Scotland’s ruling classes have fucked up. I mean really fucked up. After two decades of their unchallenged tyranny the outcome is collapsing universities, collapsing arts infrastructure, collapsing public services, a housing crisis, a domestic economy ownership crisis…
And what do ruling classes do when they fail? They crack down on those who seek to expose them. We, the ruled, can only defeat them by standing in solidarity, and a key moment with a chance to show some solidarity will happen next week. It also marks a legal milestone.
It is the latest show trial of Glasgow Councillor Fiona Higgins who, as a super-fast summary, has been persecuted for a year and a half for correctly identifying that a senior officer was hiding crucial information that should never have been hid and which his own colleagues said he shouldn’t have hid.
(I have been following this case closely because Fiona is proving to be a case study in the dogged determination not to be terrorised and silenced by the ruling classes. If you need a full catch-up, the basics of the case are explained here and then the developments that take us to next week are explained here.)
The only-slightly-longer summary is that Glasgow City Council’s Director of Finance removed from a draft budget document clear statements that the budget about to be approved required a reduction in teacher numbers, did so against the strong explicit objection of the Director of Education and by doing so left councillors passing a budget which was against their own policy because they were prevented from knowing they’d just voted to cut teacher numbers.
Fiona gets curious about this and asks for information. They refuse to give her the information so she uses the Freedom of Information Act to force the information out of them which reveals all of the above and the fact that his own colleagues objected to what he was doing. She pursued that internally, but no-one would take any action.
And this is what you really need to know – if a council official does this, the rules are that no action can be taken against them by any elected figure, but if the elected figure tells anyone what they’ve found, the unelected council official can take action against them.
If you’re new to this, I need to repeat it. If you vote for someone to represent you on a council and that person discovers an official is lying, the only thing they are allowed to do is to report it to the official’s boss. If the boss decides to do nothing, that is the end of it. If the councillor then tells anyone about this, the councillor is disciplined.
Why? Because the rules forbid elected representatives from criticising unelected officials in any way or form in public. Officials can lie without consequence but you can’t expose them without being open to being suspended. Oh, and that might make sense if the elected officials can sanction or remove the unelected official, but that’s banned too.
These officials who have no legitimacy whatsoever other than their role as servants to democratically-elected bodies have built themselves a system in which they can terrorise anyone who attempts to hold them to account
Another thing you should know; at about the same time as this, the official concerned and the boss who is the only person anywhere that can hold him to account were having private meetings to arrange lucrative ‘golden goodbye’ payments for each other that they were not entitled to, which were not approved through the required official channels and which led to Audit Scotland ruling that the officials “fell short of the behaviour and standards expected of public servants”.
So you as a member of public can only find out about dishonest practice if the person’s boss, who is in a co-dependent grift relationship with the person responsible for the dishonesty, agrees to do something about it (which in this case she did not).
Hence the ongoing pursuit of Fiona in a form of extended punishment. So, you might think, over to the public. I mean, the council can’t actually discipline the public, can they? Well it turns out they can if the lawyer the public picks screws up. You may have separately heard that the council are trying to bankrupt a group of mothers who challenged them in court.
Because it’s exactly the same case. After Fiona revealed what was happening, they took court action because they thought this was malfeasance. I won’t go into this but the case fell apart not because of the case itself but because of procedural error which was nothing to do with the plaintiffs. Yet as soon as the case fell apart, the council started its pursuit of the mothers involved. At one point the group of Glasgow mums involved turned up at a meeting to be faced with seven council lawyers, all paid for by Glasgow residents, not the officials.
Hence Leanne McGuire is being hounded by Glasgow City Council for legal costs of £43,000. Please do not mistake what is actually happening here. Scotland’s ruling classes are riven with corruption. I really mean that. They run a system where all-but set their own pay, invent bonuses for themselves, and give contracts to companies and then get even more lucrative employment with those companies.
Our media generally doesn’t catch them, simply because our media is so emaciated that the journalists who used to cover institutions like local authorities or the quango agencies no longer exist. Every so often someone else blows the whistle (like the instance with the Water Industry Commission Scotland) and this all comes to light. But it is rare.
And it is made rarer because of this reign of terror. That is the only word for it. These officials who have no legitimacy whatsoever other than their role as servants to democratically-elected bodies have built themselves a system in which they can terrorise anyone who attempts to hold them to account.
Look at what is happening in the universities. The unelected executive of Edinburgh University has just told the Senate that it is effectively unilaterally suspending the constitution of the university and is going to directly appoint people to roles who should constitutionally be selected by the Senate (which in turn is elected from the academic body).
Those hand-picked officials are to be put in place to force through a massive cuts process which is being run by the executive on its own without consultation because the executive left the university in a financially perilous condition.
Let me spell that out – the Standards Commission is arguing that it can run unjust kangaroo courts using public money and it can do so in any way it wants
They are utterly out of control. It is quite scary. If this was being done by a politician like Victor Orban you’d call it what it is – dangerous authoritarianism. He too put pliant figures in posts that others should have been filling and used those people to bypass law and the constitution. He too used judicial intimidation of the public. He too put critics on show trials.
Make no mistake, Fiona has financial and legal backing now and is taking the Standards Commission to court whether they like it or not (they definitely don’t like it). Which brings us up to speed. Next Tuesday sees Fiona’s judicial review (10AM, Court of Session) of the attempt by the Standards Commission to ‘sentence’ her while refusing to accept any of her evidence.
The Standards Commission’s defence is that it is allowed to run its own affairs however it wants and that does not need to mean fair or just treatment of the people it pursues. It is arguing that it is not obliged to operate by the standard rules of natural justice because there is an opportunity for appeal.
Let me spell that out – the Standards Commission is arguing that it can run unjust kangaroo courts using public money and it can do so in any way it wants because once it has completed the person suspended can use part of their £26k salary to hire a lawyer and appeal the decision in the Sheriff Court.
Legal figures are calling this a landmark case because if Fiona wins it will set the precedent that no, Scotland’s ruling classes cannot do whatever the fuck they want whenever they want all the time and that basic rules of natural justice apply. If it surprises you that this precedent has to be set in Scotland in 2026 then you are not alone.
The ruling class can lie but elected politicians can’t expose them. If the elected politician does expose them they can be sent to a ‘court’ which does not recognise the principle of natural justice. It can then suspend you and all you can do is try and find the money to get lawyers to go through the slow process of appeal.
Meanwhile the ruling class can also use unlimited public money – your money – to try and destroy the lives of the people they serve if those people try and hold the ruling class to account for the same malfeasance.
I want to make this as clear as I can – Fiona is making big sacrifices to stand up to the injustice of Scotland’s ruling elite and they are determined to defeat her. She is not standing up for herself, she is standing up for your right to live in a country that vaguely sounds like a democracy. I urge you to show her your support.