Debate
Exclusive: Graham fails to testify in Ogle discrimination case – subpoena to follow
Failure to obey a tribunal summons is a prosecutable offence under Irish law
Unite general secretary Sharon Graham has failed to respond to a court request to give evidence in Brendan Ogle’s discrimination case against the union she leads – and now faces a subpoena, or legal summons, to compel her to attend, for which she could be prosecuted if she fails to comply.
Skwawkbox has covered the discrimination case extensively – Ogle is also suing Unite, Graham and her sidekick Tony Woodhouse over defamatory comments made about him by Graham and Woodhouse in an apparent attempt to discredit Ogle and his discrimination case.
Despite attempts by Unite’s hugely expensive legal team, in an apparent demonstration of their eagerness to keep Graham from having to give sworn testimony, to argue that she was not relevant to the case because she is the UK general secretary and other witnesses would do instead, Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) Adjudicator Elizabeth Spelman has responded to Graham’s failure to respond by inviting Ogle and his lawyers to apply for a binding subpoena to compel Graham to attend and give evidence under oath – which Ogle’s barrister Mary-Paula Guinness has already confirmed in an earlier hearing that she will do.
Ogle’s legal team has until 22 April to file its application and Unite’s lawyers have another week to respond and a hearing of the arguments will take place 7 May.
The Unite argument that she is not relevant falls apart under scrutiny, as she has featured heavily in others’ testimony during the case so far, including her allegedly telling Irish officials to inform Ogle that there was no place for him. Unite barrister Mark Harty has also said that Graham may not be ‘amenable’ to subpoena, as if a legal summons is a matter of whether one feels like being summoned.
Ogle is claiming that Unite discriminated against him by sidelining him on his return from cancer treatment – and that he was told that Graham ‘recognises loyalty’ from those who supported her in Unite’s 2021 general secretary election. Ogle, like many Irish figures and branches, supported Graham’s rival, Howard Beckett.
In last week’s sessions of the hearing, Irish Unite stalwart James ‘Junior’ Coss gave evidence corroborating Ogle’s account of sitting through the creation of a whiteboard chart about how the union would be organised after his removal, to the evident ire of the aggressive Harty, whose approach in the preceding session in February led to several ‘sidebars’ with Spelman and Ogle’s outraged barrister.
John Douglas, former general secretary of Irish retail union Mandate, also gave evidence in support of Ogle’s case, to a similar reaction from Harty.
Sharon Graham has previously cancelled appearances in the Republic, avoiding members’ anger and scrutiny over the union’s ‘disgraceful’ treatment of Brendan Ogle. The situation caused such outrage in Ireland that union members picketed Graham’s long-delayed visit to Dublin, Unite’s Community section condemned it as ‘disgusting’ and a whole sector branch threatened to disaffiliate. She did, however, briefly speak at Unite’s Irish policy conference this week, although she did not attend the union dinner with delegates.
Skwawkbox wrote to Unite to ask for comment on the issue:
Ms Graham failed to attend the Brendan Ogle hearing in Dublin by last Friday’s deadline, despite being asked to attend and testify. The Workplace Relations Commission has now invited Ogle and his lawyers to apply for a subpoena.
Please advise, no later than 5pm:
- Why didn’t she attend to give evidence?
- Does she and Unite intend to contest the subpoena request?
- If a subpoena is issued, non-compliance is a criminal offence under Irish law. Will she comply?
At the time of writing, almost six hours after the reply deadline, Unite had not provided any response. Failure to obey a subpoena in employment cases is a prosecutable criminal offence under Ireland’s ‘Employment (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2018‘, with with penalties including prison sentences and large fines.
Sharon Graham’s tenure as Unite boss has also been marked by a string of other allegations – which neither she nor the union has denied – including destruction of evidence against her husband in threat, misogyny and bullying complaints brought by union employees. She is also embroiled in a defamation lawsuit brought by Irish union legend Brendan Ogle for the union’s treatment of him and comments made about him by Graham and her close ally Tony Woodhouse.
She has also been alleged by insiders to have:
- banned Unite officials and national banners from pro-Gaza protests
- banned and smeared films and books exposing the ‘Labour antisemitism’ scam
- placed an official under investigation who refused to cancel a Palestine solidarity fringe event at Labour’s 2023 annual conference
- told her chief of staff to threaten a soon-to-retire official with the loss of a pension bonus if he did not soften his support for Palestinians
Her supporters also prevented debate and votes on Gaza at a meeting of the union’s elected executive last month.
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Exclusive: Graham to be subpoena’d to testify in Ogle tribunal if she declines to appear
Latest news from today’s session of discrimination case brought by Irish trade unionist against Unite and Sharon Graham as witnesses again ‘rattle’ union barrister – and former GS Len McCluskey will be called again
Unite general secretary Sharon Graham will be legally summonsed to appear in Dublin at the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) discrimination case brought by Irish trade unionist Brendan Ogle against Graham and Unite, if she does not accept an invitation from Ogle’s lawyers. The news was confirmed after an attempt by Unite’s highly-paid barrister Mark Harty, to claim that Graham was not relevant to the case because she is the UK general secretary, was rejected by Adjudicator Elizabeth Spelman after Ogle’s lawyers pointed out that Ireland is a Unite region and Graham has overall responsibility, as well as allegedly telling Irish officials to inform Ogle that there was no place for him.
Ogle is claiming that Unite discriminated against him by sidelining him on his return from cancer treatment – and that he was told that Graham ‘recognises loyalty’ from those who supported her in Unite’s 2021 general secretary election. Ogle, like many Irish figures and branches, supported Graham’s rival, Howard Beckett.
The question of whether a subpoena would be issued to compel Graham to attend was left open at the end of the last three-day session of the case. Harty tried to claim Graham was not relevant to the case and may not be ‘amenable’ to subpoena, as if a legal summons is a matter of whether one feels like being summoned. Graham and her alleged words about getting rid of Ogle have featured prominently in the case so far.
In other news from the tribunal, Irish Unite stalwart James ‘Junior’ Coss gave evidence corroborating Ogle’s account of sitting through the creation of a whiteboard chart about how the union would be organised after his removal, to the evident ire of Harty, whom attendees described as becoming extremely aggressive.
John Douglas, former general secretary of Irish retail union Mandate, also gave evidence in support of Ogle’s case, to a similar reaction from Harty – whose approach in the preceding session in February led to several ‘sidebars’ with Spelman and Ogle’s outraged barrister Mary-Paula Guinness.
Tomorrow’s session of the hearing was postponed after Unite’s lawyers called pro-Graham union employee Therese Maloney in an attempt to rebut former general secretary Len McCluskey’s testimony that he had assured Ogle his job would be kept open. Adjudicator Spelman ruled that McCluskey must be on hand for re-examination before Maloney can testify.
Sharon Graham has previously cancelled appearances in the Republic, avoiding members’ anger and scrutiny over the union’s ‘disgraceful’ treatment of Brendan Ogle. The situation caused such outrage in Ireland that union members picketed Graham’s long-delayed visit to Dublin, Unite’s Community section condemned it as ‘disgusting’ and a whole sector branch threatened to disaffiliate.
Graham’s tenure as Unite boss has also been marked by a string of other allegations – which neither she nor the union has denied – including destruction of evidence against her husband in threat, misogyny and bullying complaints brought by union employees. She is also embroiled in a defamation lawsuit brought by Irish union legend Brendan Ogle for the union’s treatment of him and comments made about him by Graham and her close ally Tony Woodhouse.
She has also been alleged by insiders to have:
- banned Unite officials and national banners from pro-Gaza protests
- banned and smeared films and books exposing the ‘Labour antisemitism’ scam
- placed an official under investigation who refused to cancel a Palestine solidarity fringe event at Labour’s 2023 annual conference
- told her chief of staff to threaten a soon-to-retire official with the loss of a pension bonus if he did not soften his support for Palestinians
Her supporters also prevented debate and votes on Gaza at a meeting of the union’s elected executive earlier this month.
Failure to obey a subpoena in employment cases is a prosecutable criminal offence under Ireland’s ‘Employment (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2018‘.
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Unite 4 Gaza slams Graham’s ‘extraordinary’ attack on anti-genocide campaigners
Letter from ‘war monger’ attempting to justify her conduct and silence continues to backfire as anti-genocide group condemns betrayal of Palestinian civilians and of workers and movement
Unite members who have formed a group to campaign against Israel’s genocide in Gaza have written a response to the union’s general secretary Sharon Graham’s letter last week attempting to justify her lack of action to support Palestinians:
Response to the Statement by Sharon Graham on Palestine
On 26 March Sharon Graham, the General Secretary of Unite, and Andy Green, Chair of the Executive, issued an extraordinary statement attacking Palestine solidarity supporters. In particular it attempted to justify the leadership’s refusal to give any support to the Palestinians or Unite members campaigning to end Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
When Israel launched its attack on Gaza Unite issued a statement on 16 October which ‘unreservedly’ condemned and expressed its ‘revulsion’ over Israeli deaths on October 7 whilst merely ‘deploring’ the mass murder of women and children in Gaza.
It was only after concerted protests by Unite activists that after 4 weeks Unite issued a second statement on 3 November calling for an ‘immediate unconditional ceasefire by all parties in Israel and Gaza.’ There was no mention of Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza.
Since then there has been radio silence. There has been no publicity about the national demonstrations and no support for members wanting to take solidarity action. Despite repeated protests and petitions by members Sharon Graham has failed to attend or speak at the national demonstrations. Graham even tried to persuade Peter Kavanagh of London & Eastern Region not to speak.
Unite did absolutely nothing until a letter was sent on 25 March to the Palestinian trade union PGFTU, whose offices in Gaza had been bombed more than two weeks previously on 7 March. The timing of this letter was no coincidence. It was sent one day before her statement.
The letter offered nothing but empty words. Graham and Green are explicit in their opposition to an arms embargo on Israel or persuading workers to refuse to handle arms intended for genocide.
Graham’s letter referred to Unite’s ‘longstanding policy’ but fails to mention that Unite policy includes ‘full support for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions’. This policy does not even appear on Unite’s website. For that you have to go to the United Left site.
Graham boasts that ‘Unite was the first major union to publicly and unambiguously call for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza.’ This is not true. UNISON called for an immediate ceasefire on 26 October and on 18 October condemned Israel’s attack on the Al Ahli hospital killing nearly 500 people.
Graham has remained silent about the attacks on Gaza’s hospitals, ambulances and health care system and now its execution of children at Al Shifa Hospital.
The remainder of Sharon Graham’s letter represents a disgraceful defence of the arms industry and an attack on those who seek to ‘to undermine the defence industry or demand the disbandment of NATO and AUKUS.’ It is an industry whose purpose includes enabling genocide in Gaza and a possible nuclear war with China and Russia.
Sharon Graham has openly come out as a war monger who hides her aims behind the need to preserve jobs at any cost. We reject the argument that Unite must support war because our members’ jobs depend on it. A society where an increasing proportion of national wealth is geared to the manufacture of armaments is to the detriment of all our members.
When imperialism wages war it is workers who lose their lives. Yes there is a contradiction between representing members in the war industry and opposing imperialist wars. That is why we support the diversification of arms production into making useful goods that benefit humanity.
The idea that we must defend every job, even when it involves the murder of thousands of children is one we reject. Trade unions have historically fought for peace not war, against fascism, imperialism and racism.
Sharon Graham spits on the memory of the Rolls Royce workers in East Kilbride who, in 1973, refused to work on the engines of Chilean aircraft which had taken an active part in Pinochet’s fascist coup. A strong trade union organisation ensured that the Chilean airforce was all but grounded. Eventually it fell to Israel and South Africa to service these aircraft.
International solidarity is in the interests of all workers. Without solidarity the capitalist class can play divide and rule. Rather than building solidarity across national borders Sharon Graham prefers to play the role of a British nationalist wedded to Zionism.
Arms production is highly capital intensive. Britain’s ‘defence’ budget has steadily increased at the same time as cuts to the NHS and social services budgets. UNITE also has workers in the NHS, local government and social services. Unite members also use the NHS and are being forced to wait longer for treatment because of the cuts that enable increased military expenditure.
UNITE and its predecessor unions have a proud tradition of international solidarity. Former General Secretary of the TGWU, Jack Jones, fought in Spain against the fascists. At the time of Apartheid in South Africa we supported the struggle for liberation. An injury to one is an injury to all. We live in a society in which war is in the interests of capitalism not the working class.
Sharon Graham’s statement is an open declaration of war against those who support BDS and the liberation of the Palestinian people. The liberation of the Palestinians from Israeli Apartheid and an end to imperialist war is in the interests of all members of Unite.
Sharon Graham asserts that we are a trade union not a political party. Trade unions have historically recognised that strikes alone are not enough. We cannot achieve our economic aims without a political struggle for socialism. The NHS would never have been created if Graham’s miserable, short-sighted, dog eat dog vision had been adopted.
Today the Labour Party has abandoned the working class and embraced the neo-liberal advocates of free market capitalism. About this Graham has nothing to say.
Implicit in Graham’s statement is a threat to the affiliation to Stop the War Coalition and Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Already the affiliation to StWC has been suspended.
We call on Unite to break from Keir Starmer’s support for genocide, his embrace of NATO and neo-liberal economics and to fight for a socialist society which is free from the fear of war. We salute those who have campaigned to close Israel’s arms factories in Britain and we particularly welcome the closure of Elbit’s factory in Tamworth as a result of Palestine Action’s campaign.
See also Labour CND statement: why Unite the Union is wrong to attack groups picketing weapons manufacturing companies.
Unite 4 Palestine
1st April 2024
Unite was contacted for comment and given a copy of the statement, but did not respond.
In addition to the issues raised by Unite 4 Gaza, Sharon Graham has been alleged by insiders to have:
- banned Unite officials and national banners from pro-Gaza protests
- banned and smeared films and books exposing the ‘Labour antisemitism’ scam
- placed an official under investigation who refused to cancel a Palestine solidarity fringe event at Labour’s 2023 annual conference
- told her chief of staff to threaten a soon-to-retire official with the loss of a pension bonus if he did not soften his support for Palestinians
Her supporters also prevented debate and votes on Gaza at a meeting of the union’s elected executive earlier this month.
According to human rights group Euro Med Monitor, since 7 October last year Israel has killed over 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded more than double that number, overwhelmingly women and children and many of them with life-changing injuries, while Gaza’s health and school systems have been bombed into collapse, often using US- and UK-made weapons and systems. More than a million people have been forcibly displaced and Gaza is in famine because of Israel’s blockade of food and vital supplies. Israel is formally on trial for genocide before the International Court of Justice and ordered to stop its slaughter – and has been found by UN human rights investigators to be committing genocide.
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Exclusive: Graham attacks ‘phony’ old Unite member nos – that she managed
Union general secretary’s ‘unhinged’ letter to staff, officers and organisers continues to backfire as insiders say numbers she is now attacking were part of her job to report
Unite general secretary Sharon Graham’s bizarre letter to all the union’s staff last week, attempting to undermine a number of criticism that have been levelled at her and her management of the union, was described by union insiders as ‘unhinged’ and a ‘rant’ – and it continues to backfire.
As Skwawkbox has already covered, Graham told recipients that the union under her will always prioritise jobs in the weapons industry above the fight to stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Her letter also claimed that an unfavourable interim financial report had been faked wholesale and that the forger had gone to the extent of copying the font and layout of actual reports to fool members. The union did not respond to an enquiry whether it stood by the claim despite the screenshots of the report appearing to show that it was found on the union’s official ‘Sharepoint’ network. The letter also claimed the union’s financial value was ‘pushing up towards half a billion pounds’ – but insiders say that the value was already around half a billion when she took over two and a half years ago.
And another issue with Graham’s claims has arisen – relating to Unite’s membership figures. In an apparent attempt to refute union insiders’ claims that membership has fallen by more than two hundred thousand during her tenure, Graham wrote:
Despite inheriting membership figures that included 32,000 members on union funded subs (essentially free) and dealing with a 60,000 loss in aviation and other areas during Covid, the work we have all put in collectively has recouped these loses and more. Furthermore, we recorded an additional 16,647 net membership increase in 2023. These are real membership increases, not the phony [sic] figures of the past.
Emphasis added
One insider told Skwawkbox that the 32,000 ‘essentially free’ members were in fact members supported by Unite when they lost their jobs during the pandemic, so that they could retain their membership protections until they found new work.
But even more significantly, another said that before Ms Graham became general secretary, one of her key responsibilities as head of organising was to monitor and report on the membership – and that the membership figures before her tenure were therefore compiled and reported by her and her organising team.
The senior insider told Skwawkbox:
The figures she’s calling phoney are her own figures.
Skwawkbox wrote to Unite:
Another question with regard to Ms Graham’s email to officers, organisers and staff. This one concerns her claim of ‘phony [membership] figures of the past’. She wrote:
“Despite inheriting membership figures that included 32,000 members on union funded subs (essentially free) and dealing with a 60,000 loss in aviation and other areas during Covid, the work we have all put in collectively has recouped these loses and more. Furthermore, we recorded an additional 16,647 net membership increase in 2023. These are real membership increases, not the phony figures of the past.”
Ms Graham as head of organising was responsible for reporting membership figures to the general secretary and executive. Is she really saying that she submitted ‘phony’ [sic] numbers? By 5pm today, please.
At the time of writing, more than ninety minutes after the reply deadline provided as standard journalistic practice, no reply had been received from the union.
The outrage provoked by the letter is not the first time members have been angered over Sharon Graham’s position on Gaza. She has been alleged by insiders to have:
- banned Unite officials and national banners from pro-Gaza protests
- banned and smeared films and books exposing the ‘Labour antisemitism’ scam
- placed an official under investigation who refused to cancel a Palestine solidarity fringe event at Labour’s 2023 annual conference
- told her chief of staff to threaten a soon-to-retire official with the loss of a pension bonus if he did not soften his support for Palestinians
Her supporters also prevented debate and votes on Gaza at a meeting of the union’s elected executive earlier this month.
Her tenure as Unite boss has also been marked by a string of other allegations – which neither she nor the union has denied – including destruction of evidence against her husband in threat, misogyny and bullying complaints brought by union employees. She is also embroiled in both an employment tribunal for discrimination and a defamation lawsuit brought by Irish union legend Brendan Ogle for the union’s treatment of him and comments made about him by Graham and her close ally Tony Woodhouse.
According to human rights group Euro Med Monitor, since 7 October last year Israel has killed over 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded more than double that number, overwhelmingly women and children and many of them with life-changing injuries, while Gaza’s health and school systems have been bombed into collapse, often using US- and UK-made weapons and systems. More than a million people have been forcibly displaced and Gaza is in famine because of Israel’s blockade of food and vital supplies. Israel is formally on trial for genocide before the International Court of Justice and ordered to stop its slaughter – and has been found by UN human rights investigators to be committing genocide.
SKWAWKBOX needs your help. The site is provided free of charge but depends on the support of its readers to be viable. If you’d like to help it keep revealing the news as it is and not what the Establishment wants you to hear – and can afford to without hardship – please click here to arrange a one-off or modest monthly donation via PayPal or here to set up a monthly donation via GoCardless (SKWAWKBOX will contact you to confirm the GoCardless amount). Thanks for your solidarity so SKWAWKBOX can keep doing its job.
If you wish to republish this post for non-commercial use, you are welcome to do so – see here for more.
Exclusive: Graham claims financials ‘fake’ – but they were ‘on Unite Sharepoint’
‘Unhinged’ claim challenged by screenshots – no response from Unite to request to confirm whether union management stands by bizarre comment from general secretary in letter to all staff, officers and organisers
As Skwawkbox covered earlier today, Unite general secretary Sharon Graham sent a bizarre email to all the union’s organisers, staff and officers that was described as ‘unhinged’, ‘flailing’ and ‘a rant’ by union insiders – and called ‘disgusting’ for its prioritisation of weapons-making jobs over opposing Israel’s genocide in Gaza and Britain’s complicity in it.
As well as its section on Palestine, Graham’s letter also attempted to defuse criticism of the union’s financial management – by claiming that the ‘preliminary’ financial report circulating among astonished officers, members and activists is a forgery in which ‘those with much to lose’ even copied the font and layout of a real Unite finance report:
Fake Finance Document
Those with much to lose from the new way forward, including curtailing money given to outside organisations and the new industrial focus, have escalated actions by producing a fake Unite Finance Document for release on Social Media. Most recently appearing on social media. The document was headed “Unite Finance Report” and mirrored (down to the same font and layout) Unite’s usual finance report style. This had the sole aim of discrediting the leadership but most importantly it undermined the Union. It stated that the Union’s financial position was in difficulty since the General Secretary election. This is untrue and is now being dealt with legally.
Ms Graham did not name ‘those with much to lose’ – but those challenging her claim have pointed out that the screenshots of the ‘fake finance document’ appear to show that it was screengrabbed directly from Unite’s ‘Sharepoint’ system:
Sharepoint, a Microsoft platform, is a “web-based collaborative platform that integrates natively with Microsoft 365 … primarily sold as a document management and storage system, although it is also used for sharing information through an intranet, implementing internal applications, and for implementing business processes.” The Unite address shown on the screengrabs appears to indicate that the document was at least stored, and potentially created, on the union’s own dedicated server. It is unclear against whom the issue “is now being dealt with legally”, since no supposed culprits are identified.
The claim was perceived as so outlandish that union activists have been contacting Skwawkbox all day about it. One said:
This is unhinged, she just looks like she’s flailing all over the place.
Another commented:
This is a rant and she’s sent it to everyone, what is she thinking?
Skwawkbox wrote to Unite’s press office:
Ms Graham’s letter referred to in my previous email today also claims Unite financials were a forgery and even that someone has copied the layout and font of genuine reports to fool people. The claim has been described by Unite recipients as ‘unhinged’. Screenshots of the report show that it came from the Unite Sharepoint – is the union really claiming this was faked and stored on the official network??
No response, apart from a confirmation of receipt, was received by the reply deadline of 5pm or since. It would be extraordinarily thorough for someone to go to the lengths of adding Sharepoint details to a fake, but Unite was given the opportunity to say that it believes this was done and has not done so.
Graham also told recipients that Unite’s finances were “pushing up towards half a billion pounds”. Skwawkbox understands that they were around half a billion pounds when she took over as general secretary.
As Skwawkbox showed earlier, Graham’s letter had disgusted many who read it because it said that the union will always prioritise weapons-making jobs over the need to fight Israel’s genocide in Gaza – and appeared to imply that those working in that sector didn’t care about them being used in the slaughter of Palestinian women and children.
Sharon Graham has been alleged by insiders to have:
- banned Unite officials and national banners from pro-Gaza protests
- banned and smeared films and books exposing the ‘Labour antisemitism’ scam
- placed an official under investigation who refused to cancel a Palestine solidarity fringe event at Labour’s 2023 annual conference
- told her chief of staff to threaten a soon-to-retire official with the loss of a pension bonus if he did not soften his support for Palestinians
Her supporters also prevented debate and votes on Gaza at a meeting of the union’s elected executive earlier this month.
Apart from the issue of Gaza, her tenure as Unite boss has also been marked by a string of other allegations – which neither she nor the union has denied – including destruction of evidence against her husband in threat, misogyny and bullying complaints brought by union employees. She is also embroiled in both an employment tribunal for discrimination and a defamation lawsuit brought by Irish union legend Brendan Ogle for the union’s treatment of him and comments made about him by Graham and her close ally Tony Woodhouse.
According to human rights group Euro Med Monitor, since 7 October last year Israel has killed over 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded more than double that number, overwhelmingly women and children and many of them with life-changing injuries, while Gaza’s health and school systems have been bombed into collapse, often using US- and UK-made weapons and systems. More than a million people have been forcibly displaced and Gaza is in famine because of Israel’s blockade of food and vital supplies. Israel is formally on trial for genocide before the International Court of Justice and ordered to stop its slaughter – and has been found by UN human rights investigators to be committing genocide.
The finance and Gaza comments are not the end of the issues with Graham’s email. Skwawkbox will cover further aspects shortly.
SKWAWKBOX needs your help. The site is provided free of charge but depends on the support of its readers to be viable. If you’d like to help it keep revealing the news as it is and not what the Establishment wants you to hear – and can afford to without hardship – please click here to arrange a one-off or modest monthly donation via PayPal or here to set up a monthly donation via GoCardless (SKWAWKBOX will contact you to confirm the GoCardless amount). Thanks for your solidarity so SKWAWKBOX can keep doing its job.
If you wish to republish this post for non-commercial use, you are welcome to do so – see here for more.
Royal College of GPs deletes article exposing lack of supervision of ‘PA’ not-doctors
RCGP has been equivocal about government’s changes to use of ‘associates’ without medical training to treat patients
The Royal College of GPs has deleted an article that detailed the extent of the lack of supervision by fully-qualified doctors over the actions and decisions of the ‘physician associate’ (PA) roles – who have only two years’ training – whose use the government is expanding.
The use of PAs, which is considered by ninety percent of doctors to be dangerous to patients and confuses many patients, who do not realise that they have not been seen and treated by a fully-qualified medic, is being pushed by the government as a way of ‘downskilling’ the NHS, reducing costs and allowing increased profits for private providers, under the guise of the so-called ‘NHS Workforce Plan’ as part of the ‘Integrated Care Systems’ (ICS) project.
ICS, formerly called ‘Accountable Care Organisations’ (ACOs) after the US system it copied, were renamed after awareness began to spread that ACOs were a system for withholding care from patients and that care providers were incentivised to cut care because they receive a share of the ‘savings’. The system remained the same, but the rebranding disguised the reality.
Now, as Pulse magazine has revealed, the RCGP has deleted a case study that revealed a shocking lack and laxity in the supervision of a PA:
According to the now-deleted case study, held a ‘minimum’ of 27 10-minute appointments each day and asked the on-call doctor to review patients for an ‘urgent opinion’ only ‘once every two to three months’…
…After screenshots circulated on social media, the RCGP removed the case study at the PA’s request…
…The case study previously said: ‘[The PA] has three, ten-minute appointment slots in a row, and at the end of those slots has a ten-minute break for administration and including having prescriptions signed by a GP.’
It said supervision is ‘shared’ between GPs working at the practice, and that for ‘non-urgent concerns’ there is a ‘ten minute debrief with an on-call doctor’ which takes place every two to three weeks.
Matt Kneale, co-chair of the Doctors’ Association UK which along with the British Medical Association is opposing the changes, said:
Much of the concern from doctors in recent months has built up from a lack of transparency from Royal Colleges about where they stand on physician associates.
While we are grateful that the RCGP has removed what can, at best, be described as unprofessional practice, we maintain that the College needs to sit down with wider stakeholders on the concerns around PA roles and scope more generally.
The RCGP has voiced ‘concerns’ about the new system, but has not formally opposed it, despite the outrage of doctors and the increasing examples of companies hiring PAs instead of doctors and even making doctors redundant to switch to PAs.
The government’s expansion and renaming of these roles, along with backdoor to regulate them via the General Medical Council (GMC), which regulates doctors – is part of what experts call ‘scope creep’: physician’s assistants and anaesthetist’s assistants, as they were originally called, are valuable roles in carefully limited settings, but NHS England, the government body appointed to run (and run down) the NHS has been using them way beyond their original scope, for example even to perform some types of brain surgery and expecting them to ‘learn on the job’.
The government used a ‘statutory instrument’ to pass these changes, avoiding proper parliamentary scrutiny, but both the Tories and Keir Starmer’s Labour support these and other measures to cheapen the NHS for private involvement and only independent MP Claudia Webbe spoke against them during the brief debate. Green peer Natalie Bennett has tabled a motion in the House of Lords in an attempt to kill the instrument, but without support from the notional ‘opposition’, it is unlikely to succeed.
During the Statutory Instrument debate, Tory former Health Secretary Therese Coffey gushed about the potential for using three associates to anaesthetise patients during operations, with just a single consultant anaesthetist monitoring remotely as an ‘efficiency’.
At least two people have already died avoidably because of misdiagnosis by PAs. Emily Chesterton, 30, who didn’t realise she wasn’t seeing a doctor, was treated for a calf strain when she had a deep vein thrombosis that led to a lethal embolism. Ben Peters, 25, was sent home from A&E with a ‘panic attack’ that was really a serious heart condition.
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Video: massive demonstration outside Parliament as people demand MPs vote for #ceasefirenow
Starmeroids are not listening – but Starmer still likely to have to sack multiple front-benchers for refusing his order to abstain on King’s Speech amendments calling for immediate ceasefire
Thousands of people have gathered outside Parliament as MPs debate and vote on amendments to the King’s Speech, to demand that lawmakers support amendments by the SNP and left-wing Labour MPs calling for a ceasefire in Israel’s genocide of Gazan civilians:
The demo has caused the closure of roads around Parliament. The monstrous war-crime supporter Keir Starmer has said he will sack any front-benchers who vote for a ceasefire, but is still facing a potentially large rebellion among MPs who either have some remaining conscience or a big enough Muslim population in their constituency that they know they will be voted out next year if they toe Starmer’s line.
Meanwhile, Israel – while claiming it gave sufficient warning for Gazans to flee Al Shifa hospital, Gaza’s biggest and a refuge for thousands fleeing the genocide – has reportedly been shooting in the legs any who do attempt to evacuate the hospital.
Ceasefire now and shame on any MPs who do not vote to demand one.
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