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The Post Office Horizon Scandal Portends a Future of Digital Chaos

by Guy de la Bédoyère
8 January 2024 1:00 PM

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

Tags: AnarchyDigital IDHorizon scandalOfstedPost OfficeSchoolScienceTechnocracy

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