THE FIRST WHISTLEBLOWER LAW IN THE UK GOT DESTROYED ON ITS FIRST TRY In 1999, seven care workers at a BUPA @BupaUK care home in Bromley noticed something horrible. Elderly residents were being overdosed and physically abused by staff. So they did the normal human thing. They reported it. BUPA did the normal corporate thing. Instead of sacking the abusers, they shuffled them off to other care homes, like a bad Tinder date you just relocate instead of deleting. The seven workers, led by Eileen Chubb @CompassnInCare, kept pushing. Eventually they were squeezed out of their jobs entirely. This became the first ever case under the UK's brand new whistleblower law, the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998. Fresh law, first real test, should have been an easy win for the good guys, right. Wrong. The tribunal agreed safety rules were broken. Then it let BUPA stand up and call all seven of them liars, while the independent report proving they were right stayed locked out of the courtroom. Imagine being told you're lying, in a room where the evidence that you're not lying isn't allowed in. Parliament eventually noticed. In 2004 MP John Horam handed in their petition and the press nicknamed them the BUPA Seven. Eileen Chubb turned the whole ordeal into a charity, Compassion in Care, which has now logged over 15000 complaints from care settings. She still campaigns for #EdnaLaw, named after a resident who died after years of documented abuse that nobody with actual power bothered to stop. 25 years later the pattern hasn't changed. @stevemiddi1 @Victoria_Rixon @MLorrM @nw_nicholas @sharmilaxx Sources @BBCNews @PrivateEyeNews @guardian @Channel4News