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British Post Office Scandal

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Re: British Post Office Scandal

#101

Post by red_admiral »

mjburgess wrote: post #30

To clarify how this happened: in the UK anyone can bring a private prosecution where they effectively act as the prosecutor . This is usually used by charities who take on laws to prosecute (eg., crimes against animals). Here the post office used the law to prosecute its own staff in alleged crimes against the post office . So they were both the prosecutor and the victim. This gave them overwhelming incentives not to…

I'm mostly with you on that one, but private prosecutors still have to get the case past a judge (and often a jury too), and convince them beyond reasonable doubt. In this particular case that clearly wasn't a sufficient safeguard, but in general, private prosecutions have their place.

Re: British Post Office Scandal

#102

Post by red_admiral »

I predict the next big scandal of this kind will involve AI of some form (not least because you can sell any code more complicated than a spreadsheet as AI these days). The post office scandal shows that you can horribly mess up "trust the computers" even before AI or "smart" systems were a thing.

Re: British Post Office Scandal

#103

Post by pjc50 »

toyg wrote: post #62
drumhead wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learnt about the story from Private Eye, they'd been following it for years, there were other sources as well though, but none of them were the national press or the BBC or ITV. This story wasnt glamourous for them and they only swooped in when well after the court cases when it looked like there would be political dimension. Its sad that proper investigative journalism is only found in the smaller publications the…

> they only swooped in when [...] it looked like there would be political dimension. I'll tell you more: it's only being pushed now, after the tv production, because it tangentially involves the two leaders of the opposition.

In what way?

Re: British Post Office Scandal

#104

Post by razakel »

shrikant wrote: post #39
HatchedLake721 wrote: post #26

BBC explains why it’s hard to overturn the convictions: The scale of the Post Office scandal means that there are no easy and quick solutions for the government. Ministers could advise the King to grant Royal Pardons, once reserved for the condemned as they faced the gallows. But these would be largely symbolic acts because the government can't, at the stroke of a pen, quash a conviction. That’s because the courts ar…

If the government could find a way to make it work for the homosexual activity convictions, I'm sure they can find a way for this miscarriage of justice as well. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/04/past-convictio...

The difference being we decided that being gay shouldn't be a crime and never should have been.

Defrauding public institutions is quite a different kettle of fish. There will be people convicted who really did have their hands in the till.

Re: British Post Office Scandal

#105

Post by pjc50 »

razakel wrote: post #100
pipes wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ian hislop mentioned yesterday that computer weekly ran it in 2009. He implied private eye picked it up after that. I've been reading about probably once every two years in the guardian. The thing that is so upsetting about all of this is that it's been pretty much ignored by government since 2009, the post office systematically lied and covered this up while knowing it was destroying innocent people. And the only re…

Yeah, this is a huge ongoing scandal, and you'd only know about it if you were in tech or a politics nerd. 750 victims, including bankruptcies, prison sentences and suicides, and just one week after a TV drama something is actually being done about it. (That it can be used to attack Starmer and Davey is, I'm sure, unrelated.) Heads need to roll over this. Can you believe the woman responsible nearly became a bishop?

> Can you believe the woman responsible nearly became a bishop?

Well, yes? Have you seen the kinds of people elevated to the House of Lords lately? These institutions are now profoundly corrupt.

Re: British Post Office Scandal

#106

Post by acdha »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #65
pipes wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ian hislop mentioned yesterday that computer weekly ran it in 2009. He implied private eye picked it up after that. I've been reading about probably once every two years in the guardian. The thing that is so upsetting about all of this is that it's been pretty much ignored by government since 2009, the post office systematically lied and covered this up while knowing it was destroying innocent people. And the only re…

The cover-up is at least as dangerous as the original incompetence. It was a heavy-handed, conscious, legally aggressive cover-up. The people responsible knew exactly what was happening, and they were more than happy for the blame to fall on innocent sub-postmasters. Horizon cost £2.4bn and was apparently developed by a team of eight, three of whom were described by the team lead as "incompetent." Fujitsu also screwe…

> But Fujitsu still keep getting government contracts

This isn’t terribly surprising: government contracting is a hard business to qualify for and relatively few companies have done so. They all have failures along with successes so any attempt to ban one of them will be opposed by the people who’ve found some semblance of a working team as well as any politicians they’re close to, and it’s hard to argue that most of the replacements would be substantially more likely to deliver working systems.

The underlying problem here is that this work should be run by civil servants who are familiar with the domain and have the proper incentives. This is politically anathema to the Tory/New Labor types (or Republicans here in the US) who are committed to the fiction that there are enormous cost savings to be had from outsourcing government functions and they aren’t going lead a serious procurement reform effort because the first answer would be “most things are less efficient when contracted out” and the second would be “you need to pay market rates for technical talent even to contract effectively and empower those experts”.

Re: British Post Office Scandal

#107

Post by pjc50 »

makomk wrote: post #77
prof-dr-ir wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This explanation may be correct but happens to also fit the pattern of the BBC carrying, perhaps unintentionally, the water for the government. The more important factoid is that, until the renewed outrage this week, no one in the current UK government was seriously pushing to fix anything whatsoever.

One of the big problems with British politics at the moment is that lots of people seem to think that if the BBC is less willing to pretend there are easy solutions with no downsides the government is ignoring than other parts of the media this is seen as them being in the government's pocket. Which isn't the same as not willing at all, they pretty systematically focus only on the downsides of government policies alr…

> s less willing to pretend there are easy solutions with no downsides the government is ignoring than other parts of the media this is seen as them being in the government's pocket

I really cannot parse all the double negatives in this. Is this an allegation relating to the BBC's ties with the ruling party? https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/jan/24/panel-approvin...

Re: British Post Office Scandal

#108

Post by pjc50 »

acdha wrote: post #106
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cover-up is at least as dangerous as the original incompetence. It was a heavy-handed, conscious, legally aggressive cover-up. The people responsible knew exactly what was happening, and they were more than happy for the blame to fall on innocent sub-postmasters. Horizon cost £2.4bn and was apparently developed by a team of eight, three of whom were described by the team lead as "incompetent." Fujitsu also screwe…

> But Fujitsu still keep getting government contracts This isn’t terribly surprising: government contracting is a hard business to qualify for and relatively few companies have done so. They all have failures along with successes so any attempt to ban one of them will be opposed by the people who’ve found some semblance of a working team as well as any politicians they’re close to, and it’s hard to argue that most of…

Indeed. You can't sack/blacklist Capita or Serco or Fujitsu, no matter how bad their conduct, because they're absolutely critical to British state capacity. And the only reason they've been made that critical is profit and union-busting. Which is kept in place by recycling donations to the ruling party.

Re: British Post Office Scandal

#110

Post by jimnotgym »

As I said in another submission, people sent other people to jail through negligence and deliberate cover ups. People were bankrupted and had money extorted from them. The only remedy for this is jail time for those involved. They should lose liberty, have their name dragged through the mud and gave financial ruin. Make the time fit the crime

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38931792

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