A fig for those by law protected;

Liberty’s a glorious feast 

Courts for cowards were erected

Churches built to please the priest.

Robert Burns cursed 200 years before us but seemingly he’d the power then to see how we live now – his sarcastic observations likely hit home more in the last few days in Fife and Dundee than anyone seriously anticipated.

We’ve observed contortions and carniptions of arguments about whether it’s unkind and hateful to say a man’s a man for a’ that or if a woman is entitled to object to his invading her private female spaces at all, let alone in times of crisis. That farce has unfolded into circus comprising an international embarrassment.

Bosses, team leaders and chiefs have been turning themselves inside out to justify a flawed ideology with scant regard to law or the pain and fear their actions inflict;  they’ve perhaps conspired to condemn a woman of unblemished record on the word of an under qualified immature inexperienced overpaid airhead who thought a salary of £60,000 and a career founded on contact tracing meant she could pick the brains of colleagues similarly unfit for purpose and repeat their coffee house slogans as legal guidance. 

Yet the detail of the modern witch hunt and condemnation came to light only because of the perseverance of one woman and a small team of courageous supporters determined to defend the simple incontrovertible fact, not belief, that a man does not have and never should have the right to cross the threshold into women’s single sex spaces and that to say so is a statement of fact, not hatred or misconduct.

Worse still is that emails, case notes and reports now comprising bundles of evidence were not volunteered as part of an exercise of comprehensive disclosure. It’s been an exercise in drawing teeth and still some records, recordings and notes remain wiped, deleted, missing or simply not available.

Scotland is learning that our public bodies are mainly run by faceless boards whose principal aim when under fire  is to cover their own shortcomings and dodge the oft repeated mission statement mantras of transparency, accountability and integrity. This is achieved by offering the minimum of written information, by redacting ad absurdio and feigning indignation when caught in clear breach of the requirement to disclose as an errant document inadvertently exposes the existence of a longer chain as yet hidden, obscured from view.

This is not a new practice; it is why lawyers like paper trails; it’s why we ask for full files, for every item in a chain of correspondence, every single case note, contact record, report, assessment and proof of posting. It’s why when case notes are printed from a computer we check the footnotes to establish the date of creation or modification of the record. Sometimes in so doing we find records created years after the events they purport to record. At other times we find references to events which are not case noted and do not feature in what might otherwise be described as a comprehensive chronology of events. 

But the crux is this – lawyers need paid and legal aid is mainly not available for employment tribunals and specialist employment lawyers of high calibre are rare. Legal aid doesn’t pay for fishing expeditions. In the end all public bodies know that they have at their fingertips vast resources to fund for years arguments on freedom of information, disclosure and transparency – importantly, at no personal cost – so far. 

David’s desire to recover a full file quickly, in time to effect change in the case he is pursuing, can be resisted by Goliath almost indefinitely when the funding of procedure and litigation is weighted absolutely in favour of various extensions of the State. Most chief executives, improvement officers, equality leads and the like know full well that for every Sandie Peggie there will be a hundred less able, less supported, less vocal – there’s the challenge for Scotland – turn what is Sandie’s victory into a lesson transforming the manner in which those paid vast sums to run our public bodies respect and answer those they are enjoined and rewarded to serve. And employ public servants rewarded for telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but.