and Halton Hospitals, said its mortality rates had been falling over the past two years and were now within the ‘expected’ range.

Ministers can’t sweep these statistics under the carpet, writes NHS campaigner Fiona Bell

Imagine for a moment that a fifth of NHS hospitals in England were officially classed as having abnormally high death rates. It would be scandalous.

People would wonder if their local hospital was up to scratch. And they might question how well the NHS was coping after years of financial restraint.

You can see how the powers- that-be might not be too keen on publishing statistics like that. You can see how they might choose to use a method that minimised the number of hospital trusts classed as having high mortality rates.

And that is exactly what Prof Jarman’s excellent analysis has exposed.

He has discovered that, using an internationally accepted statistical method, 34 hospital trusts across England last year had mortality rates above the ‘expected’ range.

By contrast, using its own method, NHS Digital classed ten trusts as having high death rates.

This ‘official’ method meant a hospital trust could have a mortality rate that was 11 per cent above the national average, and still be classed as ‘normal’.

Is this right? Or does it risk sweeping under the carpet very real problems at a significant number of our hospitals?

I know what I think.

Since my grandfather died in 2009, having suffered no fewer than 17 falls at Wansbeck and Blyth hospitals in Northumberland, I have campaigned to improve NHS care. Before he died, he made me promise: ‘Don’t let what happened to me happen to anyone else.’

Sadly, so many times over the past decade I have heard the hollow promise that ‘lessons will be learned’ from some entirely preventable tragedy; or the empty pledge of greater ‘openness and transparency’ after a cover-up.

In fact, Jeremy Hunt has tried to make transparency the byword of his long spell as Health Secretary. He’s sold himself as the man who will not let another Mid-Staffs happen on his watch.

But Mr Hunt and his mandarins risk burying their heads in the sand if they blindly accept statistics that appear to show that all is well in our hospitals.

And if they can’t see the truth of what’s going on – or don’t want to – then that’s a dangerous thing.

‘If you are lining up sexual activity when there are patients on the couch, when you are meant to be focusing on their clinical needs but are focusing on something else, I simply drew the line at that.

‘It’s not a matter of morality. This wasn’t slipping away into a quiet part of the hospital or even off-site. This was, for a good part, in busy patient areas. You have got to lead by example.’

By rights, Sir Leonard’s last day at work should have been marked with glowing speeches. Bold, plain-spoken and, above all, passionate about patient care, Sir Leonard always enjoyed a reputation for getting things done.

In an exclusive interview with The Mail on Sunday, Sir Leonard bitterly refuted the allegations – and said it was no coincidence moves to oust him began after details emerged of the ‘Carry On’-style sex ring

He championed change and pioneering treatment that saw Newcastle’s hospitals garner international renown and played a pivotal role in organising the UK’s first successful infant heart transplant.

Yet Sir Leonard recalls how on January 10 this year – just months after he first clashed with the Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust chairman Kingsley Smith over the sex ring – his exceptional career was brought to an ignominious close.

For three decades, he had been chief executive of Newcastle’s hospitals but he now found himself being pushed out of the door on ‘extended leave’.

He was ordered to surrender the keys to his office in the city’s Freeman Hospital. The hospital was his life work; he helped plan it, he was its first general manager – at just 30 – when it opened in September 1977, and its wards were as familiar to him as his own home. After filling two bin bags with personal effects, he was escorted out of the building. By any standards it was a humiliating end.

Still bewildered, he asks: ‘Why was this guy with 52 years’ service, and an unblemished record, suddenly crashed out the door?’

He was accused of gross misconduct and finally sacked in June this year. But the allegations against him – said to involve bullying, among other things – were, he says, trumped up. The real reason for his removal, he claims, was that, at 70, his face ‘no longer fitted’.

That, though, would hardly explain his undignified exit.

It seems his strident views, uncompromising manner and failure to toe the line had finally caught up with him. Not that he regrets a thing.

The sex ring, which he believes played a part in his downfall, existed at Newcastle’s Royal Victoria Infirmary for four years. In the hundreds of emails exchanged, ‘going for a cappuccino’ meant intercourse and there were obscure references to ‘spreading Marmite’.

Sir Leonard became aware of its existence in early 2016. He learned that one woman was known as ‘the Madam’ and that there were fears that attempts were being made to ensnare other staff members. He was in no doubt the two consultants had to be summarily dismissed – but the trust board stated his ‘wishes would not be met’.

While the junior staff and non-medical employees resigned, the two consultants held on.

Sir Leonard claims the lacklustre disciplinary proceedings against them were effectively a foregone conclusion: the board had already decided they would keep their jobs.

Believing the proceedings were ‘not professionally handled’, Sir Leonard said he ‘cut across the board’ to commission an independent legal report into the process, which, when published, was critical of its handling. His unilateral action did not go down well with the board, he says, and ‘the mood music absolutely changed’.

But he claims the vast majority of doctors, nurses and other staff in the trust supported him. In the event, the two consultants left voluntarily. ‘They have work in the North East. I have no work in the North East,’ says Sir Leonard. ‘My career is over. They [the trust board] have destroyed my good name.’

The sex ring, which he believes played a part in his downfall, existed at Newcastle’s Royal Victoria Infirmary for four years

Following a board meeting in December, Sir Leonard listened to a scolding statement which said that the trust needed a new chief executive with different skills and abilities. It said that staff were scared for their jobs; there had been bullying allegations and widespread loss of trust among doctors.

‘I have discussed the matter with a lot of healthcare staff since and none of them would agree with that,’ says Sir Leonard. ‘If I was the rotten soul they described, I would have fallen foul of the unions. But they had no problem with me.’

The trust has accused him publicly of inappropriate behaviour but won’t go into details. Sir Leonard says he too cannot divulge too much because ‘it will compromise my legal position’.

At his spacious but modest bungalow in Newcastle, the city where he was born and bred, Sir Leonard stressed he was a ‘12 hours a day, seven days a week’ man who hadn’t taken a proper holiday in 17 years. In truth, not even his detractors would doubt his commitment. He joined the NHS as a management trainee aged 18 in 1965 and rapidly worked through the ranks.

Then and now, he viewed his role as a kind of shop-floor manager, in touch with all levels of his workforce, from consultants to cleaners.

By his own admission he could be abrasive, just as he had a reputation as ‘a risk-taker rather than a box-ticker’. ‘But I’m a chief executive running an organisation with a £1 billion turnover, nearly 14,000 employees – and I can’t raise my voice or flash my eyes?’

Railing against the NHS’s risk-averse culture, he says: ‘There is a diminishing confidence in the NHS – we are losing the dynamics of risk. There’s a great deal of professional self-preservation now.’

He says the NHS is now laden with the ‘burden of bureaucracy’. Thirty years ago, though, it was still possible to achieve results without having to fight through a bureaucratic jungle.

In 1987, Sir Leonard was the driving force behind the country’s first successful infant heart transplant.

Kaylee Davidson was five months old and dying from heart failure. Two previous deaths nationally had led to a moratorium on complex infant heart surgery, but her desperate parents pleaded with Newcastle doctors to operate.

Sir Leonard recalls: ‘She was very bonny: tiny, but absolutely beautiful. The medics were saying, “We’ve got to do it, we’ve got to do it.” ’

The operation got the go-ahead after Sir Leonard persuaded then local health authority chairman Arthur Taylor to meet with then junior Health Minister Kenneth Clarke in a London pub. Mr Clarke gave his permission in a note which read simply: ‘Arthur, tell them to get on with it, Ken.’

The operation was a success, and within weeks the Freeman Hospital was designated a national centre for paediatric heart transplant surgery.

It is a measure of his standing that following his departure in January he was inundated with letters of support, including one from Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt.

And Newcastle MP Nick Brown said: ‘Sir Leonard has been a strong voice for the interests of patients and has built the hospital trust into the internationally renowned institution it is. He has my strong support and backing.’

Since his dismissal, Sir Leonard has thrown himself into his work as chairman of Newcastle’s Freemen of the City. ‘I am still disappointed by what happened,’ he says. ‘But I have a strong sense of civic pride and life goes on.’

A hospital trust spokeswoman said: ‘The trust refutes any suggestion that the hearing, its outcome or Sir Leonard Fenwick’s alleged views about it, played any part in the subsequent dismissal of Sir Leonard Fenwick for gross misconduct.

‘Sir Leonard was dismissed for gross misconduct after allegations of inappropriate behaviour, inappropriate use of resources, and range of governance issues were proven.’

I still remember the first time the poignancy of the lonely epic of whistleblowing dawned on me.

It was not because I met a Julian Assange or an Edward Snowden.

A friend of mine told me a story of a little niece of his, a precarious girl, barely five years old, blowing an aluminum whistle, persistent in her sound effects and yet sounding almost official in her behaviour.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange prepares to speak from the balcony of the Ecuadorian embassy.

 

He stopped and asked her and she explained, ‘I am not a referee, I am a whistleblower.’

She realised that hers was a special role. Though she could not cite any names, all she conveyed in her happy way was that she had captured and internalised a moment of history.

Suddenly, a whistleblower, even in his or her anonymity, seemed a larger than life, a Cassandra-like figure, a prophet cast into the wilderness of his own truth.

For me, a whistleblower is a 20th century character.

He has to be differentiated from a dissenter.

A dissenter can range like most intellectuals do over a range of issues, waxing eloquent over dams, rights and nuclear energy.

 A dissenter is often more like a general practitioner while the whistle blower is a radical truth teller of a special kind.

Julian Assange

He is associated with one epic event with which his name gets imprinted.

One thinks of Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, Karen Silkwood on the nuclear plants, or Assange over the WikiLeaks.

It is a revelation so historical that it threatens the very framework of trust and governance.

‘The whistleblower in fact is often for years a devoted, even committed, part of the establishment’

 

There is an immediacy to the event, a ‘now’ of history different from the loneliness of the prophet predicting a dismal future.

The whistleblower in fact is often for years a devoted, even committed, part of the establishment.

The dawning of truth can be a slow process of realisation, a shattering revelation to be exposed like a scandal.

The moment of truth is only the beginning of the new history.

What you talk about is the years of loneliness, silence and witch hunting that follows that one moment of history.

The whistleblower in that sense is a special kind of creature who could only have been invented in the age of security and bureaucratisation.

The whistleblower usually remains an anomalous figure unable to return to normalcy and routine.

‘The whistleblower usually remains an anomalous figure unable to return to normalcy and routine’

 

He is the new martyr, the epic moment of sacrifice and revelation that threatens today’s corporations and the national security state.

Such a creature and his act of heroism and sacrifice require a special set of rights guaranteeing against victimisation and witch-hunting by the establishment.

The whistleblower’s vulnerability needs a special kind of protection. No Right to Information Act can be or is complete without this set of provisions.

In fact, there can be a sense of irony even in these provisions. For example, a new provision in the RTI Act allows for the closure of a case in the event of the death of the applicant.

Such a provision virtually cynically says that the elimination of an RTI activist closes the case.

The irony becomes more obvious when one reads that in 2017 alone, there have been 375 cases of recorded attacks against whistle-blowers; and of these, 56 have been murders.

The recent murder of Bhupendra Vira for exposing shady land deals in Mumbai raises a simple issue.

The vulnerability and the role of the whistleblower need to be recognised and protected. He is an activist who cannot be made into a martyr.

His exposure of scandal requires his continued existence as a reminder, a symbolic statement of what ordinary people can do through simple acts of conscience.

Information 

One has to understand that the whistleblower can only obtain that special kind of information she has by spending years mastering the rules and proceedings of an organisation.

She has to master the intricacies of the bureaucracy, compile a huge data bank of information, before she exposes the scandal.

Her vulnerability as an individual is huge as she stands alone against a bureaucracy which can be vengeful.

All one needs is a trail of suspicion, a minor suspicion, a departmental enquiry to turn a person’s life and career into shreds.

One has to also realise the mix of everydayness and heroism and even banality that might haunt a whistle-blower after the trauma of revelation.

The resignation, the abandoning a space, of a way of life has to be understood.

Many whistleblowers have their moment of publicity before they fade into years of anonymity.

It is the later years that must be sustained and appreciated. The aura of vulnerability and suspicion is difficult to exorcise.

The whistleblower as informant is subject to every act of humiliation labelled as anti-national, even a terrorist, for this one great act of citizenship.

Observations

I am reminded here of the story of Daniel Ellsberg, the man who released the Pentagon Papers, exposing the hollowness and scandal of the Vietnam War, putting an end to such legends of security like defence secretary Robert McNamara.

Daniel Ellsberg was oddly a hawk, a creature happy in the policymaking of think-tanks before he decided that truth telling was important.

Ellsberg, in fact, has made an interesting set of observations recently.

He shows that he was subject to the same rituals of humiliation, assault, accusation, such that Assange was subject to.

The nation state can never forget or forgive a citizen with a conscience.

Security officials, Ellsberg warns, can make threats, which are thinly disguised as extrajudicial steps.

Here again one has to realise the critical role of media in protecting the whistleblower.

The media as rumour-monger can destroy his hard fought attempt to sustain his integrity that is the only blue chip guarantee against a state determined to malign dissenters.

I hope this piece is a small salute to an epic figure who has defined the contours of democracy in today’s era.

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