The New Year in the UK began with a scandal that has been described as the “worst’ or “most widespread” miscarriage of justice in British history dominating the headlines and debates in Parliament.
The Post Office, the United Kingdom’s (semi-privatised) premier governmental department responsible for initiating the distribution of mail and deliveries, knowingly allowed its own staff to be wrongly charged with theft, fraud, false accounting, and even prosecuted for debts they didn’t owe. The revelation has understandably shocked the nation, and it has been perfectly accurately described as an egregious example of injustice.
The whole sorrowful saga lays out the consequences of indifference, avarice, cold and inhumane bureaucracy, careerism, and cruelty. It forces us to learn hard lessons regarding metaphysical truths and about the consequences of Faith’s absence in civic life, lest things like this happen again.
To get to grips with all this, we need an overview of what the scandal actually entailed.
Thanks in large part to a four-part documentary by ITV, the nation’s second most prominent broadcaster, the story that more than 700 of the Post Office’s sub-postmasters (independent business-owners who run smaller regional branches, also known as Post Office branch managers) had seen their lives ruined through the cognisant apathy or deliberate disregard of their employers, was brought to new heights of publicity.
Some sub-postmasters were sent to prison; others committed suicide. Plenty were brought to financial ruin. This is despite their complete innocence.
The cause of this bureaucratic catastrophe appears to have been twofold. The first was due to a faulty computer system which oversaw the accounts of the Post Office’s local branches known as Horizon, supplied by Japanese tech firm Fujitsu. The second was the indifference and dishonesty of the Post Office’s senior staff, who under the tenure of CEO Paula Vennels – though the problem originally predated her premiership – were applying pressure with the aim of turning a loss-making business around.
The Post Office’s leaders knew that their system was faulty. The Horizon software was frequently producing erroneous account balances – conveniently for the bureaucratic machine chasing more money, as some have noted – for the local branches that indicated post masters were in significantly outstanding debt: often amounting to tens of thousands of pounds.
Some sub-postmasters noticed that the balances would change by significant sums right before their eyes without any transaction having been made. They reported their complaints, after which they were each told two falsehoods.
First, the Post Office would tell the postmasters that nobody else was experiencing problems with the Horizon accounting system. This was a lie. They were aware that complaints and reports of errors were being lodged in large numbers on a regular basis.
Second, the Post Office relayed a lie by its partner in crime, Fujitsu, who, according to the BBC: “told the Post Office that no-one apart from branch managers themselves could access or alter Horizon records – meaning the blame for mistakes could only rest with sub-postmasters.”
“That turned out to be untrue,” the broadcaster’s report continued. “Two Fujitsu witnesses are being investigated for perjury.”
The story exposes corruption, which according to the Catholic definition, is the definition of evil. While innocent employees were being accused, investigated and prosecuted at the behest of their own employers, the very union (or union-adjacent) organisation supposed to represent and protect the sub-postmasters had been entirely compromised.
The National Federation of SubPostmasters (NFSP), or “Fed” as it was known colloquially, had been scandalously bought out by the Post Office – the very organisation they were supposed to be holding to account! – behind closed doors. Instead of raising issues pertaining to working standards, pay and looking after those they represented – instead the “Fed” focused on organising self-congratulatory galas and dinners throughout the year as they lauded the Post Office’s apparent achievements.
A judge in later hearings would comment: “The NFSP is not an organisation independent of the Post Office, in the sense that word is usually understood. The Post Office effectively controls the NFSP. There is also evidence the NFSP…has put its own interests and the funding of its future above the interests of its members.”
Then there is the question of how so many innocent citizens could have been successfully convicted in our apparently robust judicial system, with no confirmatory evidence of their thievery or wrongdoing (because there wasn’t any). Your guess is as good as mine – but it doesn’t suggest good things about the British courts.
As the innocent sub-postmasters tried to appeal their wrongful convictions, financial ruin and jail sentences, they were manipulated, threatened and lied to. It appears that Post Office staff at the highest levels were made aware of the problem and decided to defend the Horizon system to the hilt.
How could so many fail at a level of basic decency? Now for the diagnosis.
It is not proper for a Catholic to presume to know another’s heart without cause, and it can be a grave evil to falsely suspect. However, the possibility that Fujitsu and the Post Office either deliberately extorted money from their sub-postmasters – or turned a blind eye to their being overcharged – due to certain financial motivations seems more than plausible.
Indeed, Fujitsu have since confessed: “We were involved from the very start. We did have bugs and errors from the start and we did help the Post Office with prosecutions of sub-postmasters.”
By the time Paula Vennells left the Post Office she had miraculously managed to turn the Post Office’s fortunes around and make it the profitable business she had been brought in to achieve. Sums totalling hundreds of thousands of pounds collectively cropping up from nowhere and filling the organisation’s coffers as the sub-postmasters paid these fabricated debts certainly wouldn’t have hurt that bottom line. If so, herein lies pure avarice.
It should be emphasised that the problem with the Horizon system predates Vennells by a significant number of years. She has become the figurehead for criticism and blame – not without justification – and to only blame her would be to let the great many others at fault off the hook.
However, Vennells gained adulation and praise for this feat (she was even awarded a CBE, now handed back). After which, she was shortlisted by the Church of England for the prestigious position of Bishop of London. In this, it is striking that the CofE too, an organisation which since its very inception has not placed spiritual matters as the highest priority, sought to emulate the Post Office’s supposed financial success story amidst growing monetary woes.
Vennells was to be a potential spearhead behind this drive to efficiency. London vicar Giles Fraser wrote in UnHerd that at the time he shared this (now apparently) naïve hope that good managerial stewardship and the mass-closure of perceived moribund dwindling local parishes could ignite the Anglican re-evangelisation of England.
The mentality behind this, as Fraser correctly notes, was one that “put systems…over people”. And here we get to the crux of the matter: humans were turned into economic performers. In a word: dehumanised. Post Office managerial staff, happy to meet quotas and targets, became indifferent to the abject injustice sub-postmasters suffered and forsook the more fundamentally human endeavour: the pursuit of virtue.
After prudence, the most important cardinal virtue that requires the human to align his actions with truth and forward planning, the second most important is justice. Defined, pithily, and echoed from Aristotle to St Thomas Aquinas and the Catechism of the Catholic Church as “a habit (habitus), whereby a man renders to each one his due with constant and perpetual will”. This in turn involves ensuring too that people do not receive what they do not deserve. For example: wholly improper prosecutions, jail and fines.
It’s likely those who turned a blind-eye had the justifying mentality “I’m just doing my job”. But it’s an ancient Catholic truth that ignorance can be culpable. And it’s little wonder why: there’s a quiet avarice which underpins the contemporary mentality which we impart to new generations. Their given raison d’être is to go to school, in order to get a good job, in order to acquire resources. Little is said about the self-denying virtue of justice. Is this apt? How will it serve us into the future? How do we think it is serving us across society today as millions of elderly folk suffer through loneliness (and reports suggest even the younger generations have never felt lonelier)?
In the end, argues Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper in line with the ancients, the greatest victim of injustice – the one whom it harms most – is the one who has been unjust. It harms and distorts his character. It deforms the way he lives his life. I think if this is true for an individual person – it can also be true for an entire society.
And so it is. To date, only 93 of the hundreds of wrongly accused sub-postmasters have been acquitted, despite their innocence being well-known. We have become stunted in modern Britain – our national character is deformed; incapable of and frustrated in correcting wrongs and doing good. Efficiency and gain are the order of the day. Little else matters.
Hence so much indifference to the injustice your neighbour suffers. This is the mark of an absence of love. Though few would want to tolerate unwarranted ill-treatment for those they held most dear. In the face of such widespread indifference, then, Sir Roger Scruton therefore diagnosed our times perfectly when he said “this…is the most important feature of our postmodern culture – that it is a loveless culture”.
Catholic theology explains that evil is the absence of good where good ought to be, rather than an active thing in itself – it is a negation. Therefore, parents who don’t parent, investigators who don’t investigate, union reps who don’t represent are part and parcel of what evil is and how it operates in the world. People are entirely mistaken to think that they’re not culpable for turning away from another’s screams, even if they’re not the screams’ cause.
It is encouraging that the sub-postmasters’ ill treatment (eventually) caused as much outcry and indignation as it did. It is less encouraging that it happened in the first place. In addition, interviews with sub-postmasters reveal how after they were accused of falsifying accounts, etc., their own communities turned on them, they were vilified, abused and scorned; their children were bullied at school. It is not just the cold-hearted bureaucrats of the Post Office who come out of this terribly.
Dante places traitors in the lowest circles of his inferno – those who turned on those they were supposed to love and protect.
As our nation, defined by Aristotle as a family of families, strays further from belief in the God who commands us to love our neighbour as ourselves; further from the Church that explains to her flock that virtue is the wealth in life one should pursue, such scandals are bound to become more common.
Photo: A Post Office branch in Great Dunmow, England, 10 January 2024. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak says the government will introduce a new law to “swiftly exonerate and compensate victims” of wrongful prosecution of Post Office workers over a 16-year period. (Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images.)
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