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Wholly Unacceptable Behaviour – politicalbetting.com
Wholly Unacceptable Behaviour – politicalbetting.com
'The picture in my report is profoundly disturbing'Chair of the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry, Sir Wyn Williams, speaks as a public inquiry into the Post Office scandal finds at least 13 postmasters may have taken their own lives.https://t.co/iEfMAYAD1v? Sky 501/YT pic.twitter.com/tnjx0mEiFd
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I agree with every word.
Principles-based is hard work. It requires integrity, trust and judgement from both the regulator and the regulated. But when it works it’s so much better.
I remember being told once about the bank of England’s regulatory approach: rock up to a meeting with senior management of a bank every quarter and spend the meeting asking about management’s concerns about their competitors… they believed it gave a much clearer view of systemic risk
Just to accurately lay out the course of events, people were yelling at him because his auto-responding robot that was trained on Twitter’s userbase still displayed — against all odds — a modicum of empathy. He then made the robot speak like him and within hours it was calling itself Mechahitler.
@colincarlson.bsky.social
when i have to listen to other academics talking about how AI is changing the world, a fun game i like to play by myself is to substitute "pro-hitler chatbot" into every sentence
Paging LEON
Thanks for the header, Miss Cyclefree, but I'm going OT as I'm off for my walk.
I'll be listening to yesterday's bizarre sounding Daily T podcast, entitled (not entirely neutrally): Starmer's Brexit Surrender Summit: King Charles welcomes Macron to London | The Daily T
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftDxinGUkqc
It sounds as if will be a bit "All Aboard the Sky Lark", or as if they are all Perkin Flump when he had his personal Rain Cloud, in a hole and resolutely digging for Australia. I'll let you all know !
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Wh64XSkwwM
I'd diagnose the issue as "reality doesn't matter, as long as you can keep telling the right story."
Principles are better than rules, sure. They give better answers in edge cases and when something unexpected comes up. But when those in charge are able to compartmentalise their brains enough, so that words and reality are independent things, we're in trouble.
Once the structures measure and reward the words, irrespective of what the reality shows, that trouble is double. And because it's easier to change words than reality, that's where we have ended up.
Politicians and the political classes more concerned about protecting themselves and their institutions.
They all talk a good game but don’t deliver. I doubt compensation will be sorted this Parliament and this is not really a Labour thing, yet another shit legacy from the past govts.
Plenty of sympathetic warm words and half apologies, ‘I’m sorry I was misled’, however no hard cash or restitution and I doubt the likes of Vennels will ever face a court over this.
The problem is all the quangos, pseudo-businesses and actual businesses which get minimal external scrutiny. The rewards for lying to each other are just too great. And all you need to do to claim them are to cauterise your self-awareness and conscience.
Lawyers orchestrated the lying. Which included planned, deliberate lying to the courts and Parliament.
The Træna music festival - Norway’s Glastonbury - is on this week on that humpy island horizon left. This year, for once, they’re not getting drenched.
In the age of AI, the injustice of shifting the burden of proof in that manner looks even more outrageous now than it did then.
Just more agents of the state more focussed on managing us than protecting us
Rather than focusing on much greater and more troubling problems
In short: this is chaff
The PM requests that compensation is paid. This does not cause compensation to be paid. Instead, it cause another branch in the labyrinth of files and communications.
A request for it to be expedited, again, will create another tide of paperwork. No action.
The purpose of the Process State is more process. This is because
- action is dangerous.
- a quick, bare action with clear responsibility is doubly so.
- creating 100k pages of nonsense is safe. It is hard to read. It looks professional. It means having lots of underlings - promotion? It means not upsetting other people in the Process State. Indeed, they will se you as a Safe Pair If Hands. A Team Player.
Politicians often quote 'It must never happen again' and it always does.
In the case I am helping on it is 12 years on so the Tories, Labour and the LDs all have a hand in it. Finally at the end of the last Govt we got an admission of liability from the Govt and now that has been backtracked on. Because most impacted are in their 80s many have died or will die without resolution.
Our impression is it is mainly civil servants who block progress. This has been clear from FOIs carried out and ministers change so often you go around the loop over and over again. It has all party support.
Just to give you some idea of the pain (and the campaign for justice, as with the PO, is often more painful than the original event, or at least makes it much worse) our campaign has had both the NAO and PAC find in our favour, 2 parliamentary debates and two blocked bills.
The substitution of process for humanity is at the heart of what ails the country, I think.
Will the benefits of speedier justice outweigh the serious risk done to it by dispensing with juries ?
Jury-free trials proposed to save criminal justice system from collapse
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jul/09/jury-trials-must-be-limited-to-save-criminal-justice-system-from-collapse-inquiry-finds
I guess we only get to hear of the high profile ones. There must be dozens
Their role is to discriminate between right and wrong. THEY were presented with evidence which a bright 14 yo reader of Computer Weekly, the sort of lad dispised as a nerd could have seen was WRONG IN FACT.
They say there were directed to accept the veracity of the evidence of the Horizons software and make their decisions accordingly. If this is any different from the defences offered by those acting in a judical capacity in Nazi Germany, in what way does it differ, except in magnitude.
This is probably the greatest miscarriage of justice probably since 1689 in this country. Those who condemned the victims of this crime are criminals themselves and they should not be sleeping easily in their beds. Nor should Ed Davey.
Personally, I'd like to see jail sentences for those most responsible. Seems quite a list from CEO downwards from what she writes above.
https://x.com/j_bambrick/status/1942721376005091688
Jamie Bambrick
@j_bambrick
7h
Don’t worry, by that time I will have convinced people to leave behind the sinking ships of the UK and the Republic of Ireland and established an independent Christian state of Ulster which will be prosperous and God-fearing.
https://x.com/j_bambrick/status/1942739162047889714
At least HYUFD will have a place to spend his twilight years.
I help this campaign because I am aware of people impacted and it makes me very angry.
The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.
The reason for the computer law has to with a number of cases where the defendants challenged such things as the reliability of ATMs.
And so no lessons are learned until, on rare occasions, a lot of time is passed, new people brought in to clean sweep the organisation, and very few people are actually punished.
The supporting evidence drafted by the civil servants was often very wrong and biased. In every single case the minister sent out an identical letter to the draft and there was no written record of the minister asking questions of the civil servants evidence. It was accepted as fact.
To give you one example someone asked a question about event A that happened in 19XX. The minister replied about an entirely different event that happened some 16 years later.
I wrote pointing out they had answered the wrong question and unbelievably they gave the same answer.
My MP at the time then wrote to the minister pointing this out and the answer given was that they had answered the question!
That minister was Jo Johnson, my MP was Paul Beresford so no party animosity there. Jo Johnson had clearly just signed letters prepared by civil servants without reading anything and the civil servants obviously didn't want to answer the question.
And i say that as a believer in the good that well ordered process can do.
Polling start to the morning today from More In Common. As you were figures. We are still in the holding pattern that emerged after the May locals with minor noise moves week to week.
None of the 'scandals' or dramas are moving the dial. The creation of the Dried Fruits will likely be the next mover, weird black swans or Trussery notwithstanding
➡️ REF UK 29% (nc)
🌹 LAB 24% (nc)
🌳 CON 19% (nc)
🔶 LIB DEM 14% (+2)
🌍 GREEN 7% (-2)
🟡 SNP 3% (nc)
N = 2,084 | Dates:4 - 7/7 | Change w 30/6
Be Bernard, not Humphrey.
I find that @Richard_Tyndall has some similar views to me on this I recall. Also @Luckyguy1983, with whom I rarely agree also has some interesting views in my opinion.
John Redwood
@johnredwood
·
2h
Offering us a loan of the Bayeux embroidery reminds us of the invasion and the way so many English were forced into serfdom by the Normans. It depicts the violent deaths of English soldiers.
https://x.com/johnredwood/status/1942807774389256453
Labour might actually be relived by these polls. It seems that the welfare climbdown has not hurt them - or it has hurt them politically but not electorally (so far). Put it another way, they are already in the toilet but they’re not even further down the toilet = “phew”
I have joined the latest ranks of PB's fallen wounded and had a close up of the NHS.
I mention this not sympathy but the excuse increase in spelling errors and miswordings in give me a break on it please as it causing chaos with language centres.
Anyway NHS
The good
A1 for ambulance crew and response time
A1 for A and E
definitely A for nursing staff when they attended a patient
however C for response for attending a patient, a couple a times had to give out a bed to attract the attention to a patient in difficulty
The doctors on ward though rarely ventured from behind computer monitors when the rare tames they went to see a patient information given the patient seemed minimal.
Caveat I admit I wasnt however a model patient and discharged myself on tuesday other admittance on monday in fact giving my doctor a time a leaving by first thing tueday morning (5pm).
It’s not crushed by not enough pay, no clients left - it’s crushed by process. The unstoppable rise of compliance and HR has led to a common complaint by my friends that their role, bringing in business and managing the relationships, is an inconvenient distraction for compliance and HR from their “essential roles”.
Over their careers, these people managed not to help launder money, goose the PAs in a cupboard or make any accidental errors that people also make today and yet every move, action and issue is covered by, governed by and restricted by teams of people who never have to face the clients/public and don’t understand how the industry works because they don’t have to, their world revolves around a raft of rules and regulations and all they are doing is robotically matching actions to rules and regulations.
What these corporate equivalents of civil servants don’t seem to understand is that if you tie up the private bankers etc in red tape, it makes it infinitely harder for them to get business and if that business leaves or can’t be fought in there ultimately is no money to pay for these huge HR and compliance departments.
Most front office people are aware of the regs and rules, they do the courses etc but that is never enough, it is constant courses and tightening of rules because risk cannot be tolerated. Added to that is HR’s incessant bs to justify their growing empires.
It seems like the civil service is like compliance and HR in that they are all necessary but they have lost the idea that they are support and not the governors. Business and progress has to be made and can’t be if the support systems stifle the actors who ultimately have to do the business.
For everyone who has a perverse fetish for returning things to 'where they belong', the Bayeux Tapestry was made in England.
I have written quite a few headers on even more serious scandals and there have also been TV dramas about them and they share with this one the same essential elements which cause them to happen, to continue and to involve cruelty to the victims.
What I wrote here could and does apply to every other scandal. I am writing about it today because a report came out and to remind those with goldfish memories that nothing has changed. I have written in my book about Grenfell and blood contamination and many others and if I included every single scandal pointing out the depressing similarities it wouldn't be so much a book as a bloody enormous encyclopaedia - Cyclefree's Big Book of British Scandals.
The people mentioned in the case studies are not chaff. (The last time I heard that word used so dismissively it was by an MP in a Select Committee aimed at Dr David Kelly. He committed suicide shortly after.)
They are people like us. One of them is your age and at about the age you stopped taking drugs and turned your life around, he had a good business, a family and was looking forward to doing even better. Instead, he was wrongly convicted, had his reputation trashed, lost everything and has never been able to find employment again. He lives on charity from his family and friends. His name is Harjinder Butoy.
Don't you fucking dare call him and everyone like him and what happened to them all "chaff".
For shame, @Leon. For shame.
I often think society can be weirdly specific about which historic sins we are supposed to still feel guilty about on an individual level and which not, but that one may be a stretch.
I respect your intelligence too much for that; and you’d hate it if I did anything else
Many individuals should face criminal trials over this scandal, but do we think any will ?
And on more depressing news both labour and the conservatives make solemn pledges to retain the triple lock which shows just how much serious trouble we are when neither are fit to govern when they put their popularity before doing the right thing
Where on earth is the leader we need to take the difficult decisions, wean us off spending and borrowing, and take the country away from an inevitable debt crisis
Hayward quoted in the Indy today saying he thinks Reform have topped out and that local by elections are a better or as good an indicator of where we are compared to VI polling. In which case, JL Partners get your finger out and update the Polaris model!
https://journals.sas.ac.uk/deeslr/article/view/5642
Also examined more fully in a legal journal here:
https://www.counselmagazine.co.uk/articles/the-presumption-that-computers-are-reliable
Evidence used in speeding cases does appear to have been part of the debate, as here:
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld199798/ldselect/ldsctech/064v/st0503.htm
It is not easy to see appropriate retributive justice when many of the potentially guilty are politicians from Labour and the Tories plus possibly a LD lady.
Maybe one of the very few bonuses of a Farage Government is he will have no qualms about throwing political opponents to the wolves.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/nigel-farage-keir-starmer-reform-uk-kemi-badenoch-conservatives-b2758529.html
'Tories will consider means testing pension triple-lock, Badenoch says'
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jan/16/kemi-badenoch-uk-getting-poorer
Labour have not committed to the triple lock beyond this parliament
https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/money/labour-issues-new-statement-future-32022276
Only the LDs of the main UK parties are committed to permanently keeping the triple lock in full
https://www.libdems.org.uk/news/article/default-f4d399b80ea579afb9686280d29a77d0
When Rory Stewart repeatedly exposed the lies of officials, to him, complaints were made via the Cabinet Office that he was being difficult and unpleasant.
But for that reason I am very grateful that there are others like Cyclefree who do. Because I'm exercised about it now.
It's the casual trashing of people's reputations which really rankles. "Thou shalt not bear false witness" is one of the less fashionable commandments, but it's the biggie, really. Most people have nothing more valuable.
Good header, anyway. I liked the attempt to broaden the scope to 'all scandals' and the thought that those in charge consider themselves virtuous because they are in charge. Never trust people whise starting point is that they are the good guys, because all sorts of dubious conclusions flow from that.
And yet the electoral direction of the country still points firmly towards polarisation - some going hard left and green and more going hard right and ??
I see on X that Farage is predicting that Jenrick will take over the Tories and then Jenrick will try and outflank reform by going FURTHER to the right on migration, asylum and woke
A fascinating analysis
There’ll be a crowdfunder or two as well.
If so that’s mad.
I think this scandal is now being overdone. Far greater evils - of all kinds - are happening right now - and getting worse
It is therefore emotionally easier to distract ourselves with this relatively minor affair which has gratifyingly acceptable villains (the system, evil managers) and satisfyingly humble victims - poor Mr Bates
It’s a bit like the Salt Path (tho of course this scandal is true not fiction and real people have died and suffered)
Having said that I do want to know if any of them have actually stood there and shouted at their civil servants 'I want this fixed, I want it fixed now and I don't want any excuses'.
It is noticeable that in the campaign I am involved in people spend vastly more time and cost in finding a reason not to do something rather than just fixing the problem. I guess they hope some will just go away, as I am sure they do sadly.
Badenoch has proved she can't out war on woke Nigel and Jenrick couldn't out Farage on sending back the boats and immigrants either.
If Farage lost the next GE and left the Reform leadership then Jenrick would have a better chance as leader and to scoop up Farage's supporters on the right
Only one comment really; putting a culture right has to start at the top. It is not routine for the top - PM downwards - to openly tell 'the lie direct', but it is routine, so much so we hardly notice, to not answer questions, not admit to the reality of things, to select numbers and facts so as to lie in effect, to transfer blame and to make unfulfillable claims about the future.
I listen daily, including this morning, on R4 Today (Nick Thomas-Symonds) to ministers doing all of these things. I will listen to another tomorrow.
That is the place to start putting it right.
Robert Jenrick on Sky this morning gave an undertaking the conservatives will keep the triple lock
We get a broad idea only right now and its not that relevant unless an 'event' happens - Reform lose the average lead, Labour fall to third, Tories fall to fourth, Dried Fruitists score 10% plus regularly, LDs back into single figures etc in which case the movement might become more self fulfilling as it were
As someone once nearly put it, “if ‘Mel Stride’ is the answer, what in the name of God’s Holy Testicles is the question??”