Like many people, I was aware of and appalled by the Horizon scandal, following it at a distance over many years. And like many people, I was unaware of just how scandalous it was until watching Mr Bates v. The Post Office on ITV. For anyone that has abandoned network TV for streaming platforms, sitting through the ads will come as a shock but I recommend watching all four episodes along with the accompanying documentary. While the drama borders at times on sentimentality, it does a truly excellent job at humanising the victims of a terrible outrage perpetrated over decades by a government-owned business. It is heartening that the scandal has captured the public’s imagination and the programme makers and cast are to be congratulated.
Reflecting on the programme and reading briefly around the scandal, I have drawn three rather depressing conclusions.
Firstly, those that govern us are increasingly at ease with ordinary, blameless citizens being thrown under the bus. The human cost of the Post Office’s mismanagement of the Horizon implementation was widely known and yet a sorry cast of senior managers and Post Office ministers let it happen. And yet, it is not unique. Similar examples include the scandals concerning Northern Ireland veterans and Windrush immigrants; one could add pensioners struggling to heat their homes or the three million or so small businesses excluded from furlough support during the government-imposed lockdowns. If there is a pattern here, it is one of a governing class, regardless of political party, that is increasingly technocratic and distant from ordinary people.
Secondly, in spite of some spirited challenges on the part of some backbench MPs – notably James Arbuthnot – the sub-postmasters were utterly failed by the political class. Real progress only started once Alan Bates found a third party willing to fund a class action in the civil court. As has been demonstrated by a series of tough-talking but powerless Home Secretaries, politics has been reduced to a largely performative act as politicians are unable to bend the Blob to their will. In a bizarre demonstration of this, Nadim Zahawi performs as himself in the ITV drama, recreating his “tough” questioning of Post Office CEO Paula Vennells at a Commons Select Committee hearing. As an aside, the dramatized Vennells looks much more uncomfortable under fire from Zahawi than the real-life version, something shown on the documentary.
The Select Committee hearing had no impact because the Post Office out-Blobbed everybody, setting up a cynical “mediation” process. As reported by Private Eye: “Within a couple of years, although 150 people had applied to the scheme, a mere 12 cases had been mediated.” The Post Office kicked the scandal into the long grass and the political classes could not even bring themselves to glance in the general direction of the grass. When Arbuthnot called the scheme out, the minister responsible for the Post Office at the time, Jo Swinson (remember her?) said that it was “slightly difficult territory, because the [mediation] working group discussions are confidential… I cannot find out what is said in them”.
Thirdly, the scandal is a classic example of the unintended consequences of targets and incentives. Fujitsu, the IT supplier behind Horizon had a service level agreement with the Post Office which included penalties for bugs in the software. Superficially, this seems a good idea to ensure value for taxpayers’ money. But it created incentives for the company to paper over problems and fix them covertly; this is the real reason that sub-postmasters began to see negative balances appearing in their accounts. The Post Office too was under pressure to meet performance targets and most of Vennells’s remuneration was tied up in performance-related pay tied to the strategic plan to “achieve commercial sustainability and profitability”. Anything that threatened these strategic objectives was better off buried.
As a psychologist, I often find myself thinking of the ‘Good Samaritan’ experiment conducted by Darley and Batson in 1973. The researchers had a group of seminary students prepare a lecture about the biblical story of the Good Samaritan which was to be delivered in a neighbouring building. In the alley between the two buildings, an actor played someone slumped on the ground, suffering from an unspecified ailment. Just before heading over, some of the students were told that they were late, others were told that they should head over and had a few minutes. Those in a hurry were much less likely to stop and help, in one case even stepping over the collapsed man in their rush to talk about the Good Samaritan.
This sixty year-old experiment suggests that when we are under pressure (be it over time but also other factors such as performance targets), a tunnel vision can kick in that can cause us to lose sight of a broader context including what is happening to those around us. This to some extent explains how the Horizon scandal happened and also explains the parlous state of today’s NHS, diminished has it has been by a quarter-century of target culture. Chillingly, in the midst of covering up the scandal at the Post Office, Paula Vennells was appointed Chair of Imperial College Healthcare Trust which is responsible for five London Hospitals. (She stepped down in December 2020).
The social media reaction to the TV drama suggests a degree of popular outrage at what took place. An understandable impulse to vilify Paula Vennells has led to a petition to strip her of the CBE she was awarded in 2019 for “services to the Post Office and to charity”. While Vennells should be held accountable along with many others, this is not about one or more individuals but about a chronic failure on the part of our government and its institutions to stand up for hardworking citizens whose lives are blighted by the very government they serve.
A revolving door,a virtual chumocracy-mutual backslapping, gongs galore, inflated salaries and rewards for failure, as Broken Britain's fault lines spread, courtesy of our parasitical Nomenklatura: the Covid Inquiry -a costly farce; the dinghy armada; overpaid NHS Diversity and Inclusion managers; an entitled Blob, which undermines and defies any policies or laws which do meet with its approval,etc,etc.
I have just finished watching Chernobyl-the award winning drama-on Prime Video and a quote from the final scenes struck me as particularly apposite: " Every lie told owes a debt to the truth".
A message for the corruption ,self regard and abrogation of accountability and probity,which is infecting Blighty.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/post-office-scandal-covid-and-climate-change-the-trinity-of-con-tricks/