Post Office plan to sack Horizon IT reviewer kept secret, documents reveal
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Burnham#The_Managerial_R...
The CEO was effectively rewarded for managing the crisis (when the crisis was in full swing in 2019) by the government through the award of the CBE and a seat on the board of an NHS trust etc.
We will see how long the current system will prevail - according to Céline, a ruling class becomes parasitic if they no longer supply the military cadres, and that this is to be the only criterion. Looking at the US army recruitment numbers, it is clear that families who fought in it for generations no longer see a reason to do so, understandably.
The best we can hope for is that the phase of decline will be short, and that transfer of power will take place within the constitution, and not go off-script.
Presumably, what paved the way for that development was the recent and widely reported solution of the "nuance problem", such that we can now conduct philosophy debates without any need for going beyond a few thousand characters?
Twitter is the chattering class, comprised of the managerial types whose portfolio is their own appearance.
The best refutations of political and philosophical positions are written by absurdly overeducated guys dunking on a (usually) less sophisticated counter-party with a terse one-liner.
The Vienna Café Central under the Nazi regime maybe? Especially if it was bombed, that would make for a good comparison. Twitter is fundamentally unsuited to philosophical debate due to its nature (short form tweets), impersonality (everyone can say shit online, it's quite different to having to defend your antisemitism in the face of Theodor Hertzl), and automatisation (it's cheap to spray tweet crap from a St Petersburg troll farm to tilt public perception).
These people killed people and hid their mess. Plain and simple.
Two things here that come to mind:
1) The lack of muckraking agents in this whole affair - individuals, investigative bodies, the media, non-governmental agencies, British billionaires who have the wherewithal to finance private investigative operations etc. The sheer magnitude of that shortfall is just worrying. For those that are not fully familiar with the scope of the issues here :
Between 1999 and 2015, an estimated 3500 staff employed by the state-owned
Post Office service were accused of fraud, theft or malicious accounting.
Almost 700 of them were convicted in courts and some 230 were jailed.
Most were legally compelled to repay the amounts they were accused of
fleecing, resulting in bankruptcies, marriage failures, substance abuse and
even suicides.
There was just one not-so-little problem – virtually all of those people
were innocent.[1]
2) Whats more concerning is the larger question :
a) if people have been made to put up with these kinds of horrendous miscarriages of justice for
so long, in a postal services affair, what other miscarriages of justice are there that go
unnoticed, uninvestigated and unpunished.
b) is this "part and parcel" of middle income British life? do the Brits put a large amount of
trust in their unimpeachable public institutions? do they pull themselves back, short of calling
into question the integrity of those that are tasked with such jobs? (atleast more so than is
the case in the United States and elsewhere). I ask because I've come across things that seem to
buttress exactly that :
It is also forcing everyone to pay higher taxes for worse
public services: The great British Middle Class live in
a world of petty crime that goes un-investigated let
alone punished, over-crowded emergency health services,
and ever-lengthening NHS waiting lists (Britain has one
of the lowest ratios of doctors and hospital beds per
patient in the whole of the OECD).
[1] Inside the incredible and devastating postal service scandal that could bring down the UK government
https://www.news.com.au/finance/work/leaders/inside-the-incr...
[2] Britain Should Stop Pretending It’s a Rich Country
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/07/18/stagnant-...
[3] Dr. John Campbell
I actually donated money to The Guardian, and (reluctantly) restarted my NY Times subscription a few months ago.
While the UK has an extra level of horrible, the US has its own corporate and government Post Master scandals.
https://www.kxan.com/investigations/no-more-paper-license-pl...
Widespread criminal ring that created issue spanning all 50 states uncovered and eventually fixed primarily from one institution’s Austin, TX based reporting.
Local journalists need even more support, and they have even less support.
If there’s one legacy I and others can leave for the younger generations, it’s rebuilding a robust habit, culture, and network of paid-for journalism.
Whether they do this out of their own conviction or due to external influence is ultimately secondary. The Guardian is taking a clear side in the culture war and subjects her reporting to it. Check out their reporting on topics like race, immigration, gender relations, or the Middle East.
Perfect is the enemy of good and all that.
The main thing is to digest multiple reputable sources of information with different viewpoints.
Even rags like the NY Post I’ve come to respect (with a large grain of salt).
In the current climate that would also be a reflection of your ethical attitude.
Here's an example of a news organisation that does not take money from advertisements: https://bylinetimes.com/about/
It's part of the reason I switched my subscription to The Guardian over to them.
That is a very clear and welcome attitude for journalists to have. Very refreshing, and extraordinarily rare these days. It’s probably worth subscribing to their paper in the mere hope that they are capable, and can actually carry through on their promises.
Since we're on the topic of newspapers, this old Yes Prime Minister quote explains the UK press quite accurately:
> Jim Hacker explains who reads the newspapers
> Hacker: Don't tell me about the press. I know exactly who reads the papers. The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country; The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country; The Times is read by the people who actually do run the country; the Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country; the Financial Times is read by people who own the country; the Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country, and the Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is.
> Sir Humphrey: Prime Minister, what about the people who read The Sun?
> Bernard: Sun readers don't care who runs the country, as long as she's got big **.
I think there are alternatives that should also be encouraged. I want to spread awareness of Byline Times and Private Eye. I recently switched from a subscription of The Guardian to Byline Times.
I think local papers are also important.
I don't understand how somebody who can be a priest, appointed by God to do the right thing, was unable to behave morally. I just don't understand how she could live with herself, a priest that deliberately and knowingly hurt people to support a system which she knew was wrong. If she'd had any sense she would have realised this was going to come out anyway. I don't understand her selfishness and stupidity and cruelty.
(I'm not having a go at christianity but a particular christian, before the arguments start; please don't)
Moral licensing, the idea that if you perceive yourself to be morally superior in one situation you will naturally make immoral choices further down the line.
Also one of the previous Archbishops of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has said when pressed in the past that he doesn’t know there’s a god, but he hopes very much.
It’s certainly a long way from strident fundamentalism.
To then hear that thousands upon thousands of them are committing theft, how does this not create a voice in her head that says "hmm somethings not quite right here, I wonder if the system is to blame?". If there was even a remote chance of that then the risk of sending 1000's of innocent people to prison would she not do her best as a vicar to find that out?
Instead, she sacked the forensic accountants who raised the alarm bells and doubled down on cover ups and strong-arm tactics to stamp out the problem
I wonder if she is just a sociopath? that's the only conclusion to me that remains
"That would be very embarrasing for us".
Closely followed by:
"I hope no one important believes the system is to blame? Let's keep it that way. No problems please, at least not on my watch."
I would phrase it as "she did what was expected from a CEO in that environment". That is, (try to) protect the profits and interests of shareholders with very little regard for the workers.
It's not that strong of a link. Let's not get carried away.
Many people cooperated on the wilful institutional obstinance that led to the coverup, and they're unlikely to all be sociopaths. "This person is a sociapath" is rarely a good answer to "how could this have happened?!" Maybe that person is a sociopath, but to actually make this sort of thing happen you need many more people than that one person.
I mean, for starters Vennells wasn't even CEO when all of this business started and she inherited the mess from her predecessor. It wasn't only during her tenure that this was going on. Lots of people have been involved at all sorts of levels.
But I also wouldn't give her the wiggle room to state that she inherited it. The forensic accountants were called in under her watch and after they sounded the alarm, she was the one to sack them. She also lied about remote access to the system, a fact which would have quashed every conviction. I can't think of anyone more responsible than her
exactly it, thanks.
Hypocrisy abounds
There's no evidence priests (or ethicists, ideologues...) adhere to what they preach more often or strictly than their following (and perhaps evidence to the contrary).
On the other side of the coin you have the idea that whatever you did in the past is forgiven as long as you feel really bad about having done it. Again religious predispositions can make this worse because now you don't have to repent before those affected but just before your deity (and unless you're Catholic this can even be in private rather than having to confess to another person), i.e. it doesn't matter what those you harmed think because only your deity can forgive you if it really was an evil act (and if it wasn't, those you harmed are being unreasonable if they hold a grudge).
So either she decided it was moral (no matter how plausible that is) or she decided God had forgiven her or that it would be outweighed by other things she did (like being a priest).
I know several people who think everything they do is moral because they have strong faith. The mental gymnastics they go through to justify selfish actions is pretty impressive.
People were sent to jail on the basis of a single number spat out from a black box called Horizon.
And to charge someone of false accounting when the system didn't give them much of an option and they communicated it to the helpline baffles me. It seems like their lawyers were pretty useless.
Something also has to be done about the unjust consequences of plea bargaining. Many were convicted on the basis that they admitted to crimes that they did not commit.
I think we also have to get rid of Magistrate's courts and private prosecutions. It's ridiculous that these still exist in a modern state that operates under the presumption of the rule of law.
One exception would be one barrister who it seemed to be to express genuine regret. Even he said he was in denial for a long time and only came to the realisation recently.
Nuremberg has entered the chat.
But really, to me, the full blame should be on the Post Office, and those involved.
Trying to conceal problems? Purposefully ignoring bugs? Not listening to, well, everyone. Lying to the courts?
People need to be in jail, and starting at the top.
I'm not going to absolve Fujitsu, but I have worked government contracts in Canada. They constantly change, morph requirements, not for any real reasons other than "Oh you build this entire thing? We didn't think of X, let's add that".
Meanwhile, X basically means an entire rewrite.
I've even had situations where "Let's add X" happens, then after done, "Aw, never mind, remove that".
It's a different world.
> Agree that the courts are somewhat to blame.
> But really, to me, the full blame should be on the Post Office, and those involved.
Anyway.
> They constantly change, morph requirements
All software systems are like that. Even if they weren't, the moment a new law comes in you'd need to change them anyway. If the engineering process and build can't withstand change, that's a problem.
It seems clear that the Post Office and Fujitsu were complicit in the coverup, and the justice system utterly failed the defendants. All three are so poorly behaved, I hope some change will be triggered. Sadly, I think the way of the world is all organisations regress to the mean, and lots of them are allowed to let their mean get pretty low.
I don’t mean to diminish the culpability of all those involved in the coverup, but the system needs fixing more than they need punishment. Fixing the system has a chance of preventing future harm, punishment does not, at least not to the same extend.
This wasn't cogs in a machine that went awry, this was intentional malicious behavior.
Handwaving about "fixing a system" is begging th question. No system made by humans can resist malice of those humans.
But there are a few key points that made it essentially impossible for the accused postmasters to defend themselves against the allegations, among them as a key point the presumption that computer records are correct and must be challenged by the defendant, not proven by prosecution. And to challenge these, you’d need to have the internal records that you can’t access as defendant - no surprise that many of the accused entered a plea deal, knowing that they’d never stand a chance in a trial.
Then, the Post office boasting powers to investigate and bring cases, while not being held to the same standards as the Crown Prosecution, meaning no independent review, no challenge.
This basically made all efforts to defend hopeless, and you can see the results. The cases did turn on the outstanding work of a few heroic individuals and a stroke of luck - if not for those, this all would have gone away quietly, with the postmaster convicted, broken, silenced.
A system that allows for that is broken, and the same thing will happen again, unless the shortfalls are addressed, because careless, negligent and even somewhat malicious individuals are plenty, and heroic people defending are rare.
I can recommend reading this, which sheds some light on the legal details that made the scandal possible at this scale. https://emptycity.substack.com/p/how-the-legal-system-made-i...
Some systems have a better chance of resisting a few malicious actors within than others.
There's no reason not to do both: punish the people who broke the law and also think how in the future we might prevent such a disaster happening again (or expose it sooner, or minimize the damage it can do)
I saw this directly in California too. State employee bureaucrats changing the spec and deliverables, even on tight deadline or high priority results.
Imagine if you were on trial where the evidence against you came from, say, a computerised breathalyser.
You might argue that the code has bugs. Then that the configuration was wrong. Then that the hardware design was faulty. Then that the individual components were broken. Then that the data was altered in transmission. Then that a hacker got in. Then that a cosmic ray corrupted the data. And so on.
The defendant has no proof that the evidence is faulty, and the producers of the evidence can demonstrate (to some degree) that their hardware & software are correct.
At some point, the court has to accept the evidence presented to it. In the UK, at the moment, the assumption is that a computer is operating correctly unless shown otherwise.
The BCS (I'm a member) goes in to a little detail about why they think this presumption should change https://www.bcs.org/articles-opinion-and-research/computer-i...
Print out the transactions with their timestamps and it feels this should have been very clearly a computer error given the duplicates etc.
To me, that sounds like an accounting system made by people who fundamentally didn't understand the point of double-entry accounting, because a double-entry accounting system that uses hidden or untracked accounts entirely removes that point and is just equivalent to a single-entry accounting system. Presumably, if all those transactions were properly stored and then combined, a full double-entry ledger could be reconstructed, but it appears the system itself couldn't do that in at least some cases.
Of course, there also seems to be the suggestion that part of the Post Office's argument to subpostmasters was that even if the problems were obvious, like clear duplicate transactions, they were still liable per the contract.
The lies and coverup from the Postal service and Fujitsu were to there to hide the flaws in the system from the courts and the defendants. Even the prosecutors have said that they were completely in the dark. It’s only now that the independent reports are out that everyone knows the details.
Unless you know about the bugs in the system, the itemized transaction list makes it look exactly like the cashiers were pocketing cash and not actually ringing up the sales. It’s a classic scam that any competent retail manager or owner knows to guard against. The only difference is that these cashiers nominally own the stores they run. If they pocketed the cash from the sale of a candy bar then there would be no crime; the cash was theirs to begin with. But since they are also working for a third party (the post office), the possibility of theft is a real one.
You would assume so, but the whole problem was that the Horizon computer system would lose transactions. It might lose the transaction where the customer paid by credit/debit, and the post office received the money directly. Or it might lose the transaction that recorded the check the postmaster sent to the post office to reconcile accounts. Again, the Horizon system never had a reliable record of what transactions had actually happened. Once there were discrepancies, it was always easy for it to look like the postmaster had made a mistake or committed theft.
I took an “Accounting for managers” course back in the nineties which included double entry book-keeping - we were taught to never erase a mistake but create additional entries to correct any error. You’d think something like Horizon would adhere to agreed standards of record keeping and have a signed and immutable event log at the very least.
I think the downscaled version could potentially be deciphered if the exact font is identified.
https://www.postofficetrial.com/2021/03/project-sparrow-firs...
Looks like Arial to me.
Edit: Yes, it's Arial. Played with typing up a passage in Arial and adjusting using MS Word's justified text setting. I was able to get the right spacing etc. Here's an overlay with a image snip of the original document and my attempt (in red) overlayed. It looks almost identical.
I might play with imageworsener to see if I can figure out the exact downscaling method.
edit: ah, you beat me to it. I just played with Inkscape and word spacing to match that line. The scanned document looks very lightly slanted, but I don't think it matters too much.