Professional regulators exist to protect the public. They’re there to catch bad medical practice, dodgy legal advice, dishonesty and unsafe work. That is the job they were given.
More and more, though, they’re taking an interest in what professionals say in their own time, and policing political, social or religious views they express in their private lives.
People can lose their livelihood over this, and nobody should lose it for sharing an opinion. And it’s not just the people who get sanctioned who pay for it, when one person is investigated over a lawful opinion, everyone else notices, self-censors, and keeps their head down.
That matters to you even if you’re not a nurse or a lawyer. Open debate inside a profession is how the rest of us find out when something has gone wrong. We need nurses who can question a health policy, teachers who can question a curriculum, and engineers who can say a standard is wrong. That stops when the risk is your career.
