3 days ago
The double life of Big Mags: Paedophile hunter and secret heroin dealer
Nineties nostalgia is big business these days. Oasis are the hottest ticket in town, the biggest romcom of the year featured Bridget Jones, TikTok is awash with Gen-Zers pining for the 'Nineties summer' of their imagination and pedal pushers are making an uneasy comeback.
Latching on to this trend was surely not on Myles Bonnar's mind when he created The Ballad of Big Mags (BBC Sounds), a six-part podcast about Margaret Haney, AKA 'Big Mags', a fearsome matriarch who ruled the roost over a notorious Stirling housing estate. Yet it made me, someone who spent his teenage years in the 1990s, hopelessly sentimental.
It had it all: moral panics about paedophiles and 'neighbours from hell', tabloid sensationalism about sinkhole estates and untouchable criminals, a Scottish heroin epidemic. It even had a starring role for Robert Kilroy-Silk and his pugilistic daytime chat show. The only things missing were a Pulp soundtrack, a front-bench sex scandal and an appearance from Mr Blobby.
Bonnar, however, wasn't laying it on that thick – by itself, the story of Big Mags stands as an intoxicating time capsule for the Britpop-New Labour era. Bonnar, whether he meant to or not, put his finger on something – even that era's tales of criminality and poverty carried a certain swagger.
Haney had it in spades – a formidable, charismatic 'community leader' and the de facto head of a disreputable clan on Stirling's Raploch estate, she became irresistible media fodder when she came to attention in January 1997.
Alan Christie was a convicted paedophile, recently released from prison, who had been rehoused in Raploch. Having got wind of it, Haney led a mob to Christie's house and forced him out. For several months, she leased out her services, turning up at similar protests across the country, becoming semi-famous off the back of it – sometimes she and her crowd would force a paedophile out of an area before they'd even moved in. You couldn't help but be impressed by communities coming together to prove the effectiveness of direct action.
There was a host of amusing details: Haney rallying neighbours to her crusade by marching up and down the street shouting into a children's karaoke machine; the claim that she was the inspiration for EastEnders ' Big Mo (the BBC have denied this); the claim that she was the inspiration for a character in Ian Rankin's Rebus novel Dead Souls (Rankin has confirmed this). All in all she was a ready-made media treat: a flip-flop-wearing granny with a 60-a-day growl who made sex offenders quake in their boots. 'We'll always have people watching and waiting,' she warned paedophiles hoping to be rehoused.
Yet Bonnar's meticulous story wouldn't amount to much without a sting in its tail. While the press was happy to paint Haney as the moral heart of the Raploch estate, there was a group of people who viewed the Kilroy appearance (where she went toe-to-toe with two anonymised paedophiles) and the interviews on BBC Scotland with disgust: the people of Raploch.
Big Mags wasn't the only Haney on the estate, and as one local journalist put it, the family 'were a whole legion of one-man and one-woman crime waves – they were the stuff of legend'. By the mid-1990s, around 40 of Haney's extended family had been in jail or custody, while Big Mags herself had been convicted of assault, fraud and breach of the peace. As Haney said when a judge railed against her family: 'I don't know what he's complaining about; it's my family that keeps him in a job.'
Soon the letters began trickling into the Daily Record, all from Raploch residents furious at Haney's newfound fame. One stated that the Raploch – which the media had dubbed 'Psychoville' – was respectable until she and her family came along. One declared bluntly: 'Big Mags is not our role model.' Her neighbours had good reason to complain. The woman who was being painted in the press as a salt-of-the-earth campaigner who wanted nothing more than to protect children was the head of a huge heroin-dealing operation.
When the Daily Record ran a 'Dob in your local narco' campaign, the phone line was jammed with people desperate to shop Haney. Bonnar had got hold of a recording of a community meeting from 1992 in which Haney is railing against drugs in the Raploch. The locals cannot stifle their laughter.
In the most satisfying of narrative twists, Big Mags, that scourge of the paedophile, began to get a taste of her own medicine. First, an angry mob saw her thrown off the Raploch estate. Then, wherever Haney was to be rehoused, local people would destroy the proposed house. The Haneys ended up in homeless accommodation in another area of Stirling, in what would become known as 'Fortress Haney'.
One local journalist put the neighbours turning against Haney down to 'tall poppy syndrome', but I don't quite agree. It was 'enormous thistle syndrome' – Haney was an abrasive juggernaut of charm, influence and destruction, and one that gave all of Scotland a bad name. Bonnar clearly delighted in the fact that Haney's reign of chaos took place in the shadow of Stirling Castle. Big Mags, Queen of Scots. (Later, the people of Bannockburn rose up against her, helping Haney fit nicely into the folklore of Scotland.)
It's a terrific listen, and the series is entirely fair to Haney, allowing all sides of this complex character to gradually edge into the light so that we can all make our own judgments. Throughout, however, is a nagging feeling that even Haney, a famed and feared drug dealer and chief executive of a 'family from hell', had within her a community spirit and a sense of societal cohesion that is almost entirely lacking today.
Nineties nonsense nostalgia gone too far? Almost certainly. But the Big Mags, booze-and-fags 1990s gave the UK a shared sense of identity – whether we liked it or not.
