This week, we’re celebrating 10 years out of the Rat Race.

Posted on September 6, 2019 by Wirral In It Together
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Paul Cardin – proprietor, Wirral In It Together – age 60

In 2003 and 2009 I was bullied out of my career by two different councils.

But what had I done to deserve it? Nothing.

I blew the whistle on a financial scam at Wirral Council  and;

I lodged a complaint at Cheshire West & Chester Council.

Both times the bosses announced, ‘Paul is out of step with the rest of the team’. They thought they were telling the truth when they said that.

And they were.

I certainly was out of step with the rest of these teams, both closely-corralled groups, who spent every day in a kind of subdued half-life, looking furtively over their shoulders, scared witless of what might happen if they either failed to fit in or stepped out of line.

“Fear of the consequences” – let’s face it – is the biggest open prison in the world. But I bust out of there twice.

In return for being clobbered with two sets of “gross misconduct” charges (sackable) and branded a “troublemaker”, I took a good degree of pleasure in not backing down, clearing my name and wiping the floor with both sets of senior director bullies.

And the last time – at Cheshire West Council – I prevailed again, making Council Leader Mike Jones, Monitoring Officer Simon Goacher, Acting Environment Director Julian Pellatt and Resources Director Julie Gill look foolish and incompetent.

In Wirral in 2003, the incompetents were Director of Highway Services David Green, Green’s henchman and ‘investigating officer’ Nigel Jenkins and Garry Owen, a former UNISON turncoat, and Head of HR.

I left these characters trailing in my wake both times, secured victory, won access to my 32-year pension, retired and left them to carry on squabbling amongst themselves, handing out promotions and dispensing treats to their kissing-up, kicking-down, brown-nosed friends and acolytes.

At the final Cheshire West hearing, which came on my 50th birthday, the case against me collapsed and the Cheshire West cabal named above was left red-faced, bloody-nosed, bowed and stooping to pick up the pieces.

If anyone out there reading this is being bullied right now, don’t blink. Stand firm and take the fight right back to them – as long as you feel your health is up to it.

Be honest, measured, straightforward, and use their own policies and procedures against them. They’re not clever, you see. It’s all bluster, brinkmanship and the only iota of resilience they possess comes from overdosing on wacko TV bullies Gordon Ramsay and Alan Sugar.

In other words, they’re so full of shit – to put it crudely – there’s no room left for them to even conceive how to perform their jobs correctly.

So feel confident. Brandish the fine words of their internal policies and procedures up in front of their faces, like a mirror.

Then watch as the penny drops.

Keep your calm. Keep your dignity. And keep them in the spotlight, with the beam trained directly on them. Bear witness, as they shift and wriggle uncomfortably. Like worms.

Take your strength all the way up, cut a path through the serried ranks of wilting, chinless wonders at the top level … and don’t back down.

Don’t be intimidated by the suits. You are the power. You are the irresistible force versus the movable object. Don’t give them an inch. Stand tall. Don’t bow, flinch or show them any undue deference.

UK Councils are absolutely slewing with these aggressive, cowardly, deceitful creatures.

Why? Because they’re cossetted, common purposed, on a “journey”, egged on from above, feared by elected members, and they accurately reflect the same corrosive cultures found in the NHS and the wider public, private and charity sectors.

So too do these rats populate the broader realm of UK employment and business in general, where psycho and sociopathic meddling – done to hold the fort and manage reputations – is actively encouraged, rewarded in spades and covered up inside legal agreements when it all goes wrong.

My ten-year anniversary of fleeing these miserable, toxic shit holes arrived this week. It was achieved on my terms and I’ll be lifting a glass or two to celebrate 🥂. 

And I’m not telling you about this in order to grandstand or gloat. It’s done to show you that bullies are not infallible. They’re weak, half-formed, contemptible human beings – deserving of a good kicking.

Their power abuse makes it so, so difficult because they appear to hold all the cards… but little old YOU can be the one holding a “royal flush of truth”, and ready to SLAM IT DOWN.

So get stuck in and confront the gaslighting bastards.

YOU can take control. 

YOU can do it and emerge victorious, like I did.

Finally, see this written help I put together – influenced in its entirety by what I went through – and which I blogged on many years ago and updated recently:

Are you being bullied at work? Here’s some detailed advice that worked for me and helped me to retire, aged 50!

About Wirral In It Together

Campaigner for open government. Wants senior public servants to be honest and courageous. It IS possible!
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11 Responses to This week, we’re celebrating 10 years out of the Rat Race.

  1. Bobby47 says:
    September 6, 2019 at 8:47 pm

    Happy Out Of The Rat Race Birthday Cardin. Thoroughly deserved! Sadly the source of the truth and the reason this type of corporate behaviour is prevalent, particularly within public service, is because of simple human traits that many who pursue a type of power can quite easily display when faced with someone who’s perhaps a little cleverer than they are.
    Pop an ordinary ambitious Joe into the midst of a collection of other creeps who are driven by a deep needing to engratiate themselves with someone and a brewing and forthcoming problem gets germinated. If that person has that knack to laugh at the jokes in the right place, preferably not before the punchline, then this or that particular creeping twat will rise to near the top of their chosen Empire Of Dirt.
    In short, this ordinary person, the bastard creep, with an average intelligence quotient, who’s probably already reached his or her personal level of incompetence, suddenly find themselves promoted at least two levels above where they really should have been placed within the chain of command and who now are in a position of power of you. This is the reality of life in public service.
    Now dress this incompetent bungling idiot in a suit, wrap a lanyard around their scawny creeping neck, give them access to their own personal telephone extension, an email messaging system that’s global and cascades only one way that’s downwards to those way beneath and to those poor sods who chose long ago to just do their job well and not to crawl up someone’s arse, and you’ve suddenly got a corporate problem.
    That is, everyone above you is cut from the same cloth and equally as incompetent. Worse, everyone on the corporate ladder are all cognisant that they are all operational lightweights and have no business ever being placed inside their suits, they all begin the process of promoting other like minded creeping idiots to secure their Stronghold and create for themselves a Castle Keep mentality. Essentially, it’s the crazed and manic workings of a collective of narcissistic sociopaths intent on protecting themselves against any outside intelligence virus that may in time disrupt their hirearchial structure of idiots.
    Course, they then have to busy themselves. What idiot wouldn’t! They focus in on something that’s interesting. Nothing dull or boring. Something that pleases their inquisitive minds. It’s of no matter what it is. It’ll be something that probably works very well but they decide, due to some collective blue sky thinking, that they are able to improve this area of business by a factor of a few percent, completely failing to grasp that it’s an extremely difficult enterprise to improve something by a small percentage but relatively simple to pull a lever and fuck the entire thing up at great cost to the staff and the public.
    The result? Well, it’s fairly predictable isn’t it. The whole thing rapidly evolves into a ‘bag of rats’, the costs are enormous and whatever it was they hoped to achieve has now been replaced by a controlled narrative proclaiming, ‘all’s bloody well’.
    But it isn’t well. It’s not well at all. Whilst the creeping collection of incompetent bungling idiots of average intelligence at the top of the Empire Of Dirt, all dressed in suits and adorned with lanyards and collectively are all able and conditioned to sing from the same hymn sheet, the whistleblower at the bottom of the cascading email, thus far untainted by their bollocks and an inner determination never to crawl up another human beings arse, well he reports the event doesn’t he. He/She, believing that something is wrong and a corporate problem needs addressing to secure a better outcome, pops into an office of the now corrupted tyrannical hirearchy intent on telling the truth and reporting their considerable concerns.
    You’d think it’d all work out wouldn’t you. After all it’s supposed to. Well it doesn’t bloody work out does it. Not for the fool of a whistleblower it doesn’t. From hereon, the collection of corporate operationally lightweight narcissistic idiots who between them pulled that one single lever to fuck everything up, they now begin a reign of psychological warfare aimed at discrediting, undermining and marginalising the whistleblower that eventually, and it doesn’t take that long, results in anti depressants for the whistleblower, a period of garden leave because they’ve dug up some information that’s ten years old and has nothing to do with anything and before to long everyone in the workplace is to scared to speak of you or to you in case the Union Rep, who just happens to be your newest enemy because he goes golfing with the Chief Executive, decides to burn you with the same controlling tactics that were successfully deployed against the whistleblower who only ever wanted to report a problem within the organisation.
    What do I think? I think your well out of it Paul.

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  2. Bobby47 says:
    September 7, 2019 at 7:51 pm

    And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with incompetency. We’ve been managing it for decades. Days gone bye we’d vote someone into Office cognisant that they were completely incompetent and poorly equipped to lead a Country. Same with our public services. The difference between then and the now is our leaders insist upon doing things. Instead of sitting there as they once did, minding their own business, doing nothing to buggar things up and diligently working their way through an In Tray shifting piles of pointless paperwork, these bastards, all of which are slavish followers to Common Purpose, they now want to do things. Interesting things. Things that seem creative but more often than, if meddled with, result in chaos and confusion.
    The Council! They might get it into their heads to reduce speed limits from thirty to twenty. A noble cause ain’t it. Costly of course but it’s justification gets dressed up as ‘we’ve saved 747 lives.’ And it’s difficult to argue against unless you apply some common sense, grasp the fact that the new 20 mph speed restriction is causing traffic congestion and all the kids who live adjacent suddenly all become asthmatic costing the Health Service millions every year to treat 77,747 kids who are coughing themselves stupid because of yet another bright idea.
    There’s countless other examples of them fucking about making matters worse and it could all have been easily avoided if our leaders had sat at their desks and followed the example of those from decades past. Done fuck all and got paid for doing it.
    Yep! Let’s get back to a time when nobody up on high did anything and if things did go wrong, and they rarely did, the humble whistleblower was met by, ‘thanks a lot. I’ll look into it and get back to you once I’ve investigated and resolved your concerns. ‘Now, pull your pants up, don’t tell a soul and fuck off back downstairs and do your job’.

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    • Dee says:
      September 11, 2019 at 9:44 am

      Spot on Bobby! Our local authorities (and even our unions sadly) are rotten and corrupt to the core. You can bet whenever a council comes up with a hare-brained scheme like the 30 to 20mph limit (in our case, it was the handing over of public assets worth £2million to property developers – all shrouded in secrecy until the deal was done and the builders had moved in), someone in power is lining his/her pockets………

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  3. Joseph O'Neill says:
    September 11, 2019 at 8:28 am

    Many thanks for this wonderful story. I feel very inspired to continue to fight for Palestine.

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  8. Wirral In It Together says:
    April 20, 2021 at 4:29 pm

    Reblogged this on Wirral In It Together and commented:

    How to face up to senior bullies, dismantle their malicious attacks in a businesslike manner and ultimately … destroy them.

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