I knew what a kangaroo court was before I knew why it was called that. I had imagined that the word kangaroo could have been swapped for ‘muppets’ but without the alliteration. It’s when I learned that it is about jumping the bit in the middle where you mess around with justice and get straight to the punishment part that it made proper sense to me.
Yes, it’s Standards Commissioner time again. I thought it might be helpful just to keep following some of this because I suspect that many of you have more of a sense of the fact that there is a rather Kafkaeque nature to Scottish public life at times than of what it is actually like to be stuck in it.
To show you I want to pick up three stories, those of Fiona Higgins, Sid Perrie and Jennifer Stewart. Each shows the same thing; when it is decided that you have acted against the interests of Scotland’s ruling classes, evidence and justice are irrelevant.
The case with Fiona you will know if you’ve been reading me. She is the Councillor who caught senior council officials acting in a manner which seems clearly to me to be malfeasance. So she pursued it, complained – and was punished, because you can’t criticise an official even if they are in the wrong.
In fact as best I can tell an official in Scottish public life can go on a full-on rampage across the institution they are in and there are only two courses of action, both of which require silence. You can report it to the police and wait four years, or you can made a polite inquiry to the chief executive of whatever organisation it is and hope they do something. If they don’t, there you go.
Fiona finds the finance director to be hiding crucial information from councillors in a way that makes it impossible for them to undertake their democratic duty, so she pursues this and precisely because she identifies unacceptable practice and makes it public (the real sin here apparently) she has already been found ‘guilty’. Now she simply awaits sentencing.
By ‘found guilty’ I certainly don’t mean on the balance of evidence. She tried to submit evidence to her sentencing hearing that the official acted improperly and that she had an Article 10 right to expose this in the public interest. This is a strong defence – so the Standards Commissioner refused every shred of evidence about the official’s behaviour.
‘We operate on the basis that guilt you can’t challenge is preordained and we’re just here to punish you so not interested in evidence of your innocence and if this sounds dodgy then tough because WE ARE THE LAW’
Basically Fiona is allowed to put forward evidence in to mitigate a sentence handed down without any kind of ‘trial’ but not to actually fight the original finding. Like I say, the Standards Commission is going to regret this one because she now has outraged senior people who are supporting her with money and advice.
On that basis her lawyers have gone to Judicial Review. And this is the thing that you should get – the Standards Commission is now challenging even the right to go to external review on the basis that the Commission is quasi-judicial and can (in the parlance) do whatever the fuck it wants in its internal proceedings. They believe that only after their process is complete (improper or not) should any challenge take place.
I can translate this for you as ‘how very dare you’.
Except the law states that even semi-judicial bodies must accept evidence that challenges the case and that is what Fiona has been trying to do. So there you go – ‘we operate on the basis that guilt you can’t challenge is preordained and we’re just here to punish you so not interested in evidence of your innocence and if this sounds dodgy then tough because WE ARE THE LAW’.
You might not know so much about Sid Perrie. Sid has had a harder time of it. He is a community member of the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority elected from Balloch and West Lomond. He is a neurodivergent 75 yer old. He believed he had identified a clear conflict of interests in the process around Flamingo Land so tried to pursue it. That was not well received.
He then made a complaint about some officials to the Authority’s Chair. She passed those complaints directly to the people complained about – in, like, seven minutes from when she received them. This, it goes without saying, is not good practice.
And so the same show kicks in. I won’t go through all of this here because it’s been better documented by Nick Kempe here. The long and short is that Sid is suspended without pay for six months at a hearing he is unable to attend because the whole process left him in a state of deep anxiety and he was signed off ill.
So, in absentia and without any reference to the fact he wasn’t there, they decided again that challenging officials is always punished in Scotland. Sid is now appealing this and as you know it’s an expensive business so if you can support him, please give to his crowdfunder which will be opening soon.
The Standards Commission now seems to see its mission as closing down scrutiny of powerful officials in Scotland
Finally, the third legal challenge to the Standards Commissioner is from Councillor Jennifer Stewart. This is the one I know least about. Cllr Stewart is an independent Councillor in Aberdeen. She made a complaint about the Lord Provost of Aberdeen being misogynist.
Now I don’t know all the details but I’ve gone and had a look at a few clips of this chap and he does not exactly exude pleasantness. In fact he seems pretty awful. Is he misogynist? He certainly gives off the vibes and he’s quick with the gavel or a dismissive statement if a woman challenges him. But surely in this day and age it is not the person who accuses another of misogyny who is punished.
Again, there is a long string of complaints about this Lord Provost but basically it is the same bunch of people who refused to take action on the Lord Provost when Cllr Stewart complained who are now punishing her for implying he was sexist. I look at this again and all I can see is a process which expedites an outcome where the more powerful person is protected and the person challenging them is punished.
I understand that Cllr Stewart has decided to challenge this too. I do hope she does. Because what I think this all amounts to is a building momentum to question this whole stinking operation. The Standards Commission now seems to see its mission as closing down scrutiny of powerful officials in Scotland.
It seems to me to be becoming part of a powerful series of mechanisms that allow Scotland to be run independently of its democracy. Democracy is over here, making speeches and getting elected as a process of deciding who hands out jobs. Ruling the country is up there, somewhere else. These two spheres seem barely connected.
And so when someone from the democracy gets above themselves and tries to prise open the ruling classes, the Standards Commission kicks in. I’m afraid that is more and more what it looks like. It leaps from start to finish in one bound. Silence! Always silence!
There is far too little questioning of this going on so I am going to stay on this. Please, if anyone else has had similar experiences, send me over your story. Separately, we’re starting a significant policy paper at Common Weal aimed at rebalancing the power relations between people who represent the public and people who represent some ruling class or other. Your experiences and thoughts are welcome.
Because it isn’t right right now.