Post Office Horizon scandal: My personal guilt on a monstrous scandal

Journalists and columnists who have never written a clause about the scandal before are chasing after MPs and MSPs about why they never raised it in Parliament. 

Tabloids are heating up tar and plucking feathers for successive Post Office ministers – including LibDems Ed Davey and Jo Swinson – for their paper trail of indifference to the people we now know were affected by the Post Office’s lies.

Ed Davey

Politicians across parties are inventing heroic backstories for themselves where they – like James Arbuthnot – really championed affected postmasters. 

It is hard to say whether they are kidding themselves on or whether their intention is to kid on you.
Investigators are digging back into the origin story of the scandal which implicates New Labour procurement policies in putting in place the outsourced IT framework which helped make this moral catastrophe possible. 

Partisan barristers are hoping to use Keir Starmer’s role as a public prosecutor against him – wrongly claiming he stood over the prosecution of men and women across England.

As we move on to consider redress and compensation, the mean and dilatory reparation schemes run under the UK Government’s superintendence are also under the microscope.

Most are unprepared to say the quiet part out loud: that like much of the rest of the community, they didn’t know much about the Post Office scandal, hadn’t looked into it, hadn’t thought much about it, didn’t care about it until recently, and did sod all to address it until now. 

Easy blame is taking the place of collective reflection.

Prosecutions
I’ll never forget May 2022. Sir Wyn Williams’s inquiry into the scandal is now nearing the end of its fourth phase of hearings. He is due to spend a week in late January on Scottish prosecutions, focusing on the prosecution of William Quarm on North Uist. Quarm pled guilty to embezzlement in 2010 and died in 2012. 

His conviction has now been quashed by the High Court of Justiciary.

The Welsh judge only won permission to look at what happened in Scotland and Northern Ireland in March 2022.

One of the first things he did was hold a human-impact session in Glasgow that May, where we heard over two days from Scottish postmasters from Inverness to Pitlochry and Auchtermuchty to Greenock who had been affected by the failures of Horizon and the Post Office’s aggressive – and often legally baseless – approach to harrying suspect postmasters into oblivion, with or without having them prosecuted.

You’ve finally seen some of these people on your TV screens this week – Louise Dar, Chris Dawson, Keith Macaldownie to name but three. 

Mr Bates vs The Post Office sparked off a wave of outrage across the UK

On day one, just three or four media representatives were in the public gallery – I counted the BBC, a cub reporter from The Times up from London to do a brief stint of work experience in Scotland, and me pretending to be reporter.

This isn’t how a major national scandal should be covered – but it was emblematic, despite the harrowing and infuriating evidence we heard, of how far down the news agenda this story was as recently as the spring of 2022.

Horizon reliability
AS prosecutions in Scotland took place in the name of the Lord Advocate based on potentially junk Fujitsu data, it isn’t unreasonable to ask who knew what, when, about the reliability of Horizon, and what was done about it. 

None of this robs the Post Office of the indelible shame of its role as the central villain of the piece and its subpostmasters as this scandal’s primary victims.

Prosecution services in both Northern Ireland and Scotland have reasonable grounds to regard themselves as secondary victims of the Post Office’s distortions, with procurators fiscal relying on data submitted to them and becoming the instruments of the Post Office’s systematic dishonesty for the better part of a decade.

Last year, I reported evidence from the inquiry which showed in one case involving a Gorbals post office, in early 2019, the procurator fiscal refused to bring proceedings because of “issues with Horizon”. 

As criminal solicitor Stuart Munro points out this week, “the procurator fiscal has a legal duty to disclose relevant information to those accused of crimes, and that duty continues even after a trial is concluded”. 

He said: “As soon as the fiscal became aware of concerns about the reliability of Horizon, that should have been disclosed.” 

The evidence put in the public domain so far suggests it wasn’t. Why not?

These are reasonable questions nobody has any legitimate reason to feel defensive about. Indeed, the

Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service evidence may be important when it comes to the wider question of who knew about the faults in Horizon at the Post Office. 

Right up until 2019, the Post Office was using all its legal resources to deny systematic problems with its computer systems as it resisted the civil case led by Alan Bates and brought by 555 postmasters, including many from Scotland. 

Alan Bates

The emerging evidence from Scotland 10 years ago raises further doubts about the Post Office’s good faith.

In Holyrood last week, MSPs adduced the fact that when he was justice secretary between 2018 and 2021, Humza Yousaf seems to have had no meetings about the Horizon scandal. 

The opposition are monstering him for not talking about a scandal they weren’t talking about either. 

You might say ministers should be held to a higher standard – that successive justice ministers ought not only to have been aware about the problems with Horizon but should have been putting them on the agenda, and campaigning for justice and reparation. 

They objectively should have. But so should everyone else with a share in our public space and an opportunity to shape the political agenda, including the media. 
And most of us didn’t do nearly enough.

Hubristic reaction?
AS this scandal continued to lead the news cycle, amplifying the voices and experiences of individuals caught up in this moral and legal calamity, my overwhelming sense now is a feeling of guilt. This might strike you as a strange – even hubristic – reaction but it is real.

When I was a student, I remember reading some lectures by Karl Jaspers. A German philosopher, Jaspers wrote about the concept of guilt in the wake of the Second World War. He discriminated between different kinds of guilt. Criminal. Political. Moral. 

Karl Jaspers

In most of our ethical frameworks, he pointed out that we think of responsibility as individual. I’m responsible for what I do and my choices – but I don’t take the blame for your choices and how you behave. Bystanders and witnesses, we usually think, bear no responsibility for bad things done by other people.

But we don’t always feel that way. The human spirit is a complex thing. We talk naturally of survivor’s guilt, as survivors hold their own survival – whether from disaster or disease – against themselves, irrationally remorseful for living the life other people couldn’t. 

We often feel responsible, somehow, for things we know are beyond our control – for things in our life we didn’t prevent and opportunities to secure a better outcome we didn’t take.

So, I’ve been trying to work out why I feel guilty now the Post Office story has finally caught fire. 
And the most coherent answer I can give you is that I was there, I knew about it, and know I didn’t do nearly enough to set it right.

The firestorm of publicity Scottish aspects of this scandal received for the first time last week proves that it was possible to put this story on the agenda, that it was possible to convince not only the public but the press and politicians to take this seriously – and until now, we failed. 

For years, I’ve been bending the ear of Scottish news producers arguing this was an important story which merited the full investigative treatment. 

I didn’t bend hard enough. I’ve been writing about this scandal for years now – but didn’t write well enough to shift the Scottish political agenda one iota.

A monstrous wrong
ACADEMICS and journalists naturally follow stories. But if you know about a monstrous wrong, aren’t you somehow responsible for doing your bit to set it right if you can, rather than traipsing afterwards, wringing your hands and waiting for other people to intervene? 

Watching the fallout, I’m mostly wondering: could I, should I, have done more?

Jaspers understood this feeling, I reckon. In his lectures, he called this “metaphysical guilt”, summarised by one writer as “the guilt we all share in allowing bad things to happen, in failing to help others, in continuing with our ordinary lives when we know that too many others are utterly miserable”.

I don’t know about you. I don’t know about our politicians. But part of me feels responsible for this and how long it has taken – and continues to take – for this wrong to be righted. 

This isn’t the soft-headed notion, which says if everyone is responsible, nobody is. 

We now know only too well who is fundamentally responsible for what happened: Fujitsu fonctionnaire, Post Office managers, and the lawyers and investigators who laundered faulty evidence and leveraged confessions out of postmasters and litigated furiously to deny anything was wrong.

They now face individual and collective moral responsibility for what happened. Criminal responsibility may finally come knocking on some of their doors too. But for other people in public life, reflecting on this, whether they’re politicians accused of inaction or journalists accused of inattention? 

Uncomfortable as it might be, easy as it is to see blame everywhere else, but in your own actions and inactions: feel responsible.

There’s the off chance it might create a better world.