Free Lucy Letby Protest

Part 2 - The Protest and Narratives

On 17th March 2025, a protest took place in Liverpool outside the Thirlwall Inquiry stating the innocence of a nurse, Lucy Letby, who has been convicted of murdering several babies. For the problems with the case against Letby, see Part 1.

The Protest

The protest took place between 9 and 10am outside Liverpool Town Hall. The protest was called by the Spartacist League, which is a UK Trotskyist group. While the protest was called by this group, they explicitly stated in their promotion of the protest that anyone who agreed with the message of Free Lucy Letby could/should attend.

I don’t know how many attendees were affiliated with this group. There were only a few attendees at this event (less than 100) so I would guess the majority are Spartacist League members.

The Spartacist League, because they are a Marxist group, have a particular spin on things. Marxist groups, by and large, believe that even a capitalist/bourgeois state can provide important concessions to the working class and that these concessions are worth defending. (At this point in my life, and I confess I have thought differently in the past, I believe the only stance to take is that against anything that enhances state power and control on principle, and that radical decentralisation is the only possible means to prevent corruption).

As such, the framing put forward by the Spartacist League is that of a hard-working and competent nurse framed up for systemic failures, such as the sewage mentioned in Part 1. This is true as far as it goes, in that I do believe the Countess of Chester Hospital consultants and the police sought to scapegoat Letby for these failings by accusing her of deliberately murdering babies.

The Spartacist League links the failings of the NHS to the right wing agenda of reducing the amount of funding available to the NHS, which is why these failings exist. The League (correctly) sees Labour and the Conservatives as part of the same system (they both support the same key policies such as, say, imperialist wars).

Fundamentally, the League perceives the NHS as worth defending as an institution that provides health care to ordinary people free at the point of use and funded via taxation. The establishment sees the problem as an allegedly ‘rogue’ nurse such as Letby, whereas the opposition sees the problem as the lack of funding and corruption in management. While corruption in power structures is a real issue, neither of these narratives examines the allopathic medical paradigm as an issue.

The Allopathic Paradigm

The allopathic medical paradigm is based upon two broad factors – the separation of Western societies from natural medical knowledge, and the rise of the chemical industries in the late 19th century (the root of the modern pharmaceutical industry).

Western populations were separated from natural medical knowledge via the phenomenon of the Witch Trials. Female healers, who served the interests of the people they attended, were viciously exterminated under the guise of the Church. While the Church’s aim was to increase its own power, the Witch Trials had the effect of eliminating any competition that could arise to the allopathic paradigm in Western societies.

The second factor, the chemical industry, came about as a result of the Industrial Revolution, particularly in Germany. This industry directly spawned the pharmaceutical industry. The pharmaceutical industry is the basis of the modern NHS, because although it is directly run by the state, it purchases all of its drugs via the pharmaceutical industry, and its treatments are mostly dependent upon this industry.

Returning to Lucy Letby, she was an operative within this particular paradigm, and an agent of such. Any (inadvertent) harm she did would have been as an operative within the paradigm itself. For example, her Wikipedia page states that:

[I]n April 2016, she administered antibiotics to an infant that was not prescribed them, which she misclassified as a “minor error”.

I would bet any nurse, doctor, etc. has done the same thing or similar, and if they have a long enough career, probably multiple times.

Anyone on those wards could have caused harm to those babies, through this kind of method, or through a drug harming a baby more generally. It is much more plausible that this happened, than the alternative of Letby as psychopathic baby killer.

One final point to make. The allopathic paradigm believes its control over nature is complete. The fact that these babies were highly vulnerable and would have been at high risk of death even with the best of intentions is ignored. This links directly to the ideological belief of absolute control over nature, which is fundamental to allopathic medicine.

Conclusion

I believe the murder charges against Lucy Letby are most likely unjust and that the conviction in this case is unsafe. I believe her defence lawyers did not present a good case for her innocence. There does need to be another trial in this case.

This should not be confused with believing that the allopathic medical system should be defended. Letby was a low-level operative within that system, who took the blame for its failings. She bears no more or less guilt than any other similar operative.