We’re really not sure this makes things any better with regard to the incredible tale that’s unfolded around the judgment in Sandie Peggie vs NHS Fife.
In fact, on any interpretation we can think of, quite the reverse.
This clip was broadcast on ITV News Wales this week.
It’s a staggeringly obvious mess for a whole raft of reasons – a number of completely spurious, illogical and unsupported claims are accepted as facts without any sort of challenge or balancing voice (which has been standard practice on ITV News for a while now across almost any contentious political topic) – but it led us to somewhere magnitudes of crazier still.
My first ever real experience of politics was playing Dictator.
Originally written by Don Priestley for the Sinclair ZX81 in 1982, it was a simple text-based game which subsequently came to other formats including the Commodore 64, BBC Micro, Elan Enterprise and the ZX Spectrum, which is where I encountered it.
Something very odd happened when the Sandie Peggie employment tribunal delivered its judgment – and it wasn’t just the made-up quotes and mangled law.
Call it institutional bias, ideological capture, or just the law doing its job, but what Employment Judge Sandy Kemp’s tribunal delivered was the most one-sided outcome since Butch and Sundance decided to come out shooting.
This is actually pretty serious.
Because, y’know, you can call us old-fashioned purists or sticklers or whatever if you like, but government ministers probably shouldn’t openly lie in prepared statements to the High Court in order to pervert the course of justice.
As recently as this weekend, the Scottish Government claimed that it has “made clear it accepts the Supreme Court ruling [in For Women Scotland] and is taking forward the detailed work necessary”.
But as with so much the Scottish Government says, it’s a barefaced lie.
We thought we should keep track of all the issues with the Peggie tribunal judgment, now that Sandie Peggie has officially announced her intention to appeal it.
Because this story has some distance left to run.
This is absolutely extraordinary.
In the light of revelations exposed and detailed by Wings that the original contained several misleadingly-edited or completely made-up citations from previous cases, the Employment Tribunal today issued a corrected version of its judgment in the Sandie Peggie case. And much like NHS Fife’s repeatedly-edited previous statement on the tribunal, we suspect it’ll only be the first of many.
One must assume from reading the Sandie Peggie judgment that the tribunal was more concerned with discouraging further litigation than with giving full and fearless effect to the Equality Act.
At the heart of this case lies a straightforward question: does a biologically male employee have a legal right to undress in a female-only changing room? For Women Scotland answered that question at the Supreme Court: women-only spaces are for biological women.
Yet instead of applying that binding precedent, the tribunal awarded Sandie Peggie a technical win based primarily on procedural failings and delay, while simultaneously undermining the legitimacy of her core complaint. The effect is a ruling that says: “You were treated badly, but only because you reacted to a situation we pretend has no legal significance.”
The first and most important thing to note about yesterday’s judgment in the Sandie Peggie tribunal is that it’s a very big victory. The tribunal found that Sandie Peggie was gravely and heinously harassed by her employer through no fault of her own, and she’ll be entitled to substantial compensation as a result.
It also ruled, repeatedly and unequivocally, that Dr “Beth” Upton (who’s referred to in the judgment as “the second respondent”) is a man.
After that, it lost its mind.
We miss the days when this was parody, not “progressive” ideology.
But we are where we are.
And hey, it’s great news that their adult roles are still open to all.
We’re just putting this here for the record, really.
It’s a “debate” from the Scottish Parliament last night, on a motion from Patrick Harvie complaining that vulnerable children aren’t being pushed into a programme of lifelong medicalisation, sterilisation and mutilation quickly enough.
The motion completely ignored both the findings of the Cass Review and the Supreme Court judgment in For Women Scotland, but not a single MSP spoke in opposition to it. (Jenni Minto, the Minister For Public Health And Women’s Health, actually broke down in tears at the end because she wasn’t managing to get children’s futures permanently destroyed with sufficient urgency, mainly because the UK Parliament took legislation out of Holyrood’s hands to protect them.)
The list of those who spoke in favour of child harm was:
Patrick Harvie (Scottish Greens)
Paul McLennan (SNP)
Mercedes Villalba (Labour)
Maggie Chapman (Scottish Greens)
Elena Whitham (SNP)
Monica Lennon (Lab)
Rona Mackay (SNP)
Jenni Minto (SNP)
We hope one day they’re held publicly accountable for their actions.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
