Ethics
British Post Office Scandal
The British Post Office is presently engulfed in a truly horrendous scandal. The nationalized business purchased an accounting program from Fujitsu which seems to have failed dramatically.
The large majority of post offices in Britain are not operated directly by the Post Office but by small businesses. They sell Post Office services under license, and often function as shops for other goods and services. Post Office services include not just the Royal Mail, but a range of government functions, such as dispensing and checking forms for passports, driving licenses, etc. The people licensed to operate these post offices are called “sub-postmaster” or “sub-postmistresses”.
Failures in the “Horizon” accounting system led to the hallucination of shortfalls in income. Between 1999 and 2015 some 900 people were prosecuted. Some were imprisoned. Some died in prison. A few committed suicide.
The most serious ethical breach is not the accounting failure itself. It is probably not even the cover up, which continued after the Post Office became aware that the system was at fault. The worst aspect of the scandal is that the persecuted entrepreneurs seem to have been told that their case was an isolated one, even though the Post Office knew that there were hundreds of other examples.
It is a basic principle of natural justice that defendants must be advised of any potentially exculpatory evidence that the investigation uncovers. In this case, they seem to have been specifically told that this evidence did not exist.
In part, this may be attributable to incompetence and confusion arising from the bizarre hybrid approach to prosecutions. The Post Office itself brought the prosecutions in most cases, rather than referring the matter to the Crown Prosecution Service. These were “private” prosecutions brought by a government-owned business. Without the management experience for large-scale prosecutions, the Post Office very clearly lost its way.
Obviously, a particular individual who told one of the victims that there were no other examples may have been ignorant. But the Post Office, corporately, was not, and it should have advised its prosecutors that there were hundreds of cases.
No doubt some of the people who were told that there were no other examples of the Horizon system failing concluded that they had made an error in their own accounting, perhaps genuinely believing that they had inadvertently mis-declared their income to the Post Office. Those who stuck to their claim of innocence were persecuted for it.?
The first priority is to clear the names of those wrongly convicted and provide appropriate compensation as quickly as possible.
Those who knew of the problem and covered it up should be punished.
Then there needs to be a review of the whole structure of the Post Office. Its ancient privilege of being able to act as a prosecutor needs to be revoked. Public prosecution is properly reserved to those with appropriate training and experience, who will follow the rules and disclose exculpatory evidence.
Crisis
Boeing - is flying too safe?
In my blog, Brandjack, I raise the question of whether flying is too safe. With people calling for tighter regulation of Boeing and the airline industry in general, I point out some of the costs. Flying is already incredibly safe: much safer than any other means of travel. If such things as more frequent inspections make flying more expensive or increase delays, people will shift to more dangerous ways of traveling. If safety is the priority, then policy should be geared towards making flying cheaper and easier. (Naturally, if climate change is the policy priority, then policy would be different, but current calls for regulation are being raised in the context of safety).
Social Media
Harvard discovers brandjacking
It is ten years since my first solo book, Brandjack, was published. I wrote about the herd instinct of the media, and especially social media. A crisis can gather pace extremely fast on digital channels.
There’s potentially a lot to explore in the elite universities that were called up to give evidence about antisemitism on campus, including the commitment of universities to free speech, and the consistency with which they uphold, or choose not to uphold, that commitment.
Here, I am commenting mostly on the lack or preparedness of those giving evidence, and the fast-paced implications of handling the situation badly, which they seemed not to anticipate.
First, it seems as though the presidents of the universities were either not trained for giving evidence to Congress, or were trained by lawyers. The lawyerly answers from Claudine Gay of Harvard showed extreme caution and a lack of empathy. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R. NY.) set a very obvious trap, and Gay obligingly walked straight into it.
This immediately made Gay a target of very wide criticism, which is something she should have anticipated.
And this is where the herd instinct of social media comes in. When you are under the microscope for one thing, people will dig into other aspects of your life. Gay stepped down over unrelated allegations of plagiarism. But these came out because of her poor handling of the antisemitism issue. Claims that she was targeted because she is Black and female do not stand up to a moment’s consideration. She was Black and female before she gave evidence to Congress. The digging into her scholarship happened because she mishandled her testimony on antisemitism. The change in her circumstance was neither her sex nor her race. It was her poor performance in a very public environment.