Nurses under Maoist regulation

The Nursing & Midwifery Council, the professional regulator for nurses in the UK, is a blatant illustration of radical leftist Rudi Dutschke’s phrase ‘long march through the institutions’. A body that should be the epitome of nursing values, administered with objectivity and fairness, has been captured by Maoist revolutionary fervour.

That’s quite a claim, and it would be vehemently denied by the polite and polished people who sit on fitness-to-practise panels. These upstanding members of our society believe that they are acting rationally, but with awareness and intent to redress structural disadvantages. For decades, the NMC has pushed equity over taking each case on its merits: too many black and brown nurses were being struck off, so the regulator needed to be more understanding of discrimination, and be less sympathetic to white nurses. If in any doubt of the NMC’s two-tier approach, consider the new policy against ‘Islamophobia’.

For this article, I am indebted to the work of two fellow writers (and good friends) Roger Watson and Michael Rainsborough, both professorial and prominent figures in their fields of nursing and military strategy respectively. Both have written in recent days on Daily Sceptic on the cultural subversion in British society and its institutions. Whereas Watson wrote specifically on the NMC ban on ‘anti-Muslim hate’, Rainsborough took a broader, analytic view of the Maoist strategy behind the seemingly nonsensical ‘woke’ practices of British policing and other arms of the establishment.

Watson, who the NMC pursued (with me as accomplice) for Covid-19 wrong-think four years ago, had already lost faith with the profession to which he had committed most of his career, but he has now withdrawn from the register. The straw that broke the camel’s back was the NMC’s latest policy on policing nurses’ activity on social media, threatening action against anyone making negative comments about Islam. Watson often writes on Islamism and the dramatic changes caused by mass immigration of Muslims to British culture. So he would soon have been caught in the net.

‘I believe that the NMC’, Watson opined, ‘- long on a woke, intersectional downwards spiral – has finally lost its way’. While the NMC acknowledges the right to express political opinion, its latest guidance on misconduct states that discrimination against others on political or religious grounds is unlawful. Ther implication is that a candid commentator like Watson would readily be pursued by the NMC merely for making general remarks about Islam. It would only need someone to complain of being offended.

As Watson noted, the guidance refers specifically to anti-Semitism as well as Islamophobia, but while the former is covered in 356 words, the latter extends to 674 words (you see the empiricism of Dr Watson here). An example of Islamophobia given by the NMC is a nurse complaining of finding nowhere to park on a Friday due to the prayers at a nearby mosque. The NMC would take a dim view of such intolerance. The patient that the nurse is delayed in visiting is clearly of less import than the NMC’s Islamophilia. You can bet that a nurse who reports a Muslim colleague for skipping a patient’s appointment to attend the mosque will be in trouble herself.

Of course, the NMC would not be so puritanical on anyone criticising Christians. Indeed, nurses opposing unlimited abortion or euthanasia from a Christian perspective are given little allowance for their religious belief: if anything, it seems to count against them.

But why is the NMC doing this? The answer comes in a brilliantly incisive analysis by Rainsborough, a former academic colleague of mine at King’s College London. I can’t do justice to the article by summarising it here, but I assure everyone that this is worth sitting down to digest over a coffee, tea or something stronger. Rainsborough shows that liberalism has been overridden by Maoism, and that while the former embraces all races and religions, the latter agitates for conflict.

Some say that Britain changed after Princess Diana died in 1997, at the high watermark of Tony Blair’s New Labour, when society shed its stiff upper-lip for open emoting. Another seminal event in our culture was the Black Lives Matter frenzy in 2020, when a violent recidivist in the USA was chosen as the face of an anti-racism movement. BLM was a purely Maoist campaign, sweeping through the institutions and forcing white people to feel guilt at their very existence. This was certainly not liberalism.

There is one piece I’d like to quote from Rainsborough, because it is quite profound, on some white South African colleagues in his Department of War Studies: -

‘Progressive down to their last pronoun. Always droning on about ‘the patriarchy’. Convinced of their own moral and intellectual superiority, and never shy about reminding the rest of us. And of course they had shown their commitment to South Africa’s rainbow future by leaving the country at the first hint of the ANC coming to power.

The contradiction always struck me as curious. Now it seems less mysterious. The attraction of the ideology is not simply that it allows the adherents to occupy the moral high ground. It also allows them to assume the role of arbiters, administrators and managers of competing communities. Like colonial officials of an earlier era, or the self-appointed custodians of South Africa’s racial order, they acquire authority by interpreting, categorising, supervising and regulating relations between groups’.

Returning to the NMC, I would liken the goal of its highest ranks to that of the Maoist-inspired training organisation Common Purpose (which has gone quiet after too much exposure). The purpose of a Common Purpose alumnus career is projected by the mission to ‘make a difference’, which means a difference for which nobody has asked or voted, and which would not bring harmonise society but disrupt it.

The current outrage about two-tier policing is a belated realisation that government and all organs of the state, as well as corporate entities, are working against the ordinary people. We live in a regime of two-tier justice, two-tier professional regulation, and a manipulated complex of two-tier social relations. But the idea of tiers is simplistic. The aim of the highest powers-that-be is not necessarily to enable one or other minority to usurp the majority, but to cause the maximum division.

Divide and rule is the vehicle for problem-reaction-solution mechanisms, which always lead to tighter control. Maoism puts people in a continual sense of insecurity and confusion, because the revolution is permanent. NMC regulators are not rabid Marxists in balaclavas, but they are professionally educated officers of the state, who have been co-opted into a strategy that punishes nurses for fearing threats. And these threats are ultimately as potent to the upper echelons of nursing as they are to the nurse navigating in multicultural, post-normal Britain. The NMC is ‘making a difference’, but for whose benefit?