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Return to Sender – politicalbetting.com
Return to Sender – politicalbetting.com
There comes a point in many investigations when you know exactly what has happened, why and who is at fault. It may not mean its end. But the essential findings are clear, no matter what’s needed to colour in the whole picture.
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Yes, I agree, Cyclefree. There is no point in this farcical Inquiry continuing. We all know what the PO did, we all know what it is doing now. It is time to call things for what they are.
The Inquiry should be closed, and the criminal investigations should begin. If the Government gives a damn, it should assist. I am pretty sure it doesn't want to, so the judge needs to take the bull by the horns and tell it that there is no point in continuing unless it does.
This scandal outdoes any other in this country in my life time. Mealy mouthed words and promises that 'lessons will be learned' simply won't do. The PO wrecked the lives of hundreds of people. Those responsible must now pay, and there isn't much doubt anymore who those responsible are.
Unfortunately the optics of any government destroying Our Beloved Post Office are likely to rule this out - especially given that elderly Post Office customers are probably over-represented in the Conservative Party membership.
Can we stop with this idea that Braverman is smart enough to force her own resignation. She doesn't even know which side is which is Northern Ireland.
@bmay
Sky’s senior Ireland correspondent has just committed a murder live on
@SkyPoliticsHub
💥
https://x.com/bmay/status/1722696060819124684?s=20
The Tories want to leave this pile of shit to Labour, and Labour knows it's going to have enough trouble managing the country's finances without promising to meet the huge burden of compensation that the Subpostmasters would be entitled to under any reasonable settlement.
If you’re in your seventies, why wouldn’t you steal, knowing that the worst you face is forcible retirement?
And, they get the money back, by asset-stripping those responsible.
But there’s certainly political room for someone to do more than just watch from the sidelines.
1) stupid
2) incompetent
3) spouting professionalese word salad.
4) expecting no accountability
These are #NU10K
If you start holding them genuinely to account you are starting a war with the true establishment.
Remember how no serious figure was held to account over Rotherham? Look where they are now…
Don’t worry - in a few months time, there will be a fawning interview in the glossies with Elaine Cottam in her (presumably) large house. All about how this is a terrible imposition. She fought her way up to this tough job, and was saddled with a problem that she heroically fought. And it’s been really tough on the family…. Now all she has left is some millions and a new big job.
(And whilst the phrase "How hard can it be?" is rightly the setup to jokes with a punchline along the lines of "Much harder than you think", how hard can it be to run a network of counters providing services to the public- i.e. a set of Post Offices? Putting Horizon to one side, Post Offices are rubbish these days, and I'm not entirely sure why.)
In that way, they can move the story on from their failings and onto his failings.
How much are you thinking of?!!
I think about what happened and feel nauseous.
Relatedly and equally shamefully, the government is appealing a Freedom of Information ruling about the compensation scheme in the Blood Contamination scandal, which view with this one in the callousness with which the victims have been treated. See here - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-coventry-warwickshire-67370940.
It is hard to avoid the view that the state is now actively malicious towards its own citizens.
Then they can hold some staff career reviews….
Every director of the Post Office from the late 1990's onwards
All the law firms acting for the Post Office
Plenty of assets there.
Ultimately if a PM doesn't act regarding a minister either they agree with them, they don't care about the commentary being provoked, or they are too weak to do anything. I find it hard to believe any PM would not care, and if they do come out about disagreeing that leaves the obvious answer.
And I cannot really see much advantage to him actually acting either. He's got weaknesses on that flank to protect.
And likewise if it started under Labour there'd be a slim opportunity for the government to state with regret they didn't pick up on it soon enough, but it was begun when it was not their fault.
I don't think making a bigger deal of it would take as much political courage as assumed.
No party is going to win points on this one. So who is going to see justice is done? Maybe Sir Wyn Williams will surprise us all and be the hero of the hour, but failing that......
It's easy to be pessimistic. I don't want to be, because it grieves me to think of the harm that was done to so many innocent individuals, but I am afraid it is looking as though the culprits are going to get away light, because the politicians don't want to accept the responsibility they bore for allowing the PO to run so disatrously out of control for so long.
Nobody has clean hands.
They come in, watch my videos and post negative comments about Tesla and EVs. Lots of "woke" and "WEF" warnings, even a few anti-vaxxers. Which I happily respond to. But all they are doing is driving the algorithm to push my stuff to even more people.
I'm almost disappointed by yesterday's revenue. Despite being 171% higher than my previous best revenue day I wondered if it might be higher. Expect that today will be bigger again. All hail Daily Mail / GBeebies morons! They are very profitable if you can exploit them.
As for the Post Office and all their appalling advisors I have reached the A La Lanterne stage with them.
1. https://www.cyclefree.co.uk/the-cheque-is-in-the-post/
2. https://www.cyclefree.co.uk/a-missed-opportunity/
3. https://www.cyclefree.co.uk/making-an-offer-they-cannot-refuse/
There is a very good podcast on it by Nick Wallis who has followed this from the start - https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/m000jf7j. He has also written an excellent book on it.
And you can follow the inquiry at his blog - https://www.postofficescandal.uk/.
It began the Horizon project as ICL and got taken over by Fujitsu half way through.
He seems to think his role is to be nice to everybody. Who will bring the PO into line if he won't.
They are obstructing the statutory inquiry set up to find out the truth and politicians are being as feeble as wet lettuce in holding them to account.
It is a rare thing when the state is anything other than malicious, casually indifferent, or incompetent.
What does it actually do well?
It’s a massive, messy problem, and is going to be difficult to sort; so no different from a lot of other problems facing government - but they are better known by the public.
As Cyclefree says, easier to hand it off to a retired judge with no future career to worry about.
Nite all.
Such an inquiry should have been given to someone as tough as old boots who wouldn't take the sort of shit that's been going on. As I say, the politicians have been doing the bare minimum they can get away with.
ICL was of course a government (Tony Benn) creation in the first place, in a misguided attempt to rival IBM.
As usual it took what were some interesting independent companies and eventually turned them to mush.
[We had an Elliot 903 at school - a museum piece even then but it did teach you a lot about how these magic boxes actually worked]
That's obviously not why Braverman has gone off the pier - but if Labour had lost the plot after October 7th, truly gone into civil war and was dipping in the polls - the Tories might have been much more confident in their response to protests, Rather than shambling about looking for a way to turn the fact there are clearly problems with them, into a popularity boost, but instead just getting into a mess whereby they look like the ones stirring tensions.
https://twitter.com/ArmstrongSpace/status/1722745369019273407
I wonder how long it will be before nobody from the Apollo programme is left alive?
I think the youngest is about 88.
Any government or aspiring government that believes it has the capacity to address hard problems should take it on, or be clear that they intend to do so.
I understand politically why they don’t, but it’s one of the things which make me doubt whether Labour will be all that much better than the current government - which which has of course already proved that it’s worthless.
The more such religious bigots leave Labour the better it will be for Labour and the country
First class letters take between 2 and 7 days to reach their destinations. If you are mailing from a post office to a box in a near by post office, they sometimes get there in one day.
Most likely I am missing something. I would be grateful to anyone who can explain
what it is, why the cost seems so much higher in the UK than in the US.
The US postal system is supposed to support itself. As I understand it, it doesn't quite do that, but comes close.
(*Thrifty folks can beat the price increase by buying "forever" stamps, which are good indefinitely.)
Yes, as far as I know.
That's been true for more than a century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Free_Delivery
That part of the Post Office is subsidized by the more profitable parts.
first. They’re not going to leave politics, so where will they go? Maybe independent as a stepping stone, but in the end there will be a party acting solely for the interests of followers of their religion.
You'll never guess what happened next . . . .
https://twitter.com/EllenLWeintraub/status/1722741038995931214
Enough said... About them. And you.
The whole thing seems so utterly wrong that it seems incomprehensible that it's happened in what is supposed to be a democracy with a good legal system. It's abhorrent, in terms of what happened, the effect it has had on victims, the lack of clarity, the cover-ups, and most of all, the length of time it has gone on.
I'm also slightly saddened by the lack of anger amongst the public about it; it just does not seem to have cut-through to the public in the way other matters do. Perhaps it's because it is complex; or perhaps the 'wrong' sort of people were affected. Or perhaps it is because it was a nationalised company when the worst excesses happened.
Computer Weekly, by the way, have been excellent on this, all the way through.
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366538096/Post-Office-scandal-cover-up-a-dark-chapter-in-government-corporate-and-legal-history#Timeline
Another possible reason it never took off - the victims were widely scattered across the country, rather than in a single locale - and were often shunned in their own communities at the time.
And because of government indifference, or worse, no political advocates either.
The U.S. economy has drastically outperformed Europe's since the pandemic. The most plausible explanation is that America implemented a larger -- and in some respects, more progressive -- fiscal stimulus
https://twitter.com/EricLevitz/status/1722419205629202589
Though of course Ukraine affected, and affects Europe far more than it dies the US.
https://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.asp?newsIdx=362935
The irresponsible debt fuelled binge was Trump's tax cut fur the rich. I don't recall your railing about it at the time.
Great piece by the way.
He will be fondly remembered for his heroic opposition to climate change, build back better, voting rights and filibuster reform…and of course, for supporting Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation.
He was the best of the Republicans in the Democratic Party.
They were lucky to have him.
Fare thee well, Joe.
https://twitter.com/7Veritas4/status/1722715353120158137
Because let's face it, the best outcome would be for the judge to go postal on them.
(I fear he won't, by the way. He's had ample opportunities to hold them in contempt and not done so.)
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-november-9-2023
The PO scandal simply highlights what many of us suspect. There is little accountability in
in our institutions and few leaders have the decency to resign. We are stuck with this revolving door mateocracy and the country suffers as a result.
The lack of public anger is disappointing. It is partly for the reasons you recognise. It is complex. Even anoraks like me have difficulty following it. It is also partly because because the true horror is hard to comprehend.
You might have thought that the fact the victims were very much People Like Us would have inflamed passions and in some cases the victims were indeed strongly supported by their local communities. In others, the locals hardly knew anything about it. One of the worst cases occurred at South End Green, at the southern end of Hampstead. I know the place well and have used the PO there many times, but I didn't have a clue what had happened until I read Nick Wallis's book. I think in rural communities, awareness has been better but I think on the whole the public still retains the notion of the fluffy old Post Office that everyone likes.
Racism is clearly an aggravating factor. A proper study will be done in due course, I expect, but there is already plenty of evidence that Asian Subpostmasters got shittier treatment than white folk.
Computer Weekly was brilliant.
Prior to privatisation, the company needed government approval for price rises, which were seen as a matter of some politcal consequence, and hence it was constrained by how much extra it could charge, in rather a similar way to how local authorities are constrained over their tax rises.
Since privatation these restrictions have largely been removed, and the corporation has pushed letter prices up to their economically optimal level, at the same time expanding the variety in pricing arrangements for the volume posters (which originate and have been on the rise since the '80s), which mean that someone with a large mailing to make - who will shop around - pays a lot less per item than we do to send granny her card. This can be justified nowadays since large mailings in nicely typed identically sized C4 envelopes will whizz through the IMP whereas granny's card may end up being sorted by hand, or at least held on a loop inside the machine while the image of the postcode is transmitted to be read remotely by people employed hundreds of miles away from the actual letter to puzzle out your handwriting on the envelope.
The letters market is anyway in decline and, as for any other delivery company, its profitability depends mostly on the income from and costs of delivering packages, not letters. So trying to compare letter prices internationally is looking at only a small, and less pertinent, part of the story.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/grossdomesticproductgdp/bulletins/gdpfirstquarterlyestimateuk/julytoseptember2023
She is also a great many other things. None of them good.