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Scottish Sun
2 days ago
- Politics
- Scottish Sun
Scots crime queen confronted top Tory with tin of MINCE
The events are charted in a new BBC Scotland podcast series - The Ballad of Big Mags Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) NOTORIOUS crime matriarch Big Mags Haney confronted top Tory Michael Forsyth with a tin of European mince at a public meeting that would propel her into the public spotlight. The astonishing moment helped Haney earn a reputation as a fearsome community campaigner in Stirling's troubled Raploch estate. 3 Big Mags Haney was jailed for drug dealing after an astonishing rise and fall. Credit: Alan MacGregor Ewing - The Sun Glasgow 3 The new podcast explores the events that unfolded in Stirling's Raploch in the 1990s. 3 Former Tory MP Michael Forsyth came face-face with Mags Haney at a Poll Tax demo She went on to further infamy by rallying locals to a vigilante campaign aimed at ridding the estate of paedophiles - before she was hounded out herself as the head of a crime family from hell. The events are charted in a new BBC Scotland podcast series - The Ballad of Big Mags - that explores her incredible rise and fall during a turbulent period in the late 1990s. The first episode hears from witnesses who watched as Haney barked at the then Secretary of State for Scotland during an Anti-Poll Tax gathering. Fearsome Haney took centre stage as Mr Forsyth was quizzed by locals who had gathered to protest against Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher's hated tax regime. Raploch local Billy McChord who saw the confrontation said: 'He came to a very busy meeting at the Raploch Community Centre. 'I think it was the chief of police he came with. 'So we were in this meeting and it was getting chaotic with folk shouting at him. 'It was going well until Mags turned up with one of those wee blue bags that folk tend to get carry-outs in. 'The policemen started looking really, really nervous. 'She pulled out what was one of these European tins of mince that you were given at the time. 'The look on Michael Forsyth's face was hilarious. He was like, 'What's this about?' 'She went, 'You expect us to eat this? Well, I'll tell you, we feed our families better than this. 'You take your tin of mince up to your house and you can eat it'. 'The place just erupted in laughter.' Billy added: 'She had a bit of a reputation as being a bit of a character, shall we say. 'And she brought a lot of energy to the place. FAMILY FROM HELL By Graham Mann NEIGHBOUR Caroline Dunbar tells of her family's nightmare at living in a flat below Mags Haney whose daughter Kim ended up setting fire to their home. She tells of her ordeal at the hands of the family from hell who made threats to ruin her wedding day and broke into her home. Recalling the year she spent living beside Big Mags, she said: 'It was just unreal. My mum couldn't sleep at night with them banging down, banging the windows. 'You didn't have security doors at that time, they used to break them and everybody used to go up and down, up and down every night. Every night, seven days a week. 'They actually went into my room and stole my television. 'My window was open a bit and I must have been in the living room with my mum, my dad and my brother and a couple of my pals were in. 'They jumped in the windows and stole my television that my dad got me four months before for my birthday.' She also tells how she was on the receiving end of threats including that they would throw eggs at her wedding car. Matters reached a terrifying conclusion when Kim Haney torched their home with Big Mags, who went on to turn her daughter over to cops. The girl, then 16, pleaded guilty at Stirling Sheriff Court in October 1994 to endangering the family's lives and the lives of other neighbours by starting the blaze. She stood on a rubbish bin and leaned through an open window with a cigarette lighter. Sheriff Norrie Stein noted at the hearing the Haneys had inflicted misery on the Raploch community with seven Haneys involved in hundreds of court appearances. Reports from the time reveal Big Mags said she would meet her solicitor to consider referring the sheriff's comments to the Lord Advocate. She said: ''He's branded us another family from hell.'' 'But she was funny as well, I can't deny that, she was funny.' But the documentary also shines a light on Haney's darker side that ended with her being jailed for 12 years in 2001 for heroin dealing. In the years before she had been hailed in the media as a powerful community voice who even appeared on a prime time TV show. She had become a self-appointed figurehead of a Raploch vigilante furious that convicted sex offenders were being housed on their estate. One of her granddaughters tells how Mags even used a child's karaoke machine to rally locals at her anti-peado protests. Recalling stories from those who watched her late gran in action Cassie Donald says: 'If I remember correctly one of them said that she had a child's karaoke machine, out with the mic kind of rallying the local community to get involved in the protest.' Explaining what drove her gran's actions, she adds: 'I think there was something at her core that she really believed was wrong. 'Kicking a dog when it's down, the community was suffering enough without placing paedophiles in the community. 'It was a time when children roamed the streets. 'We knew everybody in the Raploch area so we were able to just run along to the park or go along to the shop and you were not going to meet anybody that you didn't know. 'So to put someone in that could potentially cause danger to her children or her grandchildren didn't sit right with her. 'She wasn't the only person who stood up, she just happened to shout the loudest.' But Mags' status as a community champion was short-lived as locals grew increasingly angry over her rise of a woman who was up to her neck in crime. Haney was herself on the receiving end of mob justice when a 400-strong band gathered outside her flat to make clear she and her family were no longer welcome. Just a few years later in 2003 she was sentenced to 12 years in prison for her role at the top of a drug dealing family who had terrorised the area for years. Journalist and host Myles Bonnar reveals new insights as he speaks to people closely connected to her and intimately involved in the astonishing events. He said: 'Many people only partially know the story of this controversial figure and this series will give a full account of how she rose to fame and became a source of fascination to the media and public before her criminal life was exposed.' Haney died, aged 70, in 2012, after a cancer battle. The six-part series is available on BBC Sounds now.
Scotsman
17-07-2025
- Politics
- Scotsman
How Keir Starmer is sticking to Margaret Thatcher's flawed ideology that only helps wealthy elite
Sign up to our daily newsletter – Regular news stories and round-ups from around Scotland direct to your inbox Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... It was an ordinary 1970s' day, in the Students' Representative Council office in St Andrews, when I first encountered the emerging ideology of Thatcherite neoliberalism, in all its questionable glory. It appeared in the form of a pale youth from Arbroath wearing an undergraduate red gown – a garment which itself amounted to a political statement, in an age when regulation student gear involved bell-bottomed jeans, tank tops and duffel coats. Michael Forsyth – for it was he, now Baron Forsyth of Drumlean – began to ask me searching questions, in my capacity as SRC treasurer, about what the council's officers were up to, with the modest amount of public money we received; and although I was able to provide him with answers, I remember being slightly shocked by his apparent assumption that we were all up to no good, making expensive rail trips to London for sheer pleasure, rather than for tedious National Union of Student meetings, or some soggy and rainswept demonstration. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Over the next few months, I met a few more of the group of Tories to which the young Mr Forsyth seemed to belong; and I soon began to recognise, if never fully to understand, their profound and mocking hostility to the postwar settlement in which we had all grown up, with its emphasis on a new international order based on human rights and equality, its generous state provision in some areas including higher education, and its assumption that some areas of the nation's life and economy were sacrosanct public goods, to be kept free of commercial motives and pressures. Margaret Thatcher and Norman Tebbit waves to the crowds from Conservative Central Office after the Conservatives won the 1987 general election (Picture: Rebecca Naden) | PA A lavishly funded cause From the outset, it seemed clear to me that their politics was based on the demonstrably false assumption that human beings are motivated almost entirely by individualistic self-interest, that they value nothing unless they have personally paid for it, and that all the more altruistic, convivial, collaborative and creative aspects of humanity should therefore be sidelined, in constructing political and economic systems. Yet within a few years, these young proto-Thatcherites and their disruptive ideas – badged as radical, but often simply reactionary – had taken control of the Conservative party, and then of the UK Government. Their strength, of course, lay not in the quality of their thinking, but in the popularity of their ideas about deregulation and the rolling back of the state with those who already had wealth, and wanted to be free to make more. Their cause was therefore lavishly funded from the outset; and their greatest success – as Margaret Thatcher herself pointed out – was not their triumph over more moderate forms of Conservatism, but their huge impact on the politics of the Labour party, which – under Tony Blair and since – simply absorbed many of their ideas, tropes and values. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad So fast-forward, if you will, to the world this ideology has created for us, and which we inhabit today; a world not only destabilised at global level by a growing culture of contempt towards the universal values on which the postwar generation tried to found a rule-based international order, but apparently trapped, at UK level, in a Groundhog Day of ideological attachment to a Thatcherite revolution which, it is now widely acknowledged, did not fundamentally revive the UK economy, but instead profoundly weakened it. Labour's performative cruelty This is a UK, after all, in which Labour politicians still apparently think it clever, as a badge of political strength and economic wisdom, to stage acts of performative cruelty against some of the weakest in society. It's a country crippled by chronic under-investment in its people and infrastructure, where politicians both Labour and Tory still prate about reducing public spending, and avoiding taxes on ever-increasing accumulations of wealth. And it's a society surrounded and weighed down by the wreckage of a whole raft of failed privatisations of public utilities – energy, railways, England's water – where we still, in defiance of all evidence, see further involvement of private health care companies constantly touted as the way forward for the NHS. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad We are living, in other words, in an age of almost unique ideological stalemate, when the consensus of the last four decades and more has clearly failed, socially, environmentally, and in terms of global security; but where all other political ideologies have been so successfully marginalised that we have nowhere else to turn – except, of course, to the professional hate-mongers of the far-right, always ready to supply malign and practically useless myths of 'belonging', to replace more progressive and effective forms of solidarity. At the height of the Industrial Revolution, and again after the Depression of the 1930s, it was the power of organised labour, and its emergent political wing in the Labour party and the US Democrats, that eventually provided a progressive counter-force in society, demanding a more just and sustainable future. Green-democratic revolution Today, though, the ideological chaos and evident confusion of the Starmer government suggests that that powerful progressive alliance no longer exists in any meaningful form; and that any positive moves the UK Government makes, in terms of workers' rights or public spending, may well be undermined by their lack of of any new macroeconomic strategy, and their weirdly uncritical addiction to the idea of 'growth', at any price.
The Guardian
12-03-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
Peers working for City firms dominate Lords panel scrutinising financial sector
Peers working for big City firms including Santander, Secure Trust Bank and the London Stock Exchange are sitting on a new Lords committee scrutinising regulation of the financial services industry, the Guardian has found. The House of Lords financial services regulation committee was formed in January last year and 10 of its 13 members have declared current or recent interests in the sector. From the start, it has been highly critical of the City regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority, despite a number of the committee members being paid by companies that are overseen by the watchdog. Established to consider the regulation of financial services in the post-Brexit era, in common with other Lords committees it has the power to investigate and ultimately influence laws and public policy by holding inquiries and summoning ministers and officials to give evidence. Its chair, Michael Forsyth, was until May last year paid a salary of £230,000 a year as chair of the UK retail bank Secure Trust Bank, which is regulated by the FCA and has 1 million customers. Lord Forsyth is still a shareholder, according to his register of interests. Dozens of members of the Lords have jobs in the financial services sector as well as being entitled to taxpayer-funded expenses for sitting in the second chamber to vote on and shape legislation. Peers with expertise in a certain area are often drawn on to sit on relevant committees. Their dominance on the financial regulation committee raises concerns over whether its membership is sufficiently balanced to represent the interests of consumers, taxpayers and the wider public. There are also questions over whether peers should be recused from inquiries when there could be a conflict of interest with their paid work. The two inquiries it has held so far have focused on the powers and remit of the City regulators. In April last year, Forsyth wrote to the FCA saying his committee did not agree with the regulator's plans to name companies under investigation in cases where it was in the public interest. He also asked the FCA 'not to take further steps' to bring in the plans until the committee had conducted a full inquiry. At the time, the newly formed committee had not completed any inquiries or taken evidence on any subject from witnesses. Forsyth wrote as chair of the committee: 'In our view, this proposal risks having a disproportionate effect on firms named in investigations, where those firms are subsequently cleared of any wrongdoing, particularly given the length of many investigations.' He submitted a list of 11 questions to the FCA and asked it to consider a cost-benefit analysis on naming those subject to enforcement action, saying it would be 'helpful, both for us and the wider financial services community, to receive answers'. The letter was footnoted: 'Members of the committee have declared interests in relation to financial services. They are published on the committee's webpage, here.' UK Finance, the banking and finance industry body, opposes the FCA's proposals. In November last year, after months of intense criticism from businesses and an intervention from the City minister, the FCA offered to soften its proposals on 'naming and shaming' and launched a second consultation. Earlier this month, the committee published a report calling on the FCA to halt the 'name and shame' policy unless concerns raised during the consultation process were addressed. Currently, nine other members of the 13-person committee have declared interests in financial services companies. The Liberal Democrat peer Sharon Bowles is a non-executive at London Stock Exchange plc, and the Labour peer Clive Hollick is an adviser to the fund manager Hambro Perks. John Eatwell is an economic adviser to Palamon Capital Partners and a non-executive director of Unity Trust Bank. Lord Eatwell became a non-executive director of Unity Trust in November but his role at the bank was not declared in the committee's critical report about the FCA in February. Eatwell, a Labour peer, said he had informed the Lords authorities about the role in December and had 'no idea' that it was not automatically registered with the committee as well. 'This has now been done,' he said. Another Labour peer, Jonathan Kestenbaum, appears on the FCA register as a director of Windmill Asset Management, which comes under its regulation, and he is also a director of the publicly listed JP Morgan Japanese Investment Trust. Anthony Grabiner, a barrister and crossbench peer, declared that he sat on the board of Goldman Sachs from 2014 to 2022, and has shareholdings that include Citigroup, HSBC and UBS in the financial sector. Peter Lilley, a former Tory cabinet minister, is an adviser to a Shanghai-based investment fund, YiMei Capital, while Jonathan Hill, another former Tory minister, is an adviser to the Spanish retail bank Santander and the payment technology company Visa Europe. Lord Lilley said YiMei Capital purely invested Chinese money in China and was not affected in any way by the financial regulatory authorities in the UK. He said the committee 'benefits enormously from the expertise of those members who are currently or have been more recently involved in financial services', adding that he 'cannot think of any question or point anyone has made which has been remotely self-serving'. Unlike MPs, peers do not have to declare how much they are paid outside their legislative role, unless they have clients who are foreign governments. Tom Brake, the director of the campaign group Unlock Democracy, said it would have been 'safer' had members with financial interests in the sector recused themselves from the first inquiry. He said: 'This case prompts a wider question about the extent to which members with actual or perceived financial interests that could be impacted by a committee's inquiry, and recommendations, should be able to serve on that committee. 'I will be raising this with the Lords conduct committee and asking it to consider whether, as is the case for the Lords speaker and senior deputy speaker, it might be appropriate in certain circumstances for select committee members to lay aside any relevant financial interests.' Brake questioned whether putting pressure on the FCA not to name financial service providers under investigation was in the interests of consumers. The code of conduct for members of the Lords states that 'in the performance of their parliamentary duties, members of the house shall base their actions on consideration of the public interest'. A spokesperson for the Lords committee said its members came from 'different walks of life, from across the UK, and represent a wide range of professions and backgrounds'. They added: 'Many remain active in their careers after joining the house. This professional experience is an especially useful resource in carrying out committee work.' They said members' work was governed by the Lords code of conduct and their interests were declared and published online. The spokesperson said the inquiry on the FCA's enforcement proposals accepted 40 pieces of written evidence from any interested parties and held an oral evidence session with the regulator.
