Anyone who has watched the ITV series Mr. Bates vs the Post Office will have been left stunned by the breathtaking smugness and audacity of those officials who worked for the state-owned service, the extent of its legal prerogatives and the behaviour of those officials, as well as the allegations about the dissimulation and cover-ups managed by the manufacturers of the Horizon accounting system.
It is impossible now to imagine that any of those involved could not have worked out that the idea the Post Office had been abruptly taken over by a swathe of crooked sub-postmasters was absurd. We can dismiss that immediately. They must have known it was nonsense but instead chose to fabricate an outrageous campaign that involved telling each sub-postmaster he or she was uniquely having problems, and also dedicated all their efforts to protecting the brand and revenue stream, regardless of the financial and psychological cost to the sub-postmasters. They were helped along by those lawyers who exhibited their traditional ability to say whatever the paying client tells them to say.
The ghastly saga serves as an allegory for our times in several different ways. Here we see, on an epic scale, the way organisations and prominent individuals dedicate all their time and money to saving face in the first instance until finally, years later, they are dragged to court. By then the damage is a thousand times worse than it might have been and many of the victims destroyed or dead.
I make no apology for quoting Alexander Hamilton yet again because his words describe the problem with piercing clarity:
To retract an error even in the beginning is no easy task. Perseverance confirms us in it and rivets the difficulty; but in a public station, to have been in an error, and to have persisted in it, when it is detected, ruins both reputation and fortune. To this we may add that disappointment and opposition inflame the minds of men and attach them still more to their mistakes. (1774)
This is precisely how the Post Office tragedy has played out. But there is more to it. How is it that Post Office representatives were able to force themselves on sub-postmasters, turning up like Gestapo officers in unmarked cars in the dawn, intimidating and threatening them? The answer is, unfortunately, simple. Human society is filled with people who are capable of behaving like that which is why of course the Gestapo itself was able to recruit its operatives. And the Stasi. I can smile, and murders whiles I smile (Gloucester in Henry VI Pt III).
Some are sociopaths, a type of person increasingly favoured in business and management precisely because they are psychologically capable of destroying others without a hint either of empathy or ability to understand that what they are doing might be unreasonable. Or simply they have the wherewithal to take the money and do whatever they are told.
It’s really not so very different with Ofsted. Although that scandal is on a different scale, and I’m not suggesting schools don’t need monitoring (anyone educated in the 1960s and 70s can remember just how bad some teachers could be), it’s been historically operated in a very variable way. As a former teacher myself I could see how apparently normal teachers, once recruited by Ofsted, can turn into lethal weapons that march into a school to tear the place and the staff to pieces, and sometimes from schools that hadn’t even met the standards they were demanding from others.
Ludicrous expectations, ridiculous demands, and in one case sheer invention – in one instance a safeguarding issue was invented to justify failing the school. It was upheld by subsequently inventing another variant even though the supposed new ‘problem’ had been the case for years but had never been mentioned by Ofsted before. Luckily, the head concerned hasn’t given up in despair or taken his own life. He’s fought back. But we all know what this can do to a school leader.
Although Ofsted isn’t a commercial organisation the similarities are painful. Ofsted is a brand. It has to be protected and that is exactly what we have seen happening. Saving face is what matters. At any price.
That’s only one side of the problem. In the Post Office’s case it is manifest that virtually nobody, if anyone, understood the technology. The Post Office’s senior management clearly didn’t have a clue how Horizon worked (or works), a software that had been bought because it was the cheapest pitch for the contract (according to a Panorama special). This total ignorance was something they seem to have been oblivious to, or simply didn’t care. They just collected their vast salaries and, in one case, a CBE.
They presided over other staff who clearly didn’t understand the software and that ran right down to the hit squad enforcers who strongarmed their way into hundreds of Post Offices across the country. The lawyers they hired obviously didn’t understand it either. This doesn’t seem to have been some sort of conspiracy to protect the tech mastermind behind the software, but rather evidence that in fact no-one knew properly how it worked or how to fix it.
The sub-postmasters were obviously not people who had been trained in how the software worked, merely how to operate it (or so they believed). They assumed, not unreasonably, that it had been foisted on them because it was fit for purpose. But like most of us they had to use something they did not understand and which, in this case, was defective. The difference was that hundreds of them were criminalised for that shortcoming, yet what could they possibly have done to avoid it? None of them was able to understand what the problems were, the causes, or how to prove what was going wrong.
As for Ofsted, that has become most of all a data monitoring and submission exercise. Schools have become elaborate data-entering services. The public manifestation of a school’s quality exists only in the hopelessly subjective data, sometimes made up just to have something to enter, that the staff pump into a swilling vat of numbers that spits out meaningless graphs and performance figures. No-one understands the guff that fills schools’ data records. It has become a pursuit for the sake of it. An alternate reality.
How readily that reflects almost everything in our modern world. We have gone completely beyond the point where we can look after ourselves in any meaningful way. Every house is filled with equipment few of us understand or can repair, if it is even designed to be repairable (which it usually isn’t), yet we have become totally dependent on.
Our homes have become data-generating machines whether through smart meters, online listening devices like Alexa, or filling out tax returns. From 2027 any self-employed person with an income over £30,000 will have to have digital tax-reporting software installed on a computer which will give a constant update to the Revenue (Digital Tax).
Naturally it’s being presented as reliable and more efficient (it’ll “make it easier for individuals and businesses to get their tax right”), but what happens if when that software goes wrong or turns out to have a massive bug?
If the Post Office debacle is anything to go by, there will be years of denials and brutal court cases, the ruin of some taxpayers, and then after several years the truth will come to light. But the only winners will the lawyers who will cream off most of any compensation. And it will all be because no-one understands it.
Worst of all, we are being taught to believe it cannot be any other way, even though it is patently obvious that only a few decades ago the software did not even exist and nor did the computers and yet we managed to live.
My personal view is that this isn’t any kind of conspiracy. We are descending into this of our own volition. The digital world is a mirage of order which has beguiled governments, organisations, companies and individuals, yet the reality is that it is total chaos. Far from being presided over by some mastermind or masterminds, the whole edifice is a Tower of Babel, a creaking Heath Robinson shambles which no-one understands but the confusion is taking over every part of our lives.
Carl Sagan’s words, so often wheeled out, are coming true with terrifying speed:
We’ve arranged a global civilisation in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
His words are familiar now, but they bear constant rereading. The Post Office scandal was the result of a “combustible mixture of ignorance and power”. It’s blown up in the faces of those who ran or run the Post Office. There’ll be plenty more of this to come.
Netflix has a slightly unsatisfactory movie out called Leave The World Behind. Tiny cast and presumably a minuscule budget, the plot is that some sort of war has led to the complete takeover of electronics and digital technology by some nebulous enemy (this includes making Tesla self-driving cars exit the showrooms and crash themselves on a freeway). The chilling point is that once everything is switched off there is no government, no order and nowhere to turn.
And that distill’d by magic sleights
Shall raise such artificial sprites
As by the strength of their illusion
Shall draw him on to his confusion.
Hecate in Macbeth
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Authors of articles like this can sometimes get carried away. What does Guy suggest, for instance, tht the most expensive IT solution should be selected on principle expecting it to be better.
The scandal of the matter is two fold:
first, the politicians and MSM did not want to know until it became a TV drama then they could see PR opportunities for themselves
second, then and now the inadequacy of nationalised businesses and any organisation without accountability is bound to go off the rails. Yet still we hear calls for more government, even nationalisation!
I don’t think Guy is suggesting that a more expensive IT system would on principle be better. However, if you have a competitive tender process then it is instructive to look and see why there may be significant differences in the prices quoted. There is a suspicion though that public sector projects are often awarded to the cheapest quote which, if true, can result in bad or dangerous outcomes.
To me, the key point here is the one he highlights with the Alexander Hamilton quote, on how difficult is is to admit an error. There will have been a point quite early on in this terrible saga when one or more senior people within the Post Office would have realised that a terrible mistake was being made but felt unable to stand up and admit it.
Instead this debacle continued until the day that the whole sorry mess finally arrived in front of an actual judge who didn’t take long to discover which side were telling the truth and which side were lying and obfuscating. Unfortunately, it took several years and millions of pounds in legal fees to get there.
BBC Radio 4 broadcast an excellent “exposé of the Post Office Horizon scandal” in a series of documentaries, over several weeks in May and June 2020, continued in May 2021, and again in June and July 2023, and again in November 2023.
It’s extraordinary that it took a television drama to bring it to the attention of the wider general public before there is the outcry that it deserves.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/m000jf7j
There was also a BBC Panorama programme about in April 2022, still available on the BBC iPlayer:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0016t20/panorama-the-post-office-scandal
Thanks for the link. I’m listening now.
It’s well worth a listen. A highly damning indictment. Both the PO and Fujitsu come out very badly.
Cudos to the downvoter of my above innocuous comment. At least you’re consistent.
Surprising that Britons Broadcasting Communism have done an expose of the blob which they are so much part of. Shame we do not have some public investigation of the been for their gross cover ups and biases.
Indeed. The lesson is much more openness and a very free press (not filled with neo communist, NUJ trained a holes). And monitoring of government organisations by watchdogs made up of volunteers from the public not people from within.
I don’t subscribe to Netflix so I know little about the film Leave the World Behind. However, the paragraph about it sounds like it has borrowed something from The Machine Stops by E M Forster.
I think the Horizon scandal suggests that the software could not essentially replicate the bookkeeping that sub-postmasters had previously done. Rather than automate an already working, existing system in such a way that the outputs could be compared, the PO decided to fundamentally change the system and in the process lose the audit trail.
Other problem is that many managers nowadays are not technically aware of their business and its processes. In the past (pre 1960s) most leaders and managers were promoted from the technical side of the business so they knew what bullsh*t sounded and looked like. Since then we have a managerial class of people whose only training and skill is in management, which means they can be easily swayed by clever arguments and technical guff they do not understand.
I was about to comment that I’m very surprised this scandal is blowing up now, rather than when the court decision came down several years back. However, on reflection, given what I’ve seen over the last few years, I’m far less surprised.
For a large part of my career, I worked in a technical capacity for consultancies, I’ve delivered complex software for organisations, as well as delving into previous systems that weren’t fit for purpose (including systems at MHRA, which are still in place). I was always concerned about accuracy and humble enough to consider I might not have achieved it.
For the PO to treat their system as flawless, persecuting and prosecuting, despite the obvious system flaws makes my blood boil. They knew it was shonky before the class-action went to court.
I recall they (Fujitsu, I think) even edited the underlying raw data in some instances, blowing up the audit-trail. That’s criminal.
We’ve seen more of this type of behaviour recently: raw climate data getting an overhaul; vax records too in the case of the US military. We frequently see the publishing of data analyses without the raw source data alongside.
I no longer trust any sweeping conclusions drawn from data. A graph can, and often does, lie.
I expect we’re going to see more of this.
As a (now retired) accountant I’ve always been puzzled by the technical accounting issues with Horizon. The most obvious question to ask is whether it was a proper double entry bookkeeping system? If so, every time a difference appeared at the Sub-postmaster’s end, what was the balancing entry?
So, for example if Horizon showed a £5,000 deficit, it should have showed that £5,000 was missing from the cash account, bank account or stock (stamps etc).
Perhaps it appeared in a Fujitsu suspense account that the SPM could never see?
At that stage the SPM should have been able to run a full transaction report and picked out the one or more spurious transactions. The fact that such a basic
reconciliation didn’t seem to be possible tells you that Horizon didn’t meet
even the very basic requirements of an accounting system.
Which leads to the other big question that the PO investigators or judges never bothered asking. If there is a £40,000 shortfall, where’s the money? How has the SPM extracted such a sum, was it in cash or stamps, and is there any indication,
let alone evidence, that the SPM had an unexplained boost to their lifestyle?
The fact that the PO were able to pursue their own prosecutions and bullied SPM’s into pleading guilty to “lesser” offences meant that the very few, if any
cases were ever examined properly in open court. and at least one was thrown
out by the judge when it was.
It’s not just the PO executives, Fujitsu, politicians and the media that need to learn from this. Judges should never accept theft, fraud or false accounting charges as guilty based on a couple of printouts, or the prosecutor’s say so. As a minimum the prosecutor must present a full case including how the “stolen”
money was actually extracted.
Excellent article in Conservative Woman today entitled ‘My 14 year fight for the cruelly mistreated sub-postmasters’ by Andrew Bridgen. In it, he indicts the MSM, BBC, Sky, ITV and CH4 for dismissing their plight. The moronic Ed Davey escapes censure for ignoring the issue whilst he was Minister for postal affairs, accusing Post Office bosses of ‘misleading him.’
I have already posted the Andrew Bridgen article on another thread but it is indeed an excellent article. Call me Dave had an opportunity to sort this out very early but he obviously couldn’t be arsed so walked away from it. His successors clearly determined that if it was too hot for Dave they would stay out of it too.
Vennells should of course be facing life imprisonment. As a minimum.
Yes, agreed. What an odious character she is. Clearly, her faith doesn’t extend as far as compassion and understanding of fellow humans.
Vennells is not a vicar. She’s not even a Christian. Even calling her a heathen would seem to be over exaggerating her validity. She truly is an oxygen thief.
Just another tale of government corruption. Overseen by MPs, delivered by willing sociopaths. But the financial damages are going to be tiny as compared to the ones that will be awarded re the jibby jabs.
Compensation for the jibby jabs will never happen because the government and their cronies knew from the off that the injections were dangerous. Paying compensation would raise the wrong questions and proper answers would justify life imprisonment for hundreds. It is not going to happen.
The next “pandemic” is due once the Pandemic Preparedness Treaty and the Revised Health Regulations have been dotted, crossed and signed. Always keep in mind that Billy has promised that we ‘won’t forget the next one.’
One of the issues is the inability of State organisations to draw up contracts with outside suppliers, so when problems occur the money can be reclaimed from the outside supplier.
I know of two NHS contracts with outside suppliers. One contract was not even signed by the NHS so could not be enforced. The other had not been properly drafted and meant that a new Hospital was opened with one defective lift which could not be used or repaired.
Knowing this, I would guess the contract with Futjisu might also be poorly drawn and not allow for investigation or compensation.
Whether these contracts are poorly drawn by design or just poor work standards is more difficult to answer.
Poor work standards.
In these gargantuan organisations nobody is actually in charge, no one feels any sense of ownership of the overall outcomes.
These entities are uncontrollable behemoths with lives of their own. And the people in them are simply looking out for themselves which means advancing their own careers and making sure they can’t be blamed for any of the many things that are.constantly going wrong.
And it works for them. Notice how no one is ever responsible for anything in these giant organisations. The bigger the screw up, the greater the horror, the less likely you are to find anyone to pin it on. In the end its always some nebulous collective responsibility, lessons to be learned and no one ever pays for the inhumanities of the machine except its victims.
What a terrific article.
Although there are those who clearly push for technology driven athoritarian control, I would agree that the principle force is the dynamic itself.
Basically this isn’t resolved by getting rid of a bunch of wronguns and replacing them with “good” people.
Unless we find a way to change the dynamic itself we won’t be able to stop this relentless advance towards techno totalitarianism.
Unless there is a massive drive to halt and scale back the administrative bureaucratic state, we’re all going to become slaves to the techno state, completely vulnerable to its failures and the psychopathic whims of the army bureaucrats that man it.
Make all public sector software open source, and accessible for comment, criticism and bug reports on GitHub (or equivalent). That’s how software is done in the open-source community, and it works very well. Closed-source, proprietary software is usually very bad, not because the developers are any worse than the rest of us but because there’s no access for bug-hunters, and no possibility of feedback and accountability. There’s no point trying to go after people like Paula Venells, the processes are wrong. But nobody listens to programmers.
Ian, the issue is not solely about the software it is about collusion at the top of the Post Office. Vennells was paid millions to manage this organisation when the reality is that she would actually have been incapable of running a sub post office. She wilfully supported the ‘going after’ of nigh on a thousand sub post masters whilst knowing that the faults belonged to Fujitsu. She is guilty as hell and deserves life imprisonment. As a minimum.
One thing that is probably salient here is that if people believe, or know, that they will be severely punished for failure, they are likely to cover up. I know this sounds unfair but in the world of safety, there is a big push to have what is known as a Just Culture: you will not be punished for genuine error or mistakes but will be for sabotage or willful negligence, or covering up!.
The other way to handle this is, of course, to make it clear to the great and the good that they may be severely criticised and subject to criminal proceedings if they cover up and obfuscate, etc. But that would require a step change by a government that was not itself doing its utmost to cover up all their mistakes with lies and propaganda.
I worked for a public sector organisation and I recognise the behaviours of management in the Post Office scandal. The public sector is particularly rife with these psychopathic types who are utterly arrogant about their ‘genius’ and ideas and will destroy anyone who disagrees. Ass kissers yes people and those ‘on message’, get on (with some rare exceptions) in the civil service because that is the current paradigm. All to the massive detriment of the public who pay through legalised theft (taxes). Our society is in great danger of failing massively because of the combination of this human failure and the rise of complex software to solve everything. A return to more manual processes (with computers as OUR servants) is the way out in my view.
Time for a change.
I wonder how much it cost in backhanders, holidays and expensive meals & wine to get the software accepted. I expect that is another can of worms.
Hear, hear.