I think this is a similar situation where business leaders and managers get away from any meaningful repercussions just like in the '08 negligence of regulators and bankers, or with Grenfell tower where the cladding vendor managers faked the tests, or knew of the faked tests. I think the issue comes down to the link between business and Government and how to save itself from embarrassment and extra work rectifying the situation, civil servants and ministers will try to speed up the cover up.
Burnham [0] kind of predicted the rise of unaccountable managerial class
way back in 1941, at the end of his Marxist phase. Not the fully correct picture to understand the world we are currently living in, but certainly an interesting read and important milestone to thinkers that came after him.
Thanks for the reference. There are quite a few writers railing against the current Professional Managerial Class (PMC). It's very interesting to see that their rise has quite a long history. Where things appear to have gone off the rails is that the PMC are now more interested in the management of perception than actually managing. The proposed solution is to get more competent managers but Burnham points out that the issue is likely more fundamental than that and a new social organisation may be required to deal with their shortcomings.
Yes the 'management of perception' is a key point here because that is essentially what politics is, and this case was so close to politics i.e. the government was the sole shareholder, the Post Office needed to show a profit so it could be sold
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.
One cannot understand politics without philosophy, and I believe we are currently in a golden age of philosophy, with Twitter being the rough equivalent to Vienna's Café Central. I hope the current phase of freedom its going to last a while longer.
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.
> Twitter being the rough equivalent to Vienna's Café Central
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?
Respectfully, I think y’all are both out to lunch. Twitter and the golden age of philosophy? I just see preening fools ranting at each other for clout. Twitter arguments don’t solve the nuance problem, they ignore/amplify it by reducing everything to a soundbite-level of text. Most real world solutions are very complicated, and not the kind of thing that can be solved by clever ‘gotcha’ style quips.
Twitter is the chattering class, comprised of the managerial types whose portfolio is their own appearance.
Twitter a lively conversation where the participants are expected to have read the material that is being talked about, which is often books or long-form articles, sometimes podcasts - at least that is the corner I'm interest in.
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.
> with Twitter being the rough equivalent to Vienna's Café Central
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).
As much as I agree with that and want see that happen, I predict people will get away with not so much as a slap on the wrist. Phrases to look out for are "collective responsibility", "I was only doing my job", "must preserve the reputation of the institution", "limited liability" etc.
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]
I mean how does something like that go on for so long! Especially when lives have been torn apart! Its one thing for public money to be pilfered & squandered. That happens everywhere. But those people have been wrecked, if that article is to be believed.
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).
I have come across this kind of uniquely British reluctance to call a spade a spade, in quite a few other instances as well. Dr. John Campbell of Youtube fame comes to mind but I digress.[3]
[1]
Inside the incredible and devastating postal service scandal that could bring down the UK government
Widespread criminal ring that created issue spanning all 50 states uncovered and eventually fixed primarily from one institution’s Austin, TX based reporting.
Humans are going to have a stance because they are human. Do you want to wait until there is an unbiased AI that can do journalism or do you want something that's ok now?
>IMHO Having a guiding principle or view doesn’t mean the guardian is under influence
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.
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 **.
Never seen that before. Thanks. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the joke went back to the turn of the century using different newspapers, but it's out of living memory now.
Subscriptions bring in a tiny fraction of the money that advertisers pay, and these days most journalists will happily lie for free if it supports their preferred political agenda. The only way a news organization can be impartial or unbiased is if they do not take any money from advertisers of any type, do not receive freebies or donations of any type (including press badges), and all the members of the organization actually believe that they should leave their own personal political opinions at home. On top of all of that, they actually have to be capable of investigating things, which is not a given. A pretty rare combination these days.
> While the newspaper is not politically partisan, it is not neutral and stands against corruption, injustice and the erosion of truth and the rule of law. Accurate information is the lifeblood of a democracy and, although everyone is welcome to their own opinions, facts cannot be debated.
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.
To add to the discussion of the The Guardian, I think it is borderline. It is certainly much better than the majority of entertainment / media / "news" which is billionaire-owned.
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.
"Paula Anne Vennells (born 21 February 1959) is a British former businesswoman who was the chief executive officer of Post Office Limited from 2012 to 2019. She is also an Anglican priest" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Vennells
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)
Well yes, she had a book, with written instructions from her own deity telling her not to be a tosser, and she still didn't follow it even as a priest. I truly don't understand.
The same book has written instructions telling her she can't be a priest (Paul says this multiple times.) I'm not defending that, but if she can rationalize one instruction away, surely she can any other.
I do not understand what you do not understand. People are capable of lying, to others and themselves. As of yet, there is no external influence with a proven mechanism of action that can fully prevent that.
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.
One could argue that someone actually adhering to (at least most) of the morals and teachings of any major religion (which is already a rare thing) would almost never become CEO of anything.
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).
One or two have come out as such, IIRC, with comments about how they didn’t think belief was necessary to get the job done!
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.
You seem to be surprised by hipocrisy? People will go to great lengths to justify to themselves why they're "the good guys". Having a strong dogmatic adherence to religion at worst intensifies this problem by increasing the cognitive dissonance through essentialism: "I am a good person so this thing I did can't have been that bad". This is why you'll hear people being found out to have done something for years insist "but this isn't who I am" when that's literally who they are (i.e. a person who is consistently doing those things).
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 don't understand how somebody who can be a priest, appointed by God to do the right thing, was unable to behave morally."
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.
Religion aside, it's the lack of common sense that astounds me. In her position she must have met a lot of the postmasters and recognized the type of people they are i.e. inoffensive, usually quite conscientious, dependable "pillar of the community" types.
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
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.
"12% of corporate senior leadership displays a range of psychopathic traits"
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.
I wasn't laying the blame solely on the CEO, I was responding to a comment about her being a vicar and what might be the cause of that incongruity
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
Having read Nick Wallis' excellent book on this matter, I think that, although the PO and Fujitsu acted in a despicable and criminal manner, the institution that really failed was British Justice.
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.
> People were sent to jail on the basis of a single number spat out from a black box called Horizon.
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.
Many of them have done. Most have either said I don't remember or I was only following orders from above. A few might make the concession that they were misled.
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.
Plea bargains are heavily restricted in the UK and many of these cases were heard in Crown courts. I agree about getting rid of private prosecutions though.
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".
I'm not sure that both of these can be true at once:
> 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 consider “the full blame should be on the Post Office, and those involved.” a dangerous position. A systems must hold even if individuals fail or behave in malicious ways, and focusing strongly on individual culpability tends to overshadow the failures of the system. It’s very easy to go on from there to “If those individuals had just acted properly, none of this would have happened.”
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.
The system was obviously very much not working. Some of the individuals that caused this acted on negligence, some careless ass-covering, some probably maliciously for their own gain.
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.
> No system made by humans can resist malice of those humans.
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 don't understand why someone didn't push for an itemized breakdown as a double-entry ledger. This would have covered the shifts in money and where they came from and is one of the most basic accounting tools.
The Horizon system failed to keep accurate records. It was a kind of distributed database, with individual users entering data on their terminals and occasionally connecting (potentially via dialup, iirc) to a central system to sync their records. But it was implemented badly, and records could and did get lost or modified. Records could be edited at any time by any of several parties, including the postmasters, but then when they were synced those edits could be silently lost. The resulting ledger does not and can not accurately reflect reality, thus the lost money and the convictions.
> Records could be edited at any time by any of several parties, …
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.
Yep. I’m not an accountant or even a manager, but even I know that. Apparently the Post Office testified many times that the transaction record _was_ immutable, even though Fujitsu knew that records could be edited or even lost at any time. And it appears that their own customer service employees would edit transactions all the time, to correct perceived mistakes. And it would appear that this might even make the problem worse, as the Horizon system could fail to correctly merge those changes down the line. It could silently revert the edits or silently drop entire transactions as if they had never happened.
Assuming that an itemized breakdown was requested, this is a possible answer as to why it can't be provided. How can a prosecution continue following such answer is a different question.
The prosecution would happily provide the itemized transactions, because the missing transactions are exactly what they are prosecuting. They know there were N pieces of mail that day, but payment was recorded only for N − 2 or whatever.
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.
Yea, it was their entire bookkeeping system. Obviously nobody else has ever had so complex a bookkeeping situation as The Post Office, so they had to get it custom built. I bet Fujitsu made a mint.
Creeping around the matter of when can code be trusted. To my knowledge the UK doesn't have the strictest methods to qualify code as "correct in the eyes of the law". Anyone know more on this?
As I understand it, the problem is one of hyperbolic doubt.
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.
I recall seeing in released emails about the Callendar Square bug that it's debatable as to whether what the system was doing was properly double entry. In that case, my interpretation of the emails was that there were transactions that were nominally recorded as multiple double-entry transactions, but involved, eg, a transfer from account A to a hidden outstanding account X, and a transfer from account from X to account B. Then the account X wasn't actually tracked anywhere or even expected to balance on any individual system: it appears that when multiple counters at the location were involved, the transactions weren't necessarily synchronized between them. In that case, if you have three £1k transfers from A to X (two of which are duplicates), and one £1k transfer from X to B, then it will look like £2k disappeared unless you check the balance of X.
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.
It seems nuts to me that the Post Office was allowed to prosecute their own cases rather than pass what information they had to the police who could conduct an independent investigation.
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.
