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Comment by ExoticPearTree | Hacker News Reader

I loosely followed the discussion here on HN, but I don't see any mention of anyone from the Post Office being arrested/prosecuted/sentenced for this.

It seems that some people there abused their power and need to cool down behind bars.

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It's insane to me that most of the heat is being directed at Fujitsu. Sure, there's definitely some culpability there, but the Post Office (especially their legal team) holds the vast majority of the responsibility. There's a lot weighing in on the multi-year investigation that (has been) ongoing, but I can't help but feel like they're waiting for the public furor to cool down before releasing anything.

> the Post Office (especially their legal team) holds the vast majority of the responsibility.

It really depends on what Fujitsu told which PO manager.

The Post Office also paid independent people to figure out where the problem is, and the answer was "Horizon is garbage, you can't rely on it". So, they fired those people.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-67921974

This a pattern we've seen before

1. "We aren't wrong, you are too involved to make an impartial decision. We need somebody independent to investigate"

2. "The independent investigation has finished, but we need to properly digest their report, so we can't tell you what they said yet"

3. "We've now realised the independent investigation was inadequate, everybody who worked on it was incompetent and its findings are useless so we've destroyed the report. We declare ourselves exonerated, we were right all along".

People tend to have this mistaken understanding of morality which assumes they're a good person and so therefore obviously what they did must be good (since they're a good person) and so they might need to uh, fix differences between the world as they've imagined it and the slightly less rosy reality.

For example sure, you know that stabbing Sarah in the throat resulted in Sarah becoming dead, but you had to do that, because you're a good person and Sarah was going to tell the Police that you'd stolen $18.5M from the business. You didn't steal that money! Sure, yes, you took the money and maybe you technically shouldn't have done that, but you had a 100% sure strategy for playing Blackjack and recovering the $800 000 you lost last month, except that you got a bit confused and lost all of the $18.5M, but that's not theft, that's just a minor mistake you will be able to soon fix, if only Sarah doesn't tell these lies about stealing and get you arrested. So you had to, it wasn't murder, it was really self defence. You're a Good Person!

> The Post Office also paid independent people to figure out where the problem is, and the answer was "Horizon is garbage, you can't rely on it". So, they fired those people.

A UK tradition!

> In 2009, the government came under fire when ACMD [Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs] chair David Nutt of Imperial College London was sacked for questioning government drug policy in public

https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/little-has-changed-in-uk...

As I understand it, there's an ongoing PPE thing as well.

Let me guess, they (also) only sacked people that went in one direction with respect to gov policy and not the other direction?

That implies that the Post Office didn't know about the true situation, but they most definitely did know about the issues, but continued to lie and fraudulently collect money from the sub postmasters affected whilst collecting bonuses for each successful prosecution.

In fact, they had recently shortlisted the lady in charge of the PO at the time to be the Bishop of London, because of course they had.

That's Paula Vennells and she was awarded a CBE for her role in running the Post Office. However, there's just been a petition that garnered over 1.2 million signatures for her to be stripped of her CBE and in response, she has "promised" to return it.

I, for one, don't believe her.

Apparently she can't "return" it, it has to be annulled by the British monarch.

I hope Charlie does that then, but it depends on whether he cares enough about it.

I think it would be fitting if a significant percentage of other people with CBEs started to return them with public statements about them not wanting to be associated with the likes of Paula Vennells.

It's not really on Charlie, any more than he's the one making the lists. His mother wasn't like "OH, we should honor that Post Office lady, I like receiving letters and I bet she's somehow responsible for that". She just got a list with Paula's name on it, along with various crooks, financiers, consultants, political hacks and maybe the odd charity worker.

Issuing Honours is something a Monarch does, but like declaring War or deciding what Laws should govern the country, they don't actually make decisions, that's a government problem.

So long as the general public were barely aware of a problem, this could skate along as not important for years, but now lots of people are angry because they saw a TV show and for once when they said "Hey this is terrible!" instead of "It's just a TV show it's not real you idiots" those of us who were paying attention are like "Yes, so what are you going to do about it?" which as we've seen puts pressure on government to actually do something.

To sort of answer my own question: - https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/13/business/uk-post-office-f... - https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-to-quash-wrong...

From the CNN article it seems like the police is going to get involved in this, so at least some good news for the people wrongfully prosecuted by the people charge of the Post Office.

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