Jenkins, in particular, does have to answer for his actions. But his bosses and the Post Office prosectors have much, much more to answer for and they can't be allowed to get away with pretending this was just mid-level IT bods lying of their own accord.
To be fair, there is an ongoing inquiry which was put onto a statutory footing in 2021. It's expected to complete in 2025. It's not a particularly easy site to navigate, although the search facility will bring up witness statements and videos with transcriptions of appearances at the inquiry so far. This is a mirror site with better search function.
None of that is to understate the importance of this series in making the details known and creating public pressure to get this done, and done properly. Given the general failure of inquiries to produce anything more than harsh words, that is crucual. I look forward to the second series, which must be coming given how much this one couldn't cover.
And you can point that out without suggesting that the US, which incarcerates a higher percentage of its population in the world, and uses incarceration as an extension of slavery, is somehow OK because it's probably not as bad as North Korea. The appropriate comparator is Norway, not Eritrea, yaknow?
Jail does not help. These are not the cases I would choose to test anti-carceral arguments on - and in the current carceral context, jail would be eminently reasonable. As long as they don't come out to their massive pensions and massive houses and all the trappings of luxury they bought off the backs of the people who were powerless to stop them.
I covered that. Regardless, a spell in jail won't deprive them of their pensions or their homes (Jeffrey Epstein went to jail and came out just as rich and powerful as when he went in).
I want them to pay a real price. The same price they extracted from thousands of subpostmasters. And I want every other senior executive and politician to know that it is a price that can be extracted from them too.
Yes. Forcing individual tenants to take legal action just guarantees nothing will happen, not least because they will get evicted if they try.
And it is nigh on impossible to get a decent builder in three weeks.
Councils already have the infrastructure for repairing the homes they own. They need to take responsibility for doing the necessary repairs in private rental properties and charging landlords a commercial rate for doing them. With compulsory purchase for landlords who can't or won't pay the bill.
It won't happen, of course. The law is just words and no one will be willing to enforce it.
This absolutely was a fraud. The (unfair) contract required postmasters to make good any shortfalls. The hundreds who were prosecuted either refused or ran out of their own money to make up the shortfalls. Many were sacked because they refused to sign the accounts, losing their livelihoods, pensions, life savings, homes and good names as a result. Thousands more were just quietly putting their own money in, sometimes unfairly suspecting an employee of theft, due to errors the Post Office knew about but refused to admit.
And a primary driver of the scandal was the imperative to make the Post Office profitable so that it could be privatised, with investigators paid partly based on how much money they recovered. New Labour and the Coalition both have much of this blood on their hands.
Gut-wrenchingly awful. The senior people responsible need to lose their livelihoods, pensions, life savings, homes and good names. I'm not a fan of carceral solutions and Noel Thomas, imprisoned for nine months before his conviction was overturned, says he would not wish it on anyone. He is right. But destitution is something these people visited on hundreds of people for their own financial gain and those gains need to come back to the people they harmed.
It's not "middle of the road". He is a leftist, criticising liberal* identity reductionism and its inability to recall that class is part of the intersectional framework it has co-opted and abused beyond all meaning.
*in the true sense of the word, not the USian colloquial meaning
I'm pretty sure this was the pilot for the original IT system that was supposed to allow benefit payments to be made through the Post Office. It was terrible and DWP (or whatever it was called then) withdrew and the project was foisted on the Post Office alone and rolled out in 1999. They knew right from the start, before the start, that it wasn't fit for purpose.
One of the earliest attempts to prosecute was withdrawn because they were forced to acknowledge that it wasn't fit for purpose:
It's unfortunate that the local paper has framed it like this. It's "despite Cleveleys proving the software was faulty way back in 2001, prosecutions continued until 2014 and the cover-up is still ongoing". But it's a reasonably short account of what happened back then.
An email from Fujitsu’s Holmes to a colleague in June 2004 gave an account of a conversation he had with Mandy Talbot, a senior lawyer at the Post Office. This followed Wolstenholme rejecting a settlement with a trial date set.
“The Post Office are still taking advice as to how best to deal with this and [Mandy Talbot’s] view/belief was that the safest way to manage this is to throw money at it and to get a confidentiality agreement signed,” he wrote, adding that the Post Office was determined to keep evidence of Horizon problems secret. “[Mandy] is not happy with the ‘expert’s’ report as she considers it to be not well balanced and wants, if possible, to keep it out of the public domain. This is unlikely to happen if it goes to court.”
I haven't read this specific report, that doesn't mean I'm making shit up on the spot.
No one has yet explained why Australia has a far-right party called Liberal and a centre-right party called Labor. Compulsory voting is why, IMO.