The thing I find about this post office scandal is... its easy to identify the victims, who have had their lives ruined.
But I'm honestly a bit unsure who has committed a crime here?
Maybe 1000 prosecutions are wrong... surely at some point you have to blame the legal system.
Conspiracy to pervert the course of justice and perjury by the lawyers, investigators, Post Office and Fujitsu personnel who gave evidence knowing that the Horizon system was so faulty as to be utterly unreliable and there was no evidence that any money was actually missing, let alone stolen.
There is plenty of blame to be laid at the door of the legal system, starting with the Law Commission. I shall be happily doing so in due course. 😁
The thing I find about this post office scandal is... its easy to identify the victims, who have had their lives ruined.
But I'm honestly a bit unsure who has committed a crime here?
Maybe 1000 prosecutions are wrong... surely at some point you have to blame the legal system.
Both managers and prosecutors from the Post Office were responsible for bringing prosecutions based on false evidence.
It's not 'the legal system' at fault (other than perhaps the anomaly which gave the Post Office extraordinary powers to bring prosecutions on its own behalf).
There's a fairly clear prima facie case for bringing charges for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice against a number of individuals.
(*Thrifty folks can beat the price increase by buying "forever" stamps, which are good indefinitely.)
When I left the business it was obvious the way prices would go, and I bought several hundred 'forever' stamps (which is what the standard first and second class ones with just the class and the monarch's head on them are), and am still working through them, not having had to buy a stamp for years.
Then it is you and not granny causing havoc for your acquaintances who must pay £2.50 to receive your letters because non-barcoded stamps are no longer valid. (Of course, unless you already have swapped your stamps for barcoded ones.)
Has it occurred to anyone else that the Government might just give up and say that it doesn't want to do the job any more?
It could then call a GE, and run on the slogan 'Sorry For All The Inconvenience'.
I contend that it has already done that. It doesn't know how to run a country and has retreated into rich urban silliness (Smoking? Pedicabs? Dafuq?) Truss had all the brains and placed them on black, and it came up red. Now they are a zombie government, doing stuff reflexly and spasmodically, like a chicken with the head cut off.
Just dropping in to say that I agree 100% with Cyclefree here. Where are the prosecutions? Where are the executives booted out & their pensions revoked for bringing the Post Office into disrepute by perjuring themselves? Where is the shirt rending, the wailing & gnashing of teeth?
Above all, where are the /consequences/ ?
As Malmesbury keeps reminding us, the modern executive layer, in both the public & private sphere, has built walls around itself so that there are never any consequences, ever. If we can, we should break these walls.
The inquiry hasn't even concluded yet
There is a strong body of opinion forming, Hyufd, that there is not much point in it continuing if the witnesses are not prepared to give their full support.
The evidence of failure to give that support - individually by the likes of Cottam,and institutionally by the PO - is becoming overwhelming. The Government,as owner of the PO, should be asked what it is going to do about this, and if there is no satisfactory response, Sir Wyn should refuse to continue.
That would put the blame fairly and squarely where it belongs. It would also free up the CPS to begin prosecutions.
One of the most important witnesses, Gareth Jenkins, Fujitsu computer engineer, is due to give evidence at the beginning of December. It would be regrettable to stop the inquiry before he appears.
Does anyone have a good technical brief on exactly what went wrong with the Horizon system? What caused the accounting errors in the system?
There could be some very useful lessons for other institutions, from a technical viewpoint. As well as all the obvious management, moral and legal viewpoints...
Actually for that youtube clip of Cottam it is the lawyer (who he btw?) who deserves an award. Perhaps an Oscar because by the slightest move of an eyebrow he conveys more than words ever could.
Jason Beer KC.
Look at his profile and the many other inquiries he has done.
By the way, do click on the link @Cyclefree has provided by the “thick as mince” comment. It’s a doozy.
It's quite obvious what has happened here; Post Office Legal Services drafted both her original witness statement, which she signed without paying much attention to it and never had to present in court since the case was settled prior, and may well have done the same with this latest one. It appears that the foolish manager hasn't made much effort to brief herself, or be briefed, beforehand, and the only mitigation is that she is up against a top lawyer who spends his or her life honing their skills of cross-examination and is skilled in demolishing even credible evidence. If there's an organisational failing, it is that once a matter becomes legal, the in-house lawyers tend to take over and it is very easy for the ordinary line manager, who has the day job to worry about, simply to end up following instructions, particularly as the lawyers are based at 'HQ' and the manager is out in the field, used to receiving directions from 'the centre'.
I think that’s a fair summary of the position. However, if that’s the best, the post office can do, it doesn’t say much for their general competence! Every time I read about the post office enquiry, I think back over my long career and ask myself questions about things that went wrong, and I’m sure I could make a much better fist of answering questions about those events. I think it is by now, beyond evident that the management of the post office, for some time has been totally incompetent, or indeed malevolent, and I sincerely hope that someone in the Crown Prosecution Service has been charged with preparing cases against many of those at the top of the organisation; both the board and management.
I’m no fan of the CPS but the Post Office, in England & Wales anyway, was acting as a private prosecutor. The CPS wasn’t involved. Various solicitors at private law firms, who acted in their stead, acted very badly in this.
There is an argument that the CPS, who are more used to criminal prosecutions for obvious reasons, would not have proceeded with many of them. Not a strong argument mind.
With respect, Mr S, you are slightly missing the point. My hope was, and still is, that someone in the CPS is even now preparing cases against the senior management of the post office.
Apologies. It’s early and I misread “hope that someone in the Crown Prosecution Service has been charged” as meaning you wanted a criminal charge brought against the same. Reading comprehension is not my strong suit - I’m a solicitor after all. Apologies once more.
Accepted; perhaps I should have written “tasked” instead of “charged”. I hope several people at the top of the Post Office ARE charged, in the legal use of the word.
It's hard to see how the Board cannot be charged, but the Inquiry may take so long that some will have passed on, and the rest will have decamped to safer shores. Meanwhile they watch on in comfort from their homes in Bedfordshire and elsewhere.
This is why I was suggesting last night that it is time for the Inquiry be suspended so that prosecutions could begin. The Inquiry has become the long grass that the PO is playing for.
So that's threre of us that agree - you, me, and Ms Cyclefree. Now we just need to persuade Sir Wyn Niceoldthing.
And the relevant Minister who has the power to suspend under the Act. The Government remains remarkably uninterested in this disgrace.
Badenoch: neither use nor ornament.
(PS @JosiasJessop: don't go after me. It's a saying.)
??? I'm sorry, what's that in relation to?
I'm teasing you and your tendency to criticise me when I comment on the aesthetic appeal of politicians.
That part of the Post Office is subsidized by the more profitable parts.
The same as the UK in that case. So that doesn't explain the price difference.
Prediction: this time next month there will be a major row about excess postage charges on Christmas cards, owing to confusion over the new size-based pricing for letters, and the Royal Mail imposing a £2.50 excess charge to hand over Granny's card.
Given that it is mostly pensioners who still send Christmas cards in the post, surely this can be dealt with by giving all pensioners a tax free Christmas Card Bonus Payment, say £125 or perhaps lets round it up to £150 to account for birthdays and Easter too.
No, for the simple reason it is the recipient who pays the fee, and not the sender. One day postie drops a card through the door telling you to go online and pay £1.50 or whatever. You have to gamble whether this is granny sending a card, or ACME plc making a job offer at double your current salary. And if it is granny's card, has she tucked a £50 note inside? https://www.royalmail.com/receiving-mail/pay-a-fee
My prediction is enough people will get caught out to make this the scandal that hits the papers this time next month.
I'm currently (well my wife is) in dispute with Royal Mail over a £2.50 unpaid postage fee in relation to a card sent from the Netherlands. PostNL permit paying postage online and then writing a (provided) matrix of characters (postzegelcode - linked page in Dutch, but includes a picture so you get the idea) in the area of the envelope where you would normally put a stamp (neat idea for those without printers - could be introduced here). This was done, with the correct postage, on the item received, but Royal Mail marked it as unpaid.
I'm not sure who cocked up here - Royal Mail for failing to recognise it or PostNL if they should have franked it on the way out as valid or similar, but I do know that the volume of emails this has generated so far must have cost the Royal Mail well over £2.50 in staff time. Also not a good use of my wife's time, really, but she's stubborn tenacious.
Careful. The PO may bring a private prosecution against you.
Surely, as only the husband of the person asking difficult questions and suggesting an error, the worst I can expect is for a PO/Royal Mail flunky to make snide half-accusations against me at the eventual public enquiry?
Just dropping in to say that I agree 100% with Cyclefree here. Where are the prosecutions? Where are the executives booted out & their pensions revoked for bringing the Post Office into disrepute by perjuring themselves? Where is the shirt rending, the wailing & gnashing of teeth?
Above all, where are the /consequences/ ?
As Malmesbury keeps reminding us, the modern executive layer, in both the public & private sphere, has built walls around itself so that there are never any consequences, ever. If we can, we should break these walls.
The inquiry hasn't even concluded yet
There is a strong body of opinion forming, Hyufd, that there is not much point in it continuing if the witnesses are not prepared to give their full support.
The evidence of failure to give that support - individually by the likes of Cottam,and institutionally by the PO - is becoming overwhelming. The Government,as owner of the PO, should be asked what it is going to do about this, and if there is no satisfactory response, Sir Wyn should refuse to continue.
That would put the blame fairly and squarely where it belongs. It would also free up the CPS to begin prosecutions.
As far as I can see it they gave evidence, even if not great evidence and handed over the relevant documents to the inquiry. Which is more than can be said for some inquiries at the moment.
If the CPS have evidence for prosecutions they can charge anyway, inquiry or no inquiry
Actually for that youtube clip of Cottam it is the lawyer (who he btw?) who deserves an award. Perhaps an Oscar because by the slightest move of an eyebrow he conveys more than words ever could.
Jason Beer KC.
Look at his profile and the many other inquiries he has done.
I have watched him with admiration, CF, but noted that even he could not disguise his exasperation with Ms Cottam.
That is actually the point at which I think Sir Wyn should have stepped in. It is one thing to mislead the Inquiry, but quite another to take the piss.
These figures are always revised.i don't think you can say no growth yet.. indeed growth may be negative, but you smare being a bit presumptuous to state it as a fact.
Whilst that's true, and the plus sign in +0.2% makes it sound an awful lot better than 0, let alone -0.2%, it doesn't really matter.
The key thing is that the growth in the economy is nowhere near enough for us to collectively afford nice things. And for lots of individuals, there will be a negative sign on their personal financial growth.
This is the economic stat that should scare us all and usually is a huge red flag for the economy and individuals.
The number of mortgage holders who have fallen behind on their payments climbed in the third quarter in a sign that higher interest rates are increasing financial pressure on homeowners and landlords.
Figures from UK Finance, the trade body for the banking industry, showed that 87,930 homeowner mortgages were in arrears in the three months to the end of September, up 7 per cent compared with the preceding quarter and 18 per cent on a year earlier.
The rise was even bigger on buy-to-let loans, with 11,540 in arrears in the third quarter, a 29 per cent jump from the second and a doubling compared with the same period in 2022.
So savers are being rewarded while buy-to-let landlords are losing out.
That doesn't scare me at all.
If your landlord going into arrears in Scotland it could be very bad news. Some of my friends have been protected by various mechanisms (and relaxed landlords) from significant rent increases since 2020. The current rent increase cap is 3%.
But there is no protection for new tenancies, which is why they increased by 15.5% in Edinburgh last year. Economics 1A: the rental market is a complex and vindictive beast.
Economics 1B - the housing market is actually quite simple. When there is an oversupply, it's a buyers market. When there is a shortage, it's a sellers market.
Artificial attempts to play with that all ultimately fail.
Actually for that youtube clip of Cottam it is the lawyer (who he btw?) who deserves an award. Perhaps an Oscar because by the slightest move of an eyebrow he conveys more than words ever could.
Jason Beer KC.
Look at his profile and the many other inquiries he has done.
Just dropping in to say that I agree 100% with Cyclefree here. Where are the prosecutions? Where are the executives booted out & their pensions revoked for bringing the Post Office into disrepute by perjuring themselves? Where is the shirt rending, the wailing & gnashing of teeth?
Above all, where are the /consequences/ ?
As Malmesbury keeps reminding us, the modern executive layer, in both the public & private sphere, has built walls around itself so that there are never any consequences, ever. If we can, we should break these walls.
The inquiry hasn't even concluded yet
There is a strong body of opinion forming, Hyufd, that there is not much point in it continuing if the witnesses are not prepared to give their full support.
The evidence of failure to give that support - individually by the likes of Cottam,and institutionally by the PO - is becoming overwhelming. The Government,as owner of the PO, should be asked what it is going to do about this, and if there is no satisfactory response, Sir Wyn should refuse to continue.
That would put the blame fairly and squarely where it belongs. It would also free up the CPS to begin prosecutions.
As far as I can see it they gave evidence, even if not great evidence and handed over the relevant documents to the inquiry. Which is more than can be said for some inquiries at the moment.
If the CPS have evidence for prosecutions they can charge anyway, inquiry or no inquiry
God Almighty! Can't you read? They have not given over relevant documents to the inquiry. That is one of the big problems.
By the way, do click on the link @Cyclefree has provided by the “thick as mince” comment. It’s a doozy.
It's quite obvious what has happened here; Post Office Legal Services drafted both her original witness statement, which she signed without paying much attention to it and never had to present in court since the case was settled prior, and may well have done the same with this latest one. It appears that the foolish manager hasn't made much effort to brief herself, or be briefed, beforehand, and the only mitigation is that she is up against a top lawyer who spends his or her life honing their skills of cross-examination and is skilled in demolishing even credible evidence. If there's an organisational failing, it is that once a matter becomes legal, the in-house lawyers tend to take over and it is very easy for the ordinary line manager, who has the day job to worry about, simply to end up following instructions, particularly as the lawyers are based at 'HQ' and the manager is out in the field, used to receiving directions from 'the centre'.
I think that’s a fair summary of the position. However, if that’s the best, the post office can do, it doesn’t say much for their general competence! Every time I read about the post office enquiry, I think back over my long career and ask myself questions about things that went wrong, and I’m sure I could make a much better fist of answering questions about those events. I think it is by now, beyond evident that the management of the post office, for some time has been totally incompetent, or indeed malevolent, and I sincerely hope that someone in the Crown Prosecution Service has been charged with preparing cases against many of those at the top of the organisation; both the board and management.
I’m no fan of the CPS but the Post Office, in England & Wales anyway, was acting as a private prosecutor. The CPS wasn’t involved. Various solicitors at private law firms, who acted in their stead, acted very badly in this.
There is an argument that the CPS, who are more used to criminal prosecutions for obvious reasons, would not have proceeded with many of them. Not a strong argument mind.
With respect, Mr S, you are slightly missing the point. My hope was, and still is, that someone in the CPS is even now preparing cases against the senior management of the post office.
Apologies. It’s early and I misread “hope that someone in the Crown Prosecution Service has been charged” as meaning you wanted a criminal charge brought against the same. Reading comprehension is not my strong suit - I’m a solicitor after all. Apologies once more.
Accepted; perhaps I should have written “tasked” instead of “charged”. I hope several people at the top of the Post Office ARE charged, in the legal use of the word.
It's hard to see how the Board cannot be charged, but the Inquiry may take so long that some will have passed on, and the rest will have decamped to safer shores. Meanwhile they watch on in comfort from their homes in Bedfordshire and elsewhere.
This is why I was suggesting last night that it is time for the Inquiry be suspended so that prosecutions could begin. The Inquiry has become the long grass that the PO is playing for.
That would involve action from either the Judge - too feeble, naive and/or wedded to the legal process - or Badenoch: too bloody useless.
There was a time when Bad Enoch was the darling of several PB Tories. For reasons known only to them. She is hopeless; invisible.
One 79-year-old homeowner, who did not want to be named, told the BBC he had cut back on other costs as much as he could, but was only able to pay part of his mortgage bill each month.
So why does someone who is 79 have a mortgage and not only that but a mortgage he is unable to properly pay ?
People have to take some responsibility for their own financial decisions instead of blaming the banks or the government or world events.
He probably used equity release to fund his spending at some point.
ER can be a useful tool, but in many cases it's dangerous and bad.
In principle though, I agree with your viewpoint.
Yes, he'll very likely have been sold an equity release scheme when interest rates were much lower. With little or no clear warning of what might happen when rates went up from 0.5 to 5%.
Quite likely a lot of folk in his position ?
I thought with equity release the interest just accumulates, and it is all paid when the house is sold? That's how my granfather's works...
Increasingly strange that Biden gets so little credit for the performance if the US economy
The U.S. economy has drastically outperformed Europe's since the pandemic. The most plausible explanation is that America implemented a larger -- and in some respects, more progressive -- fiscal stimulus https://twitter.com/EricLevitz/status/1722419205629202589
Though of course Ukraine affected, and affects Europe far more than it dies the US.
Or maybe people realise that it's an unsustainable and irresponsible debt-fuelled binge that is lifting interest rates, fuelling inflation and isn't even delivering that much growth for all the money they're splashing around?
US inflation has also been lower than European. The irresponsible debt fuelled binge was Trump's tax cut fur the rich. I don't recall your railing about it at the time.
US inflation should have been lower than European as it was much less exposed to the high energy prices caused by the Ukraine war.
I didn't approve of Trump's tax cuts either, though at least that was morally better because it was allowing other people to keep their own money rather than pissing it away on corporate boondoggles (though there was a fair amount of that too). Also it was in a time when markets were much more tolerant of debt-fuelled spending so the interest rate and inflation implications were much less. But overall, they should have been matched by spending cuts and weren't.
Just because one President is an irresponsible idiot doesn't mean that the current one gets a free pass.
The US desperately needed infrastructure spending, and there's also been a large boost to US manufacturing in sectors (chip manufacturing; battery plants) where they are, like us, dangerously reliant on Chinese and other Asian imports.
Biden's spending was anything but irresponsible. And he'd probably reverse Trump's tax cuts if there were any prospect of getting it through Congress.
Just dropping in to say that I agree 100% with Cyclefree here. Where are the prosecutions? Where are the executives booted out & their pensions revoked for bringing the Post Office into disrepute by perjuring themselves? Where is the shirt rending, the wailing & gnashing of teeth?
Above all, where are the /consequences/ ?
As Malmesbury keeps reminding us, the modern executive layer, in both the public & private sphere, has built walls around itself so that there are never any consequences, ever. If we can, we should break these walls.
The inquiry hasn't even concluded yet
There is a strong body of opinion forming, Hyufd, that there is not much point in it continuing if the witnesses are not prepared to give their full support.
The evidence of failure to give that support - individually by the likes of Cottam,and institutionally by the PO - is becoming overwhelming. The Government,as owner of the PO, should be asked what it is going to do about this, and if there is no satisfactory response, Sir Wyn should refuse to continue.
That would put the blame fairly and squarely where it belongs. It would also free up the CPS to begin prosecutions.
As far as I can see it they gave evidence, even if not great evidence and handed over the relevant documents to the inquiry. Which is more than can be said for some inquiries at the moment.
If the CPS have evidence for prosecutions they can charge anyway, inquiry or no inquiry
You need to get up to speed on this one, H.
The PO has been resisting, misleading and delaying the Inquiry throughout. Numerous witnesses have followed the example. It's time for the Government, as the owner, to step in. If it doesn't, Sir W should simply down tools.
Does the Gov have a Minister responsible for this?
Does anyone have a good technical brief on exactly what went wrong with the Horizon system? What caused the accounting errors in the system?
I once asked the same question but I don't know why as I struggle to give a tiny, shiny fuck about the Post Office or its historical mis-deeds.
Sandpit (I think, apologies if it was somebody else) had a very good grasp of the technical details but I've forgotten all about it as it didn't involve cars or really expensive bikes.
Actually for that youtube clip of Cottam it is the lawyer (who he btw?) who deserves an award. Perhaps an Oscar because by the slightest move of an eyebrow he conveys more than words ever could.
Jason Beer KC.
Look at his profile and the many other inquiries he has done.
Anyway, off shortly to do a writing course with a professional writer.
I expect to be told that my novel about City scandals, sex in the city and weird internet geeks (only joking!) is a load of rubbish. But the coffee should be good.
For those asking about the prosecuting lawyers in this, a firm now known as Womble Bond Dickinson (specifically the Bond Dickinson bit of it) made roughly £60m from the biggest miscarriage of justice in British history acting for the Post Office -
Everyone* fixates on tiny changes in a huge number, which has an unspecified uncertainty in its value. "The economy grew by 0.1%, +/-5%" is totally meaningless.
Just dropping in to say that I agree 100% with Cyclefree here. Where are the prosecutions? Where are the executives booted out & their pensions revoked for bringing the Post Office into disrepute by perjuring themselves? Where is the shirt rending, the wailing & gnashing of teeth?
Above all, where are the /consequences/ ?
As Malmesbury keeps reminding us, the modern executive layer, in both the public & private sphere, has built walls around itself so that there are never any consequences, ever. If we can, we should break these walls.
The inquiry hasn't even concluded yet
The use of inquiries to increase delay and obfuscation is part of the weaponry and defence system of all elites.
The prosecution of speeding drivers/murderers is not delayed by 10 years and then shelved as we await a judge led inquiry into the sociology of speeding/gender bias in murders. Prosecuting crimes and inquiries into why bad stuff happened are logically separate matters.
By the way, do click on the link @Cyclefree has provided by the “thick as mince” comment. It’s a doozy.
It's quite obvious what has happened here; Post Office Legal Services drafted both her original witness statement, which she signed without paying much attention to it and never had to present in court since the case was settled prior, and may well have done the same with this latest one. It appears that the foolish manager hasn't made much effort to brief herself, or be briefed, beforehand, and the only mitigation is that she is up against a top lawyer who spends his or her life honing their skills of cross-examination and is skilled in demolishing even credible evidence. If there's an organisational failing, it is that once a matter becomes legal, the in-house lawyers tend to take over and it is very easy for the ordinary line manager, who has the day job to worry about, simply to end up following instructions, particularly as the lawyers are based at 'HQ' and the manager is out in the field, used to receiving directions from 'the centre'.
I think that’s a fair summary of the position. However, if that’s the best, the post office can do, it doesn’t say much for their general competence! Every time I read about the post office enquiry, I think back over my long career and ask myself questions about things that went wrong, and I’m sure I could make a much better fist of answering questions about those events. I think it is by now, beyond evident that the management of the post office, for some time has been totally incompetent, or indeed malevolent, and I sincerely hope that someone in the Crown Prosecution Service has been charged with preparing cases against many of those at the top of the organisation; both the board and management.
I’m no fan of the CPS but the Post Office, in England & Wales anyway, was acting as a private prosecutor. The CPS wasn’t involved. Various solicitors at private law firms, who acted in their stead, acted very badly in this.
There is an argument that the CPS, who are more used to criminal prosecutions for obvious reasons, would not have proceeded with many of them. Not a strong argument mind.
With respect, Mr S, you are slightly missing the point. My hope was, and still is, that someone in the CPS is even now preparing cases against the senior management of the post office.
Apologies. It’s early and I misread “hope that someone in the Crown Prosecution Service has been charged” as meaning you wanted a criminal charge brought against the same. Reading comprehension is not my strong suit - I’m a solicitor after all. Apologies once more.
Accepted; perhaps I should have written “tasked” instead of “charged”. I hope several people at the top of the Post Office ARE charged, in the legal use of the word.
It's hard to see how the Board cannot be charged, but the Inquiry may take so long that some will have passed on, and the rest will have decamped to safer shores. Meanwhile they watch on in comfort from their homes in Bedfordshire and elsewhere.
This is why I was suggesting last night that it is time for the Inquiry be suspended so that prosecutions could begin. The Inquiry has become the long grass that the PO is playing for.
So that's threre of us that agree - you, me, and Ms Cyclefree. Now we just need to persuade Sir Wyn Niceoldthing.
And the relevant Minister who has the power to suspend under the Act. The Government remains remarkably uninterested in this disgrace.
Badenoch: neither use nor ornament.
I would say that 99.5% of the time, you can get away with any form of white collar crime, or else, be punished so lightly, that you might just as well have got away with it.
I know two elderly ex-solicitors, who stole £700,000, and £500,000 from clients, and were struck off, but faced no prosecution, and had IVA's with their creditors. The rest of the profession had to make good losses to clients.
How did they protect their assets? Transfer the family house into the wife / husband’s name?
Does anyone have a good technical brief on exactly what went wrong with the Horizon system? What caused the accounting errors in the system?
I once asked the same question but I don't know why as I struggle to give a tiny, shiny fuck about the Post Office or its historical mis-deeds.
Sandpit (I think, apologies if it was somebody else) had a very good grasp of the technical details but I've forgotten all about it as it didn't involve cars or really expensive bikes.
Nutshell - comms issues, I think? Some things didn't get uploaded/downloaded from the post offices to the central system and there was no/insufficient error checking to pick that up. So transactions went missing, something the system thought was impossible.
Typical of the kind of system that works fine when run in a single office on a local network for 'testing' but falls over when exposed to rural post offices with dodgy data connections.
DA translation: Kinda like developing a race track using a Ferrari and setting a target lap time of 2 minutes then opening it up to beat up old Rover Metros and sacking/prosecuting everyone who is too slow.
For those asking about the prosecuting lawyers in this, a firm now known as Womble Bond Dickinson (specifically the Bond Dickinson bit of it) made roughly £60m from the biggest miscarriage of justice in British history acting for the Post Office -
Just dropping in to say that I agree 100% with Cyclefree here. Where are the prosecutions? Where are the executives booted out & their pensions revoked for bringing the Post Office into disrepute by perjuring themselves? Where is the shirt rending, the wailing & gnashing of teeth?
Above all, where are the /consequences/ ?
As Malmesbury keeps reminding us, the modern executive layer, in both the public & private sphere, has built walls around itself so that there are never any consequences, ever. If we can, we should break these walls.
The inquiry hasn't even concluded yet
There is a strong body of opinion forming, Hyufd, that there is not much point in it continuing if the witnesses are not prepared to give their full support.
The evidence of failure to give that support - individually by the likes of Cottam,and institutionally by the PO - is becoming overwhelming. The Government,as owner of the PO, should be asked what it is going to do about this, and if there is no satisfactory response, Sir Wyn should refuse to continue.
That would put the blame fairly and squarely where it belongs. It would also free up the CPS to begin prosecutions.
As far as I can see it they gave evidence, even if not great evidence and handed over the relevant documents to the inquiry. Which is more than can be said for some inquiries at the moment.
If the CPS have evidence for prosecutions they can charge anyway, inquiry or no inquiry
Read some of the posts will you. Disclosure has been lamentable with reams of documents withheld -
Does anyone have a good technical brief on exactly what went wrong with the Horizon system? What caused the accounting errors in the system?
I once asked the same question but I don't know why as I struggle to give a tiny, shiny fuck about the Post Office or its historical mis-deeds.
Sandpit (I think, apologies if it was somebody else) had a very good grasp of the technical details but I've forgotten all about it as it didn't involve cars or really expensive bikes.
Always good to know what you give a fuck about and don’t give a fuck about. Sometimes I lie awake at night wondering.
Just dropping in to say that I agree 100% with Cyclefree here. Where are the prosecutions? Where are the executives booted out & their pensions revoked for bringing the Post Office into disrepute by perjuring themselves? Where is the shirt rending, the wailing & gnashing of teeth?
Above all, where are the /consequences/ ?
As Malmesbury keeps reminding us, the modern executive layer, in both the public & private sphere, has built walls around itself so that there are never any consequences, ever. If we can, we should break these walls.
The inquiry hasn't even concluded yet
There is a strong body of opinion forming, Hyufd, that there is not much point in it continuing if the witnesses are not prepared to give their full support.
The evidence of failure to give that support - individually by the likes of Cottam,and institutionally by the PO - is becoming overwhelming. The Government,as owner of the PO, should be asked what it is going to do about this, and if there is no satisfactory response, Sir Wyn should refuse to continue.
That would put the blame fairly and squarely where it belongs. It would also free up the CPS to begin prosecutions.
One of the most important witnesses, Gareth Jenkins, Fujitsu computer engineer, is due to give evidence at the beginning of December. It would be regrettable to stop the inquiry before he appears.
When Paula Vennels emerges from her bunker in Bedfordshire the tickets to view her interrogation will be hotter than those for Wimbledon on Finals day.
Does anyone have a good technical brief on exactly what went wrong with the Horizon system? What caused the accounting errors in the system?
There could be some very useful lessons for other institutions, from a technical viewpoint. As well as all the obvious management, moral and legal viewpoints...
Basically it was a transactional XML system feeding into the master database, and transactions were getting missed in the transformation and importation process.
The whole system appeared to be badly specified in the first place and was put into production against the wishes of the PO’s own QA team, who still had hundreds of bugs outstanding.
Just dropping in to say that I agree 100% with Cyclefree here. Where are the prosecutions? Where are the executives booted out & their pensions revoked for bringing the Post Office into disrepute by perjuring themselves? Where is the shirt rending, the wailing & gnashing of teeth?
Above all, where are the /consequences/ ?
As Malmesbury keeps reminding us, the modern executive layer, in both the public & private sphere, has built walls around itself so that there are never any consequences, ever. If we can, we should break these walls.
The inquiry hasn't even concluded yet
There is a strong body of opinion forming, Hyufd, that there is not much point in it continuing if the witnesses are not prepared to give their full support.
The evidence of failure to give that support - individually by the likes of Cottam,and institutionally by the PO - is becoming overwhelming. The Government,as owner of the PO, should be asked what it is going to do about this, and if there is no satisfactory response, Sir Wyn should refuse to continue.
That would put the blame fairly and squarely where it belongs. It would also free up the CPS to begin prosecutions.
As far as I can see it they gave evidence, even if not great evidence and handed over the relevant documents to the inquiry. Which is more than can be said for some inquiries at the moment.
If the CPS have evidence for prosecutions they can charge anyway, inquiry or no inquiry
It's plain that Cottam lied to the Tribunal , the Head of Security lied, and that Mr. Womble thinks that Ethics is a county in England.
Anyway, off shortly to do a writing course with a professional writer.
I expect to be told that my novel about City scandals, sex in the city and weird internet geeks (only joking!) is a load of rubbish. But the coffee should be good.
Laters!
Do this one, which resulted in my abrupt change of firm in September. I worked for one of the firms this comedian bought with his clients’ money back in May -
Do have to laugh. Have successfully baited anti-EV freaks to swarm onto my YouTube channel. A lunatic surge in views, watch hours and subscribers yesterday evening, which has continued at an absurd pace for the whole of today.
They come in, watch my videos and post negative comments about Tesla and EVs. Lots of "woke" and "WEF" warnings, even a few anti-vaxxers. Which I happily respond to. But all they are doing is driving the algorithm to push my stuff to even more people.
I'm almost disappointed by yesterday's revenue. Despite being 171% higher than my previous best revenue day I wondered if it might be higher. Expect that today will be bigger again. All hail Daily Mail / GBeebies morons! They are very profitable if you can exploit them.
"anti-EV freaks"
Enough said... About them. And you.
This lot are freaks. They have been fed a diet of nonsense by the right wing media and won't drop it. They all say the same things - which are fact free. And then wander off into WEF paranoia.
It's frustrating to deal with these people, but ultimately it's good news that the vaccine/5G crazies have taken up EVs, 15 minute cities and LTNs as their next topic. No serious politician can oppose them without being grouped in with the conspiracy theorists.
Otoh, the boiler/heat pump debate seems to be a bit more salient in the general population, which is a shame. Even in the US there were heat pumps installations than boilers last year.
I don't mind. I knew what I was getting in for. A massive boost to JustGetATesla (on the back of what had already been a very successful October). They won't post comments forever, but as they like to argue and feel superior they may stick around for a bit.
The YouTube algorithm likes it when videos go viral and people swarm in and comment. And when you interact with their comments. So I'll get a huge boost in how it pushes my videos out, as well as a stack of cash from ad revenue.
I've also learned some video shooting / editing tricks from the channels I went baiting, so will improve my own production too.
OK, Rochdale, if you know so much about electric cars: I would really like my next car to be an electric. But I have a family of five. At the moment, our main family car is a VW Sharan, the glory of which is that there are three large seats in the back, so no arguments about who gets the crappy seat in the middle. Also, it has sliding rear doors, which are also great for extracting kids. But I haven't found any electric cars which have this feature: like most cars, they inexplicably appear to prioritise giving an arm rest and a cup holder to passengers 3 and 5 over giving passenger 4 a decent seat. Any ideas?
For those asking about the prosecuting lawyers in this, a firm now known as Womble Bond Dickinson (specifically the Bond Dickinson bit of it) made roughly £60m from the biggest miscarriage of justice in British history acting for the Post Office -
That guy was an uniusual witness in that he was intelligent and articulate.
He was also aggressive, deeply unpleasant, and plainly dishonest. He will surely be done for perjury....unless lawyers have some kind of special exemption?
By the way, do click on the link @Cyclefree has provided by the “thick as mince” comment. It’s a doozy.
It's quite obvious what has happened here; Post Office Legal Services drafted both her original witness statement, which she signed without paying much attention to it and never had to present in court since the case was settled prior, and may well have done the same with this latest one. It appears that the foolish manager hasn't made much effort to brief herself, or be briefed, beforehand, and the only mitigation is that she is up against a top lawyer who spends his or her life honing their skills of cross-examination and is skilled in demolishing even credible evidence. If there's an organisational failing, it is that once a matter becomes legal, the in-house lawyers tend to take over and it is very easy for the ordinary line manager, who has the day job to worry about, simply to end up following instructions, particularly as the lawyers are based at 'HQ' and the manager is out in the field, used to receiving directions from 'the centre'.
I think that’s a fair summary of the position. However, if that’s the best, the post office can do, it doesn’t say much for their general competence! Every time I read about the post office enquiry, I think back over my long career and ask myself questions about things that went wrong, and I’m sure I could make a much better fist of answering questions about those events. I think it is by now, beyond evident that the management of the post office, for some time has been totally incompetent, or indeed malevolent, and I sincerely hope that someone in the Crown Prosecution Service has been charged with preparing cases against many of those at the top of the organisation; both the board and management.
I’m no fan of the CPS but the Post Office, in England & Wales anyway, was acting as a private prosecutor. The CPS wasn’t involved. Various solicitors at private law firms, who acted in their stead, acted very badly in this.
There is an argument that the CPS, who are more used to criminal prosecutions for obvious reasons, would not have proceeded with many of them. Not a strong argument mind.
With respect, Mr S, you are slightly missing the point. My hope was, and still is, that someone in the CPS is even now preparing cases against the senior management of the post office.
Apologies. It’s early and I misread “hope that someone in the Crown Prosecution Service has been charged” as meaning you wanted a criminal charge brought against the same. Reading comprehension is not my strong suit - I’m a solicitor after all. Apologies once more.
Accepted; perhaps I should have written “tasked” instead of “charged”. I hope several people at the top of the Post Office ARE charged, in the legal use of the word.
It's hard to see how the Board cannot be charged, but the Inquiry may take so long that some will have passed on, and the rest will have decamped to safer shores. Meanwhile they watch on in comfort from their homes in Bedfordshire and elsewhere.
This is why I was suggesting last night that it is time for the Inquiry be suspended so that prosecutions could begin. The Inquiry has become the long grass that the PO is playing for.
So that's threre of us that agree - you, me, and Ms Cyclefree. Now we just need to persuade Sir Wyn Niceoldthing.
And the relevant Minister who has the power to suspend under the Act. The Government remains remarkably uninterested in this disgrace.
Badenoch: neither use nor ornament.
I would say that 99.5% of the time, you can get away with any form of white collar crime, or else, be punished so lightly, that you might just as well have got away with it.
I know two elderly ex-solicitors, who stole £700,000, and £500,000 from clients, and were struck off, but faced no prosecution, and had IVA's with their creditors. The rest of the profession had to make good losses to clients.
How did they protect their assets? Transfer the family house into the wife / husband’s name?
Do the courts let you get away with doing that?
If you do it well in advance of going bankrupt (IIRC it's 5 years). One was a man, and all the assets were in his wife's name, the other a woman, and all the assets in her husband's name.
And, yes, you can make an effort to investigate, but most unsecured creditors, offered 50 p in the pound, will simply to take it.
For those asking about the prosecuting lawyers in this, a firm now known as Womble Bond Dickinson (specifically the Bond Dickinson bit of it) made roughly £60m from the biggest miscarriage of justice in British history acting for the Post Office -
That guy was an uniusual witness in that he was intelligent and articulate.
He was also aggressive, deeply unpleasant, and plainly dishonest. He will surely be done for perjury....unless lawyers have some kind of special exemption?
No. In fact as Officers of the Court we’re technically held to an even higher standard to not even inadvertently mislead a court.
Does anyone have a good technical brief on exactly what went wrong with the Horizon system? What caused the accounting errors in the system?
I once asked the same question but I don't know why as I struggle to give a tiny, shiny fuck about the Post Office or its historical mis-deeds.
Sandpit (I think, apologies if it was somebody else) had a very good grasp of the technical details but I've forgotten all about it as it didn't involve cars or really expensive bikes.
I know you're self-satirising, but to give a serious answer: it does matter for two reasons.
First, obviously, lots of people have suffered greatly through no fault of their own, so we should be upset for them, even if we don't find it an intrinsically interesting case (which I agree this isn't).. But second, the case for public ownership rests on the assumption that failure can be addressed by political recourse. If XYZ Ltd fails, none of us can do anything about it. If a publicly-owned body fails, the responsibility should rest with the elected government.
Anyway, off shortly to do a writing course with a professional writer.
I expect to be told that my novel about City scandals, sex in the city and weird internet geeks (only joking!) is a load of rubbish. But the coffee should be good.
Laters!
Do this one, which resulted in my abrupt change of firm in September. I worked for one of the firms this comedian bought with his clients’ money back in May -
'In an update the SRA has said that a levy on all solicitors is looking “likely” to plug the gap in its compensation fund created by Modhwadia’s alleged antics.
“Although we have not made any decision about what this means for a collection of funds from the profession, it looks likely that, after years of keeping them stable, we will need to increase levies”, said the SRA. ROF estimates that it could equate to a £500 charge per solicitor.
The SRA has defended its response to the crisis. “The sole shareholder at the firm was suspected of misusing significant amounts of client money, resulting in a shortage on the client account estimated to be more than £60 million”, it said.
Even though the missing money meant it was “not possible for the whole firm to carry on operating”, the SRA initially intervened only in Modhwadia’s practice and those of two other directors in order to protect clients, it said.
Then it “worked with the remaining directors to achieve as orderly closure as possible in the circumstances”, which by most accounts reaching ROF involved absolute chaos as stoic staff ploughed on to the end. For their efforts, the solicitors among them may soon be billed around £500 each.'
Increasingly strange that Biden gets so little credit for the performance if the US economy
The U.S. economy has drastically outperformed Europe's since the pandemic. The most plausible explanation is that America implemented a larger -- and in some respects, more progressive -- fiscal stimulus https://twitter.com/EricLevitz/status/1722419205629202589
Though of course Ukraine affected, and affects Europe far more than it dies the US.
Nah it’s more than the US is much more heavily weighted to tech than Europe. That’s out performed while auto, chemicals and financial services (all European strengths) have struggled
I have strived - a bit - to comprehend the “Post Office scandal” and be suitably outraged - but I can’t. My eyes just glaze over. I suppress a yawn and move swiftly on
I think it’s the branding: I associate the words “post office” with standing in slow queues in fusty buildings behind old ladies sending packages to Newent. Or the place you get obscure forms on a drizzly Tuesday
They should have called it “the Fujitsu Attack” or the “Royal Mail Murders” and I’d pay more attention
Does anyone have a good technical brief on exactly what went wrong with the Horizon system? What caused the accounting errors in the system?
I once asked the same question but I don't know why as I struggle to give a tiny, shiny fuck about the Post Office or its historical mis-deeds.
Sandpit (I think, apologies if it was somebody else) had a very good grasp of the technical details but I've forgotten all about it as it didn't involve cars or really expensive bikes.
Always good to know what you give a fuck about and don’t give a fuck about. Sometimes I lie awake at night wondering.
Dura is a Marxist, I think, and therefore concerned not very much with the fate of individuals - particularly members of the bourgeoisie - as opposed to the broad sweep of historical inevitability ?
Does anyone have a good technical brief on exactly what went wrong with the Horizon system? What caused the accounting errors in the system?
There could be some very useful lessons for other institutions, from a technical viewpoint. As well as all the obvious management, moral and legal viewpoints...
Basically it was a transactional XML system feeding into the master database, and transactions were getting missed in the transformation and importation process.
The whole system appeared to be badly specified in the first place and was put into production against the wishes of the PO’s own QA team, who still had hundreds of bugs outstanding.
Do have to laugh. Have successfully baited anti-EV freaks to swarm onto my YouTube channel. A lunatic surge in views, watch hours and subscribers yesterday evening, which has continued at an absurd pace for the whole of today.
They come in, watch my videos and post negative comments about Tesla and EVs. Lots of "woke" and "WEF" warnings, even a few anti-vaxxers. Which I happily respond to. But all they are doing is driving the algorithm to push my stuff to even more people.
I'm almost disappointed by yesterday's revenue. Despite being 171% higher than my previous best revenue day I wondered if it might be higher. Expect that today will be bigger again. All hail Daily Mail / GBeebies morons! They are very profitable if you can exploit them.
"anti-EV freaks"
Enough said... About them. And you.
This lot are freaks. They have been fed a diet of nonsense by the right wing media and won't drop it. They all say the same things - which are fact free. And then wander off into WEF paranoia.
It's frustrating to deal with these people, but ultimately it's good news that the vaccine/5G crazies have taken up EVs, 15 minute cities and LTNs as their next topic. No serious politician can oppose them without being grouped in with the conspiracy theorists.
Otoh, the boiler/heat pump debate seems to be a bit more salient in the general population, which is a shame. Even in the US there were heat pumps installations than boilers last year.
I don't mind. I knew what I was getting in for. A massive boost to JustGetATesla (on the back of what had already been a very successful October). They won't post comments forever, but as they like to argue and feel superior they may stick around for a bit.
The YouTube algorithm likes it when videos go viral and people swarm in and comment. And when you interact with their comments. So I'll get a huge boost in how it pushes my videos out, as well as a stack of cash from ad revenue.
I've also learned some video shooting / editing tricks from the channels I went baiting, so will improve my own production too.
OK, Rochdale, if you know so much about electric cars: I would really like my next car to be an electric. But I have a family of five. At the moment, our main family car is a VW Sharan, the glory of which is that there are three large seats in the back, so no arguments about who gets the crappy seat in the middle. Also, it has sliding rear doors, which are also great for extracting kids. But I haven't found any electric cars which have this feature: like most cars, they inexplicably appear to prioritise giving an arm rest and a cup holder to passengers 3 and 5 over giving passenger 4 a decent seat. Any ideas?
Similar position to Cookie and this is on the list of potential future vehicles.
I'd also note, though, that it's not just an EV thing. There hasn't really been a good Sharan replacement (we have an Alhambra, basically the same) in EV or ICE. The MPV has been largely replaced by the SUV, but they don't tend to have the same space inside, even for a similar or larger footprint. See also C-Max (we used to have one) where e.g. the Kuga is a less practical replacement.
For those asking about the prosecuting lawyers in this, a firm now known as Womble Bond Dickinson (specifically the Bond Dickinson bit of it) made roughly £60m from the biggest miscarriage of justice in British history acting for the Post Office -
That guy was an uniusual witness in that he was intelligent and articulate.
He was also aggressive, deeply unpleasant, and plainly dishonest. He will surely be done for perjury....unless lawyers have some kind of special exemption?
No. In fact as Officers of the Court we’re technically held to an even higher standard to not even inadvertently mislead a court.
Lawyers must not even inadvertently mislead, like Boris Johnson!
Do have to laugh. Have successfully baited anti-EV freaks to swarm onto my YouTube channel. A lunatic surge in views, watch hours and subscribers yesterday evening, which has continued at an absurd pace for the whole of today.
They come in, watch my videos and post negative comments about Tesla and EVs. Lots of "woke" and "WEF" warnings, even a few anti-vaxxers. Which I happily respond to. But all they are doing is driving the algorithm to push my stuff to even more people.
I'm almost disappointed by yesterday's revenue. Despite being 171% higher than my previous best revenue day I wondered if it might be higher. Expect that today will be bigger again. All hail Daily Mail / GBeebies morons! They are very profitable if you can exploit them.
"anti-EV freaks"
Enough said... About them. And you.
This lot are freaks. They have been fed a diet of nonsense by the right wing media and won't drop it. They all say the same things - which are fact free. And then wander off into WEF paranoia.
The problem is that there is a lot of valid concern about EVs at the moment, from range anxiety through charging ability to affordability - as gets discussed a lot on here. Hopefully these concerns will get addressed with time as technology improves. But they are valid concerns.
I don't think I'm anit-EV; just cautious. But don't fall into the trap of thinking that anyone who dares mention issues is anti-EV. Especially as EVs are currently generally high-value cars, and relatively inaccessible to the majority.
I'd also point out that a pro-EV poster on here has had (ahem) rather interesting views about ICE owners. Which shows the issues go the other way as well. Some of the pro-EV people are absolutely nutters, who hide behind the greenwash of owning an EV.
There are many many valid concerns! And I raise plenty of them in my videos on topics like charging. Tonight's video has me slagging off public charging.
But the nutters aren't raising valid concerns. They raise fantasy concerns based on what they have read / been told. These include: Cars waste hours queueing and then charging - about as true as claiming all fuel stops have queues because we occasionally get them at a cheap petrol station Cost of charging is outrageous - well yes it is, but so is the price of fuel at a motorway service station. Normal people do not fill up there - treat chargers the same. EVs depreciate at catastrophic rates. Yet looking in Autotrader it is clear they don't EVs set on fire and you won't get insurance to park next to your house - erm... EVs have touch screens and LED headlights which will fail. So do most modern non-EVs Then of course the perennial - there's no way to check if a battery will fail, it will die, you'll be trapped inside the car and die, and then have to spend £20k on a new battery...
Anyway, off shortly to do a writing course with a professional writer.
I expect to be told that my novel about City scandals, sex in the city and weird internet geeks (only joking!) is a load of rubbish. But the coffee should be good.
Laters!
Do this one, which resulted in my abrupt change of firm in September. I worked for one of the firms this comedian bought with his clients’ money back in May -
'In an update the SRA has said that a levy on all solicitors is looking “likely” to plug the gap in its compensation fund created by Modhwadia’s alleged antics.
“Although we have not made any decision about what this means for a collection of funds from the profession, it looks likely that, after years of keeping them stable, we will need to increase levies”, said the SRA. ROF estimates that it could equate to a £500 charge per solicitor.
The SRA has defended its response to the crisis. “The sole shareholder at the firm was suspected of misusing significant amounts of client money, resulting in a shortage on the client account estimated to be more than £60 million”, it said.
Even though the missing money meant it was “not possible for the whole firm to carry on operating”, the SRA initially intervened only in Modhwadia’s practice and those of two other directors in order to protect clients, it said.
Then it “worked with the remaining directors to achieve as orderly closure as possible in the circumstances”, which by most accounts reaching ROF involved absolute chaos as stoic staff ploughed on to the end. For their efforts, the solicitors among them may soon be billed around £500 each.'
Yep. Marvellous. The SRA fell asleep at the wheel let this guy buy two huge firms in three months, pressuring the firms involved to sell quickly to protect client interests, without doing cursory checks on sources of funds first. He was such a wide boy I’m personally ashamed I didn’t leave as soon as he became involved back in late April.
For those asking about the prosecuting lawyers in this, a firm now known as Womble Bond Dickinson (specifically the Bond Dickinson bit of it) made roughly £60m from the biggest miscarriage of justice in British history acting for the Post Office -
That guy was an uniusual witness in that he was intelligent and articulate.
He was also aggressive, deeply unpleasant, and plainly dishonest. He will surely be done for perjury....unless lawyers have some kind of special exemption?
No. In fact as Officers of the Court we’re technically held to an even higher standard to not even inadvertently mislead a court.
Lawyers must not even inadvertently mislead, like Boris Johnson!
If we inadvertently mislead we’re supposed to go back and correct the record ASAP.
I have strived - a bit - to comprehend the “Post Office scandal” and be suitably outraged - but I can’t. My eyes just glaze over. I suppress a yawn and move swiftly on
I think it’s the branding: I associate the words “post office” with standing in slow queues in fusty buildings behind old ladies sending packages to Newent. Or the place you get obscure forms on a drizzly Tuesday
They should have called it “the Fujitsu Attack” or the “Royal Mail Murders” and I’d pay more attention
Does anyone have a good technical brief on exactly what went wrong with the Horizon system? What caused the accounting errors in the system?
There could be some very useful lessons for other institutions, from a technical viewpoint. As well as all the obvious management, moral and legal viewpoints...
Basically it was a transactional XML system feeding into the master database, and transactions were getting missed in the transformation and importation process.
The whole system appeared to be badly specified in the first place and was put into production against the wishes of the PO’s own QA team, who still had hundreds of bugs outstanding.
I mean. Fucksake. YAWN
While this story does not involve the sort of pointless but visually spectacular bloodbath you constantly crave it is still incredibly important.
Do have to laugh. Have successfully baited anti-EV freaks to swarm onto my YouTube channel. A lunatic surge in views, watch hours and subscribers yesterday evening, which has continued at an absurd pace for the whole of today.
They come in, watch my videos and post negative comments about Tesla and EVs. Lots of "woke" and "WEF" warnings, even a few anti-vaxxers. Which I happily respond to. But all they are doing is driving the algorithm to push my stuff to even more people.
I'm almost disappointed by yesterday's revenue. Despite being 171% higher than my previous best revenue day I wondered if it might be higher. Expect that today will be bigger again. All hail Daily Mail / GBeebies morons! They are very profitable if you can exploit them.
"anti-EV freaks"
Enough said... About them. And you.
This lot are freaks. They have been fed a diet of nonsense by the right wing media and won't drop it. They all say the same things - which are fact free. And then wander off into WEF paranoia.
The problem is that there is a lot of valid concern about EVs at the moment, from range anxiety through charging ability to affordability - as gets discussed a lot on here. Hopefully these concerns will get addressed with time as technology improves. But they are valid concerns.
I don't think I'm anit-EV; just cautious. But don't fall into the trap of thinking that anyone who dares mention issues is anti-EV. Especially as EVs are currently generally high-value cars, and relatively inaccessible to the majority.
I'd also point out that a pro-EV poster on here has had (ahem) rather interesting views about ICE owners. Which shows the issues go the other way as well. Some of the pro-EV people are absolutely nutters, who hide behind the greenwash of owning an EV.
There are many many valid concerns! And I raise plenty of them in my videos on topics like charging. Tonight's video has me slagging off public charging.
But the nutters aren't raising valid concerns. They raise fantasy concerns based on what they have read / been told. These include: Cars waste hours queueing and then charging - about as true as claiming all fuel stops have queues because we occasionally get them at a cheap petrol station Cost of charging is outrageous - well yes it is, but so is the price of fuel at a motorway service station. Normal people do not fill up there - treat chargers the same. EVs depreciate at catastrophic rates. Yet looking in Autotrader it is clear they don't EVs set on fire and you won't get insurance to park next to your house - erm... EVs have touch screens and LED headlights which will fail. So do most modern non-EVs Then of course the perennial - there's no way to check if a battery will fail, it will die, you'll be trapped inside the car and die, and then have to spend £20k on a new battery...
Think the only valid argument there is insurance - EVs seem to be being written off rather quickly which is bumping all premiums up a lot.
Does anyone have a good technical brief on exactly what went wrong with the Horizon system? What caused the accounting errors in the system?
I once asked the same question but I don't know why as I struggle to give a tiny, shiny fuck about the Post Office or its historical mis-deeds.
Sandpit (I think, apologies if it was somebody else) had a very good grasp of the technical details but I've forgotten all about it as it didn't involve cars or really expensive bikes.
It’s very simple.
You ring up a sale in a shop. The system should record that sale once. And only once. With all the details right.
The Horizon system recorded multiple copies of the same thing, phantom transactions. It was randomly doodling bullshit in the records.
The technical name for this area in IT is Transactionality. It is an utterly, utterly solved problem. Tools, frameworks, computer languages - all designed to do it for you, in many cases. Just follow standard practise.
Does anyone have a good technical brief on exactly what went wrong with the Horizon system? What caused the accounting errors in the system?
I once asked the same question but I don't know why as I struggle to give a tiny, shiny fuck about the Post Office or its historical mis-deeds.
Sandpit (I think, apologies if it was somebody else) had a very good grasp of the technical details but I've forgotten all about it as it didn't involve cars or really expensive bikes.
Always good to know what you give a fuck about and don’t give a fuck about. Sometimes I lie awake at night wondering.
The trick is not giving a fuck about giving a fuck.
By the way, do click on the link @Cyclefree has provided by the “thick as mince” comment. It’s a doozy.
It's quite obvious what has happened here; Post Office Legal Services drafted both her original witness statement, which she signed without paying much attention to it and never had to present in court since the case was settled prior, and may well have done the same with this latest one. It appears that the foolish manager hasn't made much effort to brief herself, or be briefed, beforehand, and the only mitigation is that she is up against a top lawyer who spends his or her life honing their skills of cross-examination and is skilled in demolishing even credible evidence. If there's an organisational failing, it is that once a matter becomes legal, the in-house lawyers tend to take over and it is very easy for the ordinary line manager, who has the day job to worry about, simply to end up following instructions, particularly as the lawyers are based at 'HQ' and the manager is out in the field, used to receiving directions from 'the centre'.
I think that’s a fair summary of the position. However, if that’s the best, the post office can do, it doesn’t say much for their general competence! Every time I read about the post office enquiry, I think back over my long career and ask myself questions about things that went wrong, and I’m sure I could make a much better fist of answering questions about those events. I think it is by now, beyond evident that the management of the post office, for some time has been totally incompetent, or indeed malevolent, and I sincerely hope that someone in the Crown Prosecution Service has been charged with preparing cases against many of those at the top of the organisation; both the board and management.
I’m no fan of the CPS but the Post Office, in England & Wales anyway, was acting as a private prosecutor. The CPS wasn’t involved. Various solicitors at private law firms, who acted in their stead, acted very badly in this.
There is an argument that the CPS, who are more used to criminal prosecutions for obvious reasons, would not have proceeded with many of them. Not a strong argument mind.
One of the most shocking revelations of the scandal is just how much power the PO had as investigator and (private) prosecutor.
For many years it used this power prudently. Then the Board changed, its mandate changed, and it acquired Horizon. All hell was then let loose.
That’s one of the key take aways for me
There are historical anomalies about prosecutorial powers - the rspca, the post office, etc. They should not have the right to do this.
Does anyone have a good technical brief on exactly what went wrong with the Horizon system? What caused the accounting errors in the system?
I once asked the same question but I don't know why as I struggle to give a tiny, shiny fuck about the Post Office or its historical mis-deeds.
Sandpit (I think, apologies if it was somebody else) had a very good grasp of the technical details but I've forgotten all about it as it didn't involve cars or really expensive bikes.
Always good to know what you give a fuck about and don’t give a fuck about. Sometimes I lie awake at night wondering.
The trick is not giving a fuck about giving a fuck.
I have strived - a bit - to comprehend the “Post Office scandal” and be suitably outraged - but I can’t. My eyes just glaze over. I suppress a yawn and move swiftly on
I think it’s the branding: I associate the words “post office” with standing in slow queues in fusty buildings behind old ladies sending packages to Newent. Or the place you get obscure forms on a drizzly Tuesday
They should have called it “the Fujitsu Attack” or the “Royal Mail Murders” and I’d pay more attention
Tut
That's perfectly understandable. I was much the same for many years. Then I read little about it and learned of a few cases which were huge miscarriages with devastating consequences for the victims.
Then I realised that there were literally hundreds of such cases and it has been going on for decades.
At that point, even a sloth-like creature like me starts to think 'Wtf, how can this happen?'
Then you start to read up on it, or check out the YouTube clips, and you realise this must be the worst public scandal in 75 years.
Then you start reading properly. Be careful at that point. It is addictive, in the way that watching a thousand car pile up is compulsively addictive.
For those asking about the prosecuting lawyers in this, a firm now known as Womble Bond Dickinson (specifically the Bond Dickinson bit of it) made roughly £60m from the biggest miscarriage of justice in British history acting for the Post Office -
That guy was an uniusual witness in that he was intelligent and articulate.
He was also aggressive, deeply unpleasant, and plainly dishonest. He will surely be done for perjury....unless lawyers have some kind of special exemption?
No. In fact as Officers of the Court we’re technically held to an even higher standard to not even inadvertently mislead a court.
Lawyers must not even inadvertently mislead, like Boris Johnson!
Lawyers, and especially criminal defence lawyers, need everyone to know that 'inadvertently' and 'mislead' have very special meanings for lawyers especially when defending the indefensible in court, which, God bless them, they do all the time mostly at the taxpayers expense.
Does anyone have a good technical brief on exactly what went wrong with the Horizon system? What caused the accounting errors in the system?
There could be some very useful lessons for other institutions, from a technical viewpoint. As well as all the obvious management, moral and legal viewpoints...
Basically it was a transactional XML system feeding into the master database, and transactions were getting missed in the transformation and importation process.
The whole system appeared to be badly specified in the first place and was put into production against the wishes of the PO’s own QA team, who still had hundreds of bugs outstanding.
Interesting, thanks. More fundamental than what I'd described and heard about before. Beggars belief.
Someone was extolling V Bombers, particularly the Victor, the other day. This is a good vid (though I’ll probably find out it’s AI generated) of a Victor almost going pear shaped. It does look pretty Flash Gordon head on.
I have strived - a bit - to comprehend the “Post Office scandal” and be suitably outraged - but I can’t. My eyes just glaze over. I suppress a yawn and move swiftly on
I think it’s the branding: I associate the words “post office” with standing in slow queues in fusty buildings behind old ladies sending packages to Newent. Or the place you get obscure forms on a drizzly Tuesday
They should have called it “the Fujitsu Attack” or the “Royal Mail Murders” and I’d pay more attention
Tut
That's perfectly understandable. I was much the same for many years. Then I read little about it and learned of a few cases which were huge miscarriages with devastating consequences for the victims.
Then I realised that there were literally hundreds of such cases and it has been going on for decades.
At that point, even a sloth-like creature like me starts to think 'Wtf, how can this happen?'
Then you start to read up on it, or check out the YouTube clips, and you realise this must be the worst public scandal in 75 years.
Then you start reading properly. Be careful at that point. It is addictive, in the way that watching a thousand car pile up is compulsively addictive.
Does anyone have a good technical brief on exactly what went wrong with the Horizon system? What caused the accounting errors in the system?
There could be some very useful lessons for other institutions, from a technical viewpoint. As well as all the obvious management, moral and legal viewpoints...
Basically it was a transactional XML system feeding into the master database, and transactions were getting missed in the transformation and importation process.
The whole system appeared to be badly specified in the first place and was put into production against the wishes of the PO’s own QA team, who still had hundreds of bugs outstanding.
I mean. Fucksake. YAWN
While this story does not involve the sort of pointless but visually spectacular bloodbath you constantly crave it is still incredibly important.
There were suicides, ffs. Netflix has made blockbuster documentaries over less.
Indeed, Leon might be the man to give this scandal some more spice. "The Post Office scandal is like getting the wrong bollock removed".
Does anyone have a good technical brief on exactly what went wrong with the Horizon system? What caused the accounting errors in the system?
There could be some very useful lessons for other institutions, from a technical viewpoint. As well as all the obvious management, moral and legal viewpoints...
Basically it was a transactional XML system feeding into the master database, and transactions were getting missed in the transformation and importation process.
The whole system appeared to be badly specified in the first place and was put into production against the wishes of the PO’s own QA team, who still had hundreds of bugs outstanding.
I mean. Fucksake. YAWN
Imagine that the Knappers Gazette had special power to prosecute you for copy errors, and you'd done 10 years choke and had your assets confiscated for something they'd wrongly corrected.
After all, you managed to dredge up some empathy for that fucker Giles Coren.
Does anyone have a good technical brief on exactly what went wrong with the Horizon system? What caused the accounting errors in the system?
I once asked the same question but I don't know why as I struggle to give a tiny, shiny fuck about the Post Office or its historical mis-deeds.
Sandpit (I think, apologies if it was somebody else) had a very good grasp of the technical details but I've forgotten all about it as it didn't involve cars or really expensive bikes.
It’s very simple.
You ring up a sale in a shop. The system should record that sale once. And only once. With all the details right.
The Horizon system recorded multiple copies of the same thing, phantom transactions. It was randomly doodling bullshit in the records.
The technical name for this area in IT is Transactionality. It is an utterly, utterly solved problem. Tools, frameworks, computer languages - all designed to do it for you, in many cases. Just follow standard practise.
Fucking it up was grotesque incompetence
A puzzle to me has always been: Was there not masses of data which would show up immediately on an old fashioned audit done by an old fashioned auditor - the sort that worries about whether that 37p should be under 'requisites' or 'sundry'. They still,exist. I know some.
I have strived - a bit - to comprehend the “Post Office scandal” and be suitably outraged - but I can’t. My eyes just glaze over. I suppress a yawn and move swiftly on
I think it’s the branding: I associate the words “post office” with standing in slow queues in fusty buildings behind old ladies sending packages to Newent. Or the place you get obscure forms on a drizzly Tuesday
They should have called it “the Fujitsu Attack” or the “Royal Mail Murders” and I’d pay more attention
Tut
Indeed, albeit The Royal Mail is now a private company while The Post Office is still owned by the Government
Someone was extolling V Bombers, particularly the Victor, the other day. This is a good vid (though I’ll probably find out it’s AI generated) of a Victor almost going pear shaped. It does look pretty Flash Gordon head on.
I always liked the story of the Vulcan pilot, who got into Mach tuck in an uncontrolled dive. He said he seriously considered pushing the stick forward to do a negative G loop to try and escape..
As he was about do that, the plane finally reached dense enough air to slow down a bit. And get control back.
I have strived - a bit - to comprehend the “Post Office scandal” and be suitably outraged - but I can’t. My eyes just glaze over. I suppress a yawn and move swiftly on
I think it’s the branding: I associate the words “post office” with standing in slow queues in fusty buildings behind old ladies sending packages to Newent. Or the place you get obscure forms on a drizzly Tuesday
They should have called it “the Fujitsu Attack” or the “Royal Mail Murders” and I’d pay more attention
Tut
That's perfectly understandable. I was much the same for many years. Then I read little about it and learned of a few cases which were huge miscarriages with devastating consequences for the victims.
Then I realised that there were literally hundreds of such cases and it has been going on for decades.
At that point, even a sloth-like creature like me starts to think 'Wtf, how can this happen?'
Then you start to read up on it, or check out the YouTube clips, and you realise this must be the worst public scandal in 75 years.
Then you start reading properly. Be careful at that point. It is addictive, in the way that watching a thousand car pile up is compulsively addictive.
The Post Office Mass Torture Murders
Snappy enough for the Mail?
To be fair, the Mail has been one of the few papers to report the matter prominently, and well.
Yep it's super important. Scandal is an overused word but this is one.
For Dura I'd have thought this was manna from heaven in his struggle to overturn the military-industrial complex as it shows a huge failing of the state which could be exploited by anti-state types.
For Leon I am genuinely surprised that he is uninterested given he/we all on here have enquiring minds - yes some less developed than others you, or at least we know who you are - and it would be difficult for this scandal not to engage the least enquiring of those.
Just dropping in to say that I agree 100% with Cyclefree here. Where are the prosecutions? Where are the executives booted out & their pensions revoked for bringing the Post Office into disrepute by perjuring themselves? Where is the shirt rending, the wailing & gnashing of teeth?
Above all, where are the /consequences/ ?
As Malmesbury keeps reminding us, the modern executive layer, in both the public & private sphere, has built walls around itself so that there are never any consequences, ever. If we can, we should break these walls.
The inquiry hasn't even concluded yet
There is a strong body of opinion forming, Hyufd, that there is not much point in it continuing if the witnesses are not prepared to give their full support.
The evidence of failure to give that support - individually by the likes of Cottam,and institutionally by the PO - is becoming overwhelming. The Government,as owner of the PO, should be asked what it is going to do about this, and if there is no satisfactory response, Sir Wyn should refuse to continue.
That would put the blame fairly and squarely where it belongs. It would also free up the CPS to begin prosecutions.
As far as I can see it they gave evidence, even if not great evidence and handed over the relevant documents to the inquiry. Which is more than can be said for some inquiries at the moment.
If the CPS have evidence for prosecutions they can charge anyway, inquiry or no inquiry
Read some of the posts will you. Disclosure has been lamentable with reams of documents withheld -
HSF another doing well on the gravy train of this one for doing precisely zilch
No clear evidence of that, more that law firm Herbert Smith employed lots of paralegals it seems to review the documents for disclosure and the question was did they identify everything (lots of law firms use paralegals for this type of task though)
I have strived - a bit - to comprehend the “Post Office scandal” and be suitably outraged - but I can’t. My eyes just glaze over. I suppress a yawn and move swiftly on
I think it’s the branding: I associate the words “post office” with standing in slow queues in fusty buildings behind old ladies sending packages to Newent. Or the place you get obscure forms on a drizzly Tuesday
They should have called it “the Fujitsu Attack” or the “Royal Mail Murders” and I’d pay more attention
Tut
That's perfectly understandable. I was much the same for many years. Then I read little about it and learned of a few cases which were huge miscarriages with devastating consequences for the victims.
Then I realised that there were literally hundreds of such cases and it has been going on for decades.
At that point, even a sloth-like creature like me starts to think 'Wtf, how can this happen?'
Then you start to read up on it, or check out the YouTube clips, and you realise this must be the worst public scandal in 75 years.
Then you start reading properly. Be careful at that point. It is addictive, in the way that watching a thousand car pile up is compulsively addictive.
I think it's a toss up which is worse, this, or the Rotherham child abuse scandal.
Has any Post Office witness yet claimed "I think we were the real victims here", or will that be left to the former Chief Executive?
Just dropping in to say that I agree 100% with Cyclefree here. Where are the prosecutions? Where are the executives booted out & their pensions revoked for bringing the Post Office into disrepute by perjuring themselves? Where is the shirt rending, the wailing & gnashing of teeth?
Above all, where are the /consequences/ ?
As Malmesbury keeps reminding us, the modern executive layer, in both the public & private sphere, has built walls around itself so that there are never any consequences, ever. If we can, we should break these walls.
The inquiry hasn't even concluded yet
The use of inquiries to increase delay and obfuscation is part of the weaponry and defence system of all elites.
The prosecution of speeding drivers/murderers is not delayed by 10 years and then shelved as we await a judge led inquiry into the sociology of speeding/gender bias in murders. Prosecuting crimes and inquiries into why bad stuff happened are logically separate matters.
“No Minister, I beg you,” replies Sir Humphrey. “A basic rule of government is never look into anything you don’t have to, and never set up an inquiry unless you know in advance what its findings will be".
Does anyone have a good technical brief on exactly what went wrong with the Horizon system? What caused the accounting errors in the system?
I once asked the same question but I don't know why as I struggle to give a tiny, shiny fuck about the Post Office or its historical mis-deeds.
Sandpit (I think, apologies if it was somebody else) had a very good grasp of the technical details but I've forgotten all about it as it didn't involve cars or really expensive bikes.
It’s very simple.
You ring up a sale in a shop. The system should record that sale once. And only once. With all the details right.
The Horizon system recorded multiple copies of the same thing, phantom transactions. It was randomly doodling bullshit in the records.
The technical name for this area in IT is Transactionality. It is an utterly, utterly solved problem. Tools, frameworks, computer languages - all designed to do it for you, in many cases. Just follow standard practise.
Fucking it up was grotesque incompetence
A puzzle to me has always been: Was there not masses of data which would show up immediately on an old fashioned audit done by an old fashioned auditor - the sort that worries about whether that 37p should be under 'requisites' or 'sundry'. They still,exist. I know some.
That's a good question.
I've asked myself what I would have done if I had been one of these Subpostmasters and been confronted with an accusation I knew to be untrue. I have enough bookkeeping knowhow to run trial balances to show nothing was missing. I might even have called in a firm of local accounts to vet my work. At that point I would know for sure that it was the computer system at fault.
The problem then was that the PO would not brook this argument, and they would have brought the full force of their draconian powers down on me. They flatly refused to contemplate that Horizon could be faulty, and they aggressively pushed the line that the errors had to be down to dishonesty.
How many of us would have had the strength, tenacity and ability to resist?
I have strived - a bit - to comprehend the “Post Office scandal” and be suitably outraged - but I can’t. My eyes just glaze over. I suppress a yawn and move swiftly on
I think it’s the branding: I associate the words “post office” with standing in slow queues in fusty buildings behind old ladies sending packages to Newent. Or the place you get obscure forms on a drizzly Tuesday
They should have called it “the Fujitsu Attack” or the “Royal Mail Murders” and I’d pay more attention
Tut
That's perfectly understandable. I was much the same for many years. Then I read little about it and learned of a few cases which were huge miscarriages with devastating consequences for the victims.
Then I realised that there were literally hundreds of such cases and it has been going on for decades.
At that point, even a sloth-like creature like me starts to think 'Wtf, how can this happen?'
Then you start to read up on it, or check out the YouTube clips, and you realise this must be the worst public scandal in 75 years.
Then you start reading properly. Be careful at that point. It is addictive, in the way that watching a thousand car pile up is compulsively addictive.
I think it's a toss up which is worse, this, or the Rotherham child abuse scandal.
Has any Post Office witness yet claimed "I think we were the real victims here", or will that be left to the former Chief Executive?
It's a close call, Sean, but I'd go for the PO, mainly on the grounds of volume and number of lives wrecked.
So the poppy seller who allegedly claimed he was attacked by pro Palestinian demonstrators and who was front page news on the Daily Hate did indeed suffer a terrible attack by a child who accidentally stood on his foot !
The Tories are pouring petrol onto a very sensitive situation and are unfit to govern .
Does anyone have a good technical brief on exactly what went wrong with the Horizon system? What caused the accounting errors in the system?
I once asked the same question but I don't know why as I struggle to give a tiny, shiny fuck about the Post Office or its historical mis-deeds.
Sandpit (I think, apologies if it was somebody else) had a very good grasp of the technical details but I've forgotten all about it as it didn't involve cars or really expensive bikes.
It’s very simple.
You ring up a sale in a shop. The system should record that sale once. And only once. With all the details right.
The Horizon system recorded multiple copies of the same thing, phantom transactions. It was randomly doodling bullshit in the records.
The technical name for this area in IT is Transactionality. It is an utterly, utterly solved problem. Tools, frameworks, computer languages - all designed to do it for you, in many cases. Just follow standard practise.
Fucking it up was grotesque incompetence
A puzzle to me has always been: Was there not masses of data which would show up immediately on an old fashioned audit done by an old fashioned auditor - the sort that worries about whether that 37p should be under 'requisites' or 'sundry'. They still,exist. I know some.
That's a good question.
I've asked myself what I would have done if I had been one of these Subpostmasters and been confronted with an accusation I knew to be untrue. I have enough bookkeeping knowhow to run trial balances to show nothing was missing. I might even have called in a firm of local accounts to vet my work. At that point I would know for sure that it was the computer system at fault.
The problem then was that the PO would not brook this argument, and they would have brought the full force of their draconian powers down on me. They flatly refused to contemplate that Horizon could be faulty, and they aggressively pushed the line that the errors had to be down to dishonesty.
How many of us would have had the strength, tenacity and ability to resist?
What would your auditors audit when there were no records outside the flawed computer system?
One 79-year-old homeowner, who did not want to be named, told the BBC he had cut back on other costs as much as he could, but was only able to pay part of his mortgage bill each month.
So why does someone who is 79 have a mortgage and not only that but a mortgage he is unable to properly pay ?
People have to take some responsibility for their own financial decisions instead of blaming the banks or the government or world events.
Someone 79 with a mortgage slightly in arrears is unlikely to suffer much from it anyway - trashing their credit score probably doesn't matter too much, and I can't imagine the bank rushing to repossess - easier to just wait them out and retrieve what is owed from the estate.
The critical information in that BBC article is that almost nobody is being re-possessed, particularly in the residential sector (629 in the last year), which suggests there is less pain being caused than one might think from a the squealing. The main people getting burnt appear to be the less prudent end of the B2L landlord market, which is perhaps not such a tragic state of affairs...
Does anyone have a good technical brief on exactly what went wrong with the Horizon system? What caused the accounting errors in the system?
I once asked the same question but I don't know why as I struggle to give a tiny, shiny fuck about the Post Office or its historical mis-deeds.
Sandpit (I think, apologies if it was somebody else) had a very good grasp of the technical details but I've forgotten all about it as it didn't involve cars or really expensive bikes.
It’s very simple.
You ring up a sale in a shop. The system should record that sale once. And only once. With all the details right.
The Horizon system recorded multiple copies of the same thing, phantom transactions. It was randomly doodling bullshit in the records.
The technical name for this area in IT is Transactionality. It is an utterly, utterly solved problem. Tools, frameworks, computer languages - all designed to do it for you, in many cases. Just follow standard practise.
Fucking it up was grotesque incompetence
A puzzle to me has always been: Was there not masses of data which would show up immediately on an old fashioned audit done by an old fashioned auditor - the sort that worries about whether that 37p should be under 'requisites' or 'sundry'. They still,exist. I know some.
That's a good question.
I've asked myself what I would have done if I had been one of these Subpostmasters and been confronted with an accusation I knew to be untrue. I have enough bookkeeping knowhow to run trial balances to show nothing was missing. I might even have called in a firm of local accounts to vet my work. At that point I would know for sure that it was the computer system at fault.
The problem then was that the PO would not brook this argument, and they would have brought the full force of their draconian powers down on me. They flatly refused to contemplate that Horizon could be faulty, and they aggressively pushed the line that the errors had to be down to dishonesty.
How many of us would have had the strength, tenacity and ability to resist?
What would your auditors audit when there were no records outside the flawed computer system?
The PO took the view that any records outside the system, which suggested there was no fraud, were part of the fraud.
Does anyone have a good technical brief on exactly what went wrong with the Horizon system? What caused the accounting errors in the system?
I once asked the same question but I don't know why as I struggle to give a tiny, shiny fuck about the Post Office or its historical mis-deeds.
Sandpit (I think, apologies if it was somebody else) had a very good grasp of the technical details but I've forgotten all about it as it didn't involve cars or really expensive bikes.
It’s very simple.
You ring up a sale in a shop. The system should record that sale once. And only once. With all the details right.
The Horizon system recorded multiple copies of the same thing, phantom transactions. It was randomly doodling bullshit in the records.
The technical name for this area in IT is Transactionality. It is an utterly, utterly solved problem. Tools, frameworks, computer languages - all designed to do it for you, in many cases. Just follow standard practise.
Fucking it up was grotesque incompetence
A puzzle to me has always been: Was there not masses of data which would show up immediately on an old fashioned audit done by an old fashioned auditor - the sort that worries about whether that 37p should be under 'requisites' or 'sundry'. They still,exist. I know some.
That's a good question.
I've asked myself what I would have done if I had been one of these Subpostmasters and been confronted with an accusation I knew to be untrue. I have enough bookkeeping knowhow to run trial balances to show nothing was missing. I might even have called in a firm of local accounts to vet my work. At that point I would know for sure that it was the computer system at fault.
The problem then was that the PO would not brook this argument, and they would have brought the full force of their draconian powers down on me. They flatly refused to contemplate that Horizon could be faulty, and they aggressively pushed the line that the errors had to be down to dishonesty.
How many of us would have had the strength, tenacity and ability to resist?
What would your auditors audit when there were no records outside the flawed computer system?
I think you touch on the one point where the defenders of the Subpostmaster were weak.
I would have shown my figures to the PO and said 'OK, that's what I make it and you can see the trail. Now show me what you make it AND show me your audit trail.' They couldn't and wouldn't have been able to. Horizon quite simply made its numbers up.'
I reckon they may have backed off at that point....and gone off to attack more vulnerable prey.
That part of the Post Office is subsidized by the more profitable parts.
The same as the UK in that case. So that doesn't explain the price difference.
Prediction: this time next month there will be a major row about excess postage charges on Christmas cards, owing to confusion over the new size-based pricing for letters, and the Royal Mail imposing a £2.50 excess charge to hand over Granny's card.
Given that it is mostly pensioners who still send Christmas cards in the post, surely this can be dealt with by giving all pensioners a tax free Christmas Card Bonus Payment, say £125 or perhaps lets round it up to £150 to account for birthdays and Easter too.
We stopped sending Xmas cards last year, due to the strikes. Waste of time. We are not planning to resume sending them this year.
"NatWest will not pay the £7.5m due to Alison Rose, the banking group’s former chief executive, who was forced to resign after the mishandling of the closure of Nigel Farage’s bank accounts."
Does anyone have a good technical brief on exactly what went wrong with the Horizon system? What caused the accounting errors in the system?
I once asked the same question but I don't know why as I struggle to give a tiny, shiny fuck about the Post Office or its historical mis-deeds.
Sandpit (I think, apologies if it was somebody else) had a very good grasp of the technical details but I've forgotten all about it as it didn't involve cars or really expensive bikes.
It’s very simple.
You ring up a sale in a shop. The system should record that sale once. And only once. With all the details right.
The Horizon system recorded multiple copies of the same thing, phantom transactions. It was randomly doodling bullshit in the records.
The technical name for this area in IT is Transactionality. It is an utterly, utterly solved problem. Tools, frameworks, computer languages - all designed to do it for you, in many cases. Just follow standard practise.
Fucking it up was grotesque incompetence
A puzzle to me has always been: Was there not masses of data which would show up immediately on an old fashioned audit done by an old fashioned auditor - the sort that worries about whether that 37p should be under 'requisites' or 'sundry'. They still,exist. I know some.
That's a good question.
I've asked myself what I would have done if I had been one of these Subpostmasters and been confronted with an accusation I knew to be untrue. I have enough bookkeeping knowhow to run trial balances to show nothing was missing. I might even have called in a firm of local accounts to vet my work. At that point I would know for sure that it was the computer system at fault.
The problem then was that the PO would not brook this argument, and they would have brought the full force of their draconian powers down on me. They flatly refused to contemplate that Horizon could be faulty, and they aggressively pushed the line that the errors had to be down to dishonesty.
How many of us would have had the strength, tenacity and ability to resist?
It's still a bit odd though. Horizon creates phantom invoices which mean that money is "missing" from the account, and therefore, presumably, stolen. But those invoices must relate to a product or service. In the case of a product it should surely have been possible to show that the subpostmaster didn't actually receive the product or service that the invoice relates to. For duplicate invoices there should also have been the same customer which may be possible in some cases but again should have been a point to check: did they actually receive those services/product?
What seems to have happened is that both the prosecutors and those advising the subpostmasters did not or could not conceive of the Horizon system being wrong or unreliable.
Which is bad enough. The criminality arises where people know that the system was not reliable and yet instructs prosecutors to proceed and to make representations to courts that it was reliable. I think we have got enough from the Inquiry already to identify at least some of those who did that.
Has Braverman been sacked yet? She displays the worst of the Tory right.
Yet Sunak cannot afford to alienate the Right further, he already is leaking votes to Reform as it is and the Tory membership never voted for him as leader either
Does anyone have a good technical brief on exactly what went wrong with the Horizon system? What caused the accounting errors in the system?
I once asked the same question but I don't know why as I struggle to give a tiny, shiny fuck about the Post Office or its historical mis-deeds.
Sandpit (I think, apologies if it was somebody else) had a very good grasp of the technical details but I've forgotten all about it as it didn't involve cars or really expensive bikes.
It’s very simple.
You ring up a sale in a shop. The system should record that sale once. And only once. With all the details right.
The Horizon system recorded multiple copies of the same thing, phantom transactions. It was randomly doodling bullshit in the records.
The technical name for this area in IT is Transactionality. It is an utterly, utterly solved problem. Tools, frameworks, computer languages - all designed to do it for you, in many cases. Just follow standard practise.
Fucking it up was grotesque incompetence
A puzzle to me has always been: Was there not masses of data which would show up immediately on an old fashioned audit done by an old fashioned auditor - the sort that worries about whether that 37p should be under 'requisites' or 'sundry'. They still,exist. I know some.
That's a good question.
I've asked myself what I would have done if I had been one of these Subpostmasters and been confronted with an accusation I knew to be untrue. I have enough bookkeeping knowhow to run trial balances to show nothing was missing. I might even have called in a firm of local accounts to vet my work. At that point I would know for sure that it was the computer system at fault.
The problem then was that the PO would not brook this argument, and they would have brought the full force of their draconian powers down on me. They flatly refused to contemplate that Horizon could be faulty, and they aggressively pushed the line that the errors had to be down to dishonesty.
How many of us would have had the strength, tenacity and ability to resist?
It's still a bit odd though. Horizon creates phantom invoices which mean that money is "missing" from the account, and therefore, presumably, stolen. But those invoices must relate to a product or service. In the case of a product it should surely have been possible to show that the subpostmaster didn't actually receive the product or service that the invoice relates to. For duplicate invoices there should also have been the same customer which may be possible in some cases but again should have been a point to check: did they actually receive those services/product?
What seems to have happened is that both the prosecutors and those advising the subpostmasters did not or could not conceive of the Horizon system being wrong or unreliable.
Which is bad enough. The criminality arises where people know that the system was not reliable and yet instructs prosecutors to proceed and to make representations to courts that it was reliable. I think we have got enough from the Inquiry already to identify at least some of those who did that.
The PO took the view that anything the Postmasters had as evidence was evidence of their fraud - anything that contradicted Horizon was wrong and fake.
Has Braverman been sacked yet? She displays the worst of the Tory right.
Yet Sunak cannot afford to alienate the Right further, he already is leaking votes to Reform as it is and the Tory membership never voted for him as leader either
He cannot afford to alienate the moderates any further. He's already leaking votes to Lab, LD and disgusted non-voters as it is.
These figures are always revised.i don't think you can say no growth yet.. indeed growth may be negative, but you smare being a bit presumptuous to state it as a fact.
Whilst that's true, and the plus sign in +0.2% makes it sound an awful lot better than 0, let alone -0.2%, it doesn't really matter.
The key thing is that the growth in the economy is nowhere near enough for us to collectively afford nice things. And for lots of individuals, there will be a negative sign on their personal financial growth.
This is the economic stat that should scare us all and usually is a huge red flag for the economy and individuals.
The number of mortgage holders who have fallen behind on their payments climbed in the third quarter in a sign that higher interest rates are increasing financial pressure on homeowners and landlords.
Figures from UK Finance, the trade body for the banking industry, showed that 87,930 homeowner mortgages were in arrears in the three months to the end of September, up 7 per cent compared with the preceding quarter and 18 per cent on a year earlier.
The rise was even bigger on buy-to-let loans, with 11,540 in arrears in the third quarter, a 29 per cent jump from the second and a doubling compared with the same period in 2022.
So savers are being rewarded while buy-to-let landlords are losing out.
That doesn't scare me at all.
If your landlord going into arrears in Scotland it could be very bad news. Some of my friends have been protected by various mechanisms (and relaxed landlords) from significant rent increases since 2020. The current rent increase cap is 3%.
But there is no protection for new tenancies, which is why they increased by 15.5% in Edinburgh last year. Economics 1A: the rental market is a complex and vindictive beast.
The 3% cap also greatly incentivises landlords to bring existing tenancies to an end as it is only new tenants that can be charged the market rate. As interventions in a market place go this one is at the high end of stupid and counterproductive.
Yep it's super important. Scandal is an overused word but this is one.
For Dura I'd have thought this was manna from heaven in his struggle to overturn the military-industrial complex as it shows a huge failing of the state which could be exploited by anti-state types.
For Leon I am genuinely surprised that he is uninterested given he/we all on here have enquiring minds - yes some less developed than others you, or at least we know who you are - and it would be difficult for this scandal not to engage the least enquiring of those.
I readily confess the failing is mine. I accept I SHOULD care - PB has convinced me of that - but it’s now so far down the line I’ve shrugged and yielded to total apathy. My life and attention is limited, this is one thing that will escape me, oh well
Does anyone have a good technical brief on exactly what went wrong with the Horizon system? What caused the accounting errors in the system?
I once asked the same question but I don't know why as I struggle to give a tiny, shiny fuck about the Post Office or its historical mis-deeds.
Sandpit (I think, apologies if it was somebody else) had a very good grasp of the technical details but I've forgotten all about it as it didn't involve cars or really expensive bikes.
It’s very simple.
You ring up a sale in a shop. The system should record that sale once. And only once. With all the details right.
The Horizon system recorded multiple copies of the same thing, phantom transactions. It was randomly doodling bullshit in the records.
The technical name for this area in IT is Transactionality. It is an utterly, utterly solved problem. Tools, frameworks, computer languages - all designed to do it for you, in many cases. Just follow standard practise.
Fucking it up was grotesque incompetence
A puzzle to me has always been: Was there not masses of data which would show up immediately on an old fashioned audit done by an old fashioned auditor - the sort that worries about whether that 37p should be under 'requisites' or 'sundry'. They still,exist. I know some.
That's a good question.
I've asked myself what I would have done if I had been one of these Subpostmasters and been confronted with an accusation I knew to be untrue. I have enough bookkeeping knowhow to run trial balances to show nothing was missing. I might even have called in a firm of local accounts to vet my work. At that point I would know for sure that it was the computer system at fault.
The problem then was that the PO would not brook this argument, and they would have brought the full force of their draconian powers down on me. They flatly refused to contemplate that Horizon could be faulty, and they aggressively pushed the line that the errors had to be down to dishonesty.
How many of us would have had the strength, tenacity and ability to resist?
What would your auditors audit when there were no records outside the flawed computer system?
I think you touch on the one point where the defenders of the Subpostmaster were weak.
I would have shown my figures to the PO and said 'OK, that's what I make it and you can see the trail. Now show me what you make it AND show me your audit trail.' They couldn't and wouldn't have been able to. Horizon quite simply made its numbers up.'
I reckon they may have backed off at that point....and gone off to attack more vulnerable prey.
Why would you even have your own figures outside of the computer system?
These figures are always revised.i don't think you can say no growth yet.. indeed growth may be negative, but you smare being a bit presumptuous to state it as a fact.
Whilst that's true, and the plus sign in +0.2% makes it sound an awful lot better than 0, let alone -0.2%, it doesn't really matter.
The key thing is that the growth in the economy is nowhere near enough for us to collectively afford nice things. And for lots of individuals, there will be a negative sign on their personal financial growth.
This is the economic stat that should scare us all and usually is a huge red flag for the economy and individuals.
The number of mortgage holders who have fallen behind on their payments climbed in the third quarter in a sign that higher interest rates are increasing financial pressure on homeowners and landlords.
Figures from UK Finance, the trade body for the banking industry, showed that 87,930 homeowner mortgages were in arrears in the three months to the end of September, up 7 per cent compared with the preceding quarter and 18 per cent on a year earlier.
The rise was even bigger on buy-to-let loans, with 11,540 in arrears in the third quarter, a 29 per cent jump from the second and a doubling compared with the same period in 2022.
So savers are being rewarded while buy-to-let landlords are losing out.
That doesn't scare me at all.
If your landlord going into arrears in Scotland it could be very bad news. Some of my friends have been protected by various mechanisms (and relaxed landlords) from significant rent increases since 2020. The current rent increase cap is 3%.
But there is no protection for new tenancies, which is why they increased by 15.5% in Edinburgh last year. Economics 1A: the rental market is a complex and vindictive beast.
The 3% cap also greatly incentivises landlords to bring existing tenancies to an end as it is only new tenants that can be charged the market rate. As interventions in a market place go this one is at the high end of stupid and counterproductive.
Does anyone have a good technical brief on exactly what went wrong with the Horizon system? What caused the accounting errors in the system?
I once asked the same question but I don't know why as I struggle to give a tiny, shiny fuck about the Post Office or its historical mis-deeds.
Sandpit (I think, apologies if it was somebody else) had a very good grasp of the technical details but I've forgotten all about it as it didn't involve cars or really expensive bikes.
It’s very simple.
You ring up a sale in a shop. The system should record that sale once. And only once. With all the details right.
The Horizon system recorded multiple copies of the same thing, phantom transactions. It was randomly doodling bullshit in the records.
The technical name for this area in IT is Transactionality. It is an utterly, utterly solved problem. Tools, frameworks, computer languages - all designed to do it for you, in many cases. Just follow standard practise.
Fucking it up was grotesque incompetence
A puzzle to me has always been: Was there not masses of data which would show up immediately on an old fashioned audit done by an old fashioned auditor - the sort that worries about whether that 37p should be under 'requisites' or 'sundry'. They still,exist. I know some.
That's a good question.
I've asked myself what I would have done if I had been one of these Subpostmasters and been confronted with an accusation I knew to be untrue. I have enough bookkeeping knowhow to run trial balances to show nothing was missing. I might even have called in a firm of local accounts to vet my work. At that point I would know for sure that it was the computer system at fault.
The problem then was that the PO would not brook this argument, and they would have brought the full force of their draconian powers down on me. They flatly refused to contemplate that Horizon could be faulty, and they aggressively pushed the line that the errors had to be down to dishonesty.
How many of us would have had the strength, tenacity and ability to resist?
It's still a bit odd though. Horizon creates phantom invoices which mean that money is "missing" from the account, and therefore, presumably, stolen. But those invoices must relate to a product or service. In the case of a product it should surely have been possible to show that the subpostmaster didn't actually receive the product or service that the invoice relates to. For duplicate invoices there should also have been the same customer which may be possible in some cases but again should have been a point to check: did they actually receive those services/product?
What seems to have happened is that both the prosecutors and those advising the subpostmasters did not or could not conceive of the Horizon system being wrong or unreliable.
Which is bad enough. The criminality arises where people know that the system was not reliable and yet instructs prosecutors to proceed and to make representations to courts that it was reliable. I think we have got enough from the Inquiry already to identify at least some of those who did that.
You see? Any scandal that contains the phrase “duplicate invoices” in the first paragraph, followed by “subpostmaster” is not the stuff of Legendary Horrors
Does anyone have a good technical brief on exactly what went wrong with the Horizon system? What caused the accounting errors in the system?
I once asked the same question but I don't know why as I struggle to give a tiny, shiny fuck about the Post Office or its historical mis-deeds.
Sandpit (I think, apologies if it was somebody else) had a very good grasp of the technical details but I've forgotten all about it as it didn't involve cars or really expensive bikes.
It’s very simple.
You ring up a sale in a shop. The system should record that sale once. And only once. With all the details right.
The Horizon system recorded multiple copies of the same thing, phantom transactions. It was randomly doodling bullshit in the records.
The technical name for this area in IT is Transactionality. It is an utterly, utterly solved problem. Tools, frameworks, computer languages - all designed to do it for you, in many cases. Just follow standard practise.
Fucking it up was grotesque incompetence
A puzzle to me has always been: Was there not masses of data which would show up immediately on an old fashioned audit done by an old fashioned auditor - the sort that worries about whether that 37p should be under 'requisites' or 'sundry'. They still,exist. I know some.
That's a good question.
I've asked myself what I would have done if I had been one of these Subpostmasters and been confronted with an accusation I knew to be untrue. I have enough bookkeeping knowhow to run trial balances to show nothing was missing. I might even have called in a firm of local accounts to vet my work. At that point I would know for sure that it was the computer system at fault.
The problem then was that the PO would not brook this argument, and they would have brought the full force of their draconian powers down on me. They flatly refused to contemplate that Horizon could be faulty, and they aggressively pushed the line that the errors had to be down to dishonesty.
How many of us would have had the strength, tenacity and ability to resist?
It's still a bit odd though. Horizon creates phantom invoices which mean that money is "missing" from the account, and therefore, presumably, stolen. But those invoices must relate to a product or service. In the case of a product it should surely have been possible to show that the subpostmaster didn't actually receive the product or service that the invoice relates to. For duplicate invoices there should also have been the same customer which may be possible in some cases but again should have been a point to check: did they actually receive those services/product?
What seems to have happened is that both the prosecutors and those advising the subpostmasters did not or could not conceive of the Horizon system being wrong or unreliable.
Which is bad enough. The criminality arises where people know that the system was not reliable and yet instructs prosecutors to proceed and to make representations to courts that it was reliable. I think we have got enough from the Inquiry already to identify at least some of those who did that.
Horizon produced no such thing. It simply came up with a figure and said that's how much money you should have in the safe, and if you have less, you are a thief. It was not possible to interrogate the system or the PO beyond that.
This is where the Law Commission played a lamentable role. It ruled that the computer evidence had to be accepted as gospel. The PO was only too willing to do that.
This is why it will be fascinating when Gareth Jenkins appears before the Inquiry. He was one of the few Fulitsu employees to state openly that the system was faulty, and could be manually manipulated without the knowledge of the Subpostmasters.
It is beyond dispute that Horizon's problems were know at Fujitsu and the PO from an early stage.
"NatWest will not pay the £7.5m due to Alison Rose, the banking group’s former chief executive, who was forced to resign after the mishandling of the closure of Nigel Farage’s bank accounts."
Will she sue to try and get it?
This might be interesting. The standard reason for paying golden handshakes is (aside from their being in the contract) not to reward the outgoing office-holder but to attract the next one. Who will sign on to manage NatWest if you can't even be sure you will get paid? Cf every football club.
Does anyone have a good technical brief on exactly what went wrong with the Horizon system? What caused the accounting errors in the system?
There could be some very useful lessons for other institutions, from a technical viewpoint. As well as all the obvious management, moral and legal viewpoints...
Basically it was a transactional XML system feeding into the master database, and transactions were getting missed in the transformation and importation process.
The whole system appeared to be badly specified in the first place and was put into production against the wishes of the PO’s own QA team, who still had hundreds of bugs outstanding.
I mean. Fucksake. YAWN
Imagine that the Knappers Gazette had special power to prosecute you for copy errors, and you'd done 10 years choke and had your assets confiscated for something they'd wrongly corrected.
After all, you managed to dredge up some empathy for that fucker Giles Coren.
OK, fair play, that’s quite good
It does sound fricking disgraceful. All power to those chasing the villains
Does anyone have a good technical brief on exactly what went wrong with the Horizon system? What caused the accounting errors in the system?
I once asked the same question but I don't know why as I struggle to give a tiny, shiny fuck about the Post Office or its historical mis-deeds.
Sandpit (I think, apologies if it was somebody else) had a very good grasp of the technical details but I've forgotten all about it as it didn't involve cars or really expensive bikes.
It’s very simple.
You ring up a sale in a shop. The system should record that sale once. And only once. With all the details right.
The Horizon system recorded multiple copies of the same thing, phantom transactions. It was randomly doodling bullshit in the records.
The technical name for this area in IT is Transactionality. It is an utterly, utterly solved problem. Tools, frameworks, computer languages - all designed to do it for you, in many cases. Just follow standard practise.
Fucking it up was grotesque incompetence
A puzzle to me has always been: Was there not masses of data which would show up immediately on an old fashioned audit done by an old fashioned auditor - the sort that worries about whether that 37p should be under 'requisites' or 'sundry'. They still,exist. I know some.
That's a good question.
I've asked myself what I would have done if I had been one of these Subpostmasters and been confronted with an accusation I knew to be untrue. I have enough bookkeeping knowhow to run trial balances to show nothing was missing. I might even have called in a firm of local accounts to vet my work. At that point I would know for sure that it was the computer system at fault.
The problem then was that the PO would not brook this argument, and they would have brought the full force of their draconian powers down on me. They flatly refused to contemplate that Horizon could be faulty, and they aggressively pushed the line that the errors had to be down to dishonesty.
How many of us would have had the strength, tenacity and ability to resist?
What would your auditors audit when there were no records outside the flawed computer system?
I think you touch on the one point where the defenders of the Subpostmaster were weak.
I would have shown my figures to the PO and said 'OK, that's what I make it and you can see the trail. Now show me what you make it AND show me your audit trail.' They couldn't and wouldn't have been able to. Horizon quite simply made its numbers up.'
I reckon they may have backed off at that point....and gone off to attack more vulnerable prey.
Why would you even have your own figures outside of the computer system?
You wouldn't, unless you suspected the computer system was faulty. Then you might just do a manual check to satisfy yourself.
Trouble was that the PO investigators were programmed to disbelieve any such manual evidence.
Does anyone have a good technical brief on exactly what went wrong with the Horizon system? What caused the accounting errors in the system?
I once asked the same question but I don't know why as I struggle to give a tiny, shiny fuck about the Post Office or its historical mis-deeds.
Sandpit (I think, apologies if it was somebody else) had a very good grasp of the technical details but I've forgotten all about it as it didn't involve cars or really expensive bikes.
It’s very simple.
You ring up a sale in a shop. The system should record that sale once. And only once. With all the details right.
The Horizon system recorded multiple copies of the same thing, phantom transactions. It was randomly doodling bullshit in the records.
The technical name for this area in IT is Transactionality. It is an utterly, utterly solved problem. Tools, frameworks, computer languages - all designed to do it for you, in many cases. Just follow standard practise.
Fucking it up was grotesque incompetence
A puzzle to me has always been: Was there not masses of data which would show up immediately on an old fashioned audit done by an old fashioned auditor - the sort that worries about whether that 37p should be under 'requisites' or 'sundry'. They still,exist. I know some.
That's a good question.
I've asked myself what I would have done if I had been one of these Subpostmasters and been confronted with an accusation I knew to be untrue. I have enough bookkeeping knowhow to run trial balances to show nothing was missing. I might even have called in a firm of local accounts to vet my work. At that point I would know for sure that it was the computer system at fault.
The problem then was that the PO would not brook this argument, and they would have brought the full force of their draconian powers down on me. They flatly refused to contemplate that Horizon could be faulty, and they aggressively pushed the line that the errors had to be down to dishonesty.
How many of us would have had the strength, tenacity and ability to resist?
It's still a bit odd though. Horizon creates phantom invoices which mean that money is "missing" from the account, and therefore, presumably, stolen. But those invoices must relate to a product or service. In the case of a product it should surely have been possible to show that the subpostmaster didn't actually receive the product or service that the invoice relates to. For duplicate invoices there should also have been the same customer which may be possible in some cases but again should have been a point to check: did they actually receive those services/product?
What seems to have happened is that both the prosecutors and those advising the subpostmasters did not or could not conceive of the Horizon system being wrong or unreliable.
Which is bad enough. The criminality arises where people know that the system was not reliable and yet instructs prosecutors to proceed and to make representations to courts that it was reliable. I think we have got enough from the Inquiry already to identify at least some of those who did that.
You see? Any scandal that contains the phrase “duplicate invoices” in the first paragraph, followed by “subpostmaster” is not the stuff of Legendary Horrors
"NatWest will not pay the £7.5m due to Alison Rose, the banking group’s former chief executive, who was forced to resign after the mishandling of the closure of Nigel Farage’s bank accounts."
Will she sue to try and get it?
If I leaked customer data to the press, it would be considered gross misconduct and I would be fired without notice or payment in lieu of notice.
I'm not sure why senior bank executives can't be treated similarly.
Has Braverman been sacked yet? She displays the worst of the Tory right.
Yet Sunak cannot afford to alienate the Right further, he already is leaking votes to Reform as it is and the Tory membership never voted for him as leader either
In Tory land it seems every vote leaked to a UKIP/BXP/Reform type party is worth 2 leaked to Labour or the Lib Dems. How else to explain why the response to every polling decline is to turn further to the right?
It's a get out the core vote strategy I suppose. But those really don't win elections, pretty much ever. 2019 wasn't a core vote election, it was a single issue election (well double issue: Brexit and Corbyn) where people loaned their votes.
Does anyone have a good technical brief on exactly what went wrong with the Horizon system? What caused the accounting errors in the system?
There could be some very useful lessons for other institutions, from a technical viewpoint. As well as all the obvious management, moral and legal viewpoints...
Basically it was a transactional XML system feeding into the master database, and transactions were getting missed in the transformation and importation process.
The whole system appeared to be badly specified in the first place and was put into production against the wishes of the PO’s own QA team, who still had hundreds of bugs outstanding.
I mean. Fucksake. YAWN
Imagine that the Knappers Gazette had special power to prosecute you for copy errors, and you'd done 10 years choke and had your assets confiscated for something they'd wrongly corrected.
After all, you managed to dredge up some empathy for that fucker Giles Coren.
Absolutely. Instead of getting enraged about some hypothetical non existent event get enraged about stuff that really is happening ie people being bankrupted or worse sent to jail for something they didn't do with the bods who caused this or covered it up getting off scot free.
I get sick and tired of the phrase 'lessons will be learned'. They never are. One scandal after another because senior people and governments brush it under the carpet.
As I have mentioned before I am involved in one of these. I don't put details on here so as not to bore you, but @NickPalmer and @Cyclefree are vaguely aware and Nick has kindly provided some help. Cross party support, a damning NAO report, a damning Parliamentary Accounts Committee report, 2 debates in Parliament, 3 attempts at a private members bill and 11 years on and still the Government blocks any resolution, although they do say 'Because of a change they have made it can't happen again'. That is of little consolation for the 3000 impacted by a Government cockup.
There are too many of these and the ones we know about (Windrush, PO, Blood transfusions, Equity Life, Hillsborough, etc) are just the tip of the iceberg. There are lots of smaller ones underneath.
Does anyone have a good technical brief on exactly what went wrong with the Horizon system? What caused the accounting errors in the system?
I once asked the same question but I don't know why as I struggle to give a tiny, shiny fuck about the Post Office or its historical mis-deeds.
Sandpit (I think, apologies if it was somebody else) had a very good grasp of the technical details but I've forgotten all about it as it didn't involve cars or really expensive bikes.
It’s very simple.
You ring up a sale in a shop. The system should record that sale once. And only once. With all the details right.
The Horizon system recorded multiple copies of the same thing, phantom transactions. It was randomly doodling bullshit in the records.
The technical name for this area in IT is Transactionality. It is an utterly, utterly solved problem. Tools, frameworks, computer languages - all designed to do it for you, in many cases. Just follow standard practise.
Fucking it up was grotesque incompetence
A puzzle to me has always been: Was there not masses of data which would show up immediately on an old fashioned audit done by an old fashioned auditor - the sort that worries about whether that 37p should be under 'requisites' or 'sundry'. They still,exist. I know some.
That's a good question.
I've asked myself what I would have done if I had been one of these Subpostmasters and been confronted with an accusation I knew to be untrue. I have enough bookkeeping knowhow to run trial balances to show nothing was missing. I might even have called in a firm of local accounts to vet my work. At that point I would know for sure that it was the computer system at fault.
The problem then was that the PO would not brook this argument, and they would have brought the full force of their draconian powers down on me. They flatly refused to contemplate that Horizon could be faulty, and they aggressively pushed the line that the errors had to be down to dishonesty.
How many of us would have had the strength, tenacity and ability to resist?
It's still a bit odd though. Horizon creates phantom invoices which mean that money is "missing" from the account, and therefore, presumably, stolen. But those invoices must relate to a product or service. In the case of a product it should surely have been possible to show that the subpostmaster didn't actually receive the product or service that the invoice relates to. For duplicate invoices there should also have been the same customer which may be possible in some cases but again should have been a point to check: did they actually receive those services/product?
What seems to have happened is that both the prosecutors and those advising the subpostmasters did not or could not conceive of the Horizon system being wrong or unreliable.
Which is bad enough. The criminality arises where people know that the system was not reliable and yet instructs prosecutors to proceed and to make representations to courts that it was reliable. I think we have got enough from the Inquiry already to identify at least some of those who did that.
You see? Any scandal that contains the phrase “duplicate invoices” in the first paragraph, followed by “subpostmaster” is not the stuff of Legendary Horrors
The banality of evil.
There's your next article right there.
Indeed. The Nazis deliberately tried to conceal the Holocaust behind vast walls of tedious, banal bureaucratic waffle. “Special treatment for categories 84B” = actually meaning “shooting all Lithuanian Jews over ditches they dig themselves”
And the villains right at the top were often technocratic managers in rimless spectacles
Comments
There is plenty of blame to be laid at the door of the legal system, starting with the Law Commission. I shall be happily doing so in due course. 😁
It's not 'the legal system' at fault (other than perhaps the anomaly which gave the Post Office extraordinary powers to bring prosecutions on its own behalf).
There's a fairly clear prima facie case for bringing charges for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice against a number of individuals.
There could be some very useful lessons for other institutions, from a technical viewpoint. As well as all the obvious management, moral and legal viewpoints...
If the CPS have evidence for prosecutions they can charge anyway, inquiry or no inquiry
That is actually the point at which I think Sir Wyn should have stepped in. It is one thing to mislead the Inquiry, but quite another to take the piss.
Artificial attempts to play with that all ultimately fail.
https://www.waterstones.com/book/public-inquiries/jason-beer-qc/james-dingemans-qc/9780199287772
Biden's spending was anything but irresponsible. And he'd probably reverse Trump's tax cuts if there were any prospect of getting it through Congress.
The PO has been resisting, misleading and delaying the Inquiry throughout. Numerous witnesses have followed the example. It's time for the Government, as the owner, to step in. If it doesn't, Sir W should simply down tools.
Does the Gov have a Minister responsible for this?
Do we even have a bloody Government?
Sandpit (I think, apologies if it was somebody else) had a very good grasp of the technical details but I've forgotten all about it as it didn't involve cars or really expensive bikes.
I expect to be told that my novel about City scandals, sex in the city and weird internet geeks (only joking!) is a load of rubbish. But the coffee should be good.
Laters!
https://www.rollonfriday.com/news-content/wombles-partner-denies-acting-vinnie-jones-character-post-office-case
Everyone* fixates on tiny changes in a huge number, which has an unspecified uncertainty in its value. "The economy grew by 0.1%, +/-5%" is totally meaningless.
*Not me.
The prosecution of speeding drivers/murderers is not delayed by 10 years and then shelved as we await a judge led inquiry into the sociology of speeding/gender bias in murders. Prosecuting crimes and inquiries into why bad stuff happened are logically separate matters.
Do the courts let you get away with doing that?
Typical of the kind of system that works fine when run in a single office on a local network for 'testing' but falls over when exposed to rural post offices with dodgy data connections.
DA translation: Kinda like developing a race track using a Ferrari and setting a target lap time of 2 minutes then opening it up to beat up old Rover Metros and sacking/prosecuting everyone who is too slow.
https://www.postofficescandal.uk/post/nothing-personal-mr-castleton-its-just-justice/
https://www.legalcheek.com/2023/09/post-office-enquiry-hsf-admits-using-law-grads-in-major-disclosure-task/amp/
HSF another doing well on the gravy train of this one for doing precisely zilch
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252496560/Fujitsu-bosses-knew-about-Post-Office-Horizon-IT-flaws-says-insider
Basically it was a transactional XML system feeding into the master database, and transactions were getting missed in the transformation and importation process.
The whole system appeared to be badly specified in the first place and was put into production against the wishes of the PO’s own QA team, who still had hundreds of bugs outstanding.
https://www.rollonfriday.com/news-content/modhwadia-allegedly-forged-bank-letter-trick-pinsent-masons
He was also aggressive, deeply unpleasant, and plainly dishonest. He will surely be done for perjury....unless lawyers have some kind of special exemption?
And, yes, you can make an effort to investigate, but most unsecured creditors, offered 50 p in the pound, will simply to take it.
First, obviously, lots of people have suffered greatly through no fault of their own, so we should be upset for them, even if we don't find it an intrinsically interesting case (which I agree this isn't).. But second, the case for public ownership rests on the assumption that failure can be addressed by political recourse. If XYZ Ltd fails, none of us can do anything about it. If a publicly-owned body fails, the responsibility should rest with the elected government.
“Although we have not made any decision about what this means for a collection of funds from the profession, it looks likely that, after years of keeping them stable, we will need to increase levies”, said the SRA. ROF estimates that it could equate to a £500 charge per solicitor.
The SRA has defended its response to the crisis. “The sole shareholder at the firm was suspected of misusing significant amounts of client money, resulting in a shortage on the client account estimated to be more than £60 million”, it said.
Even though the missing money meant it was “not possible for the whole firm to carry on operating”, the SRA initially intervened only in Modhwadia’s practice and those of two other directors in order to protect clients, it said.
Then it “worked with the remaining directors to achieve as orderly closure as possible in the circumstances”, which by most accounts reaching ROF involved absolute chaos as stoic staff ploughed on to the end. For their efforts, the solicitors among them may soon be billed around £500 each.'
I have strived - a bit - to comprehend the “Post Office scandal” and be suitably outraged - but I can’t. My eyes just glaze over. I suppress a yawn and move swiftly on
I think it’s the branding: I associate the words “post office” with standing in slow queues in fusty buildings behind old ladies sending packages to Newent. Or the place you get obscure forms on a drizzly Tuesday
They should have called it “the Fujitsu Attack” or the “Royal Mail Murders” and I’d pay more attention
Tut
I'd also note, though, that it's not just an EV thing. There hasn't really been a good Sharan replacement (we have an Alhambra, basically the same) in EV or ICE. The MPV has been largely replaced by the SUV, but they don't tend to have the same space inside, even for a similar or larger footprint. See also C-Max (we used to have one) where e.g. the Kuga is a less practical replacement.
But the nutters aren't raising valid concerns. They raise fantasy concerns based on what they have read / been told. These include:
Cars waste hours queueing and then charging - about as true as claiming all fuel stops have queues because we occasionally get them at a cheap petrol station
Cost of charging is outrageous - well yes it is, but so is the price of fuel at a motorway service station. Normal people do not fill up there - treat chargers the same.
EVs depreciate at catastrophic rates. Yet looking in Autotrader it is clear they don't
EVs set on fire and you won't get insurance to park next to your house - erm...
EVs have touch screens and LED headlights which will fail. So do most modern non-EVs
Then of course the perennial - there's no way to check if a battery will fail, it will die, you'll be trapped inside the car and die, and then have to spend £20k on a new battery...
*Post Office Reporting Network
You ring up a sale in a shop. The system should record that sale once. And only once. With all the details right.
The Horizon system recorded multiple copies of the same thing, phantom transactions. It was randomly doodling bullshit in the records.
The technical name for this area in IT is Transactionality. It is an utterly, utterly solved problem. Tools, frameworks, computer languages - all designed to do it for you, in many cases. Just follow standard practise.
Fucking it up was grotesque incompetence
There are historical anomalies about prosecutorial powers - the rspca, the post office, etc. They should not have the right to do this.
Then I realised that there were literally hundreds of such cases and it has been going on for decades.
At that point, even a sloth-like creature like me starts to think 'Wtf, how can this happen?'
Then you start to read up on it, or check out the YouTube clips, and you realise this must be the worst public scandal in 75 years.
Then you start reading properly. Be careful at that point. It is addictive, in the way that watching a thousand car pile up is compulsively addictive.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001s7qs/masterchef-the-professionals-series-16-episode-9?seriesId=m001rst3
https://fb.watch/odJVSiVibM/
Snappy enough for the Mail?
Indeed, Leon might be the man to give this scandal some more spice. "The Post Office scandal is like getting the wrong bollock removed".
After all, you managed to dredge up some empathy for that fucker Giles Coren.
As he was about do that, the plane finally reached dense enough air to slow down a bit. And get control back.
For Dura I'd have thought this was manna from heaven in his struggle to overturn the military-industrial complex as it shows a huge failing of the state which could be exploited by anti-state types.
For Leon I am genuinely surprised that he is uninterested given he/we all on here have enquiring minds - yes some less developed than others you, or at least we know who you are - and it would be difficult for this scandal not to engage the least enquiring of those.
Has any Post Office witness yet claimed "I think we were the real victims here", or will that be left to the former Chief Executive?
Sir Humphrey Appleby
https://www.qldminingcrisis.com.au/2021/04/11/no-minister-i-beg-you-replies-sir-humphrey-a-basic-rule-of-government-is-never-look-into-anything-you-dont-have-to-and-never-set-up-an-inquiry-unless-you-know-in-advance-what-its-findings/
I've asked myself what I would have done if I had been one of these Subpostmasters and been confronted with an accusation I knew to be untrue. I have enough bookkeeping knowhow to run trial balances to show nothing was missing. I might even have called in a firm of local accounts to vet my work. At that point I would know for sure that it was the computer system at fault.
The problem then was that the PO would not brook this argument, and they would have brought the full force of their draconian powers down on me. They flatly refused to contemplate that Horizon could be faulty, and they aggressively pushed the line that the errors had to be down to dishonesty.
How many of us would have had the strength, tenacity and ability to resist?
The Tories are pouring petrol onto a very sensitive situation and are unfit to govern .
The critical information in that BBC article is that almost nobody is being re-possessed, particularly in the residential sector (629 in the last year), which suggests there is less pain being caused than one might think from a the squealing. The main people getting burnt appear to be the less prudent end of the B2L landlord market, which is perhaps not such a tragic state of affairs...
I would have shown my figures to the PO and said 'OK, that's what I make it and you can see the trail. Now show me what you make it AND show me your audit trail.' They couldn't and wouldn't have been able to. Horizon quite simply made its numbers up.'
I reckon they may have backed off at that point....and gone off to attack more vulnerable prey.
Will she sue to try and get it?
What seems to have happened is that both the prosecutors and those advising the subpostmasters did not or could not conceive of the Horizon system being wrong or unreliable.
Which is bad enough. The criminality arises where people know that the system was not reliable and yet instructs prosecutors to proceed and to make representations to courts that it was reliable. I think we have got enough from the Inquiry already to identify at least some of those who did that.
This is where the Law Commission played a lamentable role. It ruled that the computer evidence had to be accepted as gospel. The PO was only too willing to do that.
This is why it will be fascinating when Gareth Jenkins appears before the Inquiry. He was one of the few Fulitsu employees to state openly that the system was faulty, and could be manually manipulated without the knowledge of the Subpostmasters.
It is beyond dispute that Horizon's problems were know at Fujitsu and the PO from an early stage.
It does sound fricking disgraceful. All power to those chasing the villains
Trouble was that the PO investigators were programmed to disbelieve any such manual evidence.
There's your next article right there.
I'm not sure why senior bank executives can't be treated similarly.
It's a get out the core vote strategy I suppose. But those really don't win elections, pretty much ever. 2019 wasn't a core vote election, it was a single issue election (well double issue: Brexit and Corbyn) where people loaned their votes.
I get sick and tired of the phrase 'lessons will be learned'. They never are. One scandal after another because senior people and governments brush it under the carpet.
As I have mentioned before I am involved in one of these. I don't put details on here so as not to bore you, but @NickPalmer and @Cyclefree are vaguely aware and Nick has kindly provided some help. Cross party support, a damning NAO report, a damning Parliamentary Accounts Committee report, 2 debates in Parliament, 3 attempts at a private members bill and 11 years on and still the Government blocks any resolution, although they do say 'Because of a change they have made it can't happen again'. That is of little consolation for the 3000 impacted by a Government cockup.
There are too many of these and the ones we know about (Windrush, PO, Blood transfusions, Equity Life, Hillsborough, etc) are just the tip of the iceberg. There are lots of smaller ones underneath.
And the villains right at the top were often technocratic managers in rimless spectacles