[Robin McAlpine Blog] The race to shredder mountain

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The race to shredder mountain

There are a lot of things I’d like to be writing on just now but there is this one damned thing which keeps mestastasising into new forms of ‘WTF’ and you’re likely only to hear some of it if I write it all down, so here we go. It’s the Standard’s Commission again.

(I’ve been contacted by people a bit confused – I’ve been deliberately conflating two organisations because it is hard enough to make sense of the Kafkaesque tangle of it all even if I simplify. In reality there is an Ethical Standards Commissioner and a Standards Commission for Scotland. One rules on guilt and the other… rules on guilt. They have different addresses and different staff. No, I don’t get it. That’s why some of you have gone to look this up and been bemused. It’s two things.)

(I don’t think I’ve put two caveats in brackets before but also, I can’t keep up. I’m in a chat group with a growing number of people who are pursuing all of this and just keeping up with it is nearly a full time job. There’s so much more and I’m skimming this a lot…)

So let me pick out I guess four things to look at quickly. First and most obvious is that the Standards Commission (it’s not the ethical one) is appealing against its pretty overwhelming loss in the Judicial Review brought by Fiona Higgins. I suspect this doesn’t surprise you. I wasn’t exactly gobsmacked.

But what I do find interesting is that from the media coverage I couldn’t work out the basis of their appeal. What are they appealing? So I asked Fiona and roughly, she doesn’t know either and neither do her lawyers. The best anyone can make out they’re appealing the fact that they don’t understand the consequences of the ruling.

It reads rather like ‘but if we’re not allowed to do absolutely anything we want, what rules are we bound by?’. The answer in this case is ‘the law’. But it is the open question which I think is so important. They want clarity on why and how they’re suppost to run a non-tainted hearing system that abides by the principles of natural justice? And they’re saying this in public?

The other notably fact is the absolute lack of any consequence and the moral hazard built in. They seem to be appealing on the basis of being confused but really becaue they want to see if they can overturn the need to obey the law. It seems futile – but why not? You’re paying.

I found myself momentarily startled by this – a Scottish public body can find guilt based on false evidence and the person found guilty can’t challenge the ruling?

All these legal bills come out of your pocket, it’s money that came from your tax and would otherwise have been spent on your public services. Scottish public bodies spend a lot of time in court and frankly they spend a lot of time losing in court. Last year the Scottish Government alone spent £20 million on its own lawyers and another £10 million on outside lawyers last year.

Now I’ve not been able to find a timeline comparator for this, but you want to bet that number has risen sharply in real terms over devolution years? We spent enough on lawyers in one year to build a couple of schools.

Second, I find this remarkable. One of the people on the groupchat has been sanctioned by the Standards Commission based on evidence that she believes she can clearly prove is false. So she appealled on the basis that she had been ‘found guilty’ based on fasle evidence. She was told she can’t appeal a Standards Commission final ruling on any basis.

I found myself momentarily startled by this – a Scottish public body can find guilt based on false evidence and the person found guilty can’t challenge the ruling? They can make a complaint to the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman, but that is a completely different thing. Best I understand it the SPSO couldn’t overturn the ‘conviction’ or require compensatation. That is fundamentally wrong.

Third, let me introduce you to what some consider the sort of ‘source case’ or patient zero of a lot of this – the Malik case. This is when things started to go wrong for the Standards Commission. He was hauled infront of the Commission in 2024, gets found to have breached the code and suspended.

So he appeals via the Sherif Court based on procedural and legal error by the Standards Commission. The Standards Commission realises it has made an actual legal error and does not fight the appeal, so the Sherrif Court quashes the initial finding. This is what is odd – trying to find out what the Comission knew of the legal error, Malik went digging…

…to find his case files had all been destroyed. I found myself doing a double-take – within two years of a semi-judicial procedure there is no writte evidence of what happened? That can’t be right. That would be what the kids call sketchy as fuck.

No, this isn’t the brazen corruption of Trump, but this is where and how that kind of corruption starts to take hold

And that takes us into a simple segue to thing four – what exactly is the document retention period of the Standards Commission then? Fiona went to find out and shiver me timbers if they didn’t just change it (without telling anyone).

In May of this year their previous retention policy of keeping documents for five years (standard document retention policy in the Scottish public sector) was quietely change. They now retain documents for only 12 months. Policy changed in May, in June they destroyed the case files for 24 previous ‘convictions’. No retrospective appeals for you guys then I gues…

Actually, that takes us to thing five – the lying. The reason they give for the change in document retention is ‘GDPR’. Some of you will be familiar that GDPR is the four magic letters officials in Scotland used to overturn transparency rules (along with commercial confidentiality, court orders preventing the identification of witnesses, ongoing legal action preventing comment – you know the list).

But GDPR was introduced in 2018 and so either the Standards Commission was running an illegal document retention policy for eight years and everyone else in Scottish public life still does, or GDPR doesn’t actually require you to shred one-year-old documents that led to quasi-judicial hearings that suspended democratically-elected politicians.

Oh, sorry, when I write ‘eveyone else in Scottish public life’ I am not including NHS Tayside which breached do not destoy orders issued by a judge running the Eljamel inquiry by just destroying them anyway. I literally write about this because the Standards Commission is not the excpetion.

What does all this look like? It looks to me like the determination and doggedness of Fiona Higgins has make the Standards Commission realise that the barely-legal kangaroo court it has been operating for years might be exposed and so they are taking wild and desperate steps to hide the extent of its activities and throw Hail Mary legal challenges into the clear blue sky.

Honestly there are about another three or four case studies I could add on to the bottom of this. But they all sum up as ‘no, Standards Commission, protecting Scotandl’s highly-paid senior public managers does not overrule the European Convention on Human Rights’ Article 10 protection of free speech’ and ‘principles of natural justice are not decoration’.

The Standards Commission is right to worry. There are growing moves at Cosla and elsehwere to finally fight back. Fiona was in the newspapers earlier this week warning about the ‘chilling culture’ around Scottish officialdom. Yeah, tell me about it. This is what it looks like – some suit through the back with a shredder desperately trying to destroy evience of their misdeeds….

It is fitting that this crusade against the tyranny of unelected bureaucracies is running in parallel with the dogged attempts by the Information Commissioner to make you understand just how comprehensively your right to know what government does is being rolled back today and every other day.

It is telling that people coming from a very different political orientation from me are writing books about it and finding the same thing. This isn’t just me. This is all actually happening in Scotland. No, this isn’t the brazen corruption of Trump, but this is where and how that kind of corruption starts to take hold.

It happens because it is scummy but just about marginal enough that you can read it, get annoyed, then return to your day undisturbed. If it wasn’t for people fighting this, they’d be getting away with it. Please, keep your eye on this. It is most certainly worse for Scotland if the other side wins.

Source: The race to shredder mountain