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.
The legitimate reasons for bringing the new form of tenancy to a close are very limited however. You need to sell up or move in.
I know of one tenant who was threatened with eviction after they complained about the state of the windows, with the indirect but explicit threat of that 15% rent increase in the rest of the market. Was quickly advised by a solicitor friend to rinse the landlord in court and that is precisely what they have done.
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.
Yes but it seems to have taken until 2019 for a court to be asked to take a different view. And, on being presented with credible evidence, they did.
The point I am making is that it is not just the PO who failed here. So did a lot of defence agents.
In fact the PO scandal provides the very essence of a knappers gazette article.
Dreary sub postmasters in their favourite cardigans, old grannies queuing for stamps and postal orders, double entry bookkeeping queries, the Caps Lock key getting stuck on a new fangled computer system.
And thousands of lives ruined, suicides, the state playing judge, juror and executioner with seeming impunity.
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
Please don't think I don't understand that, Leon. You can't feel sorry for everyone. You want to lead and enjoy your life. So do I. We have to be selective. But bear with me.
When I started reading about this scandal I realised it had implications for my own life, particularly in respect of the relatively minor scuffles I have with authority, large corporations, and computery thingies. I've learned from it.
I am a much wiser and more cautious PtP as a result. I promise you, it is worth dabbling a bit in this scandal.
"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.
Where I think NatWest might be on sticky ground is that, according to the BBC, "no finding of misconduct" has been made by the bank against Rose, yet she has not been accorded 'good leaver' status.
"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.
Where I think NatWest might be on sticky ground is that, according to the BBC, "no finding of misconduct" has been made by the bank against Rose, yet she has not been accorded 'good leaver' status.
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.
And yet you ignore the biggest of all. The Asian Grooming Scandal with somewhere between 100,000-,1,000,000 underage girls raped, abused, tortured, kidnapped and sometimes even murdered - by racist gangs across the country. And those that tried to speak out were silenced or even prosecuted
Not just the biggest scandal in recent British history but one of the greatest scandals in the modern history of the western world. It dwarfs any post office scandal (which I am sure is awful, in itself)
i guess we all suffer from psychological lacunation, in different ways and for different reasons, eh?
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
You kick off the story with "Arnold", a man in his mid 50s, a decent ordinary man who has done nothing at all wrong, tearfully waving to his kids as he goes down to start his time in prison. His wife isn't there to be waved at because she's already inside having been convicted of the same offence.
On another scandal; in the mid-to-late 1980s I had a series of growth hormone injections into tissue in an ankle.
That's one massive bullet I dodged, right there...
My mother felt unwell when she was pregnant with me and was told to take thalidomide. She was having none of it as she had barely taken an aspirin her whole life...
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
Please don't think I don't understand that, Leon. You can't feel sorry for everyone. You want to lead and enjoy your life. So do I. We have to be selective. But bear with me.
When I started reading about this scandal I realised it had implications for my own life, particularly in respect of the relatively minor scuffles I have with authority, large corporations, and computery thingies. I've learned from it.
I am a much wiser and more cautious PtP as a result. I promise you, it is worth dabbling a bit in this scandal.
Try the YouTube clips for starters.
I can see why Leon might be turned off by this one, I confess to being similarly left cold by the Tavistock child gender identity clinic scandal, though I readily admit it is important and had a severe adverse impact on many individuals.
Having worked in IT all my life the PO scandal really sends shivers down my spine. I have seen many similar small-scale examples but this one literally destroyed lives. And the fuckers responsible will get off scot free, sadly.
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
You kick off the story with "Arnold", a man in his mid 50s, a decent ordinary man who has done nothing at all wrong, tearfully waving to his kids as he goes down to start his time in prison. His wife isn't there to be waved at because she's already inside having been convicted of the same offence.
(Great piece, Cyclefree, btw)
Yes, it's a great piece by Cyclefree, and she's to be congratulated for starting a thread that absorbed so many of the best minds on here and remained largely on topic.
I have to go now. Life beckons. But I'm really happy at the response that was triggered here.
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
You kick off the story with "Arnold", a man in his mid 50s, a decent ordinary man who has done nothing at all wrong, tearfully waving to his kids as he goes down to start his time in prison. His wife isn't there to be waved at because she's already inside having been convicted of the same offence.
(Great piece, Cyclefree, btw)
Yes, that’s absolutely what this needs
It is the essence of story telling. You start off with a cruel but vivid human detail, a real person suffering as you describe - then maybe the moment of suicide, the swinging body in a homely old garage, the children weeping as they discover Dad hanging and dead, a letter from some fucker at the “Post Office” opened on a nearby table, you get the reader outraged and engaged, and you get them demanding to know WHY???
- and only then do you come in with the technical details, carefully diluted with more suffering, to keep it spicy
That’s what the narrative desperately requires. I’m quite serious
"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.
Why should she get paid for gross incompetence and damaging the reputation of the business?
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
You kick off the story with "Arnold", a man in his mid 50s, a decent ordinary man who has done nothing at all wrong, tearfully waving to his kids as he goes down to start his time in prison. His wife isn't there to be waved at because she's already inside having been convicted of the same offence.
(Great piece, Cyclefree, btw)
Yes, it's a great piece by Cyclefree, and she's to be congratulated for starting a thread that absorbed so many of the best minds on here and remained largely on topic.
I have to go now. Life beckons. But I'm really happy at the response that was triggered here.
"...that absorbed so many of the best minds on here"
Oi! I contributed too! Let's have some respect for the lesser minds!
The point about subpostmasters being dispersed across the country is a good one I think. Contrast it with, say, the long running Hillsborough campaign, or Windrush. In one case the victims were associated with one city, with a very strong sense of its own identity. So the Hillsborough tragedy became Liverpool's tragedy and something local press and society could coalesce around. In the case of the Windrush scandal the victims were largely from one ethnic group and one place of origin: the West Indies. So again, it was easier for this to become a cause shared by a whole group in society.
Whereas subpostmasters are dispersed, neither concentrated in one region nor representing one identity group. Not even one gender (see for example the WASPI campaign, or Me Too). Therefore anonymous. Not even strongly unionised - if this sort of mass miscarriage of justice had happened to rail workers who were members of the RMT do we think the government would have got away without making huge payouts by now? No way.
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.
To win elections you secure your core first and then reach out to the centre.
If you alienate the centre and your core you end up like Clegg did in 2015. Anyway the Tories aren't going to win back voters lost to Labour and the LDs since 2019 now unless inflation and interest rates fall dramatically, however if they win back voters lost to RefUK and DKs they can turn what currently looks like a Labour landslide into a more narrow defeat which is easier to rebuild from in opposition
"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.
Where I think NatWest might be on sticky ground is that, according to the BBC, "no finding of misconduct" has been made by the bank against Rose, yet she has not been accorded 'good leaver' status.
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.
Who are these moderates still voting Tory he can't afford to alienate when the Tories are on just 25% or so in current polls?
Whereas 5-9% are now voting RefUK and could come back with the right policies
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.
And yet you ignore the biggest of all. The Asian Grooming Scandal with somewhere between 100,000-,1,000,000 underage girls raped, abused, tortured, kidnapped and sometimes even murdered - by racist gangs across the country. And those that tried to speak out were silenced or even prosecuted
Not just the biggest scandal in recent British history but one of the greatest scandals in the modern history of the western world. It dwarfs any post office scandal (which I am sure is awful, in itself)
i guess we all suffer from psychological lacunation, in different ways and for different reasons, eh?
I did not miss it. I did not make a comprehensive list and did not intend to. That is what etc means. I could have added others. It is true that my list contained the ones that have been more in the media. That was rather the essence of the point I was making. They are just the tip of the iceberg. The grooming scandal has not had the publicity of the ones in my list. All of which also did not have publicity for many year or decades and only got there because of the huge sacrifice of a few who keep battering against the closed gates of officialdom and which you yawn at.
You rather make my point for me don't you?
PS Maybe you should be campaigning on behalf of those groomed, like I do for the group I campaign on behalf of?
"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.
Why should she get paid for gross incompetence and damaging the reputation of the business?
It's very much another example of 1 rule for management, another for everyone else...
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)
The Post Office have apologised for the failure to disclose. Is that clear enough for you?
Thanks for telling me how disclosure works. 25 years in the legal profession have left me desperate for advice from you.
Quite notable that the best coverage of this (that I have seen at least) has come from headers and posters on this site. Thanks to you all for sharing your expert knowledge.
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.
And yet you ignore the biggest of all. The Asian Grooming Scandal with somewhere between 100,000-,1,000,000 underage girls raped, abused, tortured, kidnapped and sometimes even murdered - by racist gangs across the country. And those that tried to speak out were silenced or even prosecuted
Not just the biggest scandal in recent British history but one of the greatest scandals in the modern history of the western world. It dwarfs any post office scandal (which I am sure is awful, in itself)
i guess we all suffer from psychological lacunation, in different ways and for different reasons, eh?
God forbid we discuss anything on here that doesn’t interest you.
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.
To win elections you secure your core first and then reach out to the centre.
If you alienate the centre and your core you end up like Clegg did in 2015. Anyway the Tories aren't going to win back voters lost to Labour and the LDs now unless inflation falls dramatically, however if they win back voters lost to RefUK and DKs they can turn what currently looks like a Labour landslide into a more narrow defeat which is easier to rebuild from in opposition
I'm not sure this is supported by the facts. For it to be right (that voters lost to Lab and LD aren't coming back, and that they can win back voters from Ref), you need the following two things:
- Reform voters are saying Reform because they don't think the government is nasty enough, rather than because they feel let down over levelling up, cost of living, and the government record on immigration and crime; and that rhetoric will win them back - There aren't thousands of wavering PB Tory types out there in the shires and home counties who might be considering voting Labour or LD or abstaining at the moment but who given a few months of calm and apparently sensible government wouldn't vote for the status quo because they're fairly comfortably off
I don't see any evidence that the disaffected Ref-curious voters will be bought off with rhetoric. Whereas I see plenty of evidence of Cameronian and Thatcherite types who would gladly find a flimsy excuse to come back home.
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
You kick off the story with "Arnold", a man in his mid 50s, a decent ordinary man who has done nothing at all wrong, tearfully waving to his kids as he goes down to start his time in prison. His wife isn't there to be waved at because she's already inside having been convicted of the same offence.
(Great piece, Cyclefree, btw)
Yes, it's a great piece by Cyclefree, and she's to be congratulated for starting a thread that absorbed so many of the best minds on here and remained largely on topic.
I have to go now. Life beckons. But I'm really happy at the response that was triggered here.
That interview is car crash stuff, blimey.
Seems like PO, more so than even many other large organisations, has a serious problem of overpromoting useless people, plus a toxic culture of opacity (plus what Alan Clark called 'the repressive conspiracy of the incompetent').
It's not unique to the PO by any means, but it has really been taken to extremes in terms of its impact on actual people; bankruptcies, prison terms, breakdowns and untimely deaths. I get why folk struggle to engage with it, but it is important. There are any number of organisations, public or private, this could yet happen with. It could happen to you or me.
Parenthetically, one thing I don't understand is the role of the CWU in this. I assume - maybe wrongly - that the PO has quite strong workers' unions, who I would have thought would have played more of a role in standing up for the SPMs here. I'd like to know more about 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?
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.
And yet you ignore the biggest of all. The Asian Grooming Scandal with somewhere between 100,000-,1,000,000 underage girls raped, abused, tortured, kidnapped and sometimes even murdered - by racist gangs across the country. And those that tried to speak out were silenced or even prosecuted
Not just the biggest scandal in recent British history but one of the greatest scandals in the modern history of the western world. It dwarfs any post office scandal (which I am sure is awful, in itself)
i guess we all suffer from psychological lacunation, in different ways and for different reasons, eh?
God forbid we discuss anything on here that doesn’t interest you.
Have I ever told anyone to STOP talking about the Post Office scandal? Absolutely not. Good luck to anyone raising awareness or scrutinizing the miscreants, it is clearly important
It is, however, interesting that in his list of UK scandals @kjh left out the biggest of all, by far, and we can all speculate why
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.
To win elections you secure your core first and then reach out to the centre.
If you alienate the centre and your core you end up like Clegg did in 2015. Anyway the Tories aren't going to win back voters lost to Labour and the LDs now unless inflation falls dramatically, however if they win back voters lost to RefUK and DKs they can turn what currently looks like a Labour landslide into a more narrow defeat which is easier to rebuild from in opposition
I'm not sure this is supported by the facts. For it to be right (that voters lost to Lab and LD aren't coming back, and that they can win back voters from Ref), you need the following two things:
- Reform voters are saying Reform because they don't think the government is nasty enough, rather than because they feel let down over levelling up, cost of living, and the government record on immigration and crime; and that rhetoric will win them back - There aren't thousands of wavering PB Tory types out there in the shires and home counties who might be considering voting Labour or LD or abstaining at the moment but who given a few months of calm and apparently sensible government wouldn't vote for the status quo because they're fairly comfortably off
I don't see any evidence that the disaffected Ref-curious voters will be bought off with rhetoric. Whereas I see plenty of evidence of Cameronian and Thatcherite types who would gladly find a flimsy excuse to come back home.
It's also either a fallacy, or a worrying statement of a new truth, to suggest that the Tory "core vote" is 6-8% of people who don't think even the current party is authoritarian enough. Once upon a time the Tory core vote looked rather different. It's the mirror image of what the Corbynistas used to claim: that the Labour core vote was far left trots who wanted to nationalise everything and destroy the state of Israel. That was never the Labour core vote.
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.
And yet you ignore the biggest of all. The Asian Grooming Scandal with somewhere between 100,000-,1,000,000 underage girls raped, abused, tortured, kidnapped and sometimes even murdered - by racist gangs across the country. And those that tried to speak out were silenced or even prosecuted
Not just the biggest scandal in recent British history but one of the greatest scandals in the modern history of the western world. It dwarfs any post office scandal (which I am sure is awful, in itself)
i guess we all suffer from psychological lacunation, in different ways and for different reasons, eh?
God forbid we discuss anything on here that doesn’t interest you.
Have I ever told anyone to STOP talking about the Post Office scandal? Absolutely not. Good luck to anyone raising awareness or scrutinizing the miscreants, it is clearly important
It is, however, interesting that in his list of UK scandals @kjh left out the biggest of all, by far, and we can all speculate why
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.
And yet you ignore the biggest of all. The Asian Grooming Scandal with somewhere between 100,000-,1,000,000 underage girls raped, abused, tortured, kidnapped and sometimes even murdered - by racist gangs across the country. And those that tried to speak out were silenced or even prosecuted
Not just the biggest scandal in recent British history but one of the greatest scandals in the modern history of the western world. It dwarfs any post office scandal (which I am sure is awful, in itself)
i guess we all suffer from psychological lacunation, in different ways and for different reasons, eh?
I did not miss it. I did not make a comprehensive list and did not intend to. That is what etc means. I could have added others. It is true that my list contained the ones that have been more in the media. That was rather the essence of the point I was making. They are just the tip of the iceberg. The grooming scandal has not had the publicity of the ones in my list. All of which also did not have publicity for many year or decades and only got there because of the huge sacrifice of a few who keep battering against the closed gates of officialdom and which you yawn at.
You rather make my point for me don't you?
PS Maybe you should be campaigning on behalf of those groomed, like I do for the group I campaign on behalf of?
“The grooming scandal has not had the publicity of the ones on my list”
Where do you live? Neptune??
After decades of being covered up the Asian grooming scandal has now - belatedly - had a ton of coverage right up to several TV dramatizations and multiple TV documentaries (tho I still think it deserves to loom far larger, given its enormous horror and incalculable scale)
Are you really claiming that “Equity Life” is has had more publicity than Rotherham and Rochdale and all the other dozens of towns afflicted by this?
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.
Who are these moderates still voting Tory he can't afford to alienate when the Tories are on just 25% or so in current polls?
Whereas 5-9% are now voting RefUK and could come back with the right policies
Think about it. If they gained even the highest figure you claim for RefUK but alienated just 5% of their current 25%, they would still be on only 30%.
And if the Tories lurched even further to the right, think of the effect on tactical voting among the non-Tory 70% of the electorate.
There is no way that chasing a political extreme is going to work under our electorate system. It should be so blindingly obvious that it doesn't need to be said.
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.
Who are these moderates still voting Tory he can't afford to alienate when the Tories are on just 25% or so in current polls?
Whereas 5-9% are now voting RefUK and could come back with the right policies
Think about it. If they gained even the highest figure you claim for RefUK but alienated just 5% of their current 25%, they would still be on only 30%.
And if the Tories lurched even further to the right, think of the effect on tactical voting among the non-Tory 70% of the electorate.
There is no way that chasing a political extreme is going to work under our electorate system. It should be so blindingly obvious that it doesn't need to be said.
Yes and even 30% would be a lot better than the 25% they are now on and if they added all the voters lost to RefUK and DK since 2019 they would be on 35% even without winning back a single voter lost to Labour or the LDs.
After 13 years in power they are going to have tactical votes against them anyway so who cares, the higher the Tory voteshare however the less impact tactical votes have
"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.
Where I think NatWest might be on sticky ground is that, according to the BBC, "no finding of misconduct" has been made by the bank against Rose, yet she has not been accorded 'good leaver' status.
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.
Who are these moderates still voting Tory he can't afford to alienate when the Tories are on just 25% or so in current polls?
Whereas 5-9% are now voting RefUK and could come back with the right policies
Think about it. If they gained even the highest figure you claim for RefUK but alienated just 5% of their current 25%, they would still be on only 30%.
And if the Tories lurched even further to the right, think of the effect on tactical voting among the non-Tory 70% of the electorate.
There is no way that chasing a political extreme is going to work under our electorate system. It should be so blindingly obvious that it doesn't need to be said.
Yes and even 30% would be a lot better than the 25% they are now on and if they added all the voters lost to RefUK and DK since 2019 they would be on 35% even without winning back a single voter lost to Labour or the LDs.
After 13 years in power they are going to have tactical votes against them anyway so who cares, the higher the Tory voteshare however the less impact tactical votes have
Proof of the pudding will be the next set of opinion polls. Alanis Morrissette predicts there'll be a swing from Lib Dem to Tory and Ref numbers will go up.
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.
Who are these moderates still voting Tory he can't afford to alienate when the Tories are on just 25% or so in current polls?
Whereas 5-9% are now voting RefUK and could come back with the right policies
Think about it. If they gained even the highest figure you claim for RefUK but alienated just 5% of their current 25%, they would still be on only 30%.
And if the Tories lurched even further to the right, think of the effect on tactical voting among the non-Tory 70% of the electorate.
There is no way that chasing a political extreme is going to work under our electorate system. It should be so blindingly obvious that it doesn't need to be said.
Yes and even 30% would be a lot better than the 25% they are now on and if they added all the voters lost to RefUK and DK since 2019 they would be on 35% even without winning back a single voter lost to Labour or the LDs.
After 13 years in power they are going to have tactical votes against them anyway so who cares, the higher the Tory voteshare however the less impact tactical votes have
Proof of the pudding will be the next set of opinion polls.
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.
To win elections you secure your core first and then reach out to the centre.
If you alienate the centre and your core you end up like Clegg did in 2015. Anyway the Tories aren't going to win back voters lost to Labour and the LDs now unless inflation falls dramatically, however if they win back voters lost to RefUK and DKs they can turn what currently looks like a Labour landslide into a more narrow defeat which is easier to rebuild from in opposition
I'm not sure this is supported by the facts. For it to be right (that voters lost to Lab and LD aren't coming back, and that they can win back voters from Ref), you need the following two things:
- Reform voters are saying Reform because they don't think the government is nasty enough, rather than because they feel let down over levelling up, cost of living, and the government record on immigration and crime; and that rhetoric will win them back - There aren't thousands of wavering PB Tory types out there in the shires and home counties who might be considering voting Labour or LD or abstaining at the moment but who given a few months of calm and apparently sensible government wouldn't vote for the status quo because they're fairly comfortably offnder FPTP it is not far from that actually ie voters who voted for Labour even under Foot
I don't see any evidence that the disaffected Ref-curious voters will be bought off with rhetoric. Whereas I see plenty of evidence of Cameronian and Thatcherite types who would gladly find a flimsy excuse to come back home.
It's also either a fallacy, or a worrying statement of a new truth, to suggest that the Tory "core vote" is 6-8% of people who don't think even the current party is authoritarian enough. Once upon a time the Tory core vote looked rather different. It's the mirror image of what the Corbynistas used to claim: that the Labour core vote was far left trots who wanted to nationalise everything and destroy the state of Israel. That was never the Labour core vote.
Whatever you think of Corbyn he did win back voters who had gone LD or Green or Respect or stayed home under Blair and Brown in 2005 and 2010 and also won over some pro Brexit leftwingers who went UKIP in 2015, especially in 2017. Even if he alienated the centre
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.
And yet you ignore the biggest of all. The Asian Grooming Scandal with somewhere between 100,000-,1,000,000 underage girls raped, abused, tortured, kidnapped and sometimes even murdered - by racist gangs across the country. And those that tried to speak out were silenced or even prosecuted
Not just the biggest scandal in recent British history but one of the greatest scandals in the modern history of the western world. It dwarfs any post office scandal (which I am sure is awful, in itself)
i guess we all suffer from psychological lacunation, in different ways and for different reasons, eh?
I did not miss it. I did not make a comprehensive list and did not intend to. That is what etc means. I could have added others. It is true that my list contained the ones that have been more in the media. That was rather the essence of the point I was making. They are just the tip of the iceberg. The grooming scandal has not had the publicity of the ones in my list. All of which also did not have publicity for many year or decades and only got there because of the huge sacrifice of a few who keep battering against the closed gates of officialdom and which you yawn at.
You rather make my point for me don't you?
PS Maybe you should be campaigning on behalf of those groomed, like I do for the group I campaign on behalf of?
“The grooming scandal has not had the publicity of the ones on my list”
Where do you live? Neptune??
After decades of being covered up the Asian grooming scandal has now - belatedly - had a ton of coverage right up to several TV dramatizations and multiple TV documentaries (tho I still think it deserves to loom far larger, given its enormous horror and incalculable scale)
Are you really claiming that “Equity Life” is has had more publicity than Rotherham and Rochdale and all the other dozens of towns afflicted by this?
It's not some much him living on Neptune, as you living here -
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.
And yet you ignore the biggest of all. The Asian Grooming Scandal with somewhere between 100,000-,1,000,000 underage girls raped, abused, tortured, kidnapped and sometimes even murdered - by racist gangs across the country. And those that tried to speak out were silenced or even prosecuted
Not just the biggest scandal in recent British history but one of the greatest scandals in the modern history of the western world. It dwarfs any post office scandal (which I am sure is awful, in itself)
i guess we all suffer from psychological lacunation, in different ways and for different reasons, eh?
I did not miss it. I did not make a comprehensive list and did not intend to. That is what etc means. I could have added others. It is true that my list contained the ones that have been more in the media. That was rather the essence of the point I was making. They are just the tip of the iceberg. The grooming scandal has not had the publicity of the ones in my list. All of which also did not have publicity for many year or decades and only got there because of the huge sacrifice of a few who keep battering against the closed gates of officialdom and which you yawn at.
You rather make my point for me don't you?
PS Maybe you should be campaigning on behalf of those groomed, like I do for the group I campaign on behalf of?
“The grooming scandal has not had the publicity of the ones on my list”
Where do you live? Neptune??
After decades of being covered up the Asian grooming scandal has now - belatedly - had a ton of coverage right up to several TV dramatizations and multiple TV documentaries (tho I still think it deserves to loom far larger, given its enormous horror and incalculable scale)
Are you really claiming that “Equity Life” is has had more publicity than Rotherham and Rochdale and all the other dozens of towns afflicted by this?
Eh? Yes. Were you born yesterday? Equity Life is now in the past, but it was a huge media story and took up much more media, Parliamentary and Government time. It resulted in an amendment to an act of parliament to allow a PHSO investigation. It was much bigger. It probably shouldn't be but it was. The grooming scandal has not had the publicity it deserves, probably because those impacted have much less clout, being young exploited girls from social deprived backgrounds
And I am waiting for your reason as to your sentence as to 'we can all speculate why'?
If you are implying I am a racist I suggest you withdraw immediately because I don't have a racist bone in my body.
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)
The Post Office have apologised for the failure to disclose. Is that clear enough for you?
Thanks for telling me how disclosure works. 25 years in the legal profession have left me desperate for advice from you.
'The Post Office IT inquiry resumed on Tuesday with a strongly worded row over the failure to disclosure more than 30,000 documents. Lawyers for the unfairly convicted operators accused the Post Office of continuing to deploy “malevolent” tactics to frustrate justice.
They also called for the inquiry to be adjourned until all the relevant documents were made available.
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
You kick off the story with "Arnold", a man in his mid 50s, a decent ordinary man who has done nothing at all wrong, tearfully waving to his kids as he goes down to start his time in prison. His wife isn't there to be waved at because she's already inside having been convicted of the same offence.
(Great piece, Cyclefree, btw)
Yes, it's a great piece by Cyclefree, and she's to be congratulated for starting a thread that absorbed so many of the best minds on here and remained largely on topic.
I have to go now. Life beckons. But I'm really happy at the response that was triggered here.
That interview is car crash stuff, blimey.
Seems like PO, more so than even many other large organisations, has a serious problem of overpromoting useless people, plus a toxic culture of opacity (plus what Alan Clark called 'the repressive conspiracy of the incompetent').
It's not unique to the PO by any means, but it has really been taken to extremes in terms of its impact on actual people; bankruptcies, prison terms, breakdowns and untimely deaths. I get why folk struggle to engage with it, but it is important. There are any number of organisations, public or private, this could yet happen with. It could happen to you or me.
Parenthetically, one thing I don't understand is the role of the CWU in this. I assume - maybe wrongly - that the PO has quite strong workers' unions, who I would have thought would have played more of a role in standing up for the SPMs here. I'd like to know more about this.
Just on your CWU point - You need to remember that Sub-Postmasters were not employees of the Post Office at all, but they were individual business owners who had a contract with the Post Office to supply post office services. It is partly why the issue of them being dispersed and unknown to each other happened - there was no collective or grouping union in any sense.
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.
And yet you ignore the biggest of all. The Asian Grooming Scandal with somewhere between 100,000-,1,000,000 underage girls raped, abused, tortured, kidnapped and sometimes even murdered - by racist gangs across the country. And those that tried to speak out were silenced or even prosecuted
Not just the biggest scandal in recent British history but one of the greatest scandals in the modern history of the western world. It dwarfs any post office scandal (which I am sure is awful, in itself)
i guess we all suffer from psychological lacunation, in different ways and for different reasons, eh?
I did not miss it. I did not make a comprehensive list and did not intend to. That is what etc means. I could have added others. It is true that my list contained the ones that have been more in the media. That was rather the essence of the point I was making. They are just the tip of the iceberg. The grooming scandal has not had the publicity of the ones in my list. All of which also did not have publicity for many year or decades and only got there because of the huge sacrifice of a few who keep battering against the closed gates of officialdom and which you yawn at.
You rather make my point for me don't you?
PS Maybe you should be campaigning on behalf of those groomed, like I do for the group I campaign on behalf of?
“The grooming scandal has not had the publicity of the ones on my list”
Where do you live? Neptune??
After decades of being covered up the Asian grooming scandal has now - belatedly - had a ton of coverage right up to several TV dramatizations and multiple TV documentaries (tho I still think it deserves to loom far larger, given its enormous horror and incalculable scale)
Are you really claiming that “Equity Life” is has had more publicity than Rotherham and Rochdale and all the other dozens of towns afflicted by this?
Eh? Yes. Were you born yesterday? Equity Life is now in the past, but it was a huge media story and took up much more media, Parliamentary and Government time. It resulted in an amendment to an act of parliament to allow a PHSO investigation. It was much bigger. It probably shouldn't be but it was. The grooming scandal has not had the publicity it deserves, probably because those impacted have much less clout, being young exploited girls from social deprived backgrounds
And I am waiting for your reason as to your sentence as to 'we can all speculate why'?
If you are implying I am a racist I suggest you withdraw immediately because I don't have a racist bone in my body.
I assume that Equity Life hit a lot of people in the upper and middle and what used to be called the aspiring working classes with savings and who had newspapers precisely targeted to their needs and fears - DT, DM. And that had a lot with the scandal having decent coverage?
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.
Who are these moderates still voting Tory he can't afford to alienate when the Tories are on just 25% or so in current polls?
Whereas 5-9% are now voting RefUK and could come back with the right policies
Think about it. If they gained even the highest figure you claim for RefUK but alienated just 5% of their current 25%, they would still be on only 30%.
And if the Tories lurched even further to the right, think of the effect on tactical voting among the non-Tory 70% of the electorate.
There is no way that chasing a political extreme is going to work under our electorate system. It should be so blindingly obvious that it doesn't need to be said.
In the short term it's not about winning the election, it's about ensuring that the Tories survive as the main right-wing opposition to Labour.
Remember that Labour replaced the Liberals from their left, while the SDP/Alliance/ChangeUK have all failed to replace either Tories or Labour from the centre.
Centrist voters aren't listening to the Tories now, because centrist voters value things like honesty and competency more than the details of policy. But voters to either extreme value ideological purity more highly.
There's a strategic logic for the Tories in ensuring that they hold onto their core voters now, and then move towards the centre when their core voters are tired enough of opposition to compromise on ideology, and when centrist voters are willing to give them a hearing.
From comments on GBNews (I know) it would appear that No. 10 approved the article, but asked Braverman to remove the Ulster part, which she didn't. That's in line with Sunak's own 'tough' stance on the Met. That would make sacking her very disproportionate.
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.
No, aiui the trouble was there was no mechanism to do a manual check. Only the computer knew how many stamps you had received and sold, and postal orders, savings bank payments and so on. It might have been possible for the Post Office to compare figures from outside and notice it had sold ten times as many stamps as had been printed, but not at the subpostmaster level.
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
It's a flaw in the way people process information. We do not understand things unless we can fit it into a narrative: good guys, bad guys, sins, cover-ups, etc. Until this process is fitted into a dramatic narrative and filmed/told people will ignore it, not because they are bad but because their minds will not engage.
For myself I have speedread the articles but not to the depth that they need, because they are not relevant to betting or politics or voting (see my ongoing rant about the nature of PB). This is rather sad, because the articles are part of a necessary process. My favorite saying in politics is "Quiet, calm deliberation disentangles any knot" (Harold Macmillan, quoting G&S) and the inquiry and commentary are part of that process. Eventually I hope it will lead to the surviving innocents being compensated, although I fear it will not.
Of course, if somebody with links to playwrights and media nudged some people to do a drama, that would help. If only PB had access to such people...
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.
Who are these moderates still voting Tory he can't afford to alienate when the Tories are on just 25% or so in current polls?
Whereas 5-9% are now voting RefUK and could come back with the right policies
Think about it. If they gained even the highest figure you claim for RefUK but alienated just 5% of their current 25%, they would still be on only 30%.
And if the Tories lurched even further to the right, think of the effect on tactical voting among the non-Tory 70% of the electorate.
There is no way that chasing a political extreme is going to work under our electorate system. It should be so blindingly obvious that it doesn't need to be said.
Yes and even 30% would be a lot better than the 25% they are now on and if they added all the voters lost to RefUK and DK since 2019 they would be on 35% even without winning back a single voter lost to Labour or the LDs.
After 13 years in power they are going to have tactical votes against them anyway so who cares, the higher the Tory voteshare however the less impact tactical votes have
Proof of the pudding will be the next set of opinion polls. Alanis Morrissette predicts there'll be a swing from Lib Dem to Tory and Ref numbers will go up.
One aspect I haven't seen commented on regarding the PO scandal is the potential for racism. Quite a number of those convicted that I have seen were of south Asian origins.
I wonder, was there a notion at work that "they're all a load of wrong uns"?
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.
And yet you ignore the biggest of all. The Asian Grooming Scandal with somewhere between 100,000-,1,000,000 underage girls raped, abused, tortured, kidnapped and sometimes even murdered - by racist gangs across the country. And those that tried to speak out were silenced or even prosecuted
Not just the biggest scandal in recent British history but one of the greatest scandals in the modern history of the western world. It dwarfs any post office scandal (which I am sure is awful, in itself)
i guess we all suffer from psychological lacunation, in different ways and for different reasons, eh?
I did not miss it. I did not make a comprehensive list and did not intend to. That is what etc means. I could have added others. It is true that my list contained the ones that have been more in the media. That was rather the essence of the point I was making. They are just the tip of the iceberg. The grooming scandal has not had the publicity of the ones in my list. All of which also did not have publicity for many year or decades and only got there because of the huge sacrifice of a few who keep battering against the closed gates of officialdom and which you yawn at.
You rather make my point for me don't you?
PS Maybe you should be campaigning on behalf of those groomed, like I do for the group I campaign on behalf of?
“The grooming scandal has not had the publicity of the ones on my list”
Where do you live? Neptune??
After decades of being covered up the Asian grooming scandal has now - belatedly - had a ton of coverage right up to several TV dramatizations and multiple TV documentaries (tho I still think it deserves to loom far larger, given its enormous horror and incalculable scale)
Are you really claiming that “Equity Life” is has had more publicity than Rotherham and Rochdale and all the other dozens of towns afflicted by this?
Eh? Yes. Were you born yesterday? Equity Life is now in the past, but it was a huge media story and took up much more media, Parliamentary and Government time. It resulted in an amendment to an act of parliament to allow a PHSO investigation. It was much bigger. It probably shouldn't be but it was. The grooming scandal has not had the publicity it deserves, probably because those impacted have much less clout, being young exploited girls from social deprived backgrounds
And I am waiting for your reason as to your sentence as to 'we can all speculate why'?
If you are implying I am a racist I suggest you withdraw immediately because I don't have a racist bone in my body.
I assume that Equity Life hit a lot of people in the upper and middle and what used to be called the aspiring working classes with savings and who had newspapers precisely targeted to their needs and fears - DT, DM. And that had a lot with the scandal having decent coverage?
Yep agree. @leon seems to live in a world of half a dozen topics that he bangs on about and no knowledge of anything else that goes on which he just 'yawns' at even if people are being hurt.
Still waiting for his explanation of his comment that seemed to imply I was a racists for leaving the grooming gangs off my list! Odd that Windrush was on my list but then logic has never been a strong point for @Leon
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
Got halfway through that and drifted off, thinking about how much I want an MC20.
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
You kick off the story with "Arnold", a man in his mid 50s, a decent ordinary man who has done nothing at all wrong, tearfully waving to his kids as he goes down to start his time in prison. His wife isn't there to be waved at because she's already inside having been convicted of the same offence.
(Great piece, Cyclefree, btw)
Yes, it's a great piece by Cyclefree, and she's to be congratulated for starting a thread that absorbed so many of the best minds on here and remained largely on topic.
I have to go now. Life beckons. But I'm really happy at the response that was triggered here.
That interview is car crash stuff, blimey.
Seems like PO, more so than even many other large organisations, has a serious problem of overpromoting useless people, plus a toxic culture of opacity (plus what Alan Clark called 'the repressive conspiracy of the incompetent').
It's not unique to the PO by any means, but it has really been taken to extremes in terms of its impact on actual people; bankruptcies, prison terms, breakdowns and untimely deaths. I get why folk struggle to engage with it, but it is important. There are any number of organisations, public or private, this could yet happen with. It could happen to you or me.
Parenthetically, one thing I don't understand is the role of the CWU in this. I assume - maybe wrongly - that the PO has quite strong workers' unions, who I would have thought would have played more of a role in standing up for the SPMs here. I'd like to know more about this.
Just on your CWU point - You need to remember that Sub-Postmasters were not employees of the Post Office at all, but they were individual business owners who had a contract with the Post Office to supply post office services. It is partly why the issue of them being dispersed and unknown to each other happened - there was no collective or grouping union in any sense.
That makes sense and I guess is a reason why unionisation is important - it’s not just about pay and working conditions, it’s advocating on behalf of the whole to avoid horrific scandals like this.
One aspect I haven't seen commented on regarding the PO scandal is the potential for racism. Quite a number of those convicted that I have seen were of south Asian origins.
I wonder, was there a notion at work that "they're all a load of wrong uns"?
IIRC there is some evidence of Asian SPMs getting heavier sentences too.
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
You kick off the story with "Arnold", a man in his mid 50s, a decent ordinary man who has done nothing at all wrong, tearfully waving to his kids as he goes down to start his time in prison. His wife isn't there to be waved at because she's already inside having been convicted of the same offence.
(Great piece, Cyclefree, btw)
Yes, it's a great piece by Cyclefree, and she's to be congratulated for starting a thread that absorbed so many of the best minds on here and remained largely on topic.
I have to go now. Life beckons. But I'm really happy at the response that was triggered here.
That interview is car crash stuff, blimey.
Seems like PO, more so than even many other large organisations, has a serious problem of overpromoting useless people, plus a toxic culture of opacity (plus what Alan Clark called 'the repressive conspiracy of the incompetent').
It's not unique to the PO by any means, but it has really been taken to extremes in terms of its impact on actual people; bankruptcies, prison terms, breakdowns and untimely deaths. I get why folk struggle to engage with it, but it is important. There are any number of organisations, public or private, this could yet happen with. It could happen to you or me.
Parenthetically, one thing I don't understand is the role of the CWU in this. I assume - maybe wrongly - that the PO has quite strong workers' unions, who I would have thought would have played more of a role in standing up for the SPMs here. I'd like to know more about this.
Just on your CWU point - You need to remember that Sub-Postmasters were not employees of the Post Office at all, but they were individual business owners who had a contract with the Post Office to supply post office services. It is partly why the issue of them being dispersed and unknown to each other happened - there was no collective or grouping union in any sense.
That makes sense and I guess is a reason why unionisation is important - it’s not just about pay and working conditions, it’s advocating on behalf of the whole to avoid horrific scandals like this.
But there is the Federation of SPMs. No idea what role if any it played.
One aspect I haven't seen commented on regarding the PO scandal is the potential for racism. Quite a number of those convicted that I have seen were of south Asian origins.
I wonder, was there a notion at work that "they're all a load of wrong uns"?
IIRC there is some evidence of Asian SPMs getting heavier sentences too.
It seems that the PO management would have been where Constable Savage moved on to....
From comments on GBNews (I know) it would appear that No. 10 approved the article, but asked Braverman to remove the Ulster part, which she didn't. That's in line with Sunak's own 'tough' stance on the Met. That would make sacking her very disproportionate.
Not so disproportionate. The reference to Ulster was *very* odd, given it's notoriously the Orange side who like marching*, and pissed off everyone there - including key Tory Party allies.
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.
And yet you ignore the biggest of all. The Asian Grooming Scandal with somewhere between 100,000-,1,000,000 underage girls raped, abused, tortured, kidnapped and sometimes even murdered - by racist gangs across the country. And those that tried to speak out were silenced or even prosecuted
Not just the biggest scandal in recent British history but one of the greatest scandals in the modern history of the western world. It dwarfs any post office scandal (which I am sure is awful, in itself)
i guess we all suffer from psychological lacunation, in different ways and for different reasons, eh?
For all the good it will do, the grooming gangs are doing time or being prosecuted. Or individuals are because it is not clear how they are being tackled as gangs; if they were, it might have sped things up.
As well as the race and political correctness angles, there were common factors with the Jimmy Savile scandal. The girls were often willing victims, had chaotic lifestyles at the margins of society, and were scattered across the country.
I'm not sure there is much commonality with the other scandals named, though, which seem qualitatively different.
From comments on GBNews (I know) it would appear that No. 10 approved the article, but asked Braverman to remove the Ulster part, which she didn't. That's in line with Sunak's own 'tough' stance on the Met. That would make sacking her very disproportionate.
Well, if he's not going to sack her, he needs to try to damp down the expectation that he will, because otherwise he will look weaker than ever.
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
Got halfway through that and drifted off, thinking about how much I want an MC20.
You'd then need to save up for some gold paint and Hans Road awaits you.
From comments on GBNews (I know) it would appear that No. 10 approved the article, but asked Braverman to remove the Ulster part, which she didn't. That's in line with Sunak's own 'tough' stance on the Met. That would make sacking her very disproportionate.
There's still enough grounds to terminate her postion as Home Secretary.
Which seems to be what she has been engineering for some while. Easier to make a run for the top job when you aren't in Cabinet. If you are an utterly deluded fool, that is.
One aspect I haven't seen commented on regarding the PO scandal is the potential for racism. Quite a number of those convicted that I have seen were of south Asian origins.
I wonder, was there a notion at work that "they're all a load of wrong uns"?
I doubt it. For a start, how would the computer know? One question it does raise though is whether the subpostmaster scandal was picked up in the ethnic press (as well as, or from, Computer Weekly and Private Eye).
From comments on GBNews (I know) it would appear that No. 10 approved the article, but asked Braverman to remove the Ulster part, which she didn't. That's in line with Sunak's own 'tough' stance on the Met. That would make sacking her very disproportionate.
Not so disproportionate. The reference to Ulster was *very* odd, given it's notoriously the Orange side who like marching*, and pissed off everyone there - including key Tory Party allies.
*The other lot do, but not so much.
Yes - they were right to highlight it and it is the part that's caused the most kerfuffle. I don't know why Braverman left it in. However, the impression being given is that the Government is not behind the questioning of the Met's impartiality, which wasn't the case and reads to me as quite a cowardly retreat, leaving Braverman high and dry.
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.
No, aiui the trouble was there was no mechanism to do a manual check. Only the computer knew how many stamps you had received and sold, and postal orders, savings bank payments and so on. It might have been possible for the Post Office to compare figures from outside and notice it had sold ten times as many stamps as had been printed, but not at the subpostmaster level.
Management and prosecutors should spot quickly when out of the blue a whole load of SPMs are appearing to commit the same offence with no corroboration outside a single computer system. It's like a speed camera suddenly saying the old lady Nissan Micra drivers coming home from church are all driving at 80 mph in a 30 mph limit.
@Cyclefree has referenced the Aberfan disaster before, and when you read the wiki account, you read about the same sorts of thick as mince, malevolent, incompetents, like S. O. Davies MP, Lord Robens, the Charity Commission at the time, as you do in the Post Office scandal.
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
It's a flaw in the way people process information. We do not understand things unless we can fit it into a narrative: good guys, bad guys, sins, cover-ups, etc. Until this process is fitted into a dramatic narrative and filmed/told people will ignore it, not because they are bad but because their minds will not engage.
For myself I have speedread the articles but not to the depth that they need, because they are not relevant to betting or politics or voting (see my ongoing rant about the nature of PB). This is rather sad, because the articles are part of a necessary process. My favorite saying in politics is "Quiet, calm deliberation disentangles any knot" (Harold Macmillan, quoting G&S) and the inquiry and commentary are part of that process. Eventually I hope it will lead to the surviving innocents being compensated, although I fear it will not.
Of course, if somebody with links to playwrights and media nudged some people to do a drama, that would help. If only PB had access to such people...
I agree with most of your post but this is central to politics. The establishment cover up and lack of care and accountability are just as much reasons of why our politics have become so incompetent as whatever happens in our political parties.
From comments on GBNews (I know) it would appear that No. 10 approved the article, but asked Braverman to remove the Ulster part, which she didn't. That's in line with Sunak's own 'tough' stance on the Met. That would make sacking her very disproportionate.
Not so disproportionate. The reference to Ulster was *very* odd, given it's notoriously the Orange side who like marching*, and pissed off everyone there - including key Tory Party allies.
*The other lot do, but not so much.
The modern Conservative Party simply do not understand Northern Ireland nor Ireland. Given the history of the Conservative and Unionist Party, this is a shame
From comments on GBNews (I know) it would appear that No. 10 approved the article, but asked Braverman to remove the Ulster part, which she didn't. That's in line with Sunak's own 'tough' stance on the Met. That would make sacking her very disproportionate.
Well, if he's not going to sack her, he needs to try to damp down the expectation that he will, because otherwise he will look weaker than ever.
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.
No, aiui the trouble was there was no mechanism to do a manual check. Only the computer knew how many stamps you had received and sold, and postal orders, savings bank payments and so on. It might have been possible for the Post Office to compare figures from outside and notice it had sold ten times as many stamps as had been printed, but not at the subpostmaster level.
Management and prosecutors should spot quickly when out of the blue a whole load of SPMs are appearing to commit the same offence with no corroboration outside a single computer system. It's like a speed camera suddenly saying the old lady Nissan Micra drivers coming home from church are all driving at 80 mph in a 30 mph limit.
The PO decided to prosecute all the little old ladies. And claimed that any evidence that they weren't speeding was evidence of the evil of their fraud.
The reason I think went something like this
1) Senior management nailed their trousers to the Horizon project 2) Horizon started showing fraud, apparently 3) Senior managers in legal nailed their trousers to the awesome levels of fraud detection and prosecution. 4) By the time that even the thickest fool could see the issue, too many senior managers had invested their reputations in Horizon being right. And obviously the reputation of a senior manager is worth more than the life of a member of the Head Count.
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.
Who are these moderates still voting Tory he can't afford to alienate when the Tories are on just 25% or so in current polls?
Whereas 5-9% are now voting RefUK and could come back with the right policies
Think about it. If they gained even the highest figure you claim for RefUK but alienated just 5% of their current 25%, they would still be on only 30%.
And if the Tories lurched even further to the right, think of the effect on tactical voting among the non-Tory 70% of the electorate.
There is no way that chasing a political extreme is going to work under our electorate system. It should be so blindingly obvious that it doesn't need to be said.
Yes and even 30% would be a lot better than the 25% they are now on and if they added all the voters lost to RefUK and DK since 2019 they would be on 35% even without winning back a single voter lost to Labour or the LDs.
After 13 years in power they are going to have tactical votes against them anyway so who cares, the higher the Tory voteshare however the less impact tactical votes have
Proof of the pudding will be the next set of opinion polls. Alanis Morrissette predicts there'll be a swing from Lib Dem to Tory and Ref numbers will go up.
Mr. Play-It-Safe was afraid, poor guy He kept the nutcase and kissed his hopes goodbye He wasted his whole damn life appeasing right And as the polls crashed down He thought, "Well, isn't this nice?"
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.
Who are these moderates still voting Tory he can't afford to alienate when the Tories are on just 25% or so in current polls?
Whereas 5-9% are now voting RefUK and could come back with the right policies
Think about it. If they gained even the highest figure you claim for RefUK but alienated just 5% of their current 25%, they would still be on only 30%.
And if the Tories lurched even further to the right, think of the effect on tactical voting among the non-Tory 70% of the electorate.
There is no way that chasing a political extreme is going to work under our electorate system. It should be so blindingly obvious that it doesn't need to be said.
Yes and even 30% would be a lot better than the 25% they are now on and if they added all the voters lost to RefUK and DK since 2019 they would be on 35% even without winning back a single voter lost to Labour or the LDs.
After 13 years in power they are going to have tactical votes against them anyway so who cares, the higher the Tory voteshare however the less impact tactical votes have
Proof of the pudding will be the next set of opinion polls. Alanis Morrissette predicts there'll be a swing from Lib Dem to Tory and Ref numbers will go up.
Well, you oughtta know.
Let's see what next week's opinion polling gives. It takes time to move opinion polls; they are like a tanker (container ship) as news filtration is slow - although the impact of social media may speed it up and individuals on polling panels are likely to more attuned to the day to day political eb and flow.
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.
And yet you ignore the biggest of all. The Asian Grooming Scandal with somewhere between 100,000-,1,000,000 underage girls raped, abused, tortured, kidnapped and sometimes even murdered - by racist gangs across the country. And those that tried to speak out were silenced or even prosecuted
Not just the biggest scandal in recent British history but one of the greatest scandals in the modern history of the western world. It dwarfs any post office scandal (which I am sure is awful, in itself)
i guess we all suffer from psychological lacunation, in different ways and for different reasons, eh?
I did not miss it. I did not make a comprehensive list and did not intend to. That is what etc means. I could have added others. It is true that my list contained the ones that have been more in the media. That was rather the essence of the point I was making. They are just the tip of the iceberg. The grooming scandal has not had the publicity of the ones in my list. All of which also did not have publicity for many year or decades and only got there because of the huge sacrifice of a few who keep battering against the closed gates of officialdom and which you yawn at.
You rather make my point for me don't you?
PS Maybe you should be campaigning on behalf of those groomed, like I do for the group I campaign on behalf of?
“The grooming scandal has not had the publicity of the ones on my list”
Where do you live? Neptune??
After decades of being covered up the Asian grooming scandal has now - belatedly - had a ton of coverage right up to several TV dramatizations and multiple TV documentaries (tho I still think it deserves to loom far larger, given its enormous horror and incalculable scale)
Are you really claiming that “Equity Life” is has had more publicity than Rotherham and Rochdale and all the other dozens of towns afflicted by this?
Eh? Yes. Were you born yesterday? Equity Life is now in the past, but it was a huge media story and took up much more media, Parliamentary and Government time. It resulted in an amendment to an act of parliament to allow a PHSO investigation. It was much bigger. It probably shouldn't be but it was. The grooming scandal has not had the publicity it deserves, probably because those impacted have much less clout, being young exploited girls from social deprived backgrounds
And I am waiting for your reason as to your sentence as to 'we can all speculate why'?
If you are implying I am a racist I suggest you withdraw immediately because I don't have a racist bone in my body.
I assume that Equity Life hit a lot of people in the upper and middle and what used to be called the aspiring working classes with savings and who had newspapers precisely targeted to their needs and fears - DT, DM. And that had a lot with the scandal having decent coverage?
STOP!
Equitable Life please, as the Equitable Life Assurance Society. I know, I was working for them when the shit hit the fan.
Another shocking case of senior management hubris.
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.
Yes but it seems to have taken until 2019 for a court to be asked to take a different view. And, on being presented with credible evidence, they did.
The point I am making is that it is not just the PO who failed here. So did a lot of defence agents.
Most of the victims were not particularly well off people, and it was often a matter of resources. Certainly they were badly advised - or in some cases not legally represented at all. Many were pressured into pleading guilty, and as we know from innumerable other cases, the system sets an extraordinary high bar to admitting its mistakes in those circumstances.
If there is a criticism of the broader legal system, then perhaps it's there. There ought, in the face of compelling evidence, be easier routes to appeal miscarriages of justice.
From comments on GBNews (I know) it would appear that No. 10 approved the article, but asked Braverman to remove the Ulster part, which she didn't. That's in line with Sunak's own 'tough' stance on the Met. That would make sacking her very disproportionate.
Not so disproportionate. The reference to Ulster was *very* odd, given it's notoriously the Orange side who like marching*, and pissed off everyone there - including key Tory Party allies.
*The other lot do, but not so much.
Ministers these days seem both ignorant and incurious. As well as the Home Secretary mixing up marchers, a recent Northern Ireland Secretary remarked she had not realised the different communities voted for different parties, and the Brexit Secretary did not realise goods went to and from France via Dover.
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
"Special treatment", "Special Actions", "resettlement to the East", "evacuations", "fumigation", were the endless euphemisms.
That's what makes Himmler's Posen Speeches, in October 1943, so unusual. It was the first time that any top Nazi admitted bluntly what was being done.
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.
And yet you ignore the biggest of all. The Asian Grooming Scandal with somewhere between 100,000-,1,000,000 underage girls raped, abused, tortured, kidnapped and sometimes even murdered - by racist gangs across the country. And those that tried to speak out were silenced or even prosecuted
Not just the biggest scandal in recent British history but one of the greatest scandals in the modern history of the western world. It dwarfs any post office scandal (which I am sure is awful, in itself)
i guess we all suffer from psychological lacunation, in different ways and for different reasons, eh?
I did not miss it. I did not make a comprehensive list and did not intend to. That is what etc means. I could have added others. It is true that my list contained the ones that have been more in the media. That was rather the essence of the point I was making. They are just the tip of the iceberg. The grooming scandal has not had the publicity of the ones in my list. All of which also did not have publicity for many year or decades and only got there because of the huge sacrifice of a few who keep battering against the closed gates of officialdom and which you yawn at.
You rather make my point for me don't you?
PS Maybe you should be campaigning on behalf of those groomed, like I do for the group I campaign on behalf of?
“The grooming scandal has not had the publicity of the ones on my list”
Where do you live? Neptune??
After decades of being covered up the Asian grooming scandal has now - belatedly - had a ton of coverage right up to several TV dramatizations and multiple TV documentaries (tho I still think it deserves to loom far larger, given its enormous horror and incalculable scale)
Are you really claiming that “Equity Life” is has had more publicity than Rotherham and Rochdale and all the other dozens of towns afflicted by this?
Eh? Yes. Were you born yesterday? Equity Life is now in the past, but it was a huge media story and took up much more media, Parliamentary and Government time. It resulted in an amendment to an act of parliament to allow a PHSO investigation. It was much bigger. It probably shouldn't be but it was. The grooming scandal has not had the publicity it deserves, probably because those impacted have much less clout, being young exploited girls from social deprived backgrounds
And I am waiting for your reason as to your sentence as to 'we can all speculate why'?
If you are implying I am a racist I suggest you withdraw immediately because I don't have a racist bone in my body.
I assume that Equity Life hit a lot of people in the upper and middle and what used to be called the aspiring working classes with savings and who had newspapers precisely targeted to their needs and fears - DT, DM. And that had a lot with the scandal having decent coverage?
STOP!
Equitable Life please, as the Equitable Life Assurance Society. I know, I was working for them when the shit hit the fan.
Another shocking case of senior management hubris.
Thanks! I had some sense of unease when I posted that - good to know what it was ...
@Cyclefree has referenced the Aberfan disaster before, and when you read the wiki account, you read about the same sorts of thick as mince, malevolent, incompetents, like S. O. Davies MP, Lord Robens, the Charity Commission at the time, as you do in the Post Office scandal.
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.
And yet you ignore the biggest of all. The Asian Grooming Scandal with somewhere between 100,000-,1,000,000 underage girls raped, abused, tortured, kidnapped and sometimes even murdered - by racist gangs across the country. And those that tried to speak out were silenced or even prosecuted
Not just the biggest scandal in recent British history but one of the greatest scandals in the modern history of the western world. It dwarfs any post office scandal (which I am sure is awful, in itself)
i guess we all suffer from psychological lacunation, in different ways and for different reasons, eh?
I did not miss it. I did not make a comprehensive list and did not intend to. That is what etc means. I could have added others. It is true that my list contained the ones that have been more in the media. That was rather the essence of the point I was making. They are just the tip of the iceberg. The grooming scandal has not had the publicity of the ones in my list. All of which also did not have publicity for many year or decades and only got there because of the huge sacrifice of a few who keep battering against the closed gates of officialdom and which you yawn at.
You rather make my point for me don't you?
PS Maybe you should be campaigning on behalf of those groomed, like I do for the group I campaign on behalf of?
“The grooming scandal has not had the publicity of the ones on my list”
Where do you live? Neptune??
After decades of being covered up the Asian grooming scandal has now - belatedly - had a ton of coverage right up to several TV dramatizations and multiple TV documentaries (tho I still think it deserves to loom far larger, given its enormous horror and incalculable scale)
Are you really claiming that “Equity Life” is has had more publicity than Rotherham and Rochdale and all the other dozens of towns afflicted by this?
Eh? Yes. Were you born yesterday? Equity Life is now in the past, but it was a huge media story and took up much more media, Parliamentary and Government time. It resulted in an amendment to an act of parliament to allow a PHSO investigation. It was much bigger. It probably shouldn't be but it was. The grooming scandal has not had the publicity it deserves, probably because those impacted have much less clout, being young exploited girls from social deprived backgrounds
And I am waiting for your reason as to your sentence as to 'we can all speculate why'?
If you are implying I am a racist I suggest you withdraw immediately because I don't have a racist bone in my body.
I assume that Equity Life hit a lot of people in the upper and middle and what used to be called the aspiring working classes with savings and who had newspapers precisely targeted to their needs and fears - DT, DM. And that had a lot with the scandal having decent coverage?
STOP!
Equitable Life please, as the Equitable Life Assurance Society. I know, I was working for them when the shit hit the fan.
Another shocking case of senior management hubris.
Sorry @Benpointer all my fault re the spelling. I just infected others with my error.
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.
No, aiui the trouble was there was no mechanism to do a manual check. Only the computer knew how many stamps you had received and sold, and postal orders, savings bank payments and so on. It might have been possible for the Post Office to compare figures from outside and notice it had sold ten times as many stamps as had been printed, but not at the subpostmaster level.
Management and prosecutors should spot quickly when out of the blue a whole load of SPMs are appearing to commit the same offence with no corroboration outside a single computer system. It's like a speed camera suddenly saying the old lady Nissan Micra drivers coming home from church are all driving at 80 mph in a 30 mph limit.
Ah, but one of the attractions of the new computer system was that it would root out fraud. In your analogy, a council that had just installed speed cameras would not be surprised or even unhappy when they caught speeding motorists. Finding lawbreakers was a feature, not a bug.
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
It's a flaw in the way people process information. We do not understand things unless we can fit it into a narrative: good guys, bad guys, sins, cover-ups, etc. Until this process is fitted into a dramatic narrative and filmed/told people will ignore it, not because they are bad but because their minds will not engage.
For myself I have speedread the articles but not to the depth that they need, because they are not relevant to betting or politics or voting (see my ongoing rant about the nature of PB). This is rather sad, because the articles are part of a necessary process. My favorite saying in politics is "Quiet, calm deliberation disentangles any knot" (Harold Macmillan, quoting G&S) and the inquiry and commentary are part of that process. Eventually I hope it will lead to the surviving innocents being compensated, although I fear it will not.
Of course, if somebody with links to playwrights and media nudged some people to do a drama, that would help. If only PB had access to such people...
I agree with most of your post but this is central to politics. The establishment cover up and lack of care and accountability are just as much reasons of why our politics have become so incompetent as whatever happens in our political parties.
Agreed. Any ideas on how it should be stopped? Serious question
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.
Who are these moderates still voting Tory he can't afford to alienate when the Tories are on just 25% or so in current polls?
Whereas 5-9% are now voting RefUK and could come back with the right policies
Think about it. If they gained even the highest figure you claim for RefUK but alienated just 5% of their current 25%, they would still be on only 30%.
And if the Tories lurched even further to the right, think of the effect on tactical voting among the non-Tory 70% of the electorate.
There is no way that chasing a political extreme is going to work under our electorate system. It should be so blindingly obvious that it doesn't need to be said.
In the short term it's not about winning the election, it's about ensuring that the Tories survive as the main right-wing opposition to Labour.
Remember that Labour replaced the Liberals from their left, while the SDP/Alliance/ChangeUK have all failed to replace either Tories or Labour from the centre.
Centrist voters aren't listening to the Tories now, because centrist voters value things like honesty and competency more than the details of policy. But voters to either extreme value ideological purity more highly.
There's a strategic logic for the Tories in ensuring that they hold onto their core voters now, and then move towards the centre when their core voters are tired enough of opposition to compromise on ideology, and when centrist voters are willing to give them a hearing.
That's right. The ultimate Nightmare Scenario is a meltdown so bad that your Main Oppo Party status is threatened. You have to take that possibility right out of the equation and the way to do this is make damn sure you keep the core of your core. If you risk them and at the same time fail to get any centre back (because it turns out you've already been written off there) you allow your Nightmare Scenario a sniff. It's upside/downside risk analysis rather than expected value best result (since it could well be that tracking centre-wards is likely to be a net seat winner for the Cons).
It's similar (although not exactly the same) to the position Labour found itself in for the Brexit election of 2019 (which like the Cons now they knew they would lose) after the LDs embraced full fat Stop Brexit. Up to then Labour's policy had been a Soft 'jobs first' Brexit (aka the BRINO) but this became too risky after the LDs went Bonzo Remain. It'd leave the LDs in sole possession of the Remainer lane with the possibility of Remainers flocking to them and (shock horror) doing so well as to challenge Labour for Main Oppo Party status. This could not be countenanced hence the Labour pivot to Ref2 (which everyone knew meant Remain). They did this to take their Nightmare Scenario off the table despite knowing it could well lead to a worse defeat than if they had stuck with their previous policy.
"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.
Why should she get paid for gross incompetence and damaging the reputation of the business?
She shouldn't get paid for incompetence or harm. The question is, do they need to pay her in order to attract the next crop of bosses? Same as football. Would you sign for Chelsea or Arsenal if one of them had the reputation of stiffing managers over payment terms? Why go to NatWest when you can be sure Barclays will still pay you when the chips are down?
One aspect I haven't seen commented on regarding the PO scandal is the potential for racism. Quite a number of those convicted that I have seen were of south Asian origins.
I wonder, was there a notion at work that "they're all a load of wrong uns"?
From May.
Post Office admits 'abhorrent' racist slur was used to describe suspects in Horizon scandal
More than 700 former Post Office staff were wrongly prosecuted for theft and false accounting in what has been described as "the most widespread miscarriage of justice in UK history". Now, documents have come to light showing investigators were asked to group suspects based on race.
Black Post Office workers who were falsely accused in the Horizon scandal were classified using a racial slur, according to documents obtained by campaigners.
More than 700 former Post Office staff were wrongly prosecuted for theft and false accounting in what has been described as "the most widespread miscarriage of justice in UK history".
Post Office prosecutors tasked with investigating sub-postmasters were asked to group suspects based on racial features.
The document, thought to have been published in 2008, asked investigators if the suspects were "N*****d Types" - a racist term from the colonial era of the 1800s that refers to people of African descent.
Other categories on the document include "Chinese/Japanese types" and "Dark Skinned European Types".
Seema Misra, who was pregnant with her second child when she was jailed after being wrongly convicted of stealing from the Post Office she ran in Surrey, said she was angry at the new revelations.
"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.
Why should she get paid for gross incompetence and damaging the reputation of the business?
She shouldn't get paid for incompetence or harm. The question is, do they need to pay her in order to attract the next crop of bosses? Same as football. Would you sign for Chelsea or Arsenal if one of them had the reputation of stiffing managers over payment terms? Why go to NatWest when you can be sure Barclays will still pay you when the chips are down?
I'd do it for just her £2.4m base pay, if they're struggling. I worked for a bank for 14 years and never divulged any client information, if that helps.
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.
Who are these moderates still voting Tory he can't afford to alienate when the Tories are on just 25% or so in current polls?
Whereas 5-9% are now voting RefUK and could come back with the right policies
Think about it. If they gained even the highest figure you claim for RefUK but alienated just 5% of their current 25%, they would still be on only 30%.
And if the Tories lurched even further to the right, think of the effect on tactical voting among the non-Tory 70% of the electorate.
There is no way that chasing a political extreme is going to work under our electorate system. It should be so blindingly obvious that it doesn't need to be said.
Yes and even 30% would be a lot better than the 25% they are now on and if they added all the voters lost to RefUK and DK since 2019 they would be on 35% even without winning back a single voter lost to Labour or the LDs.
After 13 years in power they are going to have tactical votes against them anyway so who cares, the higher the Tory voteshare however the less impact tactical votes have
Proof of the pudding will be the next set of opinion polls. Alanis Morrissette predicts there'll be a swing from Lib Dem to Tory and Ref numbers will go up.
It seems every time something like this happens the call goes up for “lessons to be learnt” yet up it pops again - albeit somewhere else and slightly different. I appreciate it may be a human reaction to CYA - but somehow you’ve got to have systems and a culture that prevent that (or at least prevent the worst aspects of it).
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
It's a flaw in the way people process information. We do not understand things unless we can fit it into a narrative: good guys, bad guys, sins, cover-ups, etc. Until this process is fitted into a dramatic narrative and filmed/told people will ignore it, not because they are bad but because their minds will not engage.
For myself I have speedread the articles but not to the depth that they need, because they are not relevant to betting or politics or voting (see my ongoing rant about the nature of PB). This is rather sad, because the articles are part of a necessary process. My favorite saying in politics is "Quiet, calm deliberation disentangles any knot" (Harold Macmillan, quoting G&S) and the inquiry and commentary are part of that process. Eventually I hope it will lead to the surviving innocents being compensated, although I fear it will not.
Of course, if somebody with links to playwrights and media nudged some people to do a drama, that would help. If only PB had access to such people...
I agree with most of your post but this is central to politics. The establishment cover up and lack of care and accountability are just as much reasons of why our politics have become so incompetent as whatever happens in our political parties.
Agreed. Any ideas on how it should be stopped? Serious question
I think a bit of sortition, at least in the Lords, if not the Commons would make some difference.
More, ordinary, sane people being willing to join political parties would help.
Another one would be restoring the gap between elite earnings and average earnings to closer to 20:1 rather than 200:1 or whatever it is now.
But a lot of this is human nature and too be repeated in the future.
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.
And yet you ignore the biggest of all. The Asian Grooming Scandal with somewhere between 100,000-,1,000,000 underage girls raped, abused, tortured, kidnapped and sometimes even murdered - by racist gangs across the country. And those that tried to speak out were silenced or even prosecuted
Not just the biggest scandal in recent British history but one of the greatest scandals in the modern history of the western world. It dwarfs any post office scandal (which I am sure is awful, in itself)
i guess we all suffer from psychological lacunation, in different ways and for different reasons, eh?
I did not miss it. I did not make a comprehensive list and did not intend to. That is what etc means. I could have added others. It is true that my list contained the ones that have been more in the media. That was rather the essence of the point I was making. They are just the tip of the iceberg. The grooming scandal has not had the publicity of the ones in my list. All of which also did not have publicity for many year or decades and only got there because of the huge sacrifice of a few who keep battering against the closed gates of officialdom and which you yawn at.
You rather make my point for me don't you?
PS Maybe you should be campaigning on behalf of those groomed, like I do for the group I campaign on behalf of?
“The grooming scandal has not had the publicity of the ones on my list”
Where do you live? Neptune??
After decades of being covered up the Asian grooming scandal has now - belatedly - had a ton of coverage right up to several TV dramatizations and multiple TV documentaries (tho I still think it deserves to loom far larger, given its enormous horror and incalculable scale)
Are you really claiming that “Equity Life” is has had more publicity than Rotherham and Rochdale and all the other dozens of towns afflicted by this?
Eh? Yes. Were you born yesterday? Equity Life is now in the past, but it was a huge media story and took up much more media, Parliamentary and Government time. It resulted in an amendment to an act of parliament to allow a PHSO investigation. It was much bigger. It probably shouldn't be but it was. The grooming scandal has not had the publicity it deserves, probably because those impacted have much less clout, being young exploited girls from social deprived backgrounds
And I am waiting for your reason as to your sentence as to 'we can all speculate why'?
If you are implying I am a racist I suggest you withdraw immediately because I don't have a racist bone in my body.
I assume that Equity Life hit a lot of people in the upper and middle and what used to be called the aspiring working classes with savings and who had newspapers precisely targeted to their needs and fears - DT, DM. And that had a lot with the scandal having decent coverage?
STOP!
Equitable Life please, as the Equitable Life Assurance Society. I know, I was working for them when the shit hit the fan.
Another shocking case of senior management hubris.
Sorry @Benpointer all my fault re the spelling. I just infected others with my error.
Bizarrely @Benpointer it is the one I have least excuse for getting wrong. Although I know very little about it, it does have some relevance to the campaign I am involved in because of the law change allowing the PHSO to investigate. I am in a scenario where there is no route of appeal and we have tried 3 times to get a law change to allow a PHSO investigation. We also thought there might be a loop hole in the current law (it was a stretch) to allow an investigation due to the Equitable Life provision (insurance companies). So I have read the name umpteen time.
With regard to all the others I have no knowledge whatsoever.
Proof of the pudding will be the next set of opinion polls. Alanis Morrissette predicts there'll be a swing...
I'm sitting in a tube carriage, work clothes and luggable. It's crowded. I'm looking at a Tube ad. It has a woman made out of legs and big eyes and the words "Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie".
From comments on GBNews (I know) it would appear that No. 10 approved the article, but asked Braverman to remove the Ulster part, which she didn't. That's in line with Sunak's own 'tough' stance on the Met. That would make sacking her very disproportionate.
Maybe they felt they had a duty of care to stop a minister of the Conservative & Unionist Party appearing so boneheadedly ignorant about a part of the Union? Not something that has invariably troubled them before tbf.
Lib Dems are most likely to prioritise having fun in day to day life. Tories appear to be miserable buggers.
#Funning here
I am getting increasingly more left-wing and Woke as I get older, but I actively deprecate the concept of fun and find it frivolous (arguably work is fun, which makes me...lucky?). There is something deeply wrong with me...
Quite notable that the best coverage of this (that I have seen at least) has come from headers and posters on this site. Thanks to you all for sharing your expert knowledge.
The specialist IT press (Computer Weekly, The Register etc) have been over the story for years, so has Private Eye.
Little coverage in more mainstream media until the inquiry though. As someone noted above, the Daily Mail has actually been quite good in recent weeks.
Also a good point by @TimS above, about the sub-postmasters not being an identifiable group, nor their grievance the result of a specific newsworthy event, compared to other scandals such as Hillsborough or Windrush. Small business owners with no union behind them. I’ll add that, in many of the cases, the local news was that the sub-postmaster, who everyone had a good word to say about, had turned out to be a crook.
It’s also good to see everyone on this forum who says they are a lawyer or an IT professional (groups way over-represented here compared to the general population!), is utterly horrified at how this scandal unfolded.
Comments
I know of one tenant who was threatened with eviction after they complained about the state of the windows, with the indirect but explicit threat of that 15% rent increase in the rest of the market. Was quickly advised by a solicitor friend to rinse the landlord in court and that is precisely what they have done.
The point I am making is that it is not just the PO who failed here. So did a lot of defence agents.
Dreary sub postmasters in their favourite cardigans, old grannies queuing for stamps and postal orders, double entry bookkeeping queries, the Caps Lock key getting stuck on a new fangled computer system.
And thousands of lives ruined, suicides, the state playing judge, juror and executioner with seeming impunity.
It writes itself.
When I started reading about this scandal I realised it had implications for my own life, particularly in respect of the relatively minor scuffles I have with authority, large corporations, and computery thingies. I've learned from it.
I am a much wiser and more cautious PtP as a result. I promise you, it is worth dabbling a bit in this scandal.
Try the YouTube clips for starters.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67377140
I would have thought leaking confidential information was 1st class misconduct at any bank but NatWest obviously think differently.
That's one massive bullet I dodged, right there...
Not just the biggest scandal in recent British history but one of the greatest scandals in the modern history of the western world. It dwarfs any post office scandal (which I am sure is awful, in itself)
i guess we all suffer from psychological lacunation, in different ways and for different reasons, eh?
(Great piece, Cyclefree, btw)
Having worked in IT all my life the PO scandal really sends shivers down my spine. I have seen many similar small-scale examples but this one literally destroyed lives. And the fuckers responsible will get off scot free, sadly.
I have to go now. Life beckons. But I'm really happy at the response that was triggered here.
It is the essence of story telling. You start off with a cruel but vivid human detail, a real person suffering as you describe - then maybe the moment of suicide, the swinging body in a homely old garage, the children weeping as they discover Dad hanging and dead, a letter from some fucker at the “Post Office” opened on a nearby table, you get the reader outraged and engaged, and you get them demanding to know WHY???
- and only then do you come in with the technical details, carefully diluted with more suffering, to keep it spicy
That’s what the narrative desperately requires. I’m quite serious
Oi! I contributed too! Let's have some respect for the lesser minds!
Whereas subpostmasters are dispersed, neither concentrated in one region nor representing one identity group. Not even one gender (see for example the WASPI campaign, or Me Too). Therefore anonymous. Not even strongly unionised - if this sort of mass miscarriage of justice had happened to rail workers who were members of the RMT do we think the government would have got away without making huge payouts by now? No way.
If you alienate the centre and your core you end up like Clegg did in 2015. Anyway the Tories aren't going to win back voters lost to Labour and the LDs since 2019 now unless inflation and interest rates fall dramatically, however if they win back voters lost to RefUK and DKs they can turn what currently looks like a Labour landslide into a more narrow defeat which is easier to rebuild from in opposition
Especially given the default rules are say nothing because revealing anything could be a criminal offence....
Whereas 5-9% are now voting RefUK and could come back with the right policies
You rather make my point for me don't you?
PS Maybe you should be campaigning on behalf of those groomed, like I do for the group I campaign on behalf of?
Thanks for telling me how disclosure works. 25 years in the legal profession have left me desperate for advice from you.
- Reform voters are saying Reform because they don't think the government is nasty enough, rather than because they feel let down over levelling up, cost of living, and the government record on immigration and crime; and that rhetoric will win them back
- There aren't thousands of wavering PB Tory types out there in the shires and home counties who might be considering voting Labour or LD or abstaining at the moment but who given a few months of calm and apparently sensible government wouldn't vote for the status quo because they're fairly comfortably off
I don't see any evidence that the disaffected Ref-curious voters will be bought off with rhetoric. Whereas I see plenty of evidence of Cameronian and Thatcherite types who would gladly find a flimsy excuse to come back home.
Seems like PO, more so than even many other large organisations, has a serious problem of overpromoting useless people, plus a toxic culture of opacity (plus what Alan Clark called 'the repressive conspiracy of the incompetent').
It's not unique to the PO by any means, but it has really been taken to extremes in terms of its impact on actual people; bankruptcies, prison terms, breakdowns and untimely deaths. I get why folk struggle to engage with it, but it is important. There are any number of organisations, public or private, this could yet happen with. It could happen to you or me.
Parenthetically, one thing I don't understand is the role of the CWU in this. I assume - maybe wrongly - that the PO has quite strong workers' unions, who I would have thought would have played more of a role in standing up for the SPMs here. I'd like to know more about this.
It is, however, interesting that in his list of UK scandals @kjh left out the biggest of all, by far, and we can all speculate why
Where do you live? Neptune??
After decades of being covered up the Asian grooming scandal has now - belatedly - had a ton of coverage right up to several TV dramatizations and multiple TV documentaries (tho I still think it deserves to loom far larger, given its enormous horror and incalculable scale)
Are you really claiming that “Equity Life” is has had more publicity than Rotherham and Rochdale and all the other dozens of towns afflicted by this?
And if the Tories lurched even further to the right, think of the effect on tactical voting among the non-Tory 70% of the electorate.
There is no way that chasing a political extreme is going to work under our electorate system. It should be so blindingly obvious that it doesn't need to be said.
After 13 years in power they are going to have tactical votes against them anyway so who cares, the higher the Tory voteshare however the less impact tactical votes have
They will have no problem filling her job.
And I am waiting for your reason as to your sentence as to 'we can all speculate why'?
If you are implying I am a racist I suggest you withdraw immediately because I don't have a racist bone in my body.
They also called for the inquiry to be adjourned until all the relevant documents were made available.
A lawyer for the Post Office strenuously denied the claims'
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/oct/11/post-office-accused-of-withholding-documents-from-it-scandal-inquiry
Remember that Labour replaced the Liberals from their left, while the SDP/Alliance/ChangeUK have all failed to replace either Tories or Labour from the centre.
Centrist voters aren't listening to the Tories now, because centrist voters value things like honesty and competency more than the details of policy. But voters to either extreme value ideological purity more highly.
There's a strategic logic for the Tories in ensuring that they hold onto their core voters now, and then move towards the centre when their core voters are tired enough of opposition to compromise on ideology, and when centrist voters are willing to give them a hearing.
For myself I have speedread the articles but not to the depth that they need, because they are not relevant to betting or politics or voting (see my ongoing rant about the nature of PB). This is rather sad, because the articles are part of a necessary process. My favorite saying in politics is "Quiet, calm deliberation disentangles any knot" (Harold Macmillan, quoting G&S) and the inquiry and commentary are part of that process. Eventually I hope it will lead to the surviving innocents being compensated, although I fear it will not.
Of course, if somebody with links to playwrights and media nudged some people to do a drama, that would help. If only PB had access to such people...
I wonder, was there a notion at work that "they're all a load of wrong uns"?
Still waiting for his explanation of his comment that seemed to imply I was a racists for leaving the grooming gangs off my list! Odd that Windrush was on my list but then logic has never been a strong point for @Leon
Any chance when the public inquiry is over that the government does something?
*The other lot do, but not so much.
As well as the race and political correctness angles, there were common factors with the Jimmy Savile scandal. The girls were often willing victims, had chaotic lifestyles at the margins of society, and were scattered across the country.
I'm not sure there is much commonality with the other scandals named, though, which seem qualitatively different.
Which seems to be what she has been engineering for some while. Easier to make a run for the top job when you aren't in Cabinet. If you are an utterly deluded fool, that is.
@Cyclefree has referenced the Aberfan disaster before, and when you read the wiki account, you read about the same sorts of thick as mince, malevolent, incompetents, like S. O. Davies MP, Lord Robens, the Charity Commission at the time, as you do in the Post Office scandal.
https://x.com/MattChorley/status/1722888009937191015?s=20
Lib Dems are most likely to prioritise having fun in day to day life. Tories appear to be miserable buggers.
#Funning here
The reason I think went something like this
1) Senior management nailed their trousers to the Horizon project
2) Horizon started showing fraud, apparently
3) Senior managers in legal nailed their trousers to the awesome levels of fraud detection and prosecution.
4) By the time that even the thickest fool could see the issue, too many senior managers had invested their reputations in Horizon being right. And obviously the reputation of a senior manager is worth more than the life of a member of the Head Count.
He kept the nutcase and kissed his hopes goodbye
He wasted his whole damn life appeasing right
And as the polls crashed down
He thought, "Well, isn't this nice?"
Equitable Life please, as the Equitable Life Assurance Society. I know, I was working for them when the shit hit the fan.
Another shocking case of senior management hubris.
If there is a criticism of the broader legal system, then perhaps it's there. There ought, in the face of compelling evidence, be easier routes to appeal miscarriages of justice.
That's what makes Himmler's Posen Speeches, in October 1943, so unusual. It was the first time that any top Nazi admitted bluntly what was being done.
Footage below of multiple successful USV hits.
https://twitter.com/Osinttechnical/status/1722894610651844843
It's similar (although not exactly the same) to the position Labour found itself in for the Brexit election of 2019 (which like the Cons now they knew they would lose) after the LDs embraced full fat Stop Brexit. Up to then Labour's policy had been a Soft 'jobs first' Brexit (aka the BRINO) but this became too risky after the LDs went Bonzo Remain. It'd leave the LDs in sole possession of the Remainer lane with the possibility of Remainers flocking to them and (shock horror) doing so well as to challenge Labour for Main Oppo Party status. This could not be countenanced hence the Labour pivot to Ref2 (which everyone knew meant Remain). They did this to take their Nightmare Scenario off the table despite knowing it could well lead to a worse defeat than if they had stuck with their previous policy.
Post Office admits 'abhorrent' racist slur was used to describe suspects in Horizon scandal
More than 700 former Post Office staff were wrongly prosecuted for theft and false accounting in what has been described as "the most widespread miscarriage of justice in UK history". Now, documents have come to light showing investigators were asked to group suspects based on race.
Black Post Office workers who were falsely accused in the Horizon scandal were classified using a racial slur, according to documents obtained by campaigners.
More than 700 former Post Office staff were wrongly prosecuted for theft and false accounting in what has been described as "the most widespread miscarriage of justice in UK history".
Post Office prosecutors tasked with investigating sub-postmasters were asked to group suspects based on racial features.
The document, thought to have been published in 2008, asked investigators if the suspects were "N*****d Types" - a racist term from the colonial era of the 1800s that refers to people of African descent.
Other categories on the document include "Chinese/Japanese types" and "Dark Skinned European Types".
Seema Misra, who was pregnant with her second child when she was jailed after being wrongly convicted of stealing from the Post Office she ran in Surrey, said she was angry at the new revelations.
https://news.sky.com/story/post-office-admits-abhorrent-racist-slur-was-used-to-describe-suspects-in-horizon-scandal-12890411
The hard work is appreciated here.
Of the mess they left when they went away
It's not fair, to deny me
Of the cross I bear that they gave to me
They, they, they oughta know...
To be honest it feels like UK is drowning in scandals (and inquiries into them). I just read this heartbreaking article about the bad blood scandal in the latest LRB: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n22/florence-sutcliffe-braithwaite/we-ve-messed-up-boys
It seems every time something like this happens the call goes up for “lessons to be learnt” yet up it pops again - albeit somewhere else and slightly different. I appreciate it may be a human reaction to CYA - but somehow you’ve got to have systems and a culture that prevent that (or at least prevent the worst aspects of it).
My not very highbrow contribution for the day.
Suella Braverman is an anagram of "Ms Venal Ruler - BAA !!".
(Let's see if animated GIFs work on PB)
More, ordinary, sane people being willing to join political parties would help.
Another one would be restoring the gap between elite earnings and average earnings to closer to 20:1 rather than 200:1 or whatever it is now.
But a lot of this is human nature and too be repeated in the future.
With regard to all the others I have no knowledge whatsoever.
It was quarter of a century ago.
Not something that has invariably troubled them before tbf.
Little coverage in more mainstream media until the inquiry though. As someone noted above, the Daily Mail has actually been quite good in recent weeks.
Also a good point by @TimS above, about the sub-postmasters not being an identifiable group, nor their grievance the result of a specific newsworthy event, compared to other scandals such as Hillsborough or Windrush. Small business owners with no union behind them. I’ll add that, in many of the cases, the local news was that the sub-postmaster, who everyone had a good word to say about, had turned out to be a crook.
It’s also good to see everyone on this forum who says they are a lawyer or an IT professional (groups way over-represented here compared to the general population!), is utterly horrified at how this scandal unfolded.