The key question raised by the Horizon story is whether it’s a scandal or a crisis. Why is that important? Simply this: although scandals generate controversy, shock, anguish and anger, they don’t result in significant change. After a while, the public becomes bored, the media caravan moves on – to the next story, the next scandal; politicians piously declare that “lessons have been learned” (though heads rarely roll), and so on. Crises, on the other hand, do lead to systemic change, at least in working democracies. Laws change, institutions are closed or radically reformed, culprits go to jail… life does not go on as before.
There’s no question that the Post Office’s inhumane treatment of sub-postmasters constituted an egregious scandal. And initially there were indications that it might actually have become a crisis. Just a week after Mr Bates vs the Post Office aired on ITV, for example, the prime minister announced that the government would be introducing a new law to quickly exonerate and compensate the victims of “one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in our nation’s history”.
A whole new law, eh? Maybe this scandal is a crisis after all. Not so fast. Although we don’t know the detail yet, it will just be a piece of legislation to right a specific wrong – a bit like the Dangerous Dogs Act of 1991, say. But it will do nothing about the systemic problems that led to the mistakes and injustices in the first place.
First, there’s clearly something radically wrong with the corporate governance of the Post Office, whose senior executives, having signed off on the purchase of a flawed software system, then persisted in denying that it was flawed, and that any discrepancies that it logged must be because of criminal behaviour by users.
Then there’s the legal precedent that places the burden of proof upon a defendant to demonstrate why the output from a computer should not be relied upon as a true statement of fact. “The presumption,” as one barrister puts it, “effectively ‘magics’ computer output into truth – a privilege rarely accorded other species of hearsay evidence.”
Speaking of the law raises another issue: why has there not been legal action against Fujitsu, the supplier of the flawed system? In the Commons on Tuesday, Paul Patterson, the company’s Europe chief executive, was in full damage-limitation mode. Fujitsu was “truly sorry” and had a “moral obligation” to help fund redress for sub-postmasters. Aw, shucks. Kevin Hollinrake, the postal affairs minister, said that negotiations with Fujitsu would take place following the conclusion of a public inquiry.
Good luck with that: the government has a dismal track record in such negotiations. Fujitsu, you see, is a key “strategic supplier” to the government. It makes around £100m a year from this work, and has won 150 new contracts worth £2.04bn since the 2019 court ruling that Fujitsu’s Horizon IT system caused accounting errors that were blamed on the unfortunate sub-postmasters. Clients for these lucrative contracts include the Home Office, HMRC, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, the Ministry of Defence and the Department for Work and Pensions. And then of course there’s the £2.4bn lifetime contract Fujitsu has with the Post Office for the Horizon system.
Fujitsu has been lucratively sucking on the government’s teats for quite a while. The Financial Times reports that sometime during the 2010-2015 coalition government, the Cabinet Office “pushed to formally exclude Fujitsu and other companies from bidding for government deals on the basis of their performance in previous contracts, according to three current and former Whitehall insiders”. Another insider told the paper that “Project Sushi”, a bid to blacklist a group of IT giants regarded as having performed poorly, had focused heavily on Fujitsu. But the push was ultimately unsuccessful because “government lawyers advised that it would not be legally possible to discriminate against companies based on their past performance”.
So you can perhaps see why Rishi Sunak might be reluctant to sue Fujitsu for compensation for the sub-postmasters whose lives have been wrecked by their flawed system. The truth is that the British state has been hollowed out to the point where it is so dependent on the corporations to which it has outsourced critical services and functions that it dare not rein them in. And, as if to underscore the point, Fujitsu, which in 2016 was awarded a £4.6m contract to run the country’s flood warning system, this month got a £2m extension after the Environment Agency experienced difficulty finding a replacement supplier.
So it looks as though the Horizon scandal was just that – a scandal. Sad but inevitable in a neoliberal world. Welcome to the New Corporate State.
What I’ve been reading
Enemy of the States
Read Bret Stephens’s salutary New York Times column, The Case for Trump… by Someone Who Wants Him to Lose.
Life through a lens
Inside My Dark Room is a lovely essay by Julie Park in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Travel sick
Henry Wismayer has written an interesting feature about global tourism, Nice View. Shame About All the Tourists, for Noema magazine.
