"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.
"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.
"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.
The combination of a Trump presidency, conservative Supreme Court, and a Republican Congress could potentially override the existing bars to changing the constitution.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/11/10/mike-johnson-rewrite-constitution-00126157 ..Article V of the Constitution provides a second path: If two-thirds of the states petition Congress, it must call a constitutional convention, where multiple amendments could be proposed at the same time. The Constitution does not specify how to select delegates from states to this convention, provides no limit on the scope of such a convention, and offers no guidance on how the convention would ratify these new amendments. Once the convention developed a method to pass amendments, the slate of amendments they selected would return to the states for consideration. In order to become law, three-fourths of states would need to approve the slate of amendments, either through their legislatures or through statewide conventions — at least in theory.
..Because Article V provides no restrictions on what a constitutional convention can consider or change, many legal scholars believe that adding such restrictions would be unconstitutional. “A convention likely cannot be limited at all by Congress or the states,” Russ Feingold — legal professor, former Wisconsin senator and current president of the American Constitution Society — wrote with Peter Prindiville in The Constitution in Jeopardy. “This clear, textual reading of Article V is supported by over a century of legal opinion from across the political spectrum.”
..As of now, the subject of these legal opinions remains entirely speculative. “Today, no such convention has ever been called,” Johnson said at the hearing, “but efforts have been underway in recent years to do so.
..COSA’s version of an Article V convention seems deliberately designed to leave liberals and progressives in the cold. The Constitution does not specify whether delegates would be appointed by state legislatures or popular vote, or how many votes each state would have. But COSA treats these questions as settled jurisprudence. State legislatures would choose delegates, which means the delegates, like state governments, would skew disproportionately conservative relative to the population. Each state would have only one vote, which means that Wyoming would have the same voting power as New York or California. A convention assembled under such rules would be orders of magnitude more conservative than the American electorate. “The worst case scenario is that [an Article V convention] puts all of our cherished constitutional rights and civil rights completely up for grabs,” Stephen Spaulding, vice president of Common Cause, testified at Johnson’s subcommittee hearing last month..
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.
There was, the Federation. But they have a mixed record in sticking up for their members
Braverman’s reference to triumphalist marches designed to intimidate and her comparison with marches in Ulster was illuminating and interesting.
Even if you don’t agree she made an arguable point. And advanced the debate
Personally I agree. Orange marches are an expression of community power and a flex in the face of Ulster Catholics. The same goes for 100,000 people chanting “from the river to the sea”
Again, the outcry over her words seems out of all proportion to what she actually said. She seems to have a knack for winding up people into a silly froth
It could serve her well in years to come. As Thatcher said “when people attack you personally you know you’re winning the argument”
Braverman’s reference to triumphalist marches designed to intimidate and her comparison with marches in Ulster was illuminating and interesting.
Even if you don’t agree she made an arguable point. And advanced the debate
Personally I agree. Orange marches are an expression of community power and a flex in the face of Ulster Catholics. The same goes for 100,000 people chanting “from the river to the sea”
Again, the outcry over her words seems out of all proportion to what she actually said. She seems to have a knack for winding up people into a silly froth
It could serve her well in years to come. As Thatcher said “when people attack you personally you know you’re winning the argument”
100k people aren't chanting "from the river to the sea".
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.
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 problem was that the PO management had loads of uncorrobarated reports of excessive speeding, so put the camera there with the explicit intention of making loads of prosecutions. The team installing the camera told them it wasn’t yet calibrated, but the management insisted that the prosecutions continued and persuaded that court that the calibration certificates for the equipment weren’t required. The judges, for some reason, agreed, even as defendants pointed out that the cameras were unreliable.
Braverman’s reference to triumphalist marches designed to intimidate and her comparison with marches in Ulster was illuminating and interesting.
Even if you don’t agree she made an arguable point. And advanced the debate
Personally I agree. Orange marches are an expression of community power and a flex in the face of Ulster Catholics. The same goes for 100,000 people chanting “from the river to the sea”
Again, the outcry over her words seems out of all proportion to what she actually said. She seems to have a knack for winding up people into a silly froth
It could serve her well in years to come. As Thatcher said “when people attack you personally you know you’re winning the argument”
Honestly, I think that is one of the dafter things Thatcher said - if indeed she did (she is often misattributed, like the 'any man over 30 on a bus' quote). Was e.g. Corbyn winning the argument when everyone on here was (correctly) calling him a dense, tiresome coot?
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?
The next stage is the councillors in those towns are no longer answerable to the Labour Party, but an Islam First party
Braverman’s reference to triumphalist marches designed to intimidate and her comparison with marches in Ulster was illuminating and interesting.
Even if you don’t agree she made an arguable point. And advanced the debate
Personally I agree. Orange marches are an expression of community power and a flex in the face of Ulster Catholics. The same goes for 100,000 people chanting “from the river to the sea”
Again, the outcry over her words seems out of all proportion to what she actually said. She seems to have a knack for winding up people into a silly froth
It could serve her well in years to come. As Thatcher said “when people attack you personally you know you’re winning the argument”
Honestly, I think that is one of the dafter things Thatcher said - if indeed she did (she is often misattributed, like the 'any man over 30 on a bus' quote). Was e.g. Corbyn winning the argument when everyone on here was (correctly) calling him a dense, tiresome coot?
She was definitely wrong on the bus thing
And I say that as someone who is right now on an extremely crowded and tiresome “rail replacement bus service” from Truro to Plymouth
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
Weasel words. Of everyone who posts regularly on this board, only you could be described as part of the media elite. You write for a magazine that has the ear of, indeed was formerly edited by, the top echelons of the governing party. If it wasn’t a free gig substantially below your pay grade I’m sure any thread header that you deigned to write would be eagerly published on here.
Yet, for reasons best known to yourself, you decide to indulge your oppression fantasies by moaning that an anonymous poster on a message board has not highlighted a matter you think should be highlighted. Doubtless we are part of an elitist conspiracy designed to keep any discussion of multiculturalism, your latest hobby horse, suppressed. Despite the fact you do, and often boast about, writing pieces far beyond the limited readership of discussions on here.
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.
More a matter of upsetting the Orange/Unionist side even more than it was after Mr Johnson's best efforts. The DUP and UUP could be critical in the balance after the next election.
Plus walking heavily footed all over another minister's petunia beds is not good practice, esp. when explicitly told not to do it by the PM an head of party.
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
Weasel words. Of everyone who posts regularly on this board, only you could be described as part of the media elite. You write for a magazine that has the ear of, indeed was formerly edited by, the top echelons of the governing party. If it wasn’t a free gig substantially below your pay grade I’m sure any thread header that you deigned to write would be eagerly published on here.
Yet, for reasons best known to yourself, you decide to indulge your oppression fantasies by moaning that an anonymous poster on a message board has not highlighted a matter you think should be highlighted. Doubtless we are part of an elitist conspiracy designed to keep any discussion of multiculturalism, your latest hobby horse, suppressed. Despite the fact you do, and often boast about, writing pieces far beyond the limited readership of discussions on here.
Er, what?
I merely noted an interesting omission in a list of major UK scandals - the biggest scandal of all
I’m not minded to have a massive debate about Rotherham right now. Too depressing
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?
The next stage is the councillors in those towns are no longer answerable to the Labour Party, but an Islam First party
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
Weasel words. Of everyone who posts regularly on this board, only you could be described as part of the media elite. You write for a magazine that has the ear of, indeed was formerly edited by, the top echelons of the governing party. If it wasn’t a free gig substantially below your pay grade I’m sure any thread header that you deigned to write would be eagerly published on here.
Yet, for reasons best known to yourself, you decide to indulge your oppression fantasies by moaning that an anonymous poster on a message board has not highlighted a matter you think should be highlighted. Doubtless we are part of an elitist conspiracy designed to keep any discussion of multiculturalism, your latest hobby horse, suppressed. Despite the fact you do, and often boast about, writing pieces far beyond the limited readership of discussions on here.
@leon also still hasn't said why we can all speculate why I missed that off my list. Presumably wanting to avoid a ban?
"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.
“Good Leaver” is defined differently depending on the contract but, normally, it’s anyone who is not a “Bad Leaver”. A “Bad Leaver” is normally defined (roughly) as anyone who leaves for a reason other than death, retirement, redundancy (usually),or a breach of comtract by the employer. There’s often a discretionary element too. But we’re not privy (in any sense of the word) to the contract so we’ve no way of knowing.
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?
The next stage is the councillors in those towns are no longer answerable to the Labour Party, but an Islam First party
They should call it United Kingdom Islamic Party.
Can you please change your avatar? I don’t object to the chosen flags it’s just that it looks exactly like @Beibheirli_C’s avatar and I therefore presume it’s her commenting and I’m constantly flummoxed by her abrupt alteration in personality
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
Weasel words. Of everyone who posts regularly on this board, only you could be described as part of the media elite. You write for a magazine that has the ear of, indeed was formerly edited by, the top echelons of the governing party. If it wasn’t a free gig substantially below your pay grade I’m sure any thread header that you deigned to write would be eagerly published on here.
Yet, for reasons best known to yourself, you decide to indulge your oppression fantasies by moaning that an anonymous poster on a message board has not highlighted a matter you think should be highlighted. Doubtless we are part of an elitist conspiracy designed to keep any discussion of multiculturalism, your latest hobby horse, suppressed. Despite the fact you do, and often boast about, writing pieces far beyond the limited readership of discussions on here.
Er, what?
I merely noted an interesting omission in a list of major UK scandals - the biggest scandal of all
I’m not minded to have a massive debate about Rotherham right now. Too depressing
No. You invited “speculation” as to why he didn’t do so. So come on then - speculate. Why do you think the omission occurred?
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
Weasel words. Of everyone who posts regularly on this board, only you could be described as part of the media elite. You write for a magazine that has the ear of, indeed was formerly edited by, the top echelons of the governing party. If it wasn’t a free gig substantially below your pay grade I’m sure any thread header that you deigned to write would be eagerly published on here.
Yet, for reasons best known to yourself, you decide to indulge your oppression fantasies by moaning that an anonymous poster on a message board has not highlighted a matter you think should be highlighted. Doubtless we are part of an elitist conspiracy designed to keep any discussion of multiculturalism, your latest hobby horse, suppressed. Despite the fact you do, and often boast about, writing pieces far beyond the limited readership of discussions on here.
Er, what?
I merely noted an interesting omission in a list of major UK scandals - the biggest scandal of all
I’m not minded to have a massive debate about Rotherham right now. Too depressing
No. You invited “speculation” as to why he didn’t do so. So come on then - speculate. Why do you think the omission occurred?
Because he probably forgot about it. Which says a lot in itself
"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.
“Good Leaver” is defined differently depending on the contract but, normally, it’s anyone who is not a “Bad Leaver”. A “Bad Leaver” is normally defined (roughly) as anyone who leaves for a reason other than death, retirement, redundancy (usually),or a breach of comtract by the employer. There’s often a discretionary element too. But we’re not privy (in any sense of the word) to the contract so we’ve no way of knowing.
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
Weasel words. Of everyone who posts regularly on this board, only you could be described as part of the media elite. You write for a magazine that has the ear of, indeed was formerly edited by, the top echelons of the governing party. If it wasn’t a free gig substantially below your pay grade I’m sure any thread header that you deigned to write would be eagerly published on here.
Yet, for reasons best known to yourself, you decide to indulge your oppression fantasies by moaning that an anonymous poster on a message board has not highlighted a matter you think should be highlighted. Doubtless we are part of an elitist conspiracy designed to keep any discussion of multiculturalism, your latest hobby horse, suppressed. Despite the fact you do, and often boast about, writing pieces far beyond the limited readership of discussions on here.
Er, what?
I merely noted an interesting omission in a list of major UK scandals - the biggest scandal of all
I’m not minded to have a massive debate about Rotherham right now. Too depressing
No. You invited “speculation” as to why he didn’t do so. So come on then - speculate. Why do you think the omission occurred?
Yes come on @leon. Stop being a cowardy custard, speculate. I want to know why I left it off the list.
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).
We obviously need an inquiry into why lessons are not being learnt.
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
Weasel words. Of everyone who posts regularly on this board, only you could be described as part of the media elite. You write for a magazine that has the ear of, indeed was formerly edited by, the top echelons of the governing party. If it wasn’t a free gig substantially below your pay grade I’m sure any thread header that you deigned to write would be eagerly published on here.
Yet, for reasons best known to yourself, you decide to indulge your oppression fantasies by moaning that an anonymous poster on a message board has not highlighted a matter you think should be highlighted. Doubtless we are part of an elitist conspiracy designed to keep any discussion of multiculturalism, your latest hobby horse, suppressed. Despite the fact you do, and often boast about, writing pieces far beyond the limited readership of discussions on here.
Er, what?
I merely noted an interesting omission in a list of major UK scandals - the biggest scandal of all
I’m not minded to have a massive debate about Rotherham right now. Too depressing
No. You invited “speculation” as to why he didn’t do so. So come on then - speculate. Why do you think the omission occurred?
Because he probably forgot about it. Which says a lot in itself
Oh come on that is pathetic. And what does it say about me if I forgot it? Come on say what you mean. Don't be such a wimp.
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
Weasel words. Of everyone who posts regularly on this board, only you could be described as part of the media elite. You write for a magazine that has the ear of, indeed was formerly edited by, the top echelons of the governing party. If it wasn’t a free gig substantially below your pay grade I’m sure any thread header that you deigned to write would be eagerly published on here.
Yet, for reasons best known to yourself, you decide to indulge your oppression fantasies by moaning that an anonymous poster on a message board has not highlighted a matter you think should be highlighted. Doubtless we are part of an elitist conspiracy designed to keep any discussion of multiculturalism, your latest hobby horse, suppressed. Despite the fact you do, and often boast about, writing pieces far beyond the limited readership of discussions on here.
Er, what?
I merely noted an interesting omission in a list of major UK scandals - the biggest scandal of all
I’m not minded to have a massive debate about Rotherham right now. Too depressing
No. You invited “speculation” as to why he didn’t do so. So come on then - speculate. Why do you think the omission occurred?
Yes come on @leon. Stop being a cowardy custard, speculate. I want to know why I left it off the list.
You know you want to.
Should we do some 'speculation' first and then ask him to say if we've hit the spot?
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
Weasel words. Of everyone who posts regularly on this board, only you could be described as part of the media elite. You write for a magazine that has the ear of, indeed was formerly edited by, the top echelons of the governing party. If it wasn’t a free gig substantially below your pay grade I’m sure any thread header that you deigned to write would be eagerly published on here.
Yet, for reasons best known to yourself, you decide to indulge your oppression fantasies by moaning that an anonymous poster on a message board has not highlighted a matter you think should be highlighted. Doubtless we are part of an elitist conspiracy designed to keep any discussion of multiculturalism, your latest hobby horse, suppressed. Despite the fact you do, and often boast about, writing pieces far beyond the limited readership of discussions on here.
Er, what?
I merely noted an interesting omission in a list of major UK scandals - the biggest scandal of all
I’m not minded to have a massive debate about Rotherham right now. Too depressing
No. You invited “speculation” as to why he didn’t do so. So come on then - speculate. Why do you think the omission occurred?
Because he probably forgot about it. Which says a lot in itself
Oh come on that is pathetic. And what does it say about me if I forgot it? Come on say what you mean. Don't be such a wimp.
It says a lot. That’s all I’m saying. And you know I’m right - as does everyone else - what is says is more important than what it doesn’t say. And yet both are important. You didn’t say it yet you said it. That goes without saying
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
Weasel words. Of everyone who posts regularly on this board, only you could be described as part of the media elite. You write for a magazine that has the ear of, indeed was formerly edited by, the top echelons of the governing party. If it wasn’t a free gig substantially below your pay grade I’m sure any thread header that you deigned to write would be eagerly published on here.
Yet, for reasons best known to yourself, you decide to indulge your oppression fantasies by moaning that an anonymous poster on a message board has not highlighted a matter you think should be highlighted. Doubtless we are part of an elitist conspiracy designed to keep any discussion of multiculturalism, your latest hobby horse, suppressed. Despite the fact you do, and often boast about, writing pieces far beyond the limited readership of discussions on here.
Er, what?
I merely noted an interesting omission in a list of major UK scandals - the biggest scandal of all
I’m not minded to have a massive debate about Rotherham right now. Too depressing
No. You invited “speculation” as to why he didn’t do so. So come on then - speculate. Why do you think the omission occurred?
Yes come on @leon. Stop being a cowardy custard, speculate. I want to know why I left it off the list.
You know you want to.
Should we do some 'speculation' first and then ask him to say if we've hit the spot?
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
Weasel words. Of everyone who posts regularly on this board, only you could be described as part of the media elite. You write for a magazine that has the ear of, indeed was formerly edited by, the top echelons of the governing party. If it wasn’t a free gig substantially below your pay grade I’m sure any thread header that you deigned to write would be eagerly published on here.
Yet, for reasons best known to yourself, you decide to indulge your oppression fantasies by moaning that an anonymous poster on a message board has not highlighted a matter you think should be highlighted. Doubtless we are part of an elitist conspiracy designed to keep any discussion of multiculturalism, your latest hobby horse, suppressed. Despite the fact you do, and often boast about, writing pieces far beyond the limited readership of discussions on here.
Er, what?
I merely noted an interesting omission in a list of major UK scandals - the biggest scandal of all
I’m not minded to have a massive debate about Rotherham right now. Too depressing
No. You invited “speculation” as to why he didn’t do so. So come on then - speculate. Why do you think the omission occurred?
Because he probably forgot about it. Which says a lot in itself
Oh come on that is pathetic. And what does it say about me if I forgot it? Come on say what you mean. Don't be such a wimp.
It says a lot. That’s all I’m saying. And you know I’m right - as does everyone else - what is says is more important than what it doesn’t say. And yet both are important. You didn’t say it yet you said it. That goes without saying
Well that was a load of drivel wasn't it? Backed yourself into a bit of a corner there.
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
Weasel words. Of everyone who posts regularly on this board, only you could be described as part of the media elite. You write for a magazine that has the ear of, indeed was formerly edited by, the top echelons of the governing party. If it wasn’t a free gig substantially below your pay grade I’m sure any thread header that you deigned to write would be eagerly published on here.
Yet, for reasons best known to yourself, you decide to indulge your oppression fantasies by moaning that an anonymous poster on a message board has not highlighted a matter you think should be highlighted. Doubtless we are part of an elitist conspiracy designed to keep any discussion of multiculturalism, your latest hobby horse, suppressed. Despite the fact you do, and often boast about, writing pieces far beyond the limited readership of discussions on here.
Er, what?
I merely noted an interesting omission in a list of major UK scandals - the biggest scandal of all
I’m not minded to have a massive debate about Rotherham right now. Too depressing
No. You invited “speculation” as to why he didn’t do so. So come on then - speculate. Why do you think the omission occurred?
Yes come on @leon. Stop being a cowardy custard, speculate. I want to know why I left it off the list.
You know you want to.
Should we do some 'speculation' first and then ask him to say if we've hit the spot?
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
Weasel words. Of everyone who posts regularly on this board, only you could be described as part of the media elite. You write for a magazine that has the ear of, indeed was formerly edited by, the top echelons of the governing party. If it wasn’t a free gig substantially below your pay grade I’m sure any thread header that you deigned to write would be eagerly published on here.
Yet, for reasons best known to yourself, you decide to indulge your oppression fantasies by moaning that an anonymous poster on a message board has not highlighted a matter you think should be highlighted. Doubtless we are part of an elitist conspiracy designed to keep any discussion of multiculturalism, your latest hobby horse, suppressed. Despite the fact you do, and often boast about, writing pieces far beyond the limited readership of discussions on here.
Er, what?
I merely noted an interesting omission in a list of major UK scandals - the biggest scandal of all
I’m not minded to have a massive debate about Rotherham right now. Too depressing
No. You invited “speculation” as to why he didn’t do so. So come on then - speculate. Why do you think the omission occurred?
Because he probably forgot about it. Which says a lot in itself
Oh come on that is pathetic. And what does it say about me if I forgot it? Come on say what you mean. Don't be such a wimp.
It says a lot. That’s all I’m saying. And you know I’m right - as does everyone else - what is says is more important than what it doesn’t say. And yet both are important. You didn’t say it yet you said it. That goes without saying
Well that was a load of drivel wasn't it? Backed yourself into a bit of a corner there.
Or I’m just bored on a bus and mildly winding you up? Consider that possibility
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
Weasel words. Of everyone who posts regularly on this board, only you could be described as part of the media elite. You write for a magazine that has the ear of, indeed was formerly edited by, the top echelons of the governing party. If it wasn’t a free gig substantially below your pay grade I’m sure any thread header that you deigned to write would be eagerly published on here.
Yet, for reasons best known to yourself, you decide to indulge your oppression fantasies by moaning that an anonymous poster on a message board has not highlighted a matter you think should be highlighted. Doubtless we are part of an elitist conspiracy designed to keep any discussion of multiculturalism, your latest hobby horse, suppressed. Despite the fact you do, and often boast about, writing pieces far beyond the limited readership of discussions on here.
Er, what?
I merely noted an interesting omission in a list of major UK scandals - the biggest scandal of all
I’m not minded to have a massive debate about Rotherham right now. Too depressing
No. You invited “speculation” as to why he didn’t do so. So come on then - speculate. Why do you think the omission occurred?
Because he probably forgot about it. Which says a lot in itself
Oh come on that is pathetic. And what does it say about me if I forgot it? Come on say what you mean. Don't be such a wimp.
It says a lot. That’s all I’m saying. And you know I’m right - as does everyone else - what is says is more important than what it doesn’t say. And yet both are important. You didn’t say it yet you said it. That goes without saying
Well that was a load of drivel wasn't it? Backed yourself into a bit of a corner there.
Or I’m just bored on a bus and mildly winding you up? Consider that possibility
LOL Digging a hole and desperately trying to escape.
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
Weasel words. Of everyone who posts regularly on this board, only you could be described as part of the media elite. You write for a magazine that has the ear of, indeed was formerly edited by, the top echelons of the governing party. If it wasn’t a free gig substantially below your pay grade I’m sure any thread header that you deigned to write would be eagerly published on here.
Yet, for reasons best known to yourself, you decide to indulge your oppression fantasies by moaning that an anonymous poster on a message board has not highlighted a matter you think should be highlighted. Doubtless we are part of an elitist conspiracy designed to keep any discussion of multiculturalism, your latest hobby horse, suppressed. Despite the fact you do, and often boast about, writing pieces far beyond the limited readership of discussions on here.
Er, what?
I merely noted an interesting omission in a list of major UK scandals - the biggest scandal of all
I’m not minded to have a massive debate about Rotherham right now. Too depressing
No. You invited “speculation” as to why he didn’t do so. So come on then - speculate. Why do you think the omission occurred?
Because he probably forgot about it. Which says a lot in itself
Oh come on that is pathetic. And what does it say about me if I forgot it? Come on say what you mean. Don't be such a wimp.
It says a lot. That’s all I’m saying. And you know I’m right - as does everyone else - what is says is more important than what it doesn’t say. And yet both are important. You didn’t say it yet you said it. That goes without saying
Well that was a load of drivel wasn't it? Backed yourself into a bit of a corner there.
Or I’m just bored on a bus and mildly winding you up? Consider that possibility
LOL Digging a hole and desperately trying to escape.
Yes. That’s me alright. Desperate. I might actually ask the driver to stop the bus at Bodmin Parkway so I can think of a way out of this fiendish argumentational cul de sac
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).
We obviously need an inquiry into why lessons are not being learnt.
Neither inquiries nor lesson learning can begin to make up for the qualities of competence, integrity, justice and honesty. Nothing at all works properly without them.
I think it is because ordinary centrists discern the possibility, however slight, that Starmer gets this that he is a zillion points ahead in the polls.
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.
On here’s a magnificently boring debate which might help me make it through to Liskeard
Which UK county has the best flag?
I’m going with Cornwall for now as it’s basically the only one I know (apart from the inferior Devon offshoot) and it really is quite good. Simple and expressive and iconic
"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.
I'll do fucking up massively and talking bullshit about clients, while drunk to journalists, for £1.2m base pay.
I have strived - a bit - to comprehend the “Post Office scandal” and be suitably outraged - but I can’t. My eyes just glaze over. I suppress a yawn and move swiftly on
I think it’s the branding: I associate the words “post office” with standing in slow queues in fusty buildings behind old ladies sending packages to Newent. Or the place you get obscure forms on a drizzly Tuesday
They should have called it “the Fujitsu Attack” or the “Royal Mail Murders” and I’d pay more attention
Tut
Leon: people committed suicide. An innocent woman was jailed while pregnant. A 19 year old was jailed. People were bankrupted, lost homes, businesses. Marriages were destroyed. Families were shunned with children in school taunted about their dads being crooks. The human consequences of what happened were awful.
What the Post Office did to these people was evil. It was done by professionals to save their face, to make money, to get promotions and even when faced with the consequences, few have had the human decency to apologise.
This is above all a very human story. As all such scandals are - the human behaviours which lead to the wrongdoing and the consequences for other human beings.
That is the one thing I have learnt from my decades doing this stuff and the one thing I would like to get across to people reading this. If we forget that we lose sight of why this matters.
Braverman’s reference to triumphalist marches designed to intimidate and her comparison with marches in Ulster was illuminating and interesting.
Even if you don’t agree she made an arguable point. And advanced the debate
Personally I agree. Orange marches are an expression of community power and a flex in the face of Ulster Catholics. The same goes for 100,000 people chanting “from the river to the sea”
Again, the outcry over her words seems out of all proportion to what she actually said. She seems to have a knack for winding up people into a silly froth
It could serve her well in years to come. As Thatcher said “when people attack you personally you know you’re winning the argument”
100k people aren't chanting "from the river to the sea".
On here’s a magnificently boring debate which might help me make it through to Liskeard
Which UK county has the best flag?
I’m going with Cornwall for now as it’s basically the only one I know (apart from the inferior Devon offshoot) and it really is quite good. Simple and expressive and iconic
On here’s a magnificently boring debate which might help me make it through to Liskeard
Which UK county has the best flag?
I’m going with Cornwall for now as it’s basically the only one I know (apart from the inferior Devon offshoot) and it really is quite good. Simple and expressive and iconic
"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.
I'll do fucking up massively and talking bullshit about clients, while drunk to journalists, for £1.2m base pay.
On here’s a magnificently boring debate which might help me make it through to Liskeard
Which UK county has the best flag?
I’m going with Cornwall for now as it’s basically the only one I know (apart from the inferior Devon offshoot) and it really is quite good. Simple and expressive and iconic
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.
More a matter of upsetting the Orange/Unionist side even more than it was after Mr Johnson's best efforts. The DUP and UUP could be critical in the balance after the next election.
Plus walking heavily footed all over another minister's petunia beds is not good practice, esp. when explicitly told not to do it by the PM an head of party.
I suspect she's spent the square root of fuck all thinking about NI and just had a fuzzy blob in her head telling her that PITA NI = SF = IRA = Gaza Marchers = Hamas.
On here’s a magnificently boring debate which might help me make it through to Liskeard
Which UK county has the best flag?
I’m going with Cornwall for now as it’s basically the only one I know (apart from the inferior Devon offshoot) and it really is quite good. Simple and expressive and iconic
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
Weasel words. Of everyone who posts regularly on this board, only you could be described as part of the media elite. You write for a magazine that has the ear of, indeed was formerly edited by, the top echelons of the governing party. If it wasn’t a free gig substantially below your pay grade I’m sure any thread header that you deigned to write would be eagerly published on here.
Yet, for reasons best known to yourself, you decide to indulge your oppression fantasies by moaning that an anonymous poster on a message board has not highlighted a matter you think should be highlighted. Doubtless we are part of an elitist conspiracy designed to keep any discussion of multiculturalism, your latest hobby horse, suppressed. Despite the fact you do, and often boast about, writing pieces far beyond the limited readership of discussions on here.
Er, what?
I merely noted an interesting omission in a list of major UK scandals - the biggest scandal of all
I’m not minded to have a massive debate about Rotherham right now. Too depressing
No. You invited “speculation” as to why he didn’t do so. So come on then - speculate. Why do you think the omission occurred?
Yes come on @leon. Stop being a cowardy custard, speculate. I want to know why I left it off the list.
You know you want to.
Should we do some 'speculation' first and then ask him to say if we've hit the spot?
YES
And while we're at it, because it'll be a nice complementary, we can speculate why you're wanting us to speculate about how someone could possibly fail to bring the 'Asian grooming scandal' into each and every post about bad things that have happened in the UK (or indeed when the topic is something else, eg fiscal policy).
I'll sit it out, though, because I know both answers.
I agree the headers we've had on this scandal are enlightening and contrasts with how poorly covered the issue is in the mainstream press.
It should be pretty simple for the government to:
1) Invalidate all prior prosecutions from the Post Office. The scandal is so widespread there is no need for a detailed examination of each case - the assumption should once again be innocence unless proven guilty again with what we know today.
2) Properly compensate everyone prosecuted.
3) Set-up an independent investigatory team with the task of prosecuting anyone who committed a crime in conjunction with this miscarriage of justice.
4) Fire the entire Post office Board and senior leadership and replacing them with independent voices given the task of cleaning out the stables, including actively helping with prosecutions against the former leadership of the Post Office.
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
That is exactly what Nick Wallis does in his book. He starts with the story of Tracy - a 19 year old, engaged, taking on a role which she was enthused about - and being betrayed by an organisation she trusted.
I agree the headers we've had on this scandal are enlightening and contrasts with how poorly covered the issue is in the mainstream press.
It should be pretty simple for the government to:
1) Invalidate all prior prosecutions from the Post Office. The scandal is so widespread there is no need for a detailed examination of each case - the assumption should once again be innocence unless proven guilty again with what we know today.
2) Properly compensate everyone prosecuted.
3) Set-up an independent investigatory team with the task of prosecuting anyone who committed a crime in conjunction with this miscarriage of justice.
4) Fire the entire Post office Board and senior leadership and replacing them with independent voices given the task of cleaning out the stables, including actively helping with prosecutions against the former leadership of the Post Office.
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
Weasel words. Of everyone who posts regularly on this board, only you could be described as part of the media elite. You write for a magazine that has the ear of, indeed was formerly edited by, the top echelons of the governing party. If it wasn’t a free gig substantially below your pay grade I’m sure any thread header that you deigned to write would be eagerly published on here.
Yet, for reasons best known to yourself, you decide to indulge your oppression fantasies by moaning that an anonymous poster on a message board has not highlighted a matter you think should be highlighted. Doubtless we are part of an elitist conspiracy designed to keep any discussion of multiculturalism, your latest hobby horse, suppressed. Despite the fact you do, and often boast about, writing pieces far beyond the limited readership of discussions on here.
Er, what?
I merely noted an interesting omission in a list of major UK scandals - the biggest scandal of all
I’m not minded to have a massive debate about Rotherham right now. Too depressing
No. You invited “speculation” as to why he didn’t do so. So come on then - speculate. Why do you think the omission occurred?
Yes come on @leon. Stop being a cowardy custard, speculate. I want to know why I left it off the list.
You know you want to.
Should we do some 'speculation' first and then ask him to say if we've hit the spot?
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
That is exactly what Nick Wallis does in his book. He starts with the story of Tracy - a 19 year old, engaged, taking on a role which she was enthused about - and being betrayed by an organisation she trusted.
Read it.
I’ve done a first skim-read of it, and am now reading through it again more slowly and in detail. It’s utterly horrifying.
Plenty of human stories, with professional and systemical indifference to them - just imagine what a writer from the best-selling weekly news magazine could produce if he got his head around it?
IanB2 - Thanks for your explanation of the price differentials for postage in the US and the UK.
(Two more details on postage costs in the US: Pre-sorted first-class mail costs less to send. Charities are charged less, so the Salvation Army can send me multiple letters over the year, asking for money.)
Braverman’s reference to triumphalist marches designed to intimidate and her comparison with marches in Ulster was illuminating and interesting.
Even if you don’t agree she made an arguable point. And advanced the debate
Personally I agree. Orange marches are an expression of community power and a flex in the face of Ulster Catholics. The same goes for 100,000 people chanting “from the river to the sea”
Again, the outcry over her words seems out of all proportion to what she actually said. She seems to have a knack for winding up people into a silly froth
It could serve her well in years to come. As Thatcher said “when people attack you personally you know you’re winning the argument”
100k people aren't chanting "from the river to the sea".
Up To Our Knees in Fenian Blood the equivalent..
That is a bit more direct and no-nonsense, you have to say. No airy fairy lyrical ambiguity there.
I agree the headers we've had on this scandal are enlightening and contrasts with how poorly covered the issue is in the mainstream press.
It should be pretty simple for the government to:
1) Invalidate all prior prosecutions from the Post Office. The scandal is so widespread there is no need for a detailed examination of each case - the assumption should once again be innocence unless proven guilty again with what we know today.
2) Properly compensate everyone prosecuted.
3) Set-up an independent investigatory team with the task of prosecuting anyone who committed a crime in conjunction with this miscarriage of justice.
4) Fire the entire Post office Board and senior leadership and replacing them with independent voices given the task of cleaning out the stables, including actively helping with prosecutions against the former leadership of the Post Office.
How do we vote for the Ratters party?
Hmm - the above is the logical, sensible, decent response.....
Not enough crucifixion's. But I'm in a Crassus mood.
Yorkshire deserves a mensh cos its one of the few most people won't have to look up (like Cornwall tbf).
Middlesex has the triple-sabre, which is pretty cool, though I'm sceptical about the very concept of 'Middlesex' as a thing (this isn't me parlaying vexillology into a trans debate btw).
I have strived - a bit - to comprehend the “Post Office scandal” and be suitably outraged - but I can’t. My eyes just glaze over. I suppress a yawn and move swiftly on
I think it’s the branding: I associate the words “post office” with standing in slow queues in fusty buildings behind old ladies sending packages to Newent. Or the place you get obscure forms on a drizzly Tuesday
They should have called it “the Fujitsu Attack” or the “Royal Mail Murders” and I’d pay more attention
Tut
Leon: people committed suicide. An innocent woman was jailed while pregnant. A 19 year old was jailed. People were bankrupted, lost homes, businesses. Marriages were destroyed. Families were shunned with children in school taunted about their dads being crooks. The human consequences of what happened were awful.
What the Post Office did to these people was evil. It was done by professionals to save their face, to make money, to get promotions and even when faced with the consequences, few have had the human decency to apologise.
This is above all a very human story. As all such scandals are - the human behaviours which lead to the wrongdoing and the consequences for other human beings.
That is the one thing I have learnt from my decades doing this stuff and the one thing I would like to get across to people reading this. If we forget that we lose sight of why this matters.
Could we see possible jail sentences for people involved in this? Would the required evidence be there to convict individuals? Part of the problem with a 'story' I suggest is the need for a baddie - crude as it sounds.
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
Weasel words. Of everyone who posts regularly on this board, only you could be described as part of the media elite. You write for a magazine that has the ear of, indeed was formerly edited by, the top echelons of the governing party. If it wasn’t a free gig substantially below your pay grade I’m sure any thread header that you deigned to write would be eagerly published on here.
Yet, for reasons best known to yourself, you decide to indulge your oppression fantasies by moaning that an anonymous poster on a message board has not highlighted a matter you think should be highlighted. Doubtless we are part of an elitist conspiracy designed to keep any discussion of multiculturalism, your latest hobby horse, suppressed. Despite the fact you do, and often boast about, writing pieces far beyond the limited readership of discussions on here.
Er, what?
I merely noted an interesting omission in a list of major UK scandals - the biggest scandal of all
I’m not minded to have a massive debate about Rotherham right now. Too depressing
No. You invited “speculation” as to why he didn’t do so. So come on then - speculate. Why do you think the omission occurred?
Yes come on @leon. Stop being a cowardy custard, speculate. I want to know why I left it off the list.
You know you want to.
Should we do some 'speculation' first and then ask him to say if we've hit the spot?
YES
And while we're at it, because it'll be a nice complementary, we can speculate why you're wanting us to speculate about how someone could possibly fail to bring the 'Asian grooming scandal' into each and every post about bad things that have happened in the UK (or indeed when the topic is something else, eg fiscal policy).
I'll sit it out, though, because I know both answers.
I agree the headers we've had on this scandal are enlightening and contrasts with how poorly covered the issue is in the mainstream press.
It should be pretty simple for the government to:
1) Invalidate all prior prosecutions from the Post Office. The scandal is so widespread there is no need for a detailed examination of each case - the assumption should once again be innocence unless proven guilty again with what we know today.
2) Properly compensate everyone prosecuted.
3) Set-up an independent investigatory team with the task of prosecuting anyone who committed a crime in conjunction with this miscarriage of justice.
4) Fire the entire Post office Board and senior leadership and replacing them with independent voices given the task of cleaning out the stables, including actively helping with prosecutions against the former leadership of the Post Office.
Last night I watched the National Geographic program about the day of the Kennedy assassination 60 years ago in 12 days time (I highly recommend it by the way). Inevitably there were bits of Kennedy rhetoric in it. "We don't do these things because they are easy but because they are hard", he said of going to the moon.
Untangling and sorting this appalling mess definitely falls into the "hard" category rather than the "simple" one to me, but that absolutely does not mean the government should not do their upmost to fix this mess in a body they are responsible for.
Where do we find politicians with the moral certitude that JFK espoused? Not in this government, that is for sure.
I have strived - a bit - to comprehend the “Post Office scandal” and be suitably outraged - but I can’t. My eyes just glaze over. I suppress a yawn and move swiftly on
I think it’s the branding: I associate the words “post office” with standing in slow queues in fusty buildings behind old ladies sending packages to Newent. Or the place you get obscure forms on a drizzly Tuesday
They should have called it “the Fujitsu Attack” or the “Royal Mail Murders” and I’d pay more attention
Tut
Leon: people committed suicide. An innocent woman was jailed while pregnant. A 19 year old was jailed. People were bankrupted, lost homes, businesses. Marriages were destroyed. Families were shunned with children in school taunted about their dads being crooks. The human consequences of what happened were awful.
What the Post Office did to these people was evil. It was done by professionals to save their face, to make money, to get promotions and even when faced with the consequences, few have had the human decency to apologise.
This is above all a very human story. As all such scandals are - the human behaviours which lead to the wrongdoing and the consequences for other human beings.
That is the one thing I have learnt from my decades doing this stuff and the one thing I would like to get across to people reading this. If we forget that we lose sight of why this matters.
Could we see possible jail sentences for people involved in this? Would the required evidence be there to convict individuals? Part of the problem with a 'story' I suggest is the need for a baddie - crude as it sounds.
Several people have IMHO perjured themselves at the inquiry itself. Before that, many senior managers were having internal discussion admitting that the Horizon evidence was flimsy at best, and totally wrong at worst, before testifying in prosecutions that it was infallible.
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.
Alg's analogy works fine.
You do have a point though. Part of the problem was that the PO expected to find fraud so wasn't surprised when Horizon suggested it. Your example comes under strain however when you look at the sheer numbers involved. Even in your Council/Speeding example, you would think that somebody might smell a rat when the numbers exceeded all reasonable expectations.
Long before I became acquainted with the details I wondered why common sense did not alert the PO to the possibility that something somewhere might be terribly wrong, and needed checking. Now I appreciate that it was more than a failure of common sense. It was mischief, largely driven by self-interest.
At one point the PO did appoint an organistion to investigate the matter honestly to see if there was any possible explanation other than that the PO had an extraordinary number of dishonest Subpostmasters. That firm was called Second Sight. It quickly established that there were problems with Horizon. The PO ignored its findings, began to distance itself from the firm, and in due course dispensed with their services. In short, the PO refused to believe what it was saying once it was clear it was saying something the PO didn't want to hear.
This is why I have no sympathy for the scum. They knew what they were doing. They doubled down on their lies. Prison is too good for them.
This is interesting. I don't know what his plans are - is he stepping down at the next election? He sounds closer to Starmer than to the Sunak-Braverman iteration of the Tory party.
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.
There was, the Federation. But they have a mixed record in sticking up for their members
They were on the side of Post Office management so were utterly useless at helping their members.
I have strived - a bit - to comprehend the “Post Office scandal” and be suitably outraged - but I can’t. My eyes just glaze over. I suppress a yawn and move swiftly on
I think it’s the branding: I associate the words “post office” with standing in slow queues in fusty buildings behind old ladies sending packages to Newent. Or the place you get obscure forms on a drizzly Tuesday
They should have called it “the Fujitsu Attack” or the “Royal Mail Murders” and I’d pay more attention
Tut
Leon: people committed suicide. An innocent woman was jailed while pregnant. A 19 year old was jailed. People were bankrupted, lost homes, businesses. Marriages were destroyed. Families were shunned with children in school taunted about their dads being crooks. The human consequences of what happened were awful.
What the Post Office did to these people was evil. It was done by professionals to save their face, to make money, to get promotions and even when faced with the consequences, few have had the human decency to apologise.
This is above all a very human story. As all such scandals are - the human behaviours which lead to the wrongdoing and the consequences for other human beings.
That is the one thing I have learnt from my decades doing this stuff and the one thing I would like to get across to people reading this. If we forget that we lose sight of why this matters.
Could we see possible jail sentences for people involved in this? Would the required evidence be there to convict individuals? Part of the problem with a 'story' I suggest is the need for a baddie - crude as it sounds.
Several people have IMHO purjured themselves at the inquiry itself. Before that, many senior managers were having internal discussion admitting that the Horizon evidence was flimsy at best, and totally wrong at worst, before testifying in prosecutions that it was infallible.
Yes, there have been numerous clear cut examples of perjury at the Inquiry itself.
The broader crime of perverting the course of justice seems more appropriate for the CEO, Paula Vennels, and her Board.
I like Kirkcudbirghtshire's flag, though obvs discounted for not-English reasons:
No I specifically said “UK flags” not English flags
Yes I like that one. Cool and clever and unusual
It's quite a new one; I'm a regular visitor to the place and it's only recently started appearing - according to wiki was made official in 2016, and reflects a traditional cloth check of Galloway and the cross of St Cuthbert (the 'Cudbright' bit of the name).
I was surprised to learn that the Lincolnshire flag is so recent - 2005, as it is flown everywhere, certainly in north Lincs anyway (perhaps in response to the more strident county identity of its northern neighbour).
I like Kirkcudbirghtshire's flag, though obvs discounted for not-English reasons:
No I specifically said “UK flags” not English flags
Yes I like that one. Cool and clever and unusual
It's quite a new one; I'm a regular visitor to the place and it's only recently started appearing - according to wiki was made official in 2016, and reflects a traditional cloth check of Galloway and the cross of St Cuthbert (the 'Cudbright' bit of the name).
I was surprised to learn that the Lincolnshire flag is so recent - 2005, as it is flown everywhere, certainly in north Lincs anyway (perhaps in response to the more strident county identity of its northern neighbour).
Yes many if not most of them are new (Cornwall is unusual in having such a relatively ancient flag - reflecting its long identity as a different place)
But I thoroughly approve. I like regional differences - I like going from somewhere to somewhere else entirely and knowing this partly because the flags change
How boring to just shrug and say “meh we don’t have a flag”
I accept this is not the most pressing issue of the day but it has successfully got me over the Tamar in a bus without dying of boredom
I like Kirkcudbirghtshire's flag, though obvs discounted for not-English reasons:
No I specifically said “UK flags” not English flags
Yes I like that one. Cool and clever and unusual
It's quite a new one; I'm a regular visitor to the place and it's only recently started appearing - according to wiki was made official in 2016, and reflects a traditional cloth check of Galloway and the cross of St Cuthbert (the 'Cudbright' bit of the name).
I was surprised to learn that the Lincolnshire flag is so recent - 2005, as it is flown everywhere, certainly in north Lincs anyway (perhaps in response to the more strident county identity of its northern neighbour).
Yes many if not most of them are new (Cornwall is unusual in having such a relatively ancient flag - reflecting its long identity as a different place)
But I thoroughly approve. I like regional differences - I like going from somewhere to somewhere else entirely and knowing this partly because the flags change
How boring to just shrug and say “meh we don’t have a flag”
I accept this is not the most pressing issue of the day but it has successfully got me over the Tamar in a bus without dying of boredom
The counties that used to be kingdoms, Kent, Essex, have quite ancient flags. Yorkshire's White Rose too. Many of the modern ones blatantly rip off St Piran's.
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
Weasel words. Of everyone who posts regularly on this board, only you could be described as part of the media elite. You write for a magazine that has the ear of, indeed was formerly edited by, the top echelons of the governing party. If it wasn’t a free gig substantially below your pay grade I’m sure any thread header that you deigned to write would be eagerly published on here.
Yet, for reasons best known to yourself, you decide to indulge your oppression fantasies by moaning that an anonymous poster on a message board has not highlighted a matter you think should be highlighted. Doubtless we are part of an elitist conspiracy designed to keep any discussion of multiculturalism, your latest hobby horse, suppressed. Despite the fact you do, and often boast about, writing pieces far beyond the limited readership of discussions on here.
I have written quite a few articles about the various child abuse scandals, the IICSA reports and, once again, the government's failure to do anything. @Leon goes on about Rotherham but the child abuse scandals are about much more than Rotherham.
I agree the headers we've had on this scandal are enlightening and contrasts with how poorly covered the issue is in the mainstream press.
It should be pretty simple for the government to:
1) Invalidate all prior prosecutions from the Post Office. The scandal is so widespread there is no need for a detailed examination of each case - the assumption should once again be innocence unless proven guilty again with what we know today.
2) Properly compensate everyone prosecuted.
3) Set-up an independent investigatory team with the task of prosecuting anyone who committed a crime in conjunction with this miscarriage of justice.
4) Fire the entire Post office Board and senior leadership and replacing them with independent voices given the task of cleaning out the stables, including actively helping with prosecutions against the former leadership of the Post Office.
"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.
I'll do fucking up massively and talking bullshit about clients, while drunk to journalists, for £1.2m base pay.
I agree the headers we've had on this scandal are enlightening and contrasts with how poorly covered the issue is in the mainstream press.
It should be pretty simple for the government to:
1) Invalidate all prior prosecutions from the Post Office. The scandal is so widespread there is no need for a detailed examination of each case - the assumption should once again be innocence unless proven guilty again with what we know today.
2) Properly compensate everyone prosecuted.
3) Set-up an independent investigatory team with the task of prosecuting anyone who committed a crime in conjunction with this miscarriage of justice.
4) Fire the entire Post office Board and senior leadership and replacing them with independent voices given the task of cleaning out the stables, including actively helping with prosecutions against the former leadership of the Post Office.
Agreed. And....
5) Return to the Subpostmasters all the money extorted from them by the PO's ill-founded investigations, including of course interest.
There is no indication yet that the PO intends to do any such thing.
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
That is exactly what Nick Wallis does in his book. He starts with the story of Tracy - a 19 year old, engaged, taking on a role which she was enthused about - and being betrayed by an organisation she trusted.
Read it.
I’ve done a first skim-read of it, and am now reading through it again more slowly and in detail. It’s utterly horrifying.
Plenty of human stories, with professional and systemical indifference to them - just imagine what a writer from the best-selling weekly news magazine could produce if he got his head around it?
Serious journalism requires sustained hard work. It's the sustained bit that's usually the problem.
Comments
#RegulatoryRequirement
I can self authorise.
Here
You
Away
Fair
Me
All as a sort of 'ouergh' sound. Great song though.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/11/10/mike-johnson-rewrite-constitution-00126157
..Article V of the Constitution provides a second path: If two-thirds of the states petition Congress, it must call a constitutional convention, where multiple amendments could be proposed at the same time. The Constitution does not specify how to select delegates from states to this convention, provides no limit on the scope of such a convention, and offers no guidance on how the convention would ratify these new amendments. Once the convention developed a method to pass amendments, the slate of amendments they selected would return to the states for consideration. In order to become law, three-fourths of states would need to approve the slate of amendments, either through their legislatures or through statewide conventions — at least in theory.
..Because Article V provides no restrictions on what a constitutional convention can consider or change, many legal scholars believe that adding such restrictions would be unconstitutional. “A convention likely cannot be limited at all by Congress or the states,” Russ Feingold — legal professor, former Wisconsin senator and current president of the American Constitution Society — wrote with Peter Prindiville in The Constitution in Jeopardy. “This clear, textual reading of Article V is supported by over a century of legal opinion from across the political spectrum.”
..As of now, the subject of these legal opinions remains entirely speculative. “Today, no such convention has ever been called,” Johnson said at the hearing, “but efforts have been underway in recent years to do so.
..COSA’s version of an Article V convention seems deliberately designed to leave liberals and progressives in the cold. The Constitution does not specify whether delegates would be appointed by state legislatures or popular vote, or how many votes each state would have. But COSA treats these questions as settled jurisprudence. State legislatures would choose delegates, which means the delegates, like state governments, would skew disproportionately conservative relative to the population. Each state would have only one vote, which means that Wyoming would have the same voting power as New York or California. A convention assembled under such rules would be orders of magnitude more conservative than the American electorate. “The worst case scenario is that [an Article V convention] puts all of our cherished constitutional rights and civil rights completely up for grabs,” Stephen Spaulding, vice president of Common Cause, testified at Johnson’s subcommittee hearing last month..
Even if you don’t agree she made an arguable point. And advanced the debate
Personally I agree. Orange marches are an expression of community power and a flex in the face of Ulster Catholics. The same goes for 100,000 people chanting “from the river to the sea”
Again, the outcry over her words seems out of all proportion to what she actually said. She seems to have a knack for winding up people into a silly froth
It could serve her well in years to come. As Thatcher said “when people attack you personally you know you’re winning the argument”
And I say that as someone who is right now on an extremely crowded and tiresome “rail replacement bus service” from Truro to Plymouth
Pity me
Yet, for reasons best known to yourself, you decide to indulge your oppression fantasies by moaning that an anonymous poster on a message board has not highlighted a matter you think should be highlighted. Doubtless we are part of an elitist conspiracy designed to keep any discussion of multiculturalism, your latest hobby horse, suppressed. Despite the fact you do, and often boast about, writing pieces far beyond the limited readership of discussions on here.
Plus walking heavily footed all over another minister's petunia beds is not good practice, esp. when explicitly told not to do it by the PM an head of party.
I merely noted an interesting omission in a list of major UK scandals - the biggest scandal of all
I’m not minded to have a massive debate about Rotherham right now. Too depressing
Anal bum reversal
You know you want to.
There’s a weird flag on this bus
A mix of the Cornish flag of St Piran with green issues? Something else entirely?
I think it is because ordinary centrists discern the possibility, however slight, that Starmer gets this that he is a zillion points ahead in the polls.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/11/10/ftse-100-markets-new-uk-gdp-flatline-latest/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Devon
Frankly, a pathetic rip-off of the Cornish flag
On here’s a magnificently boring debate which might help me make it through to Liskeard
Which UK county has the best flag?
I’m going with Cornwall for now as it’s basically the only one I know (apart from the inferior Devon offshoot) and it really is quite good. Simple and expressive and iconic
What the Post Office did to these people was evil. It was done by professionals to save their face, to make money, to get promotions and even when faced with the consequences, few have had the human decency to apologise.
This is above all a very human story. As all such scandals are - the human behaviours which lead to the wrongdoing and the consequences for other human beings.
That is the one thing I have learnt from my decades doing this stuff and the one thing I would like to get across to people reading this. If we forget that we lose sight of why this matters.
https://www.jetpunk.com/users/shadowapex/blog/english-county-flags-ranked-from-best-to-worst
https://panda156815532.wordpress.com/2021/08/14/ranking-english-county-flags/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZaWgEIs58s
Is that weird genius or terrible? I think probably terrible
Not bad. Not as good as Cornwall but better than Norfolk
I'll sit it out, though, because I know both answers.
It should be pretty simple for the government to:
1) Invalidate all prior prosecutions from the Post Office. The scandal is so widespread there is no need for a detailed examination of each case - the assumption should once again be innocence unless proven guilty again with what we know today.
2) Properly compensate everyone prosecuted.
3) Set-up an independent investigatory team with the task of prosecuting anyone who committed a crime in conjunction with this miscarriage of justice.
4) Fire the entire Post office Board and senior leadership and replacing them with independent voices given the task of cleaning out the stables, including actively helping with prosecutions against the former leadership of the Post Office.
Read it.
Plenty of human stories, with professional and systemical indifference to them - just imagine what a writer from the best-selling weekly news magazine could produce if he got his head around it?
(Two more details on postage costs in the US: Pre-sorted first-class mail costs less to send. Charities are charged less, so the Salvation Army can send me multiple letters over the year, asking for money.)
Not enough crucifixion's. But I'm in a Crassus mood.
Middlesex has the triple-sabre, which is pretty cool, though I'm sceptical about the very concept of 'Middlesex' as a thing (this isn't me parlaying vexillology into a trans debate btw).
Yes I like that one. Cool and clever and unusual
Untangling and sorting this appalling mess definitely falls into the "hard" category rather than the "simple" one to me, but that absolutely does not mean the government should not do their upmost to fix this mess in a body they are responsible for.
Where do we find politicians with the moral certitude that JFK espoused? Not in this government, that is for sure.
Not sure it says “Sutherland” but I like it nonetheless
You do have a point though. Part of the problem was that the PO expected to find fraud so wasn't surprised when Horizon suggested it. Your example comes under strain however when you look at the sheer numbers involved. Even in your Council/Speeding example, you would think that somebody might smell a rat when the numbers exceeded all reasonable expectations.
Long before I became acquainted with the details I wondered why common sense did not alert the PO to the possibility that something somewhere might be terribly wrong, and needed checking. Now I appreciate that it was more than a failure of common sense. It was mischief, largely driven by self-interest.
At one point the PO did appoint an organistion to investigate the matter honestly to see if there was any possible explanation other than that the PO had an extraordinary number of dishonest Subpostmasters. That firm was called Second Sight. It quickly established that there were problems with Horizon. The PO ignored its findings, began to distance itself from the firm, and in due course dispensed with their services. In short, the PO refused to believe what it was saying once it was clear it was saying something the PO didn't want to hear.
This is why I have no sympathy for the scum. They knew what they were doing. They doubled down on their lies. Prison is too good for them.
This is interesting. I don't know what his plans are - is he stepping down at the next election? He sounds closer to Starmer than to the Sunak-Braverman iteration of the Tory party.
Why would you not have a flag? Flags are fun. You fly them outside offices. Shows a bit of pride and they’re good for tourist branding
Put out more flags!
The broader crime of perverting the course of justice seems more appropriate for the CEO, Paula Vennels, and her Board.
I was surprised to learn that the Lincolnshire flag is so recent - 2005, as it is flown everywhere, certainly in north Lincs anyway (perhaps in response to the more strident county identity of its northern neighbour).
But I thoroughly approve. I like regional differences - I like going from somewhere to somewhere else entirely and knowing this partly because the flags change
How boring to just shrug and say “meh we don’t have a flag”
I accept this is not the most pressing issue of the day but it has successfully got me over the Tamar in a bus without dying of boredom
5) Return to the Subpostmasters all the money extorted from them by the PO's ill-founded investigations, including of course interest.
There is no indication yet that the PO intends to do any such thing.
Has anyone seen a worse flag than THIS?
It's the sustained bit that's usually the problem.
not now be aware that Belfast city has literally the worst flag in the world
Meanwhile: