RSGB: trouble at the top - again (updated)

Oh dear!  The RSGB, never a favourite organisation of this blog, has just found itself losing a young, capable and experienced Board member.

Young, professional and capable: precisely the kind of person the RSGB - and all of us - cannot afford to lose.  It's a real f**k-up. Image: M0MUX

 

And the RSGB can't hide what's going on. I'll let Andy Mace, M0MUX - no less a figure than a senior engineer with Sky UK - speak for himself, through a text screen grab that was made public via Twitter:

I think these very regrattable and long-standing aspects of the RSGB are something we will all recognise.  Quite what the RSGB will do, beyond try to pretend it didn't happen, is anybody's guess.  But I remain a non-member, and will continue to be so for as long as this anachronistic, out-of-touch bunch of people run the show.

Note also Andy's principled approach to representation - he recognises he was voted-in by the members, and explains to them - fully - why he's stepped down. 

That's very much the kind of accountability you won't find from the RSGB, not least because, as a private company, it isn't covered by the UK Freedom of Information Act. Its MDs have, in the past at least, also refused to disclose how much, exactly, they were paid. Then, all they would say was what the accounting laws dictated - 'over £60k' (I understand it has fallen below this now, but by how much, nobody knows). 

An organisation partly funded by members, but not fully accountable to those members. I wonder why things keep going wrong?

UPDATE: Inevitably, it has now started to turn ugly. Len Paget (an RSGB Board member at the time of writing) may be able to rely on the 'it's my personal account, not the RSGB's' defence, but this kind of thing really doesn't look good, and is an astronishingly childish thing to do in response to M0MUX's departure:

 

Screen grab from Amateur Radio UK group Facebook thread 9th Jan 22.