Hello there, welcome to UK column.
I'm Ben Rubin and I am delighted to be joined today by Paul
Atherton, who is a film maker, playwright, author, artist,
journalist and social campaigner, and most importantly
for the context of today's discussion, a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Arts, Manufacturers and Commerce, more
commonly known as the RSA. Welcome, Paul.
Thank you very much, Ben. Good to be here.
Good stuff. So a lot of people I think will
be familiar with the RSA. It is a very well known name
certainly, but it'd be great if you could just give us a little
bit of background to the organization, when it was
founded, what its purpose is and and some key milestones in its
history. Sure.
Well, most people, as you say, will probably recognised it as
the RSA. The actual original title was
the Society for the Encouragement of Manufacturing,
Commerce and Arts. It was set up by a gentleman
called William Shipley who was one of the early members of the
London's first society, which is the Royal Society.
Saw the Industrial Revolution camp coming, saw the way banking
and mercantile credit was working in the City of London
and realised quite quickly that this was going to decimate the
arts and crafts. So rather than arts as in fine
art, it was the arts and crafts, it was the, the, the thatchers,
the silversmiths and the steelmakers.
And he thought, well, how, how do I protect this?
How, how am I going to be able to make sure that that group has
a voice? And rather than trying to battle
this oncoming industrial revolution and this oncoming
nature of banking, he went, no, I'll just make it as important
as those other two. And so he's founded the society
with the principles basically of protecting those sort of crafts
and arts in those environments, which by our terms today, we
call them working class roles. But obviously they, you know,
they, they are very artisan roles and very specialist roles.
But they were about to be replaced by sort of the mass
manufacturing and mass industrialisation of what was
coming in Britain. So our original idea basically
was founded to say, hey, here's a group of people, we should
protect it. It's not all about money.
It's not all about growth and industry.
It's about people. And there are a lot of people in
Britain that are going to be decimated by this.
We should embrace them and encourage them.
So that was the original ethos of the organization back all the
way in 1754. And we have at its essence,
always been a charity. And we, we, we were a charity
before the notion of charity existed.
So we had a King's charter that basically said, yes, you can
behave like this. You don't have to be in a
business model. You can do these things for the
population. And as the years progressed in
the centuries past, we, we morphed to adapt to the ages.
The thing most people will know about the Royal Society of Arts,
if they have any interest in it, is it was the organization that
came up with the notion of blue plaques.
So when the industrial revolution was knocking down
lots and lots of architecturally important buildings to build
massive factories, the RSA went bad idea.
We need this architecture. This architecture is important.
And the way they thought to protect this was say, hey, look,
someone famous lived here, don't knock this house down.
And that became incredibly powerful tool didn't wasn't
always successful, but it did shift people's opinions about
what they were knocking down. So a lot of the buildings that
remain with blue plaques on them was a direct consequence of the
Royal Society of Arts. And it was again part of that
ethos of protecting things and looking after things and
nurturing a more important asset to human nature than just give
us the money. And so we then come into sort of
the the 1800s and again, the RSA steps up when Britain needed to
place itself on the map and came up with Prince Albert, who was
our then president and Henry Cole, who was at the time all
this prior to 1912, we were known as members.
After 1912, we became fellows. He was a member.
And he said, look, we we need to create the greatest, biggest
structure that's ever lived on the planet to demonstrate just
how wonderful we are at trade. And but more importantly, he was
trying to raise funds to build what was then going to be the
South Kensington Museum. Now the South Kensington Museum,
as most people today would know it is the Victorian Albert
Museum. But he goes, well, how, how do
we fund this? So they set up the great
exhibition, this amazing glass structure that sat in Hyde Park
and then lately moved to South London, which is now known as
course Crystal Palace and and house all these amazing works
from across the world. And they crowdfunded that.
They went out to the public and said, look, we want to build the
biggest structure in the world. Will you help us do it by giving
us a donation of people did. And then they charged people to
go into that structure. And the figures for that were
amazing. They were about 100 million
visitors over a period of time. And they they came and they saw
this thing and they paid to get in.
And that money was meant to raise enough to open the
Kensington, South Kensington Museum.
It didn't just do that. It raised enough money to build
the Science Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Royal Albert
Hall and Natalie, the Albert Memorial.
That area then became known as Albertopolis.
But again, the essence of that, the Victorian Albert Museum was
originally a teaching museum. It was designed for the working
class to come in and learn. It had the world's first ever
cafe, and that cafe was a working class cafe.
If people would finish their jobs, come in, they'd be able to
get a really hearty meal for very little money and they would
have night classes there free of charge.
And again, so that this is the essence of the RSA and has been
pretty much up until the point really about 25 years ago and
the turn, turn of the Millennium.
And then we started to turn into something vastly different.
And we had the appointment of the CEO.
And with Tony Blair's idea of the third set there, which kind
of came in with this election in 97, we started to become a
business. And as that's evolved now we
are, well, we don't know what we are in truth, we're, we're not
really a charity. We're far more interested in
generating money and then not giving it to anything
charitable. So, so as as condensed as I can
do it that that's pretty much it's highlights and it's
history. Amazing.
So this is part of the bedrock of the nation ultimately, right?
I mean, talking about incredible heritage and culture.
I had no idea about the blue plaque.
So that's that's fascinating and sounds like it was directly
responsible for what did you call it, Albertopolis?
I mean, that's basically half of Knightsbridge, isn't it?
You know, it's been built on the back of this thing.
I did love the fact that when Henry Cole was was look looking
at the area, it was called Brompton.
And he didn't like the name of Brompton because it sounded sort
of downmarket and cheap and he wanted to feel salubrious.
And of course it is South of Kenton and Kensington Gardens
just at the top of the road. And so he named the the museum,
the South Kensington Museum, even when the area South
Kensington didn't exist. And the tube station lactally
came and named itself after the museum.
And he got his accomplishment by changing the name.
But yeah, I, I mean, the, the, the, the very ethos of, of the
RSA, when most of our young fellows come in, I asked them,
have you heard about the RSA? And actually quite a lot of
young people have not. But then I asked them, have you
ever taken an OCR exam? And they.
Oh, yeah, yeah, I've taken OCR exams.
Well, that sounds for Oxford, Cambridge and the Royal Society
of Arts because it was the RSA that came up with the
standardized, the idea for the standardized examination.
So it, it is literally the essence, as you say, the bedrock
of a, of a British society. And, and pretty much everything
that we do and sort of the, the nature we do in some way has
come from the, the Royal Society of Arts.
You, you look at things like the Royal Academy, for instance,
Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough were both sort of
presidents in different times and they clashed over what the
word arts meant. And Gainsborough was very much
still arts and crafts. Reynolds was kind of going, no,
no, we've, we should be evolving now.
This should be arts. So the first ever summer
exhibition that was ever held in Britain was held in the great
room at the RSA on John Adams Street.
But when Reynolds couldn't get his way, he bought Burlington
House on Piccadilly and set up the Royal Academy.
So there are all of these kind of spin offs in the Royal
Institution of, of people realising that we need to
educate the masses, we need to engage people in culture and
gender, a sense of community and build on that platform.
And that has been the driving force of our organization for
270 first years. Fascinating, I I hadn't realised
it was linked into the Royal Academy as well.
And that distinction between crafts, crafts and arts and umm,
you know, practical things that people do on a daily basis
almost, but are still creative versus the kind of high arts of
sculpture and portraiture and the more conceptual modern arts
that have come along in the past century or so.
I think that's absolutely fascinating to see how those two
things have actually kind of come from the same place.
Really brilliant and amazing. Now you've, you've mentioned
that it's, it's a fellowship. Can you describe a bit more
about what that actually means and also maybe some of the names
that we might recognise who've been fellows of the RSA over the
years? Yeah.
So as I mentioned, the, the, the, the notion of a fellow
didn't really come in till the early part of the 20th century
in 1912. But it, it was a way of
distinguishing people that were involved with the Royal Society
of Arts as not just being members.
Yeah. You were embraced into an
organization. You were, if you can imagine it,
like a Christian fellowship, a group of individuals all working
for the betterment of each other and the betterment of society.
And, and it was to begin with, it was it was considered an
honour. The post normals that we use the
FRSA Fellow Royal Society of Arts, which you can use after
your name when you become a fellow was also a very quick and
easy way to recognize other people with sort of similar
thinking or a similar ethos. Because one of the great things
about the Royal Society of Arts is it really has encaptured
people from all walks of life. It's included people like Marie
Curie, it is included people like Karl Marx, Adams, you know,
you've got the birth of communism and the birth of
capitalism with Adam Smith, the both new fellows.
Tim Berners Lee is a fellow, the creator of the Internet.
Johnny Ives is a fellow who who obviously designed the iPod and
left the other Apple product. You know, these people who have
genuinely shifted how the world works in one guise or another
have have sort of come in embraced, but they've not always
agreed. The one thing that they all
agree on is that we want to make the world a better place.
Marx obviously came about from one perspective.
Adam Smith came in from another and and as we've seen, you know,
people like Stephen Hawking who've come through the they're
they're, they're all people that have an amazing idea, an amazing
sense of improving people's lives.
And that's everybody's lives, not their lives per SE, but but
generating something that benefits British society as a
whole. And I think when again, it, it,
it comes back to that notion that we you're uniting in a
group of people with a singular goal, which is to make Britain a
better place. But how we get that we may not
agree on, but we we debate and we do so in a reasoned manner.
You know that that was the whole point of the institution is that
it brought these great thinkers, because the best ideas do not
come from a single person. The best ideas come from being
challenged and being forced to present an argument in such a
valid and immovable way that everybody then goes, oh,
actually this is the way to go. So if you again, you know, if
you look at the history of how Henry Cole and Prince Albert
eventually got Crystal Palace built, it was because they both
believed in what they were doing.
It was an incredibly arduous task.
It wasn't an easy thing. You know, we talk about it now
as if they just went, oh, hello, let's do this and off they go.
But of course, it wasn't. There were lots of politics
involved. There was there.
There was lots of machinations about judging who was actually
going to construct this thing. There was lots of fear that they
would raise the funds. What happens if it all collapse?
This is one of the biggest things that Britain is ever
going to do, you know, and, and on it goes.
But because they were, they, they were successful doing it
that time when we came to do the Festival of Britain a century
later, you know that there was a lot of that gambit and a lot of
that tactic that was already embedded.
So the, the society was able to go to government and state and
go look, let's create this amazing thing on the South Bank
to again celebrate the genius of Brits, the amazing
craftsmanship, the amazing workmanship, the way we're
standing way above the rest of the world in terms of technology
and everything like that. So that fellowship is is this
idea of joining in or previously you have to be invited then you
could apply, but you have to, you know, prove your worth.
Now we are far more like a membership where you just pay
your money, you can get in and you can use it post normal.
So the idea of fellowship and that united of people is, is
diminishing and diminishing rapidly, sadly.
Which is absolutely crucial and to the point of what we want to
talk about today, right? Because the reason that you and
I first met is that I'd had it had come to my attention.
I can't remember is actually where from the there were some,
some rumblings coming out of the RSA, some disquiet, some some
industrial action even I think had taken place over the past
year or so. And this is all happened under
the, I want to say current CEO, but I think he might have just
left Andy Haldane, formerly the Bank of England, which we will
no doubt get into as we go along.
But it sounds like this transformation from a fellowship
focused on a higher purpose, the improvement of the nation, the
protection of our heritage, is this kind of degradation of that
core purpose has been happening for a little while.
And you mentioned Matthew Taylor a little while ago, who was the
chief executive before Andy Haldane, who if I remember
correctly, was actually quite a senior advisor to Blair at one
time. Yeah, that, that's, that's quite
correct. So Matthew Taylor was the first
ever chief executive officer. It was it was a new role.
I have yet to be able to get to the bottom of how we went from
voting. We're the person that led our
institution as we all fellows have voting rights in the
charity to this external appointment by somebody that
just goes, oh, he's going to run the organization now, which
seems like counter intuitive to everything we stand for, really.
But that predated me becoming a fellow.
I became a fellow in 2000 and what do we know?
2025, two thousand and 1817. But I, I'd been involved with
the RSA, well, pretty much since I was in school.
I mean, I, I used to the Royal Institute Christmas lectures was
something I was very excited about and became part of my
Christmas tradition. And the Royal Institution had a
strong connection to the Royal Society of Arts.
When I was 16, I took an RSA typing exam.
So I became affiliated through their examination board that
existed at the time. And then by the time I moved to
London when I was in my mid 20s, I used to go regularly to the
public talks and I'd always aspired to become a fellow
there. It was one of those sort of
aspirational things you had as a well, not very few did, but
certainly as a Valley's child growing up under a Thatcher's
Brit. And it was kind of like, oh,
that's where you want to be. You want to be with this this
amazing ethos and this amazing culture, this amazing group.
So that was always an aspiration.
So when I was invited by a friend of mine who nominated me,
I was just over the moon. And I remember that, you know,
in in the great room, there is a mural that took 25 years to
paint. And I just literally start SAT,
stood actually and and sort of admired that for a good part of
chunk because I felt like I'd actually become part of this
institution. So all the way through its
history, you know, it was this idea of a group and looking
after itself and looking after its members.
And then the appointment of ACEO seemed counter intuitive to
that. I, as I say, I don't know the
mechanics of it or how it was achieved, but Matthew was there,
as you say, he was one of Tony Blair's right hand people,
senior advisors and he, from what I could tell, basically
turned the RSA into a classic think tank.
We're basically, we're sort of banging out reports and we're
not really doing anything. You know, we're holding
conferences and things. I mean, the, the, the lecture
seat series has always existed with the RSA.
So that continued as it's always done.
But this idea of moving away from getting a group of people
to find a solution to a problem was now, oh, we're going to
employ some people that work at the top of the organization and
the fellows can just pay their funds to fund that research that
will then either give or sell off to somewhere else.
And there was a distinct shift and fellows that I spoke to had
been a considerable time, but that was not really the way to
be going. Many people just kind of went,
it's not really having that much of an impact on us.
We're, you know, we're, we're still uniting and doing what
we're doing in the house, which is on John Adams St. just off
Strand here in London. But there was a distinct shift.
But when Andy Haldane came in, that really shook everybody
because nobody understood why former chief economist to the
Bank of England who had never been ACEO in his career, had not
really any third sector experience.
It's certainly not had any diverse experience outside of
banking. His entire career since he left
university was in one job, you know, progressively, but
nonetheless with the Bank of England and that was it.
So he was coming into the most multi discipline organization
that probably exists in the world where everybody comes from
different backgrounds, different careers, different ideologies,
and was now going to lead this organization to where nobody was
really sure. In addition to that, he was
getting paid to run a charity, more money than he was being
paid to be the chief economist of the Bank of England, which
all slightly took us back. And, and some of those
revelations took a little time to come to light.
As you rightly point out, when he came in, he immediately
started clashing with staff to such a point that for the first
time ever in the Royal Society's history, the staff required to
unionize. And this was huge because you
have to remember prior to these CEO appointments, staff were
fellows. So by definition, any problems,
it would be sorted communally there there, you know, there'd
be no reason to have an US and name is the you know, there
wasn't management. It was just all fellows and
suddenly subcontractors were coming in, catering were
outsourced. People at front of house staff
that had worked there for decades and decades and decades
were suddenly this, you know, sort of poo pooed and said, oh,
we're moving you to this outsourced company.
You can't renegotiate. And so basically the whole of
the existing staff, which is the, the organization was run
roughly on about 3540 people. The majority of them decided to
join the union and, and retaliate against this.
And yes, we had lots and lots of industrial action, much of which
was publicized to the detriment of the organization.
But I didn't seem to bother the trustees, which I always found
slightly strange. I, and to the point that we have
now literally had a / 100% turnover staff so that nearly
anybody that existed when I first joined.
And those people were committed to the organization for life.
You know, they weren't temps or anything.
You know, they just said they'd work for decades.
I'd all gone and even some of Haldane's own appointments who
he sort of brought in and a big fanfare went as quickly as they
arrived and and and often under very dark clouds to the point
that one of our members of staff was dismissed, took an unfair
dismissal tribunal and won it. Now we're supposed to be a
charitable institution that's all about uniting people.
And yet here we have this structure where the CEO is
seemingly so disconnected from the very ethos of what we do is
have no association with us whatsoever in it's entire
history. And we and, and he's meant to be
running this organization and seemingly just running it into
the ground. Incredible.
So you've got a, you've got a a stable, robust, mature,
extremely valuable institution. It's run in a very specific way.
And then you have two new leaders come in who essentially
just completely disrupted this thing and turned it from what it
was into something it's not. I think the, the, the, the,
essentially it sounds a bit like what we've seen happening across
the government over the past 30-40 years, right?
The introduction of private contractors, the changing of
people's employment contracts, like all of that kind of thing.
There's lots of parallels here with what we've seen happen
around, around central government, I think you know,
under various different governments.
Yeah, I, I think we've seen it across the board.
I think, I think that, you know, this was the birth of the third
sector, you know, this, this idea that we should treat our
charities as if they're businesses and bringing in
so-called CEOs on these ridiculously high salaries to
operate them as if they're businesses when in fact they're
not and they never have been or wherever they should be.
They are charities. You know, the whole point is
that they should be supplying something charitable.
But often you see these organizations now, as you
rightly point out, you know, you privatize absolutely everything.
And then the only thing that matters to anybody in those
institutions is revenue. And seemingly that revenue is
only being generated to pay the staff that aren't needed to
deliver the things not being delivered.
I mean, it just seems about the most insane scenario that you've
got that we we have taken the very word charity, which if you
look at the sort of English Dictionary definition, it's
giving to the poor and go on. Yes, well, we could do that, but
alternative, it's much better to raise donations and funds and
and you know, make my own nest with it.
You know, you know, at 200,000 a year, Andy Harding, it is, you
know, they've passed a large proportion.
We've gone from 39 staff to over 100 with many of these titles,
as David Graver says in his in his bullshit jobs, you're you're
kind of going, they just made-up.
We've got a director of fellowship and a fellowship
director. There are departments with three
managers and only one member of staff.
And you're calling me this should this is just ludicrous.
But again, there, there doesn't seem to be anybody overseeing
this. The the trustees don't seem to
be challenging this ethos. In fact, they seem to be
encouraging it. The outcome of all this is that
fellows who've been fellows for decades and decades and decades
resigned en masse. We've almost lost a 1/4 of our
fellowship. We were, we were nearing 40,000
and we're now just over 30,000. And many of those fellows now
are being brought in not really as fellows, they're just people
who are, as I said earlier, just paying their membership fees
and, and joining. We've we've got these two very
weird setups where we're bringing in people in America
and Australia and the different sort of banners.
So whilst the RSA is sort of auk charitable institution, these
these are the things that sort of not for profits or community.
I'm never quite sure what other countries do.
But, you know, again, it's just a way of bringing in revenue
because what other countries do and how they think is vastly
different to what Britain does and how it thinks.
And that also felt an element of globalization coming into our
own institution where actually the very ethos of how we were
founded is like, don't do that. We we have crafts and skills and
talents in this country that are unparalleled to such a degree
that the world comes to us. You know, there is a reason that
Marie Curie was a fellow. You know, she's frank.
There's a reason John, you know, that John Logie Bear came up in
Scotland with television. There's a reason that Mozart
came over with his father and performed in London.
You know, it draws the greatest of talent from all around the
world and, and we, we should be proud of that.
We, we should embrace that and encourage that.
And again, This is why things like the Victorian Albert Museum
was built, was to get the working class into these
establishments, to encourage them to, to help them learn and
understand. And so to watch this get
corporatized and profitized for the sake of a the the usual sort
of, I hate to use the term 1%, but that is the essence of what
it is, is this sort of small cabal group of individuals who
are now having not only taken over nearly the, the government,
the corporations and everything else have now managed to tap
into the charities and turn that into their own revenue.
So. It's just mind blowing.
It sounds like the organization is imploding, frankly.
I mean, if you're losing 25% of your fellowship down from 40,000
to near. So I think I just looked on the
website and said that it's now 31,000.
So you've got thousands of people who ultimately are your,
you know, it's not just about the, the membership that they're
paying, it's also about their, their own personal contributions
to the community and the, the, the, you know, the, the whole
kind of spirit in essence of, of, of the, of the society.
I mean, to, to what extent, I mean, some of the things you
just said, they're a ludicrous, right?
I mean, the idea that you've got 3 managers in a department with
one employee, right? I mean, that's just, that's just
crazy. I mean, is, is, that is what
we're looking at here? Is it just mismanagement always?
Do you think that there's something deliberate?
I mean, are they actually trying to destroy it in some way?
I think you've got a double edged sword.
I think I, I think, as I mentioned, Andy had no
affiliation with the Royal Society of Arts, had no
understanding of what it was before he joined, never had the
role of CEO before. And I'm, and so there was a
level of just sharing competence that came in with that.
But at the same time, you know, we've got a board of trustees
that includes the, you know, the, the chairperson, Sandra
Boss, a Black Rock and, and you, you kind of go in where, why are
these appointments kind of accepted?
Because ultimately they're going to come in with that same old
classic finance thinking and actually what's required in an
institution, an organization like the Royal Society of Arts,
Is it a vast array of different approaches and people with vast
and differing backgrounds? And we just don't see that
reflected. So I think on the one side,
you've got somebody who is completely incompetent and
unknowledgeable about the institution running it.
And in the process of doing that, I believe panicked,
created his own little cabal and just, you know, surrounded
themselves with yes people and in the process of doing that,
managed to alienate the majority of active fellows.
And on the other side, you've got people using it as profile
for other things. You know, Lloyd Grossman has
just been appointed our chairman in the past year.
Tim Miles was was former to that.
And again, you know, they're they're both very
institutionalized people. They come from, you know, very
set kind of corporate world and it's just not incongruent for
for something like the RSA. So I think it is one, it's
incompetence and the other I think it is tactical.
And I think we've seen it with Tufton St. and all the various
organizations like the Alan Smith Institute and all the
things that spin off that, where these organisations are now
tapping into cultural institutions that are well known
to the public at large, but certainly within their own
networks as some kind of esteem badge so that they can do off.
You know, I'm the chair of this or I'm the trustee on this board
and things. And that helps in other career
paths. Certainly it certainly does.
I mean, this is just astonishing really this, this, this kind of
globalization I think is fascinating.
And I'm just looking at the trustee board here and I can see
that there's, there's a significant board.
We can talk a bit more about them in a moment.
But then also the fact that you've got a separate board for
the RSA in the US and for Oceania.
And actually, none of that has got anything to do with England
or the UK or you know, what, what the institution was
originally set up to, to, to represent ultimately.
Now you've talked a little bit about commercialization, it
sounds like. And actually you also use the
term think tank earlier, which I think is quite interesting,
given particularly the, the, the, the political background of
Matthew Taylor, right, in particular, because that's
certainly his world. So you've now got this thing
which which was all of the stuff that we've described, they're
now trying to turning into a think tank slash.
It almost sounds a little bit like a kind of Soho House type
thing that they're going for. Is that?
Does that resonate with you? Sadly, yes, because one of the
appointments of the head of Fellowship actually came from
Soho House. So he, he, he was the head of
membership of Soho, which everybody thought was a really
weird thing. A couple of points to note.
The house which stands on John Adams St., which was designed by
the Adam Brothers. So it's got a myriad of Allen
fireplaces and goodness knows what the cost of that would be,
but it obviously belongs to us. So it was called an owned by us
on that land is open to the public.
So it is part of it's charitable process.
At the library, the cafe, the the sort of workspaces, anybody
can just go in, you have to sign in, but nothing prevents you
from doing that. So we're not a membership house.
You know, you're not paying your money into the fellowship to, to
get access to a building, which is how most membership buildings
operate. You know, they, they, you know,
the conduit is probably the closest and the most modern
thing to the Royal Society of Arts, which I think has existed
enough for about 10 years. And they, their ethos is very
similar to ours, but it's far more a classic membership style
where you pay thousands of pounds to get access to, you
know, private area and private spaces that no one else can get
access to. That is not true of the Royal
Society of Arts on John Adams St.
Anybody can walk in, anybody can use the library, anybody can use
the Cafe. So the notion of kind of trying
to structure it like a membership in that way is
ludicrous because you're like going, well, you don't need to
pay to get into the building. So if that's if it's access to
the building or app, it just turn out.
So the fellowship fees were originally structured to fund
some of the organizations, but, you know, also to to go to poor
people there, you know, help to help with, with, with, with the
issues of the day. And so now it seems that the
revenue source, as I said earlier, is simply to fund the
wages of the staff that are now employed, not as it was
originally to support the fellows, but to work off in its
own little sort of operational thing with this banner of the
RSA above it. And so, yeah, I mean it, it's,
it's, it is a strange thing to kind of go, oh, become a fellow
because and if you look at any of the, the material these days,
it's like, why would you become a fellow?
It's kind of like I, I think anybody with any intelligence.
And we've seen it happen in the house.
It basically became a very, very inexpensive we work, you know,
people started realizing, oh, I can come in and use this and,
you know, a computer up and I haven't got to pay the fees of,
of a we work office. And it changed the dynamic and
it changed the way people behaved in the house and it
changed everything. And again, that's part of it's
commercialization. But there is no real revenue
source, nor should they be from the Fellows Fund, which should
basically be going to charitable purpose which is helping poor
people endure their sufferings of being poor.
They selling corporate memberships like the company can
companies come along and like buy them for their staff and
that kind of thing now? Yeah, that's it.
That again, I think that came under Andy's auspices.
You know, after the mass exodus of Fellows, they, they've tried
to get corporate memberships and all kinds of things.
And I think we've had a couple sign up again.
You, you look at it and go, I don't see what the advantages of
a corporate membership because access to the house is free.
What are you paying for? You know, it's you paid to be a
fellow because you wanted to help other people.
If you're just buying that, you'd be better off going to
Soho House or Home House or, you know, any of the other modern
clubs that we know exist or even any of the older clubs that
still exist. So yeah, it was, it's a strange,
strange, strange idea to try and corporatize this in that way.
And it's clearly it's failing and you know, it's not working
for them because they're, they're losing revenue and the
house has always been hired out as a venue.
So, you know, weddings are a big revenue source for the
institution and, and sort of other big events and filming and
all that kind of things. Because obviously, you know,
we're, we're quite an old and realistic, I think the grade, if
we're not grade one, we're grade 2 star listed.
And, and so you know, it, it's a great venue to do great things
and that that's a revenue source.
And that happens on the weekends so that again, the club doesn't
open on the weekends. So you know, it isn't a home
house. It isn't.
It's very much kind of working environment of Monday to Friday,
although we have now got a new bar.
Sounds like there's a bit of an identity crisis going on down
there and, and a lot and a lot of value extraction, frankly,
right. Because you, you, you've
mentioned the, the, the, the, the actual physical building on
John Adams St. And I can attest to the fact
that it is a beautiful, beautiful building in an, in an
astonishing location. And it sounds like some people
have come along and gone, Oh, we'd like a bit of that.
We'll take that. And, you know, we'll make as
much money as we can out of it in a very cynical fashion.
You've mentioned to me when we spoke the other day some frankly
really quite troubling stuff about the archive.
It'd be great to hear a bit a bit more about that.
And what's been going on with the the the assets that the
society has been entrusted to care for, Frankly, that it
doesn't appear to be doing that anymore.
No, I mean, this is probably I, I would call this the worst type
of cultural vandalism I've ever encountered in my entire life.
So when I, when I first became aware of the well society, I was
very aware of its archive. It had a brilliant archive
display out. And the things that are kept in
the archive are obviously the classic things you'd have with
any organization, minutes and meetings and things.
But these minutes include people that invented electricity, the
first demonstration, the telephone in Britain.
They, you know, these are amazing things.
Plus the fact we have an art collection that much of which is
on loan to the National Gallery. And Eve, who's the head of
archive, had been there 12-13 years.
And suddenly in the last six months, the entire department,
everybody now has been either let go or pressured out.
Or one of my friends who volunteered in the archive was
just ceremoniously told neighbor to come back again.
And there doesn't seem to be anybody now protecting this
archive, which as you rightly point out, this should be
considered a national archive. This is the nation's work.
And some of the most important inventions and creations have
come out of the Royal Society of Arts and some patents.
And it's just an amazing thing. And it's some of it is actually
in the building the parts of the archive or elsewhere.
But the issue is now is, which I'm sure will come on to, you
know, I've had a conflict with the RSA and in checking the,
the, the new rules that they created, they now have the
auspices to be able to sell anything they want to generate
revenue with the broad Society of acts.
And you're like going that, well, that shouldn't be a thing.
You shouldn't just be able to flog off whatever you want to
whenever you want to if you're losing money.
But again, nobody seems to care. I've raised it with the Charity
Commission. They don't seem to care.
I've raised it with the trustees.
They don't seem to care. And it seemingly, you know, the
only people that do care are genuine fellows, and most of
whom sadly now have resigned their fellowships and and moved
on elsewhere. Unbelievable.
I mean, this, this really concerns me, right?
I mean, I think you use the term cultural vandalism.
I would agree completely. People are basically selling off
national assets for their own benefit and to the total
detriment of the nation. And this is happening at the
RSA. It's happening everywhere else
as well. Absolutely appalling behaviour.
And the fact that they're actually rewriting their own
governance essentially to make this OK as well.
I mean, it's just so cynical to hear this kind of thing.
Yeah, but as you say, I think it's commonplace.
There just doesn't seem to be anybody in Britain right now
that there are no grown-ups left is what I would say.
There's nobody coming in going. Well, that's a really silly idea
now, you shouldn't do that. Should you put the nice painting
back? They're just not doing it.
And, and you know, for me, the most disappointing thing was the
Charity Commission. I genuinely thought when I
raised this with the Charity Commission that the least that
they would do was go and investigate to see what's gone.
Because I mean, none of this seems to be public, you know,
I'm only aware of the archive department going because I was
working so closely with them, you know, and it was shocking.
And especially because. Eve was so well respected
amongst the archive community. If you go, you know, to any
other institution and, and talk about Eve, she was always held
very, very highly amongst people because she was so good at her
job and understanding how precious these items are and how
important it is to keep these things logged and protected at a
time when a lot of archivists are going, oh, we don't have
money, we can't do this, we can't.
And she didn't do any of that. She was like, no, no, this is my
life's work. I'm going to, you know, and it's
for the best again. Once again, it's for the
betterment of everyone in Britain and that's how people
should think and that's how all the fellows used to think.
But sadly, that's no longer the key.
Indeed. So it sounds like you've been
making a a bit of a nuisance of yourself so far as the trustees
and the board would probably have it inside the RSA and
frankly blowing the whistle on some inexplicable and
inexcusable behaviour, frankly. Could you talk to me a little
bit about that, this process that you've been going through
and how you've been targeted? It all started with an idea a
long time ago that a woman called Anne Longley and I were
chatting some years ago at a London fellows meet up down in
Greenwich. And we both I've got a tech
background and she's she is a tech and we're both going, we
should have a platform where we can share ideas and quickly
connect with each other and say I've got I'm doing this.
Let's get a group together who's in type thing.
And I'm really bad at kind of not being quick and proactive.
So if if I pick something up, I run with it and I get the job
done. So a lot of people used to ask
me, I said, Paul, where do you get your funding from?
From your films? And I'm like, well, every
project's different. But one thing I guarantee you is
I never get grants. And they go, why?
And I said, because it takes a grant maker three months to make
a decision. And in that time I will have
come up with the idea, made the film, put it there and moved on
to the next project. So I immediately started hitting
this sort of bureaucratic brick walls and I kind of went, OK,
well, that's clearly not. However, Ann picked up the ball
and ran with it and over about a 2 1/2 three-year period,
eventually persuaded the RSA to build a social media platform,
basically a sort of a LinkedIn for for RSA.
Sadly though, it morphed into something neither of us had
hoped and it basically became a third party product bought in
the States. It's a white label product
called Circle and it it works exactly the same way as every
other social media platform and you basically buy it, find your
name on the front of it and and present to your audience that
it's yours. So anyways, as part of the
innovation team of this, I was asked to beta test it and I got
on there and the first thing I spotted was the terms and
conditions with the exact same as Twitter or Facebook's, which
was completely anti the RSA data protection rules.
So I brought it to their attention went, hey, this circle
thing shares your data and it links you to other platforms and
they can sell your information. And I'm, it's fine if people
want to do that because, you know, how do people use Facebook
and LinkedIn and all the other things, but they need to be
aware of this. And I, I got an e-mail back
going, Yep, Paul, absolutely. Thanks for bringing this to our
attention. We'll make sure it's up front
and center that this is a third party product and that you're
actually coming out of the Rs as own sort of date protection.
And I thought that's perfectly acceptable.
Everybody knows what's going on. We move on from there.
What actually happened is they buried it in the terms and
conditions of the RSA. And when you sign up for Circle
now, it just says, you know, you're an RSA member.
Click here to join Circle. And the majority of people, they
just think it's an RSA product, which it isn't.
And so that was that was my start in conflict because people
then said, oh, you're trying to dissuade people from signing up
to serve. And they clearly spent a lot of
money on this. When I asked why they didn't use
an open source product, I was told that, oh, it's open source.
Confused some of our older bellows.
And I'm like, well, I'm not buying that because most people
who work in open source came from Gen.
X and boomers. Most people who are sort of Gen.
Z millennials don't even know what open source is, let alone
anything else. But anyway, but nonetheless, you
can learn, you know, we're, we're, we're intelligent people.
You, you can learn. And an open source product would
mean it embedded with our ethos. And one of the biggest ironies
is Amanda Brock, who is the head of Open source UK, is a fellow
and nobody thought to approach her and kind of go, hey, Amanda,
you're a fellow. What should we do?
Do this. So again, it was a bunch of
people knowing very little about the technology, asking another
bunch of people who knew even less about technology, about
which technologies they use rather than the resources, some
of the greatest technological talent that we have as part of
our fellowship. And I think that was a classic
demonstration of why the organization is splitting up the
way it is. And yeah, so I, I, I, I was seen
as a, as a troublemaker and that was kind of the start.
And I was mortified at the bad press we were getting during the
industrial revolution. And I was also mortified about
how fellows who are uniting together to try and support the
staff and, and trying to be what I would consider fellows were
being shut down consistently. They were being barred from
coming into the building. They, they, they, they, they
couldn't contribute. And so I wrote a sub stack about
it called for the love of fellowship and basically
explaining my passion for the organization, how much I love it
and how much I dislike what's happening to it at the moment.
I'm trying to put a bit of a rallying call for any fellows
that that were in my sphere to kind of unite and and push back
against this sort of destruction really of our of our beloved
institution that resulted in the RSA management telling me that I
had brought the organization into disrepute.
And that claim has varied from me bullying staff members,
allegedly, which actually, when you look at the evidence, and
I've supplied that to you of an e-mail of the person I'm
supposed to have bullied. It was him bullying me and me
saying I'm not dealing with you anymore.
You've upset me, leave me alone. And then him going, well, you've
upset me now. And apparently that was me
bullying him. Yeah.
And, and according to our bylaws, Oh no.
So let's get this straight. So the first thing I, I hear
about it, I get an e-mail from Andy Haldane in one of the most
ridiculous emails I think I've ever received from a living
human being, saying you cannot speak to other fellows or staff
at the RSA. And I'm like, well, considering
most of these people that I know at the RSA and my friends, are
you telling me I can't communicate with my friend?
And I didn't get a response to that.
I then kind of escalated this up to Tim Iles going, look, this is
ridiculous. I mean, this is an embarrassing
e-mail from somebody that's supposed to be a chief exec.
It's supposed to be professional, supposed to be
empathetic, supposed to be compassionate.
And actually it's just telling me I can't do something because
I've done something he doesn't like.
That should not be acceptable to the chair of of our institution.
Him instead of investigating anything or doing anything, just
wrote back to me saying I've spoken to Andy and I agree with
everything he says was like, well, that's not helpful.
So then I reached out to the Charity Commission going look,
this is a structure. We predate you, by the way.
So, you know, as a charitable organization, we we came come
under the King's charter and not under the charity laws.
That's going to be really complicated.
We're also a voting fellowship. So we're unique in that in terms
of charity. How do you treat this
differently? And they go, we don't, we just
treat you like like a normal charity.
So you're like, right, so you don't have enough law or
understanding of what we're doing here.
So they were a dead end. And and yeah, and they
culminated in the subset. They then go, right, we're going
to kick you out off. So they dropped me an e-mail
saying we had a meeting, we had a vote.
You've got to go. But you do have, according to
our bylaws, our made-up bylaws, you do have a right to an
appeal. Would you like to an appeal?
And I was like, well, yeah, that's a no brainer.
And so they set up the first meeting for this appeal, which
they were going to do online. And they said, you can't do it
online, you're going to have to do it in person.
And they said, oh, we're not doing that.
We're not doing this. So basically I had two rounds of
appeal that I wasn't even present at.
But they both sort of went, well.
We can't agree to expelling you until I got to my third and
final round. And this was when Sandra Boss
from BlackRock was on the panel and the head of CIPD and the
former director of the House of Commons, first director of the
House of Commons. And I'm sitting in this room
with these three people and we're going through, you know
what I've done wrong? And in the first round, I was
like, I actually don't know what I'm trying to be expelled for
because it's been a moving target.
First it was close bringing the organization into distribute.
Then it's because I'm bullying staff.
Now. I don't know what it is today.
And they all all agreed that actually it wasn't clear they
were going to go away. They were going to get this
thing done. And then we came back the next 1
and in the next one, it should have been the final hearing.
According to the bylaws, there should have been no other
hearing. This is full and final.
Whatever the decision was at this meeting was going to be.
And the decision that came out of this meeting is that we
cannot uphold the reason to expel you.
Ergo, we're not agreeing with your expulsion, but we're not
going to let you enter the house.
It's like, well, and, and we've also had a decision that we're
going to bring some external person in to, to make the final
decision. And I'm like, well, that's not
in your bylaws. That's not what your bylaws say.
And they're very, very, very clear and they're very, very
emphatic in this particular context.
The rest of them are wishy washy.
But on this one issue, this final hearing had to be the
final hearing, clear and emphatic.
And they brought in somebody external who apparently did some
reading, didn't get in touch with me on any level, didn't
talk to me, didn't interview me, didn't ask me any questions and
said, oh, no, I agree that you should be expelled.
So you're being expelled. And in this response is, again,
you've got, they've actually gone.
Yeah, we broke the bylaws. We banned you from the building
when we shouldn't have done. We did this wrong.
We did that wrong. We did the other wrong.
But it's all right because you're gone now.
But I haven't. I'm still here.
I'm still trying to figure this out.
Yes, it sounds like they manufactured an outcome that
they were looking for to get rid of someone who was causing them
an inconvenience. And yes, that's not that
unsurprising, frankly, given a lot of what you've just
described to me, you know, in terms of this takeover of the
institution. Now you, you have kind of
mentioned a couple of people there.
I'll just focus. You mentioned Sandra boss.
So this she's actually the, the, the head of the chair of
BlackRock UK, right? So these are very powerful,
influential people. Is there anyone else on the
board that people should be aware of that you think is, you
know, a particular interest? I mean the, the three people,
and I can't really, you'll probably be able to look at
their names quicker than I, but one is the head of the CIPD,
which is a charge in issue. Personal development of all the
people you'd think would make sure that somebody in my
situation would have been getting the best protections
would have been him. And the other was the former
director of the House of Commons.
So I mean, they, they, they, they were not inconsequential
individuals by any stretch of the imagination.
So we've got Ian Ayles, who is the treasurer of the RSA.
So he he was the director general of the House of Commons.
Commons, yeah. Yeah, then.
Then was there another man you said?
The head of the CIPD. David D'souza Yeah, OK, there's
some pretty serious people on here.
My friend Richard supported me in, in the meetings.
And you know, one, one of the key things, what we kept saying
is, you know, where's the evidence to back this stuff up?
You know, I, I, you claim that I bullied, you claim that I done
XY and Z, some of these things. That's the level of, you know,
criminal activity. You know, if, if you've been
bullying someone to, to, to such an extent, but they, they didn't
provide any. And you know, one of the, the,
the most laughable things is that after we've had this, they
said, oh, the RSA said we've, we've given them new evidence,
like, well, after the judgement you've gone on, well, that
didn't work out for us. So I have some new evidence that
I've never seen ever. So I've never been able to
comment on it or, or retaliate against it.
So, yeah, as, as you say, it was clearly manufactured.
But again, no protections, nothing from the Charity
Commission, nothing from the trustees.
And I should point out that of all the sort of tick boxes in
inclusivity, I'm probably, I'm probably the bingo card of them
all. Because you know, I, I, I watch
a mixed race. I come under the banner of Black
Caribbean other. I have a disability in that I
suffer with MECFSI am reliant on disability DWP payments.
I've been homeless for 15 years. And you know, you're like going
of all the people that they that an organization like the RSA
should be rallying around and supporting and going, my gosh,
you've got all that going on, yet you're still producing
films. You're still, you know, bringing
attention to the public of the the failures in various systems
all across the UK to try and make other people's lives
better. Their approach is you're
bothering us, go away. Well, you're asking lots of
inconvenient questions about what exactly is it they're up to
back there, you know, that never goes down well.
OK, this is fantastic. Thank you so much, Paul.
This would be really interesting.
Just just on a final point, at an institutional level, what
would you like to see the RSA do and get back to in terms of
it's, it's it's future direction?
Go back to what we were. Go back to a fellowship, a
fellowship that elects its leaders, that is a group of
individuals who come together to solve single problems.
So, you know, whether it's looking at welfare or money or
health, that we we go right, OK. Every time that there's been a
major problem in Britain, it has been a group of people in the
RSA who've got together and gone.
If we do this, this, this and this, and here's the talent and
here the expertise and here are the connections, we can fix this
problem in a matter of days or weeks or months.
And that's what I want to see back.
I want to see a fellowship of united, talented people with
their core ethos about helping and supporting other human
beings in the British Isles, being led by someone that they
have elected to lead. That sounds like exactly the
kind of institution that we need to have in this country right
now. That's been a fantastic
conversation. Thank you so much for your time.
Paul Rafferton, FRSA, for all those listening and watching
back home. Thanks for watching.