The U.K. has been consumed by a scandal involving the use of faulty accounting software, Horizon from Fujitsu, used by the Post Office to accuse postmasters and postmistresses of stealing funds. Under U.K. law, the Post Office is empowered to prosecute alleged offenders directly. Between 1999 and 2015, an astonishing 700-750 hardworking and conscientious managers of local community post offices, often the pillars of society and the very backbone of small businesses in the country, were convicted. Their protestations of innocence and suggestions of glitches in the software were dismissed: the computer does not lie, the courts were told and they accepted the infallibility of technology. Many were coerced into pleading guilty because they could not afford to fight a state behemoth. They lost the respect of their peers, many were ruined financially, several went to jail and some committed or tried to commit suicide.
It was only in 2019 that High Court Judge Peter Fraser cleared the postmasters and pinned responsibility for the financial discrepancies on the software. The Criminal Cases Review Commission has described the scandal as the “biggest single series of wrongful convictions in British legal history”. But the scandal wasn’t over yet. Their efforts to overturn the wrongful convictions and receive reparations have been painfully slow and around 70 claimants died in the interim with their names still not cleared. As of January 2024, just 93 convictions have been reversed and only 30 people have received any compensation.
Although the scandal has been bubbling away under the radar for more than 20 years, a four-part ITV dramatisation that screened recently finally caught the public attention, and then some. Mr. Bates vs the Post Office tells the sorry tale through the eyes of one brave man Alan Bates, unflinchingly supported by his wife Suzanne Sercombe, who kept fighting the entire system and establishment to clear his name, exonerate their colleagues and indict the senior executives. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has pledged to introduce a bill this year to exonerate all the postmasters convicted through the dodgy Horizon-based evidence.
The Metropolitan Police has launched an investigation into potential fraud, perjury and perverting the course of justice.
There are many parallels of this scandal with the Covid saga over the last four years. In what follows, I draw in particular on comments on the Horizon scandal in two recent articles in the U.K. Telegraph by columnists Allison Pearson (which attracted nearly 5,000 online comments) and Allister Heath (2,600 comments), and a third article in the Conservative Woman by Professor Angus Dalgleish.
The first obvious parallel is the blind faith in computers and technology that was untested in the real world. The two equivalents in the case of Covid are the elevation of mathematical models to science and the use of unreliable PCR tests, especially with elevated cycle threshold counts. The PCR machine can be made to run multiple ‘cycles’ (like a washing machine) to keep amplifying the target viral material in the sample to make it detectable. The Ct value, the number of cycles it takes to detect the virus, becomes increasingly less accurate beyond 25-28 Ct yet in some cases it was raised up to 40 and those who tested positive were treated as Covid cases.
Another parallel is in the awarding of state gongs to the perpetrators of mass cruelty. The then-CEO of the Post Office Paula Vennells got a CBE for her services to the Post Office (she has since bowed to public pressure to hand back the honour), while the number of health officials and scientists receiving honours have been sickeningly high.
A third is in the refusal of ministers and parliamentarians to listen to the ordinary people desperate to get their honour and lives back.
The Post Office Minister at the time, Sir (another one) Ed Davy, refuses to accept responsibility and instead blames it all on civil servants: they lied to him on an industrial scale! In fact it is the complicity of all the top institutions and their smug and self-righteous senior personnel – from cabinet ministers to judges, lawyers, executives, investigators, the Post Office board and the Fujitsu board, the engineers and technicians – that has been so sickeningly repeated in the Covid years.
It seemingly did not occur to anyone to ask why over 750 managers with hitherto unblemished records were suddenly all committing financial fraud at the same time, which coincided with the mass rollout of a new accounting software to Post Office branches across the country. No one seems prepared to stand up for the victims of the wrongs and the harms.
And no one still today is prepared to inquire into the dramatic explosion of reported adverse events and excess deaths that coincide with lockdowns and mass vaccinations. They too have encountered unconscionable delays in having their cases investigated and compensation awarded. In a related vein, very few countries seem prepared to take back healthcare workers and civil servants dismissed for refusing to comply with vaccine mandates.
A fourth commonality is the role of Andrew Bridgen MP, crying in the wilderness in both tragedies that something wrong was happening to the Horizon- and vaccine-injured that needed to be looked at. While his name has become familiar in the time of Covid, he had the conviction and the courage to act on it in trying, in vain, to highlight the plight of the postmasters for many years.
A fifth common theme is the class divide, where the rapacious political, bureaucratic and business elites got the financial and social rewards but the harms, pain and suffering were borne by the workers. The rewards – promotions, bonuses, honours – for ruining so many innocent, decent, honourable lives really stick in the craw.
A final common theme is that justice will not be seen to be done and the sense of justice will not be appeased unless many of the top people responsible are put behind bars. There will be no emotional closure for the victims and their families and no effective deterrent to future wrongdoing by jumped-up and condescending members of the ruling class without full and transparent criminal justice accountability. As Heath writes, the postmasters, “the best of Britain, were persecuted by the worst of Britain: the overpromoted corporate-bureaucratic class, the useless apparatchiks of Britain’s Kafkaesque bureaucracies, the unaccountable arms-length bodies, the out of control lawyers, the civil servants and the subsidy-hungry corporations”.
What we need to close this particular circle is both a proper inquiry and a human-interest personalised TV dramatisation of the Covid-related injustices inflicted by the unholy collusion between the different components of Big State, Big Pharma, Big Tech and the mainstream media.
Ramesh Thakur, a former UN Assistant Secretary-General, is Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University, Senior Research Fellow at the Toda Peace Institute, and Fellow of the Australian Institute of International Affairs. His new book, Our Enemy, the Government: How Covid Enabled the Expansion and Abuse of State Power (Brownstone Institute, 2023), is out now. This article was first published by Spectator Australia.
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“All this and the execrable Wheel of Time in Culture Corner.”
Delingpole I think missed out on a treat with Wheel of Time, though understandably, I think. The beginning does seem very Lord of the Rings, and it takes time for the majestic scope, originality and solid plotting and characterisation to become apparent. It would be easy to dismiss it early, never get far into it and come away as dismissive as Delingpole is here. It is in fact justly classed as one of the greats of modern fantasy writing. Far from being sub-Tolkien (which the first book can easily give the impression of), in fact it is almost completely different from any of Tolkien’s work, except in some superficial plot details, and a great complement to Tolkien, in being written from a thoroughly western conservative base without Tolkien’s Christian theology. Not that there’s anything wrong with Christian theology as a basis for art, but Jordan’s classic covers a whole separate area of western conservatism, and is much more American (in a good way).
But the Amazon interpretation is, indeed execrable. Unsurprisingly so, given that they have taken a profoundly conservative work and rendered it into a vehicle for modern woke ideology. In order to do so, they have necessarily gutted it of most that gave it any artistic depth (and introduced a lot of loathsome woke ideological crap).
As one reviewer correctly said of it: “They’ve co-opted this because…they are nowhere near talented enough to make their own story. They could never write something as great as Wheel of Time and have it be as successful, but they want to get the message, their standards and views out. And so they will co-opt something that’s great, inject their bullcrap into it, because they’re not talented enough to make their own, and then ruin it in the process.”
This is nothing unusual – people co-opting art to convey their own message. But it’s especially problematic in cases like this, where the message being pushed is the diametric opposite of the content of the art itself. It’s as though you were to take surrealist art and use it to somehow make conservative propaganda by fundamentally changing and “reinterpreting” it into representational traditionalist paintings, while keeping the attribution to the original artist.
Surrealist art was “reinterpreted” into advertising – there’s no “as if” about it – and the term “surreal” was “reinterpreted” as a synonym for “zany”, or, in the parlance of the especially intellectually challenged among the middle classes, as a synonym for “weird”, “nonsensical”, or “unexpectedly self-contradictory”.
But who watches film version of books anyway? Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings was a superb literary achievement. I’ve stayed away from the films.
“Surrealist art was “reinterpreted” into advertising – there’s no “as if” about it“
And the artists involved would doubtless be figuratively spinning in their graves. Which is roughly the point I made.
“But who watches film version of books anyway? Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings was a superb literary achievement. I’ve stayed away from the films.”
With some regrettable lapses, the LotR films were reasonable adaptations.
The overriding point is that an adaptation of a great work of writing is made into a film, by and large, by a no better than average film maker, so as you imply, it’s rash to have high expectations.
But the kind of intentional ideologically motivated, manipulative vandalism we are dealing with in the case of Wheel of Time is a rather different thing.
The Lord of the Rings trillogy was good.
The Hobbit trilogy was two movies too long. In fact, even the one movie could have been a few years shorter.
Yes, I pretty much agree with this guy:
Amazon’s Lord of the Rings – I’ve Got A Bad Feeling About This
FIVE SEASONS?????
Shove that right in there beside your vaccine mandate!
Got to have plenty of space for the strong empowered women to develop their characters while helping the pathetic men-children to find their inner homo….
Never been more grateful that I have boxed sets of Breaking Bad and Westworld to fall back on. Not to mention the early seasons of Route 66.
Binged the first 5 on Saturday. Usually any anti male, pc bs will turn me right off immediately. Didn’t find this so far.
I don’t mind strong women and long as it’s not women good man bad. The glass cannon spell casters need strong skilful male fighters or they are useless. Some Aisha whatever dislike men, some don’t. It took 3/4 of them to overcome one male spellcaster… etc.
Having never read the books and not knowing anything about it prior to watching it I quite enjoyed it. It was a bit formulaic D&D, 1 archer, 1 barbarian, 1 thief, 1 healer, 1 assassin in the party, but it works for a reason I guess. And the troll-orcs or trollocks was a bit unoriginal
I think your woke bullshit detector might need recalibrating. I’d prescribe a diet of pre-1950s films and literature only, for as long as it takes.
The “glass cannon” nature built into the idea of female magic users was difficult to avoid entirely, but even there they managed to transform the famously stoic and battle hardened warders into a bunch of cry babies.
There are certainly formulaic fantasy tropes built in, but they (in the books at any rate) are used as building blocks for a genuinely original work of huge scope and real depth. But that’s part of the reason why it’s easy to dismiss as mere sub-Tolkien rehash unless you persist with it through at least the end of the first book. Jordan I believe openly acknowledged a debt to Tolkien, but then again that’s the case (the debt, acknowledged or not) for most fantasy writers from the second half of the C20th onwards,
The D&D formulaic party construction aspect you mention is definitely a function of the TV series, not the book. In the book the characters are very young (about 17, at a guess) when they leave their village, and extremely naive. That’s vital to their development through the story. The TV series trashed all this by making them older, and gave them some actually abhorrent characters and histories, that are utterly wrong for the book roles.
I can’t speak to the book comparison ‘Having never read the books’. What’s really in your face wokey about it so far 5 in?
The whole thing is one long sjw lecture about race, gender roles, religious politics and sexual behaviour that the book story is twisted beyond breaking to fit. As I noted, it bears at best occasional, superficial relationship to the books, and in many significant aspects is diametrically opposite to the books’ approach to key issues.
If you can’t see it, it’s most likely because you don’t have any particular problem with the sjw world view, so its unlikely anything I write will mean much to you. If it doesn’t trouble you that a remote, isolated backwater village is portrayed as a more racially diverse place than a US port city, or that supposedly battle hardened, veteran, stoic warriors are portrayed as shrieking and crying in hysterical emotiveness over battle deaths, that men are systematically portrayed as emotionally incontinent and rarely even minimally competent, compared to the women characters, then you are watching it from a very different cultural place from mine. We would probably be speaking different languages. I can only suggest finding some of the many negative reviews out there and trying to read or view them with an open mind.
The animated version, The Lord of the Rings (1978) Directed by Ralph Bakshi was excellent, the others you didn’t miss much.
And don’t laugh at this, but I would say another animated film i’d consider a classic work of art, is Bambi (1942), not so much the story, but the artwork had incredible ambience in parts, it was clearly a labour of love, & beautiful animation.
Actually the film made me read the book
Ironically ‘evil cannot create only corrupt’ was a Tolkien theme.
I see the irony of which you speak – nice connection
There is little doubt now that the regime intends to murder the majority of the population
Yup.
Discreetly of course.
They’ve been killing over 20% of the UK population for years now, it was always likely to be extended, especially with the demographic crisis of an ageing population (caused by said measure).
Sorry, but it just was.
According to a recent London Calling it’s pronounced Oh-Micron.
Does the French President’s wife pronounce it ‘Ohhh, Macron….”?
O mi cron?
You should disassociate yourselves from James Dellingpole in order to retain your integrity. N Kirkpatrick
The plan is to kill us
They needed some sort of a solution…
(First they came for people who need an organ donor).
The War on Drugs – Bill Hicks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knq49PqsMLc
Bill is sorely missed and we need his commentary today more than ever.
Still cant get over the BBC RADIO FIVE documentary I heard about drug gangs in Bradford with a central character called Meggy – true life story – which basically spilled the beans on how many main drug dealers are informants, assets, they work with impunity, they get help to launder the money through the police and they tip off dealers who they supply who get busted by the police to make it look like they are doing their job.
‘Police informant and rival drug dealer who set up Yassar Yaqub’ – the claims about Meggy before he was jailed for murder
https://www.examinerlive.co.uk/news/west-yorkshire-news/police-informant-rival-drug-dealer-16212313