Sickening discrimination is dressed up as lads’ banter
THIS week has been a shameful one for the gilded cocoons of sexist and offensive privilege in Scotland.
We should not be surprised that “sickening” sexist, racist and homophobic jokes were made by an after-dinner speaker at the Scottish Football Writers’ Association (SFWA) awards in Glasgow.
But we should take heart, that in that audience were women who refused to tolerate it, who stood up, walked out and spoke up.
It wasn’t just the sexist warblings of Bill Copeland, a former QC turned afterdinner speaker which offended the women but the alleged homophobic and racist references too.
The women were unwilling to sit there and swallow discrimination dressed up as “banter”.
Sports journalist and TV presenter Eilidh Barbour tweeted: “Never felt so unwelcome in the industry I work in than sitting at the Scottish Football Writers’ Awards.
“A huge reminder there is still so much to do in making our game an equal place.”
That a woman who has excelled in her field should feel so uncomfortable and excluded among her peers is an appalling indictment of football and the insidious bloke culture it’s immersed in.
Journalist Gabriella Bennett was among two tables of guests who left the ceremony and publicly condemned the offensive spectacle.
We have hopefully progressed from a day when those women would have been roundly pillioried as humourless. Instead, they won a small victory for all women, for female journalists.
The SFWA had their arm twisted but they have promised to do better and Copeland has been thrown back to whichever archaic world moulded him.
No such humility or recognition from the Faculty of Advocates in their handling of the degrading and sexist comments made by one of their own about one of Scotland’s most respected women’s rights campaigners. This week we reported on leading QC Brian McConnachie who sent texts about the head of Scotland’s largest rape charity, saying he would “s**g” her “just to have something over her”.
McConnachie’s degrading and sinister sexual remarks about Sandy Brindley were presented as evidence in a complaint to the Faculty of Advocates which demands a QC acts with honour and integrity in their personal and professional lives. What
McConnachie, a former High Court prosecutor, meant by having “something over” a campaigner for survivors of sexual assault, only he can know.
But one can assume “honour and integrity” were not foremost in his thinking there.
The precursor to that text was one in which he quoted another male QC as having also indicated he would like to have sex with Ms Brindley.
When that complaint landed with the disciplinary committee of one our most important legal bodies, we’d assume a strongly worded reproach would have been in order.
Instead they took umbrage in the context of these messages, only with the fact McConnachie had been “disloyal” to another QC by repeating their tawdry lad chat.
There was deemed no “unsatisfactory professional conduct” in the disgusting comments he made about Ms Brindley.
The other QC may or may not have said what he did but if he had, the faculty appeared unperturbed by the prospect of two QCs sharing odious exchanges about a woman who has a professional relationship with the legal profession, including the faculty.
How depressing for any female law trainee, any woman who is a solicitor or QC or a victim in a witness box, that the legal industry tolerates the same old insidious “boys will be boys” attitude.
Even if McConnachie’s texts did not technically make the bar of disciplinary action, the faculty should have condemned them as sexist and intolerable, in a post #MeToo world.
If female journalists can make a stand against sexism in their industry, surely a powerful body like the Faculty of Advocates can call it out in their profession.