Mick Hartley

Paul Knaggs at Labour Heartland – Sandie Peggie and the Institutional Madness That Chose Ideology Over Women:

A 318-page tribunal judgment confirms what working women already knew: Britain’s public institutions will sacrifice them on the altar of fashionable nonsense

Ask yourself a simple question. What kind of health service suspends an experienced nurse for objecting to undressing beside a man in a women’s changing room? What kind of organisation spends over £250,000 of public money defending that suspension? And what kind of political class watches this unfold and calls it progress?

The answer arrived in 318 pages: the kind captured by ideology so completely that biological reality, women’s dignity, and basic safeguarding all became negotiable. The kind where a working-class woman’s right to privacy matters less than institutional compliance with fashionable doctrine.

And yes, this is a Labour activist writing, but he can still see how badly Peggie was let down by the unions:

Where were the unions while Peggie was suspended and investigated for defending women’s spaces?

The deafening silence from organised labour throughout this case speaks to a deeper rot. Trade unions that once existed to protect working people from arbitrary management power have been captured by the same middle-class activists who run HR departments and diversity committees.

Peggie needed a union to tell NHS Fife that suspending a nurse for safeguarding concerns was outrageous. She needed collective bargaining power to push back against ideological management. She needed solidarity from fellow workers.

Instead, she got lawyers and crowdfunding. The institutions that should have defended her were either complicit or absent.

This is not an accident. It is the result of decades of middle-class graduate activists colonising labour movement structures and redefining “progressive” to mean whatever makes them feel virtuous. Class struggle becomes secondary to policing language and enforcing fashionable doctrines.

The working-class women who need unions most now find themselves abandoned by organisations more interested in corporate diversity initiatives than defending shop-floor workers from management harassment.

Can’t argue with that.

Added: there is an amusing touch of the “no true Scotsman” here, though. No true working class unionist would bow their knee to this gender ideology nonsense over the rights of hard-working women – so the unions must have been taken over by the middle class…