[Robin McAlpine Blog] These ‘ego inquiries’ are a disaster

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These 'ego inquiries' are a disaster

My concerns about Scotland’s public inquiry system are legion, prime among them the ridiculous cost and time involved, the sense that the legal establishment see them as a means to early retirement and the sense that public officials see them as a way to evade responsibility and let others ‘learn the lessons’.

But to that I now need to add that some of these inquiries seem to function as their own justification, their own ideological ouroboros, a system that exists to prove it must exist. It is a feeling that has been growing and growing in conversation with some people involved.

This broke into the public this week – yet still managed not to speak its own name. The story about how innocent people have had their lives destroyed by the child abuse inquiry has finally made it into the media, but there is still a failure to name the problem here. The problem is that these inquiries appear to have decided what they were going to find before they even commenced.

The Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry has been an utter debacle from the outset. Yet another vainglorious act of showboating by Nicola Sturgeon, the inquiry was set up to root out abusers she was certain were there. It should first have sought to find evidence that there was a systematic problem in the first place.

It was a debacle from the outset for other reasons – a whistleblower from overseas who had experience of other child abuse inquiries had done some contract work for this inquiry in its early stages had contacted me almost as soon as it got underway. What she told me was that she had never seen such a shambolic, unprofessional mess in her life. She was appalled at the way it operated.

She was strongly of the view that it was being milked for profit rather than run for results. But by that time it hadn’t actually done much work. I am on the press release list and regular as clockwork for what feels like most of my life I’ve been getting the ‘this week at the child abuse inquiry the witnesses are…’ emails. At moments it felt like they were interviewing every single person who was ever involved in any way.

There seemed to be one certainty inherent in this; that Scotland was filled with violent child abusers who were employed in child care services. Off the inquiry set, hunting out this army of miscreants everyone ‘knew’ was there.

I have never had so many people approach me with serious concerns about any single initiative in Scottish politics, without exception

Thing is, the evidence didn’t really support this. I spoke to someone who did a detailed review of decades of paperwork who said (referring to Sturgeon) "I’ll take their money if someone has to, but did she really think people were writing down ‘abused a child’ today in their official records? What did she expect us to find, exactly?"

Then someone else told me about the process whereby adults who had been in the care system at the time were basically told ‘report a paedophile from your youth and get £20,000 compensation’. I don’t know if they did this in good faith or it was an effort to ‘drum up trade’, but what sort of outcome did they expect from this?

For Steve Cowan (who is the former care worker who has gone public with what happened to him) it meant a false accusation and a long, long period of purgatory as his life was ripped apart. Yet another whistleblower (I have never had so many people approach me with serious concerns about any single initiative in Scottish politics, without exception) put it to me as ‘they didn’t find what they were convinced they’d find so they started making it up.’

I was told by one person that someone was arrested for ‘torture’ and yet it seems all he had done was let some of the boys play with a Van de Graaff generator to get little electric shocks – like I did when I was a kid.

Now I want to warn here; I do not even nearly begin to take a tolerant attitude to child abuse and I do not doubt that there are real instances of abuse that have never been prosecuted. And equally, I do not mistake hearsay and anecdote for solid evidence. This is a particularly murky area where little is immediately clear.

But I can tell you that Australia ran an inquiry covering three times as many people and they did it in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the expense. In Scotland we seem to have a ‘perma-inquiry’ which will just keep going until it proves itself right.

I fear something similar has happened with the Shaku Bayoh inquiry. This should have been a fairly routine Fatal Accident Inquiry. That ought to have pursued two simple questions – was Bayoh’s death in custody the result of malpractice and was it racially motivated? How this has sprawled into a £50 million public inquiry is beyond me.

For what it’s worth, my answer to the two questions from what I’ve read is yes, there had to be some misconduct because no-one should die in custody, but there appear to be very strong mitigating factors here and nothing I’ve seen that suggests this was a deliberate act. And I can see nothing at all that suggests that a big, violent white man who had been seen with a weapon earlier in the night and had resisted arrest and tried to fight the police while on a cocktail of stimulants would have been treated differently.

Our public inquiry system has gone beyond not fit for purpose and is now an embarrassing charade

But this inquiry seems to have existed as ‘Scotland’s Gorge Floyd moment’ long before there was any evidence that such a framing was merited. It was set in the context of the flurry of activity in Scotland at the time which was about the slave trade, and these issues seem to have become linked. They are not.

Now before anyone starts messaging me to say that endemic structural racism link all instances of racism, I know, I agree. But not legally they don’t. This inquiry wasn’t a review of the state of the nation or the meaning of life. It should have been answering those two specific questions in their own specific context.

How this has become the circus it has become I do not understand, egos and showboating of some of those involved notwithstanding. And again, how this circus racked up a bill of £50 million in barely two years is beyond anything I can make sense of.

Scottish politics is, I’m afraid, fundamentally substandard. It deals in signals and slogans and show, not facts and detail and seriousness. Everyone wants their moment. Sturgeon regularly positioned herself as the saviour of kids in care and what do you know, she creates a giant inquiry to prove it. Humza Yousaf, who made his race a key element of his First Ministership, ends up with a big, wannabe landmark race inquiry.

Meanwhile my friends who are the victims of rogue Tayside surgeon Eljamel campaigned for decades to even get basic recognition for what happened to them. Just a pity it didn’t coincide with a First Minister who decided they wanted to be the hero of the victims of a health board cover up. (Can you imagine such a thing? Nope, me neither.)

Our public inquiry system has gone beyond not fit for purpose and is now an embarrassing charade. They are supposed to be efficient, forensic means of getting to the truth in crucial instances of injustice.

In Scotland they have become press releases through other means, campaign stunts, means of burnishing the status of a self-satisfied political class. And the poor bastards dragged into this ego mill, chewed up and spat out? They are clearly not relevant.

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