How making a complaint about the way he’d been treated
left the editor feeling even more insulted and humiliated
By Milan Rai
From almost the beginning at PN, I’ve experienced low-level friction with Peace News Trustees (PNT). From early on, there have been hints that some PNT directors were unhappy with the editors (at first, Emily Johns was my co-editor, then she decided to just be ‘the production worker’ – partly because she found the friction draining – leaving me as the sole editor).
However, whenever I or others in PN pressed PNT to explain what they had a problem with, they refused to spell this out, which I found frustrating and undermining. This pattern has continued more recently with the new PNT chair, Glyn Carter.
This long history of feeling distrusted and undermined by PNT directors came to a head two years ago, when one of the PNT directors, Albert Beale, insulted and undermined me in front of other PNT directors and the PN staff and board.
I wish I had just played this by the book from the beginning, contacting my union, the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), as soon as I received Albert Beale’s insulting email.
I thought it was too minor to trouble them, when journalists are facing the sack. I also couldn’t believe that we wouldn’t be able to resolve things in PNT.
I’m very proud to have been a union member throughout my time as PN editor. I hope any future editor, if there is one, will also pay their union dues.
I was definitely not let down by the NUJ. I never gave them a chance to stand up for me, and that is the one thing I regret in this whole sorry saga.
Honestly though, this incident with Albert Beale was just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the insulting, aggressive and undermining behaviour that PN staff have been on the receiving end of. PNT sexism has been off the scale.
Somehow the staff have just put up with a toxic work environment, year after year, focused on just doing our jobs.
Albert Beale’s behaviour in 2022 was the straw that broke the camel’s back. After he refused to communicate for months and refused mediation, I started a grievance procedure, a formal complaint process, which resulted in PNT deciding in April 2023 that the only sanction needed was for Albert Beale to withdraw from PNT meetings for 7.5 months.
I thought that was inadequate and I asked for an appeal.
For 16 months, PNT have refused that request, despite clear guidance from ACAS (the advisory, conciliation and arbitration service, the official employment law advisory group) and similar bodies that organisations should allow appeals in such cases.
I have been very disappointed by PNT’s refusal to allow an appeal and I see no alternative at this point to putting this story into the public domain.
At the heart of this conflict, in my view, is the inability of a PNT director to understand his role as a director and therefore as an employer and manager.
Albert Beale saw himself (and probably still sees himself) as just one of the gang, a fellow activist able to act and speak like any other member of a voluntary campaigning group, when, actually, as a director, he is in a position of authority, with responsibilities as an employer towards his employees.
(At the same time, Albert has enthusiastically supported using all of PNT’s financial and legal levers to drive Peace News and its staff to ‘the brink’.)
I was shocked by Albert Beale’s behaviour during this conflict: insulting a staff member, refusing to apologise or even to communicate with that staff member for months, refusing mediation (repeatedly), finally (reluctantly) issuing ‘apologies’ which were themselves undermining and insulting.
In my view, his behaviour should disqualify him from being a director, certainly of a peace movement organisation.
PNT does not agree.
What happened
In early March 2022, a hard-working and endlessly-positive worker at Housmans Bookshop, Nik Górecki, comes up with the idea of a big meeting of staff and directors from the whole PN group of companies. Nik talks to members of Housmans Bookshop, Peace News and PNT – including Albert Beale – about getting together to talk in an open-ended way about improving/changing the group structure and its ways of working.
8 March: at a PN staff meeting, other staff members suggest that I facilitate the meeting. I go along with this idea.
Nik graciously accepts the idea of me facilitating the meeting.
He asks me to circulate a date-finding poll to people in PNT and in Peace News. I email the PN board and staff, and also Alice Kadel and Albert Beale, the two active members of PNT apart from Claire Poyner.
On 15 March, Albert ‘replies to all’ in response to my ‘please fill in this date-finding poll’ email.
Among other things, he writes to Alice Kadel, Leslie Barson of the PN board, and the PN staff: ‘I’m afraid I must add one last point too, Mil. I really think there are reasons why you’re one of the least appropriate people to be organising/facilitating a PNT meeting.’
I reply (also on 15 March): ‘I would be grateful, Albert, if you could explain to me (and to everyone else who has received your email) why you wrote: “I really think there are reasons why you’re one of the least appropriate people to be organising/facilitating a PNT meeting.”’
I also point out that, as I had written in my email, I am not the organiser of the meeting (Nik is) and that I’ve been nominated by others to be the facilitator (and I’m happy to step down from this role).
Albert Beale does not respond to this or later emails from me (or to a letter, or to an answerphone message) – for months.
22 April: another member of PNT suggests mediation to Albert. He refuses.
27 June: the Peace News Ltd board suggests mediation to Albert, with my full support. Albert does not reply.
On 7 July, after nearly four months of silence, Albert Beale emails me to apologise for the ‘perhaps intemperate tone’ of his 15 March email. He does not accept that he was wrong to say that I was organising the Housmans-PN-PNT meeting; he accepts that he may have been wrong: ‘if I’d got the wrong end of the stick, then some of what I wrote was a bit off the point of course’ (emphasis added).
In other words: ‘You might be lying or you might not be lying when you claim you were not the organiser of the meeting.’
12 July 2022: the PN board again suggest mediation.
On 11 August, Albert makes it clear he is not interested.
On 12 August, I write a paper to PNT asking for a grievance procedure against Albert Beale.
As an employee of a wholly-owned subsidiary, I’m entitled to launch this formal process, PNT recognises.
The paper is heard at the next PNT meeting, on 6 September. As part of the process, the then chair of PNT talks to me and to Albert Beale, and sends me Albert’s formal response. I explain why I do not find this statement adequate.
On 18 April 2023, after a seven-month process, the then PNT chair tells me the decision of PNT: Albert will step back from PNT meetings ‘for the rest of the year’ (7.5 months). That’s it.
23 April: I ask for an appeal. The then chair of PNT replies, the same day: ‘It would be helpful to me in advising the Board about an appeal, which would clearly not be heard by me, to know what you would regard as an acceptable outcome, if you feel able to indicate what you would consider that to be.’
This implies that there will be an appeal, automatically.
However, the PNT chair then steps down, to be replaced first by Andrew Rigby, temporarily, and then by Glyn Carter.
Both new chairs deny the appeal.
Compromise?
In June 2023, as the storm clouds are gathering in the larger Peace News Ltd/PNT conflict, I propose a compromise, setting a deadline of the 2 September PNT meeting.
By that date, (1) Albert and PNT should agree to extend Albert’s withdrawal period from PNT to one year and (2) Albert should agree to some minimal changes to his November ‘apology’, to remove the worst aspects of it (including the continuing insinuation that I have been lying about not being the organiser of the Housmans-PN-PNT meeting).
If those two changes are made, I will consider the matter closed.
Albert does agree to the minimal changes I asked for, but PNT does not on 2 September extend his withdrawal period and does not produce an explanation for the length of his ‘sentence’ (7.5 months).
Because the two conditions have not both been met by 2 September, I withdraw my compromise offer and ask again for an appeal.
PNT steadfastly refuse me my right to an appeal from then on.
They later extend Albert’s withdrawal period. To me, this just makes their behaviour on 2 September even more insulting.
Led by Glyn Carter, PNT would not meet me half-way when they thought they could just ignore my feelings and disrespect me – when they thought I would just crumble.
Conclusion
I have been shocked and angered by PNT’s behaviour.
If the larger crisis had not escalated this year, the Peace News Ltd board was going to consider hiring an independent HR professional to review how PNT had treated me.
This suggestion came from Eve Wedderburn, who brought a wealth of knowledge and experience to the Peace News Ltd board from her previous role as a director in a much larger NGO.
Eve put in many difficult hours as my advocate, which I appreciate very much.
It is only with Eve’s fresh and informed eyes that we as the staff have been able to see how poisonous our work environment has been. We should have put in grievance procedures at the beginning, over a decade ago.
Join the NUJ: www.nuj.org.uk
This article originally appeared in Peace News 2674 (September 2024)