The Canaries: Twenty British Whistleblowers Who Changed the World
Alex Grant

·       In 2024 whistleblowers are suddenly all over the British news media: blowing the whistle on the Poat Office scandal, and sex attacks carried out by the former Harrods owner Mohamed Al-Fayed and the clergyman John Smyth (which has just prompted the resignation for the archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby). Even the cosy world of primetime television is rocked by allegations about inappropriate behaviour of the MasterChef presenter Gregg Wallace.

·       In all these cases, complaints that were first made many years – or sometimes decades – ago are only now coming to public light. Whistleblowing usually entails jeopardy. Whistleblowers who raise the alarm about wrongdoing within institutions are often ignored or marginalised. When they take their concerns to outside bodies or the media they are often fired, forced to resign, or smeared by counter-allegations. In some cases, whistleblowers are prosecuted, jailed or threatened with violence, and some may have been killed to ensure their silence.

·       These cases expose a long-standing suspicion of whistleblowers in British society. In all of them whistleblowers are only being belatedly praised after the mainstream media took their stories up, or after the public figures they blew the whistle on have died and can no longer bring libel proceedings.

·       Whistleblowers in Britain have often been – and still are - ignored by the media, or denigrated as cranks and busybodies. In America, whistleblowers such as Daniel Ellsberg (who leaked the Pentagon Papers, a secret account of the Vietnam War, to the New York Times in 1971), and the Watergate reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, are seen as national heroes. They have few equivalents in modern British history. Many recent British scandals, such as the Grenfell Tower fire and the contaminated blood saga, feature very few whistleblowers: no-one saw any point in speaking out.

The Canaries: Twenty British Whistleblowers Who Changed the World will challenge the myth that British history has few heroic whistleblowers. It will focus on twenty whistleblowers in post-war Britain, from the end of World War Two to the present day, whose whistleblowing was particularly courageous, or which had a long-lasting effect on British society, and the wider world. Above all, they are great stories.