Corporates: the end of tolerance

By Richard North - January 12, 2024

A clear and unmistakable sign of the media interest provoked by Bates vs The Post Office came yesterday when national newspapers and broadcasters alike devoted themselves to coverage of the resumed inquiry into the Post Office Horizon scandal.

The inquiry was first announced by the fool Johnson during PMQs on 26 February 2020 and set up shop in September 2020 under the chairmanship of retired High Court judge Sir Wyn Williams.

The inquiry was placed on a statutory footing on 19 May 2021, on the recommendation of its chairman, giving it power to compel witnesses and demand evidence, with fines or imprisonment for non-compliance.

Originally set to report in the Summer of 2021, after two phases, the inquiry is now in phase four, taking testimony from Post Office employees, devoting the whole of yesterday to examining Stephen Bradshaw, a Post Office investigator involved in some of the most prominent miscarriage of justice cases.

As the Guardian admits, he is a relatively minor figure in the affair – he was not an executive, or a key decision-maker – and in other circumstances his evidence might have gone unreported.

But, the paper says, he led the news bulletins because “this was the first day of evidence since the ITV drama turbocharged public fury about the case”. People watching the hearing got to learn what the frontline perpetrators of the scandal were like.

Widely reported by all the national newspapers, what stands out from his testimony is headlined in The Times, telling us: “Post Office lawyers wrote my statement, investigator tells inquiry”.

This is the written statement he supplied to the Inquiry prior to his oral evidence, which includes a declaration attesting to its accuracy and truth in the same way that an oath does in court prior to giving evidence in person.

In my former life as an environmental health officer, I have completed such statements as a prosecution witness and, in my long career as an expert witness I had done likewise and have been long-aware of the absolute duty to ensure that statements expressed only my views.

In fact, I recall several instances when prior to submission I have had lawyers ask me to reconsider parts of what I wrote. Where it was a matter of rephrasing to improve clarity or accuracy, I had no problems, but I would not entertain “massaging evidence” to strengthen the case, and don’t recall having been asked to do so.

But here, in this media report (and elsewhere), we see Bradshaw admitting that content included in his statement had not been written by himself but had been inserted by a lawyer from the Cartwright King firm acting for the Post Office, specifically phrasing which declared the Post Office’s “absolute confidence” in the Horizon IT system.

This emerged when he was asked by Julian Blake, counsel to the inquiry, whether he thought this kind of statement was appropriate, Bradshaw replied: “No, not really no. It’s not my words”. He went on to explain that the words appeared to be a business statement drafted by a PR and approved by lawyers”, adding: “In hindsight … there probably should have been another line stating: ‘These are not my words’”.

Earlier, it seems that Bradshaw had told the inquiry that he was not “technically minded” and was not equipped to know whether there were bugs or errors in the system, which means, in effect, he was not qualified to make (or endorse) any statement about the functioning of the Horizon system.

Apart from being another illustration of the Post Office’s bad faith, Bradshaw is personally liable for his own statement and is wholly responsible for its content. Arguably, his statement is a lie, one of the many which has pervaded this entire affair.

Looking at the bigger picture in an extended rant, Allister Heath in the Telegraph writes a column headed: “Middle England has been betrayed by Britain’s feckless new establishment”, asserting that Horizon scandal “exposes the deficiencies of all our institutions”.

He does have a point, there, as I conceded in yesterday’s comments, but I also pointed to the need within all these institutions for individuals to accept their own personal responsibilities.

For instance, in a separate exchange in the inquiry, Bradshaw is asked about a prosecution where the Post Office indicated it would accept a guilty plea on a less serious charge (then theft) provided the postmaster agreed to accept that there was “nothing wrong with Horizon”.

From this, and other strains of his evidence, it becomes clear that there were multiple indications to confirm that Bradshaw knew that there were problems with Horizon – as did his employer – yet he chose to ignore the evidence and exclude the possibility of computer error in the investigations he pursued.

This is the sort of man who, had he been around in 1940 and the Nazis had invaded England, would have willingly lined up at the gates of a newly constructed concentration camp, to assist in the extermination of the Jews.

He is the embodiment of the “I was only obeying orders” mentality. The unwillingness of people within organisations to stand up and be counted is as much a problem as the institutions themselves which, after all, are staffed by individuals.

This notwithstanding, while I accept entirely Heath’s point, but I also make the point that much of the problem arises because we allow ourselves to be browbeaten. When instructed, we knuckle under and obediently conform. That is our default state.

Although it is by no means comparable, in my observations about EDF, I have made this point. Unilaterally, the company (along with others) decided to discontinue home visits to read meters.

They didn’t declare this as a change of policy or ask for views. They simply decided, whence it became the “duty” of every householder to read their own meters and send in the readings. And like good little boys and girls, most of the population rose up … and obeyed.

We constantly take such impositions without complaint. We tolerate poor customer service, when the corporates palm us of with call centres, based in deepest Bombay, forcing us to deal with semi-literate “agents” who speak with impenetrable Indian accents, instead of hanging up and refusing to play.

In all sorts of ways, we allow institutions and officials to abuse our patience, our trust and our tolerance. We allow it in lots of small ways, conceding our rights to be treated with respect until the system is confident that it can take us for granted. And then we wonder why it does just that.

But at the heart of this entire affair and the extraordinary publicity is just one man, Alan Bates – and his wife. They refused to allow the Post Office to beat them and, in standing their ground, enabled others to join them and mount a cohesive campaign. We need more people like Alan Bates and his wife, people who in big ways and small ways simply refuse to accept what the system thinks it can get away with.

That is not to say, though, that we have an easy task – far from it. The system is built on lies, half-truths, spin and self-deception. We are told, for instance, that the creator of the Horizon software, the multinational conglomerate Fujitsu, has made an apology for its part in the Horizon affair.

If it has made any form of apology, it is not to be seen on its website, but what we do see is a corporate statement on its “social responsibility”. This, it says …

… is part of the Fujitsu Way and part of our company DNA. It means more than simply delivering outstanding results for our customers. It means looking after and respecting our people and our suppliers, and supporting the wider communities within which we operate. It is genuine and longstanding, and our practice has been recognised and applauded externally in many benchmarks and indices.

It is this sort of delusional corporate bullshit that allows companies such as Fujitsu to screw people into the ground while convincing themselves that, by making grotesque profits on the back of human misery, they are a force for good.

This comes over in spades on its Twitter account where the company claims to be “Building new possibilities by connecting people, technology and ideas, creating a more sustainable world where anyone can advance their dreams”.

Yet, with no recognition of its part in the Horizon affair on its website, it still has this self-congratulatory case study posted and, elsewhere on its site it tells us its 7,000 employees in the UK “are passionate about delivering excellent service to our customers every day”.

Not only this, it boasts, “our people live and breathe our global purpose to make the world more sustainable by building trust in society through innovation”. That, it gloats, is “about seeing the value technology can create for customers today and in the future – and making it real”.

What is has made real is a living hell for thousands of people caught up in the nightmare of its shoddy work and its attempts, alongside the Post Office, to cover up its failures. Hell is not enough for this company, or those who worked alongside it, and those who should have but failed to bring the nightmare speedily to an end.

But the only way this sort of thing will stop being repeated is when we decide, by our actions, to end it – an end to our tolerance of being abused by the “system”.