To draw your attention to Mr Bates vs The Post Office

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There is already a thread about this on the Telly Addicts forum here

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/telly_addicts/4970440-mr-bates-vs-the-post-office-mon-to-thur-itv-9pm-tv-pace-no-spoilers

However this seems like such an important subject that I thought I would draw attention to it on AIBU.

The first episode aired tonight but the whole series is available on itvx.

Most of you will no doubt have heard about the Horizon scandal, but whether you have or you haven't this program is compelling. It will probably make you furious but it deserves as wide an audience as possible.,

David Enright on Sky News this morning

Anna Jones: What did you & your clients make of Angela Van Den Bogerd evidence?

David Enright(represents sub-postmasters): "My clients have described her as the first lady of the flat earth society.. as she has a history of misleading the courts..."

https://x.com/Haggis_UK/status/1783746063486029925

She's very reminiscent of Liz Truss. Not me guv, I was right, everyone else wrong and I can't remember.

I've not seen the ITV drama so that testimony about the Martin Griffiths case was new to me. Watching what went on and Bogerd's account was thoroughly depressing. As I imagine it was for the other 18000 people watching the Inquiry's stream on youtube.

Woah! Did she just admit that she asked for Fujitsu to intervene to make a change on a branch's account?

She's talking about asking for a new ID to be assigned to the change, so that it will be separate from the SPM's entries: all well and good.

But in order to make such a request, she must have known, in 2013, that such remote intervention is possible.

I know they're talking about a different issue here. She's so busy trying to defend on that front, that she's slipped on this one.

She's very "little old me, I'm just here to help, and make tea and photocopy for the big boys and girls", isn't she?

As opposed to some of the men last week who were, "I'm a master of the universe and too important to have known the details of this stuff."

So many of them are behaving like there's a different Post Office Limited, through a door somewhere, where the real decisions are being made.

I wonder which tack Vennells will take: master of the universe or hapless, people-pleasing junior earnestly trying to help everyone but obedient to their boss.

My money's on the latter.

Yes, some of the comments made at the inquiry were quite telling on that score.

There is a group of in-house lawyers who've been lobbying the SRA about this for some time - before the ITV programme and before the post office scandal was quite so well known. Whether the SRA will take a blind bit of notice I don't know. They are utterly useless and arrogant (where have we heard that before).

Just seen that someone else has already posted the comments concerned:

Also significant today was Paula Vennell's note of a meeting with Crichton. She wrote, "Susan was possibly more loyal to her professional conduct requirements and put her integrity as a lawyer above the interests of the business". This demonstrates clearly that Vennells was out of her depth. A lawyer is, first and foremost, an officer of the court regardless of who pays their wages. As such, Crichton was required to put her integrity ahead of Post Office's interests. Any half-decent CEO would know this.

Ultimately people just have to admit at the inquiry that they knew what was going on but they had mortgages to pay so they followed orders.

Ultimately that's what it all boils down to. I need my job and I don't care what happens to other people.

My overall view is that many of the senior staff at the Post Office had not been trained to do their jobs to the necessary professional standards, that this had effectively corrupted the culture in the Post Office, so anyone demanding higher standards or doing anything to rock the boat would harm their career there to no purpose, and then the icing on the cake was for Horizon to be protected as the #1 priority, so that inadequate people with no sense of professionalism would do anything to support this because there were no safeguards in the culture of the organisation.

It's easy to see why Alan Bates sees the organisation as being irredeemable.

Jason Beer KC denounced Ron Warmington's choice of email font, Comic Sans, as "headache inducing".

He's done the same thing today with asking her repeatedly that Ron W said he had "strong evidence of a miscarriage of justice"

She's so full of shit

Jason Beer KC is done with his questioning. That means they're dedicating the entire afternoon for harsh questioning from counsel for the core participants.

Edward Henry KC is making the point that AVDB can't change her tune now from the evidence she gave to the High Court because to do so would open her up to be convicted for perjury. And so she is unable to give truthful answers to the Inquiry.

"Genuine's doing some pretty heaving lifting there" oooof. Stealing line

Mr Beer KC made that comparison yesterday when her answer to one of his questions contradicted what she said at the court trials.

The letter that's now being read is 2015, denying that remote access is possible. She said earlier today that in 2013 she asked for a remote access transaction to be given its own non-SPM id.

Hahah they're annoyed by her failure to keep her voice up.

Can't hide annoyance at 3pm on a Friday 🤣

My god that woman has ‘selective memory’ - it’s unbelievable how many communications she didn’t see, cannot remember seeing, and her unrelenting question-dodging and cold as ice manner is infuriating. How anyone keeps calm listening to her, I do not know.

Completely different... yet strangely reminiscent...

A DWP whistleblower working in the Carers' Allowance section repeatedly raised the issue of inappropriate prosecutions by the DWP, first internally, then with MPs, then by writing to the CPS suggesting judges should be provided with the NAO report revealing the DWP's massive incompentence.

So the DWP sacked him.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/apr/25/hailed-hero-sacked-carers-allowance-whistleblower-dwp

(For anyone interested, the below article explains a bit about Carers' Allowance, and the below MN thread has posters' experiences:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/apr/07/why-are-so-many-carers-taken-to-court-for-benefit

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5049094-to-think-the-carers-allowance-scandal-shows-the-uncaringness-of-the-dwp?page=1
IIUC Carers Allowance is a relatively small amount of money for people doing over 35 hours a week care for a disabled person. The rules around it are peculiar. First it is means-tested, rather than simply being for the 35 hours a week. Secondly, the means-testing is neither on gross pay, nor on net pay, nor on annual pay, but rather on some complicated DWP calculation which sometimes allows certain expenses but sometimes doesn't, includes hypothetical pension contributions even when these don't exist, and is calculated over such intervals that someone can easily fall foul if their pay comes through a day early or late.

The third peculiarity is that if the DWP-determined nominal income in any particular week is over the limit, the Carers Allowance is removed completely for that week. Not reduced by the amount over the limit, but completely removed.

Unsurprisingly, the above often goes inadvertently wrong – and immediately creates a debt of the entire amount of the Carers Allowance for that period. The DWP are aware of the earnings and the debt, but instead of dealing with unwitting over-earnings immediately have been letting the debt build up over years and then prosecuting people and confiscating assets under Proceeds of Crime legislation.)

To be clear, the cause of the problems is very different in the Carers' Allowance situation.

It's the DWP's attitude and behaviour towards the people affected – and towards anyone trying to draw attention to the problem – which is so very, very similar.

I'm not sure that many terrible decisions don't have the common root of responsible individuals 'going with the flow' in corrupted organisations.
DWP always conflates its underpayments and overpayments despite this meaning some people getting nothing and others being paid many times over, HMRC appears to have been formed to avoid senior Customs & Excise employees having their collars felt over the London Bond scandal, it now seems clear that the Department of Health sacrificed haemophiliacs to save money.
Elsewhere; NASA lost two space shuttles because raising concerns early was career-threatening in their toxic culture, Boeing falsely blamed pilot-error in the Lauda Air case many years before doing the same after the 737-Max disasters, BP followed the Union Carbide and Exxon playbook with Deepwater Horizon and paid a hefty penalty when things unraveled.
In the Post Office case, the Simon Clarke letter indicates the negligence of ministers, senior civil servants, direct and indirect employees and directors of the Post Office - many of whom lied in public, some under oath.
The mass-pardoning is no kind of justice and if the government can't afford to compensate its victims, why not give them beneficial ownership of the Post Office?

As I understand it, any compensation for the situations the victims are in that is caused by the actions of a Government "controlled" agency will come out of the public purse, which means if the public purse is not big enough to pay it then it means raising taxes to get the additional funds. Which flies in the face of the current Government's policy/aims to reduce the tax burden on everyone.

Compensation should come from Post Office, but the scale of this scandal is such that paying proper compensation to all the victims would bankrupt Post Office. The Government is therefore having to step in and provide funds to cover compensation. However, the total compensation bill is minute compared to government spending generally - less than 1%. This is at the noise level in government accounts, so is highly unlikely to affect the amount of tax the government raises.

The bullies certainly all use the same self-righteous cant about "public money" to quiesce the feeble squeaks of their consciences.

While having no qualms about accepting bonuses out of public money or using public money to destroy their targets.

I don't remember.

I didn't see that email.

This was not part of my job.

The dog ate my home work.

Not knowing or forgetting is not acceptable, this is the reason the people at the top get the big money, to take responsibility.

In this digital age you leave a trail wherever you go, everything can be found if you don't want to hide it.

Are they really so lacking in self awareness that they don't know how they are coming across?

I would hope this ends with those responsible doing significant prison time and the removal of their pensions and property " earned" while they were in charge and used to provide decent pay outs to the victims.