Is it past time UK therapists had a trade union?

I’d end up with no affiliation to a national body at all if it was the ethical thing to do to reject them all and stop paying their membership fees.

The trajectory and impact of the protesting response to UKCP’s announcement last week, that it has pulled out of the Memorandum of Understanding protecting LGBTQIA clients from being peddled snake oil conversion nonsense, will be watched closely by what we might call their competition.

The truth is, they all exist to make money and grow in influence, and therefore power. Do they do good work even so? A lot of the time, yes. That must be acknowledged. Can they damage the reputation of therapy, and introduce barriers to getting into the professions, finding employment, getting fair wages? It happens. Do any of them provide liveable scholarships and bursaries (not just token modest amounts) to encourage and support working class, Black, disabled, and LGBTQIA people, to name only some of the disadvantaged and underrepresented groups in society, into the therapeutic professions? Not to my knowledge.

There’s plenty of talk but not enough walk, for sure. As is, we’ve an absurd situation in UK law whereby therapists don’t need to belong to any supposedly representative organisation in the UK, with anyone being able to ‘set up shop’ as a therapist even without any training or qualifications, let alone ethics and guiding principles, and yet the organisations aren’t exactly trying to pull in new members or maintain those they’ve got, not with their high membership costs and poor service.

My own take on all of this and wider contextual stuff, of barriers to diversifying the therapeutic workforce, along with the high costs and complexity of such grand follies as the Scoped framework, is that all of it boils down to a set of control mechanisms, regulations and frameworks that are being, if not exactly corrupted, warped and bent out of shape. This once gradual but hugely concerning move, away from solid ethical principles, is now potentially going to be accelerated by the UKCP withdrawing support for, and solidarity with, the trans community – and it is rumoured to be followed in its reprehensible action soon by another body. These organisations appear run like exclusive privileged clubs primarily for the money. Is it true, though? I don’t know. They’re certainly not sufficiently transparent about their workings.

What we really need, like doctors and nurses and many other professions, is a trade union willing to listen to and act upon decisions initiated and directed by its membership, ethical in its construction and unwavering principles, resistant to media and party political pressure, working hard with the aim of nurturing and protecting both therapists and clients, enabling greater access as well, and campaigning without fear of governmental reprisal, social media mobs, and false newspaper headlines.

The chances of this happening are zero, but only because the truly steadfast professionals working on the frontline of client care put up with so much as individuals, only ever aggregating online and in person at conferences to talk about the work itself, when there’s no reason we can’t also gather to fight for real, beneficial and systemic change from the roots of the tree upwards, not only for the LGBTQIA community but other underrepresented groups who know full well when they are being used or discarded, the support for them being fickle, subject to which way the party political winds are blowing, rather than held fast and stable by genuine ethical conviction.

Perhaps UKCP’s wilful dereliction of its obligation to do what’s right will turn out to be the hinge moment that pushes the other counselling and psychotherapeutic ‘representative’ bodies to react energetically to ensure UKCP stays an outlier, a rogue element of dwindling relevance, with those other organisations backing off from considering taking the same action themselves.

I wouldn’t be working as a counsellor if I didn’t have some optimism and a measure of faith in people being able to do the right thing. Wrong happens all the time. The last thing we should ever do is shrug and be silent when we see and know a thing to be wrong and bad, whether we’ve been doing what we do to help people for 40 years or a year.

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