Peggie tribunal shows a strain of delinquency in our public bodies

The Herald Scotland

22-07-2025

The Sandie Peggie tribunal, currently playing out in Dundee has seen a procession of highly-paid but wantonly incompetent civic automatons embarrass themselves and the Scottish education system.
Each day, we can feast on a fresh flurry of statements that point to a strain of callous delinquency at the heart of our public bodies. There are hundreds more of these dismal Tamany Hall bureaucrats operating at every level of civic governance in Scotland. The fix is a simple one: pay them salaries well beyond their experience and ability so that they are yours forever to bend and manipulate into any shape you want.
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The traditional struggles of the UK Left for better jobs; affordable housing; equality in health and education have been replaced by genderism, climatism, Ukrainism and good old-fashioned Jew-baiting. Working-class families and communities now fear losing their jobs and their liberty for not being conversant in the clouds of psycho-babble that pass for policy-making in Scottish and UK politics.
This though, isn't the scariest part. The chill sets in when you look around and find that your neighbourhood Tories seem more likely to support working-class people when they fall foul of the Bearsden Bolsheviks. Sometimes you catch yourself thinking unclean thoughts about backing the Tories or supporting the Union in the manner of a Trappist monk who inadvertently catches porn on his social media feed and can't unsee it.
Tories are more likely to agree with you when you ask why the liberal elites of Scotland and the UK loathe women and working-class communities so much. In this scenario the Tories are the like the devil in 1 Peter 5:8: 'Be sober-minded, be alert. Your adversary the devil is prowling around like a roaring lion, looking for anyone he can devour.'
In these dark moments of the soul, when you are vulnerable to some of the temptations of the Right, it's good to be reminded of just why you and generations of your family harbour a righteous loathing of the Tories and all their vile stratagems.
The announcement yesterday that a Public Inquiry is to be held into the sinister events at the Orgreave coking plant in Yorkshire in June, 1984 was one of those moments when you remembered why you loathe Toryism and all that it represents: all its empty promises. John Swinney may be the most cowardly and craven political leader Scotland has ever produced and the clown-show cabinet he heads at Holyrood often makes you cringe in embarrassment.
But nothing they will ever do can match the vicious ferocity the Tories and Margaret Thatcher unleashed against working-class men and their families fighting for their livelihoods and the futures of their communities during the Miners' Strike in 1984/85.
Forty years after the Metropolitan Police – then still contaminated by London gangland corruption – beat unarmed striking miners to a pulp, this is a long overdue first step in remedying an appalling miscarriage of justice against working people.
The aftermath of this brutality by the British state against its own people was even worse than the blood-letting. Thousands of striking miners were arraigned to appear before hastily-convened kangaroo courts and handed punitive sentences on charges trumped up by corrupt police officers. It pointed to another lamentable truth: the judiciary had also been nobbled in Mrs Thatcher's psychotic desire to crush the trade union movement, using every lever of the state at her disposal.
That though, was still not enough to slake the Tories bloodlust against working people who had dared to rise up against them. Miners and their families were black-balled from meaningful employment for decades afterwards, effectively putting their communities beyond social repair.
A cadre of MI5 agents was able to infiltrate the National Union of Mineworkers and feed false stories to an all-too-willing media, including the Daily Mirror under the stewardship of the thief, Robert Maxwell. When, years later, the paper's 'award-winning' stories about NUM corruption were shown to be lies, they were forced to hand back the awards. But the damage had been done.
Britain's mining industry was still profitable, but Mrs Thatcher simply wanted them gone, to the extent that billions were found – mainly from the hidden receipts of the new North Sea oil Klondyke - to pay huge settlements to long-serving miners. From this, another lie took root: that many miners became rich. But how much does a few hundred grand last when neither you, nor any of your descendants would never work again?
It also overlooked another truth: that for many decades these men and their fathers and grandfathers had risked their lives every day to make Britain an industrial power-house. My own dad, a trade unionist to the end of his life, was in awe of the miners. 'Whatever they're paid, it'll never be enough for what they do for this country,' he once told me.
He also told me something else: that it was these men and their working-class comrades whose ultimate sacrifice in two world wars contributed most to Britain's victory. And that when they were dying in their millions the British royal family and its aristocratic boot-lickers were preparing to make deals with the Nazis.
Kevin McKenna is a Herald writer and columnist. He is Features Writer of the Year and writes regularly about the working-class people and communities of Scotland.