A bit more than three years ago, I wrote a post on Ricochet, When Computers Rule, about the Royal Mail scandal involving Fujitsu’s Horizon software and the plight of hundreds of UK “sub-postmasters” who’d been accused, prosecuted and convicted for fraud because, once the Fujitsu software system was implemented for Post Office management, their accounts and their books went completely out of whack and showed thousands–sometimes tens or hundreds of thousands–of pounds of funds missing in their daily reporting to the mother ship.
A word to the wise: the Post Office in the UK operates differently than it does in the States, and there are over 11,000 of these “sub-post offices,” usually operating out of small general stores, chemist shops, or newsagents, dotted all over the country, often in out-of-the-way villages (think Agatha Christie mysteries) which would otherwise be underserved. The people who run them are contractors, not employees of the Royal Mail. And the post office itself is used for purposes unheard of in the US–you can go there to pay your utility bill, perform banking transactions, and get your welfare payments, as well as buy stamps and send off letters and packages.
Diligent observation, and reporting to the post office, on the part of the sub-postmasters that their end-of-day reconciliations weren’t balancing fell on deaf ears. TPTB preferred to believe that their chosen–at great public expense–IT system must be perfect and that the sub-postmasters were guilty of fraud, and they simply refused to validate their own software, preferring instead to threaten and bully the sub-postmasters into submission, and into–in many cases–making up the shortfall from their personal finances, even to the point of selling their houses or ruining their own financial circumstances in order to avoid the opprobrium of a trial or the appearance of shady dealing.
Over the next several months, things got worse. And so I wrote another post on Ricochet, in April of 2021, Which Office Do I Go to, to Get My Reputation Back. By that time, things had begun to tilt a bit in the sub-postmasters’ favor, and “panels,” “inquiries,” “experts,” and so-on, were beginning to imply that perhaps the course of true justice–like that of true love–didn’t run [all that] smooth. I don’t expect this was much of a relief to those whose lives had already been ruined, or those who’d already committed suicide from the social shaming. Or even to those who, like dozens of the sub-postmasters who’d taken on this rather gentle career option late in life and post-retirement, had already died with their names under a cloud.
In my 2021 post I mentioned that:
Politicians, of course, are now jumping on the bandwagon from all sides amid calls to strip the Royal Mail’s former chief executive of her CBE honor (awarded for services to the Post Office), and to require her to pay back the millions of pounds she collected in bonuses while overseeing this travesty.
Of course, calls to “strip” Paula Vennells of her CBE (Commander of the British Empire) medal went nowhere. And yet, 24 hours ago (some 33 months after I first mentioned the public’s and the media’s reporting on the necessity), she turned it back of her own accord. No word yet on if, or when, she’ll pay back her ill-gotten gains. (Also, TBC, the monarch has to revoke the honor, if her thus-far empty gesture is to have actual meaning. But it’s a start.)
And today, Rishi Sunak, Prime Minister of the UK, indicated that he’d support a mass overturning of the “guilty” verdicts imposed on more than seven hundred sub-postmasters and the name-clearing of hundreds more between 2000 and 2015, as there simply isn’t evidence that they did anything wrong. (Working their way through the courts, one at a time, over the course of many years, only 93 convictions have been overturned so far, and far fewer than that number have received any compensation for the ruination of their own lives and their families’ lives.)
What has caused this sudden disturbance in The Force? A force which–otherwise and typically–might have taken years, perhaps decades, to discombobluate? (You have only to look at Baroness Hallett’s Covid inquiry, which is expected to take several more years to decide whether or not the British response to the pandemic was appropriate or not. By the time the findings are released–with any luck for them–most of those concerned will be, at the very least, out of public life, or–more usefully–dead, and calls for reprisals will also go nowhere, because, after all, “what difference, [at that point, would] it make?”
But, not this time.
What’s got Britain so exercised today (to the point that the Israeli-Hamas war has become almost a footnote), is a four-part ITV television drama series, Mr. Bates vs The Post Office.
I’m sorry that’s what it took. But I’m glad the point finally seems to have been made.
Perhaps there’s a lesson in here somewhere.
For those who can’t follow this in The Telegraph because of the paywall, here’s a write-up from the Daily Mail. Truly heartbreaking.
And now we have calls for Mr. Bates to be awarded a knighthood. Sure. Either that or–even trade–just give him Paula Vennells’s CBE.
**Seventy years ago, ITV was known as “the rough lot,” because it wasn’t the BBC, and because it was a commercial network supported by advertising rather than by an enforced taxation fee. Today–and only perhaps it’s less beholden–it’s one of the more honest British networks. Tempora mutandur.
I titled the first post I wrote on this subject, When Computers Rule.
Little did I know.
From this morning’s Telegraph (emphasis mine):
The Justice Secretary has been urged to scrap a law that was backed by the Post Office and requires courts to presume that evidence derived from a computer is reliable.
and, a bit further on:
It replaced a law which said that prosecutors using evidence derived from computers had to verify that the system it came from was working correctly. [WHAT A CONCEPT!! (Yes, I’m shouting!)]
It [the new law] was introduced in 1999 by the then Labour government following a Law Commission recommendation.
Documents that the Post Office submitted to the Law Commission in 1995 show that [the Post Office] viewed these “technical requirements” [of the previous law] as a barrier to successful prosecutions.
All this happened just before and while the Horizon (Fujitsu) system was being installed in British post offices.
This particular example speaks to something I regularly find myself explaining to my American friends, many of whom can’t get past the idea that the British people live in onerous subjugation merely due to the fact that they have a King (or a Queen).
That’s simply not the case.
The British people live in onerous subjugation because they are–generally–a civilized, quiet, orderly, decent people who follow rules and do what they are told. And they treat others as they would like to be treated themselves.
But the rules that are made, and what they are told, and the way that they are treated on a regular basis by the people who actually do run their country (and those people do not include the monarch or any members of the royal family) fully reflect the corrupt, greedy, self-serving instincts of ludicrously misnamed “civil service,” AKA the blob or the deep state, and have very little interest in promoting the welfare of the average man or woman on the street. (Google, “Health Care, NHS” for any number of disgraceful examples.)
Decades ago, on a train between Worcester and Shrewsbury, I sat and listened to the chatter among my compartment-mates (all strangers). A couple of hours. And nothing but [expletive] and moaning about “the authorities” and petty and stupid constraints on their abilities to live what seemed like normal little lives, coupled with incessant whining about how nothing could be done because “you can’t fight city hall” (a phrase which somehow seems to have trickled its way across the Pond, and resonates particularly distressingly among my countrymen).
That was the day I decided that–no matter my one-time dream of living in a St. Mary’s Mead-like village in the Midlands in my declining years (perhaps as the postmistress, LOL)–I’d never be able to move back to my native country.
As I frequently tell my sister, I’d be the lead story on the eleven-o-clock news almost every night.
I’d far rather throw in my lot with my ruder, more obstreperous cousins, in a country which–although not perfect, and certainly on a downward trajectory–still has a chance of redeeming itself.
To be clear, I love my English family. But since the deaths of almost all of the WWII generation (Dad, Mum, Auntie Pat, Granny and Grampa, etc.), we’re a shadow of our former selves. The only exceptions seem to be the three of us–myself and my two younger siblings. Throwbacks, all.
We were all raised in the United States. All of us pursued successful careers very different from any other family member. None of us suffers fools gladly. And–I know–we’re all regarded with a bit of horror by our quieter and more “respectable” relatives.
Until, that is, they need someone to kick down a few doors to get medical care for an elderly relative, or to sort out their own situation vis-a-vis a bullying local official. Then they are happy to have any or all of us on deck and in the fight, no matter how mortifying they find some of our (usually successful) tactics.
Frankly–and while fully acknowledging the present monarch’s shortcomings–I think Britain is fast approaching a time when its people would be much better off if Parliament served at the pleasure of the King, and not the other way round.
I continue to be aghast at the unwinding of this story, and the rank pettiness, frankly, of the entire government. Looks like the postal retailers will finally get some justice in this, albeit far too late for many, and too little for all.
And I agree with you entirely that the Monarchy has actually surrendered too much power to the Parliament, in a weird inverse of how our Congress has willingly legislated away much of its own real power to the Executive, which itself (regardless of the administration at this point) is itself largely toothless (at best) or willfully feckless (and two-faced) about managing its own bureaucracy. Congress at this point seems to have lost the plot entirely, and is largely a staging ground for nascent personality cults or weasels who covet posts within the bureaucratic blob.
Both systems are entirely unhinged at this point, and unable to correct their own bureaucracies’ abuses of the people they are supposed to serve.