It's time to overthrow the lanyardocracy

Spectator

18-07-2025

The trials of Sandie Peggie are a parable of where power lies in a country when lies are power. Peggie is a nurse from Fife, by all accounts a hard-working professional dedicated to her vocation and her patients. Things went awry, however, when she objected to undressing in a changing room in front of Dr Beth Upton, a male medic who identifies as a woman. If that sentence sounds absurd, that's because it is, but we are supposed to pretend otherwise – especially if we want to be considered good people. Dishonesty is the best policy.
Following a complaint from Dr Upton, Peggie was suspended by NHS Fife in January 2024, and she took the health board and Dr Upton to an employment tribunal. NHS Fife petitioned for the tribunal to sit in private and Dr Upton asked that his identity be anonymised, but both requests were denied. Earlier this month, NHS bosses finally disclosed their legal bill so far – £220,465 – at the instruction of the Scottish information commissioner. On Wednesday, an internal NHS Fife inquiry cleared Peggie of misconduct, failures in patient care and misgendering Dr Upton – but the tribunal continues.
Every time a health board witness gives evidence in the proceedings, it becomes less of a mystery why NHS Fife wanted the tribunal to sit in secret. It has revealed itself to be an inept organisation, led by a hapless hierarchy, implementing guidelines that are in a very distant relationship with equalities law. If the health board had simply shredded the Equality Act and glued the pieces back together at random, it would have made for a more coherent policy than the one put in place.
This is what happens when you submit to an unfalsifiable ideology that is so patently false. A few basic questions would have saved NHS Fife, to say nothing of Sandie Peggie, all this grief, but genderism is an unforgiving religion and heresy is punished severely. When the employment tribunal concludes, the health board will have to confront some hard truths about how it got here, and so will the rest of Scotland. While NHS Fife deserves no sympathy after all it has put Peggie through, it is far from the only institution of the Scottish state to have been annexed by the gender identity movement.
Gender ideology was able to spread so far, so deep and so fast thanks to the structural vulnerabilities in Scottish democracy. These include an ideologically narrow and intellectually shallow political class; a parliament ill-designed for scrutiny and chronically incapable of attracting parliamentarians equal to the task; an over-mighty executive wedded to secrecy, allergic to transparency, and contemptuous of accountability; and a civil society, including charities, academics and journalists, more aligned than is healthy with the political aims of the Scottish government.
It is no surprise that this environment was so conducive to the democratic sub-contracting that sees government fund third-sector activists to lobby for policies endorsed by academic activists, drafted by civil service activists, to be implemented by public sector activists. An entire ecosystem of policymaking that never once comes into contact with public opinion. These activists represent what Lord Glasman calls 'the lanyard class', a concept developed by Janice Turner, and which broadly describes the dreary wokescolds who have marched through the institutions with 'be kind…' on their lips and '…or else' in their eyes.
Ideological cliques are nothing new in politics. The Corbynistas set out to remake the Labour party just as the Blairites did before them, while the Notting Hill Set around David Cameron and George Osborne toiled to drag the Tories to the left just as the Thatcherites had done to take the party to the right. What differentiates the gender sect, and the progressive movement as a whole, is the mission: they aim not to reshape politics but to replace it.
As the Sandie Peggie case demonstrates, but which can just as readily be seen in policymaking on immigration, race, national identity, heritage, and even foreign policy matters like Gaza, progressives share none of the Marxist's passion for debate or the liberal's tolerance for dissent. They are not in the business of changing minds or winning converts but of enforcing doctrine and burning heretics. This explains not only the secretive, hierarchical way in which gender policy is imposed but also the doctrinaire refusal to engage with nonbelievers. Thus are statements of biological fact met with rote recitations ('sex is not binary', 'trans women are women') while organisations signed up to gender ideology delay implementation of the Supreme Court's judgment in For Women Scotland or reject it outright. (Lord Hodge might have the law on his side but Emily from HR reckons he's on the wrong side of history.)
You might have noticed that my metaphors keep lurching between political and religious. I can't help it. The last time pseudo-left ideology and retrograde superstition were this perfectly fused, the Shah of Iran was checking in his baggage at Mehrabad International Airport. While the Khomeinists replaced a secular monarchy with an Islamic theocracy, the lanyard class espouses democracy in theory, but in practice it oversees a lanyardocracy in which decisions are made by progressive elites without regard to popular opinion and in which institutions like parliaments and courts are legitimate only insofar as they affirm the beliefs and aims of the lanyarded establishment.
Lanyardocracy draws legitimacy not from democratic mandates but from the secular scapulars that hang around the necks of its high priests. Elections might change governments but they don't change the civil service, public sector bureaucracies, quangos or other citadels of lanyardocracy. An elected government, no matter the size of its majority or strength of its mandate, can expect to be frustrated or even sabotaged if it is out of step with the lanyard regime. The institutional hostility with which For Women Scotland and interim guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission have been met is portentous and what it portends should give pause to those who blithely declare 'woke' to be over.
'Woke' is going nowhere until it is purged from the institutions it has captured or those institutions are dissolved and rebuilt. It is not enough for opponents of progressive ideology to win power and pursue a different policy direction. They must first win the fight to restore substantive democracy and that means dismantling the regime squatting on top of it. Sandie Peggie has been put through hell but something good might come of her ordeal if it accelerates regime change. It's time to overthrow the lanyardocracy.