While you and I struggle with the real world, our leaders sit and ignore chaos in Unicornland

Scottish Sun

22-07-2025

BILL LECKIE While you and I struggle with the real world, our leaders sit and ignore chaos in Unicornland
EVER wonder why the national animal of Scotland is a unicorn?
Historians tell us it's because our forebears saw it as a creature whose strength, innocence and purity embodied the values our people held most dear.
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Bill Leckie reckons our leaders are living in Unicornland
Credit: John Kirkby - The Sun Glasgow
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First Minister John Swinney
Credit: PA
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The case of nurse Sandie Peggie has shown how leaders and civil servants are living in a fantasyland
Credit: Alamy
But that was then, back in the 15th century when it was first adopted onto our coat of arms.
While this is now, when the people who run the country have long since deleted those values along with their incriminating WhatsApp messages.
A time when the textbooks really should be rewritten to record that the unicorn is Scotland's beastie of choice because, like our politicans and bureaucrats, it exists in a fantasy world.
And because anyone doesn't like what they get up to is welcome to sit on its horn and swivel.
We see this attitude in First Minister 'Full-On' John Swinney's latest re-heating of an Independence policy which, were it a Tupperware of leftovers in your fridge, would long since have mutated into its own tiny population of furry bacteria who hate the outside world.
We see it in the 67 days summer holiday our MSPs have awarded themselves while the country they're paid handsomely to run comes apart at the seams.
We see it in the £10million-plus cost of keeping a cabal of NHS head honchos in Range Rovers while armies of sick and injured taxpayers suffer endless hours of misery in A&E queues or years of agony waiting for vital operations.
We see it in the self-entitled behaviour of the minority of civil servants who must make their colleagues fume as they use pet cats and a lack of fresh air as reasons to refuse demands to work from an office.
Perhaps most jaw-droppingly of all right now, though, we see it in the ever-mushrooming scandal of Sandie Peggie, the Fife nurse dragged through the courts because she didn't want to share a changing room with a biologically male doctor, Beth Upton, who identifies as a woman.
So far, this travesty of a show trial, this embodiment of a breed of managers too terrified of their own shadows to display even a shred of common sense, has cost £220,000 in legal fees.
Gender row nurse cleared of gross misconduct
Once the employment tribunal which has been running in parallel with it is done, we can probably double that figure.
Yet that's only the financial aspect. What will be so much harder to quantify is the monstrous waste of time and of energy, the positive work all those involved could have been doing all this time, the damage done to the mental health of both Nurse Peggie and Dr Upton over 18 tortuous months.
And all because their bosses lacked either the savvy or the will – maybe even both – to sit the pair of them down and talk their problems through until they learned something from them.
Not only would that have cost hee-haw, it might even have helped create a happier, more opem-minded workplace; an achievement that would, for me at least, have been priceless.
History has failed to teach Israel's leaders
LET us die of hunger, it is better.
The plaintive words of a survivor after the latest brutal attack by Israeli forces on starving Palestinians queueing for food and water.
After more than 70 died over the weekend – taking the total since a blockade on aid was lifted beyond 700 – Tel Aviv leaders claimed its troops 'faced a real threat' from crowds.
Sure. When they have all the guns and the crowds barely have the strength left to walk.
After the horrors Jewish people endured during World War II, the humiliation and the torture and the near eradication, I can't get my head round why Netanyahu's government now seem so hell-bent on wiping out their next-door neighbours in Israel's name.
Does history teach us nothing?
Or does it simply turn us into the thing that we once feared and despised?
Instead?
No sooner had Nurse Peggie been cleared of gross misconduct on Thursday than her employment hearing was re-starting on Friday.
And halfway through that day's evidence, NHS Fife had the brainfart of all brainfarts and decided to release a 1,700-word statement that left her legal team without a name.
They claim this attack was signed off on by their own lawyers, but not only did the KC acting for them in the employment hearing claim not to have seen it before it went live, it has since been edited twice to remove veiled suggestions that Nurse Peggie's supporters had threatened opponents with violence.
Seriously, how do these chancers attain such a level of arrogance that not only can't they admit defeat and rethink their mindset, but they swagger straight back into another unwinnable fight?
Paying fortunes to turn a he-said-she-said shopfloor rammy into a national news story has done not one person one shred of good – yet it seems this is the only way our politicians and pen-pushers know how to deal with anything, to lawyer up and chuck money at it.
Scattercash attitude
They wouldn't dare have the same scattercash attitude were they running a private company, with profits to protect and shareholders to keep onside.
Yet as this farrago of a sham of a mockery proves yet again, they clearly see the public purse as Monopoly money.
As political analyst Chris Deerin wrote in yesterday's paper, the SNP have long since lived by the motto of 'public sector good, private sector bad', with the people they shoehorn into positions of power within the civil service become untouchable; in return, naturally, for never questioning anything Holyrood does.
This is a key reason why Scotland has 14 health boards – meaning 14 CEOs, 14 heads of finance, 14 HR departments and the rest – for five million people, while London has just five for almost double the population.
This bloated level of over-management, in turn, is a key reason why hospitals can't afford to provide the the basic services its clinical staff desperately want to. And so it goes, through health and schools and local councils, from potholes to ferries to courtrooms and back again.
Bottom line? While you and I struggle along in the real world, the ones calling the shots are drifting along in Unicornland, blissfully unware of the utter chaos they're causing.
Or worse still, not giving the teeny-tiniest flying you-know-what.
Finally the airline returned my bag!
FILED last week's column on Aer Lingus losing my luggage for a week then went straight back into battle.
Rang a call centre, asked when my gear was being returned and – as no one who read the previous rant will be surprised to hear - was told that 'once we have an update, you will be informed'.
Ten minutes later, they emailed to confirm my bag would be flying the following day to Boston and then on to Denver.
Well, dear reader, enough was enough.
I googled the CEO of Aer Lingus, copied them into an email addressed to their head of customer services and firmly but politely explained my predicament.
Four minutes after that?
The phone rings and it's the their head of baggage handling, apologising most sincerely and promising that the wee fella would be arriving in Glasgow at 7.40 that night and would then be sent directly to me in a cab.
At which point we'll skim over the fact that it was in fact the following afternoon and an argument with Glasgow Airport before it was finally dropped off. And concentrate instead on these very valid questions:
What if the person whose trip had been ruined by a missing bag didn't have the clout of a newspaper column behind them?
What if they didn't have the cheek to take their problem the very top of the tree?
And why should it take such drastic action to attain such a basic level of service in the first place?
Answers on the back of a used boarding pass to the usual address.
In Glasgow, that is, not Colorado.