Weekend essay
Comment
Ethics
Justice
8 min read

The Post Office scandal: why truth matters

Lawyer Alex Stewart analyses the Post Office scandal for the lessons it teaches on our missing morals.

Alex Stewart is a lawyer, trustee and photographer.  

A man, dressed in a suit and anarak, stands in front of a law court.
Toby Jones plays the eponymous Mr Bates in ITV Studios dramatisation.

The reaction to ITV's 4-part dramatisation of the The Post Office Horizon story has been profound. It managed to stir up huge public sympathy for the sub postmasters and has galvanised the Government into action. The story has also tapped into deep wells of moral outrage at a time when trust in our institutions and corporations is the lowest in living memory. It’s a tale of failure to take responsibility. It’s a tale that shows the truth matters. 

A failure to take responsibility 

What seems to have enraged us most is the collective moral failure over many years of those in positions of power. They either deliberately covered up the problems with the Post Office’s Horizon IT system, by withholding information about known faults, or simply ignored them.  The sense of disbelief has been compounded by the apparent inability, so far, to pin the blame on any one person or group of people. The Post Office’s ex CEO, Paula Vennells, has handed back her CBE but it seems she was only the tip of an iceberg of obfuscation and prevarication.   

What emerges is a pattern of behaviour that moral philosophers call moral diffusion. It is also called the ‘bystander effect’, so-called after a case in which a woman was attacked in New York in the presence of a large number of people who knew that she was being assaulted but failed to come to her rescue as they all saw it as someone else’s problem. 

I witnessed an example of this the other day in London at a busy pedestrian crossing. A man with an angle grinder was cutting through a bicycle lock.  As the sparks flew, pedestrians looked at each other for reassurance, as if to ask - is this ok?  Was he shamelessly stealing the bicycle, or had he been sent by the council to remove a long-abandoned bicycle?  No one knew and no one intervened. 

The instinct to shirk responsibility seems to be hardwired into us, part of our fallen nature.  It all started with Adam and Eve. Embarrassed and ashamed they hide, only to discover you cannot hide from God. And when they are discovered, both deny personal responsibility, saying in effect “it wasn’t me”.  

Later we have the story of Cain killing his brother Abel. Cain doesn't deny he has done something wrong, he simply denies he had any responsibility for his brother at all.  He asks why he should have any concern for anyone beyond himself. ‘Look after Number One’ Is the voice of Cain throughout the ages. 

Why is this failure of leadership such an effrontery to us? Because we instinctively recognise that leadership is not about lording it over others. 

The Government has promised to hold to account those responsible for the scandal.  Perhaps the roving searchlight of the inquiry will succeed in identifying the human culprits? In the meantime, executives and politicians are scrambling over themselves to deny responsibility, typified by the response of Sir Ed Davey who has taken the art of the non-apology to a new level. The honourable exception, among the political class, is Lord Arbuthnot who as an MP was both tireless and fearless in campaigning for justice for the sub-postmasters.     

Why is this failure of leadership such an effrontery to us? Because we instinctively recognise that leadership is not about lording it over others, hiding behind other people’s decisions or passing the buck, it is about taking responsibility.  In practice we do not live by the philosophy presented by Glaucon in Plato’s Republic, that justice is whatever is in the interest of the stronger party.  Nor are we willing to live in a Darwinian world where in the struggle for supremacy there is no need for the powerful to look out for the weak simply because they are powerful.    

There is a fascinating moment in the story of Moses in the book of Exodus when he notices an Egyptian official beating one of the Israelite slaves. He sees that no one else is willing to intervene and he gets involved, at some personal risk, and in so doing marks himself out as a leader.   

Leadership is born when we become active not passive, when we decide that something is wrong and we need to take steps to put it right. These are the people who make the world a better place because doing nothing, though it may not be illegal, is not morally neutral. Failing to act to prevent a wrong does not simply leave a vacuum, it gives permission for evil to flourish. Or as Burke put it “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.”   

Alan Bates could have resigned himself to his fate, but instead has doggedly pursued justice for 20 years.  

We all long for leaders who will lead responsibly and not out of self-interest, who will not turn a blind eye to the suffering of the powerless or blame others when asked to explain why they did nothing.   

This is especially so in the church which holds itself to a higher standard and should know better. The ITV series quite deliberately dwells on the fact that Paula Vennells was, as well as being CEO of the Post Office, ordained in the Church of England.  

The truth matters 

Key to the success of the sub-postmasters case was the ability to get to the truth, a task made very difficult by the fact that the Post Office held all the records needed to prove that it was the Horizon system, not the sub-postmasters, that was at fault.   

Being able to determine the truth of a matter is essential to how we lead our lives, and especially in matters of justice.  The version of events presented by the Post Office turned out to be false, but once this false version was on record, the reputations of otherwise upstanding pillars of local communities were destroyed overnight.  The public shame and the human cost of being cruelly and wrongly labelled a liar and thief is powerfully brought home by the TV series, as is the relief of vindication. 

We do not in reality live our lives in a postmodern universe where truth is seen as relative (Oprah’s infamous “What is your truth?” moment), or nothing more than a claim to power.  We know on a daily basis the power of the truth to set us free, from false accusations or a guilty conscience, and how much it stinks when we are deceived - especially when it is by the powerful.  

A lack of integrity 

During the Cold War, there was a running joke that the best indicator of whether a country operated as a one-party state was whether it had the word “Democratic” in its name.    

We have become used to the same kind of dissonance between image and reality, whether it is the smiley telegenic people in a company’s glossy videos (actors? library footage?) or an impossibly worthy values statement.

I was once part of group of employees invited to revamp our employer’s declared values. We were presented with a set of aspirational statements that described a culture that was akin to the Garden of Eden and a working environment that bore no relation to the reality.  When I pointed this out, I was not invited back.   

In public Paula Vennells was insistent that the Post Office cared about its people while out of the spotlight those people were being horribly mistreated.   

It isn’t always so, but how can so many organisations live with such glaring contradictions?  Or is it that boards become so disconnected, by geography or otherwise, from the organisations they run and the cultures they preside over that they actually believe the image over the reality?  

"Computer says no"

One of the more terrifying issues raised by the Post Office scandal is how the principle of the presumption of innocence was abandoned.  How come the testimony of hundreds of innocent people was rejected in favour of a faulty computer system’s data?  

Part of the problem is that the English courts regard computer records as reliable unless the defendant can show otherwise. Since 1999, the burden of proof - and with it the presumption of innocence – has effectively been reversed: the defendant is guilty unless he can show that the computer records implicating him are wrong.   

The notion that we cannot challenge a computer that “Says No” is a real problem. As the Post Office scandal shows, computer software is often riddled with bugs. After all, it is written by fallible human programmers. It also became clear that the Horizon system’s data could be manipulated remotely - and without the knowledge of the sub postmasters.  

To assume that computer generated evidence is infallible is a very dangerous assumption in a world increasingly dominated by machines and, more recently, artificial intelligence.   

A very human story 

The sub-postmasters in the Post Office case were not machines or assets.  The ITV drama succeeded in doing what no legal or investigative process can adequately do, it humanised the victims. Despite all the PR talk about caring for its people, the Post Office only cared about its own reputation, and in the process of trying to save itself lost its humanity and its reputation.   

The drama successfully stripped away all the lifeless procedural, technical and legal terminology to reveal a very simple, devastatingly human story that needed to be told. In Alan Bates’ words: “the Post Office stole my livelihood, my shop, my job, my home, my life savings and my good name”.   

This Post Office story has struck a chord because it reminds us of is what is increasingly missing in public life - leadership, accountability, respect for the truth, integrity and humanity. 

Watching the ITV drama, I was frequently moved to tears and cheered at the end. We root for the victims out of solidarity, as if we ourselves had been wronged.  

The Christian understanding of sin identifies it as a public not a private matter, as it infects the whole body politic.  This is why the case name given to a crime is “R (that is, the state) v X”. There are certain wrongs which are so serious they are considered to be offences against the whole community, not just the individual victim.  

The Post Office saga is a parable of our times.  It tells a story of a society whose elites have become dangerously detached from principle and deaf to the concerns of ordinary people. It will not go away any time soon. The moment of true catharsis, if it comes, will be when our institutions and leaders have earned back our trust. 

The last word goes to the book of Proverbs: 

When good people run things, everyone is glad, but when the ruler is bad, everyone groans. 

Article
Comment
Community
Sustainability
Wildness
5 min read

What my noisy, messy crow neighbours have taught me about how to live

We can’t control nature; we just need to become more porous to it

Joel Pierce is the administrator of Christ's College, University of Aberdeen. He has recently published his first book.

Crows caw and strut.
Meet the neighbours.
Townsend Walton on Unsplash.

Our neighbours hate our crows. I can’t blame them. The hundreds of crows that occupy the tops of the ancient pines which surround our rural manse are the noisiest and messiest residents I have ever lived near. They greet each sunrise with a din of caws and counter-caws, as if they are deeply concerned that anyone might miss this momentous daily event or the fact that it’s now happening before 5:30a.m. In nesting season, which lasts most of April and May, our car is easily identifiable in any carpark by the crusted grey spots with which the crows see fit to adorn it. Within a week of moving in, we gave up on the washing line so invitingly strung between two of the pines. Our pristine whites were too tempting a target for our crows. 

I do not attend the meetings of our local community council, but I hear whispers of what transpires there. Our crows, evidently, have been a regular topic of conversation. Multiple solutions have been proffered for driving them away. All have been tried and all have failed. Our crows cling fiercely to their homes and their determination is more than a match for any human efforts. If I have the vibe of my community right, at least some of its members feel that there’s something perverse, obscene even, about a flock of birds being allowed to upset our human right to create a serene, comfortable, and convenient habitation. Our clump of houses is surrounded by a visually stunning landscape; shouldn’t the aural landscape be equally beautiful?  

If my family does not mind our crows, it is because the treetop drama is just one more example of many natural encroachments on the house, some more welcome than others.  

Every year we celebrate the miraculous return to our eaves of house martins, home from their intercontinental peregrinations. We look forward to another summer spent watching their acrobatics and listening to their chicks in the nests an arm’s length from our windows.  

Clearing up the mess of our attic’s bats is an annual chore, one thankfully performed stoically by our church’s property convener, but there are compensations - such as the twilight shows they put on outside our living room window, performing impossible turns and reversals midair in their search for prey.  

Less welcome are the massive spiders, which are a perennial presence; the slugs, which seemed to apparate onto the hall carpet all through winter, the mice, two of whom sacrificed themselves to knock our dishwasher out of action by chewing through its hose; and the wasps who built a nest the size of a telephone box in the roof space above our back bathroom.  

Least fun of all has been what we call the Great Earwig Migrations, which have happened twice in our half-decade in the manse and which involve weeks of finding the little bugs under, seemingly, every object and on every surface.  

When we moved into the manse, we expected challenges, the high heating bills, the leaking roof, and the isolation of the countryside. What we did not expect was the experience of porousness; the shock of realising that we had so little control over what other forms of life saw fit to share our habitation with us.  

At first it felt to me perverse, obscene even, that a house, even a 120-year-old house, should be so vulnerable to incursions by animal creation. Shouldn’t our home, our space, be a haven where we can control who or what enters, who or what we feel comfortable with, and who or what we can exclude?  

If I had to give a name to this expectation, maybe it would be that of the buffered home, a play on philosopher Charles Taylor’s description of the modern self as buffered. Taylor contrasts the selves we aspire to be in modernity, ones able to control and order our bodies, our space, our lives, and our relationships so that they accord with our autonomous desires and actions, with those of our premodern ancestors. Medievals and ancients assumed porosity. Bodies were subject not just to biological infection, but spiritual infections too. Projects and plans were frustrated not just by mistakes or personal failings, but by the ever-fickle whims of the goddess Fortuna. Their lives, their bodies, their homes, existed in a perpetual state of vulnerability. The threat of everything falling apart was always on the horizon. 

We want nature to survive, flourish even, but not at the cost of our comforts or our sense of autonomy and security.

Modern technology has helped us tame the more unwelcome of these forces, but it has also given us an overly naive expectation that all that is inconvenient about nature can and should be gradually eliminated. This expectation frames the way we respond to worries about climate change and other creeping environmental crises. We want nature to survive, flourish even, but not at the cost of our comforts or our sense of autonomy and security. But as our ancestors might remind us, we are part of nature too, and, just as in any relationship, mutual vulnerability and sacrifice are needed if we are all going to survive. This is scary, but there are resources within Christianity - within other faiths too - to help us understand that there are benefits to affirming our vulnerability, our porosity. 

My daughters love our crows. They point in wonder as the crows flood into the sky at dusk, hundreds of them making a giant circle once, then twice round the garden, before settling down for the night. When, in late May, grounded fledgings appear, bundles of feathers shocked at the sudden inhospitality of the nest, too stunned to realise they can fly home, my daughters watch over them, anxious lest the local cats take advantage of their bewilderment.  

A few Sundays ago, my youngest, who struggles to stay quiet and well-behaved in Sunday School, pulled me out of church early. We sat on the church lawn staring up at the crows and soon were adapting the andante melodies of that Sunday’s hymns into imagined songs of praise that crows might sing. “No,” my youngest said, simpatico with the crows as she is, “I think they’d want something more upbeat.” And so we tried setting our own corvid-themed praise lyrics to Rosé and Bruno Mars’ song APT, while listening to the caw and counter-caw above. “Dad, how do you think God sees the world?” she asked me when we finished. I stumbled through my best theologically informed explanation of how God could be in every part of creation without being of it, before she stopped me. “I think it’s like a giant snow globe that he holds in his hands.” Watching the birds swirl around us, two stationary figures caught by the same currents of air that were sweeping them aloft, what could I do but agree? 

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