While nothing I have heard about him makes me inclined to like him, I don’t think the news of Lenny Walker getting the sack as a cabinet member of Crawley council is a good thing. Specifically, it is not a good thing for potential whistleblowers out there.
There are two possibilities – either Mr Walker has had complaints from council workers about racial discrimination and/or bullying or he hasn’t.
If he has then him getting sacked for raising the matter is really going to discourage anybody from coming forward on their own behalf as they won’t feel confident that they have any sort of whistleblowers’ protection. Would any individuals who spoke to him feel that their situation has been improved by this controversy? If they had a specific grivance about a particular individual or event, is their position made better by suggestions that it is part of institutional racism?
If he hasn’t then it could be even worse – he could be seen as stirring everything up so much that anybody with a genuine grievance in the future will be inclined to keep quiet about it, and the reputation of the council will have been harmed for nothing.
Of course, there is an argument that it was not so much what he said as how he said it: straight to the press without going through official channels, and in such melodramatic terms that bringing the authority into disrepute is a given. I have to say it doesn’t sound like the council I used to be part of and I can’t believe that it has changed so much in a dozen years.
I got the impression that he had received some complaints, going by the article in the News from the previous week.
However, if he didn’t have (or wasn’t prepared to pass on) evidence, it would seem foolish to have gone to the press. He didn’t, however, actually say that the council was ‘institutionally racist’, just that he’d heard that from employees as their opinion.
If there are whistleblowers who went to him, they may also not have wanted him to ‘out’ them to the officers/leader.
It’s an odd situation.