Post Office: It's about culture

I’ve been following The Post Office scandal for more than a decade. I know my GLO from my JFSA, but it has taken reading Dan Ariely’s book “Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things”, for me to understand it.

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The biggest failure isn’t Government, The Post Office, or Fujitsu. It’s culture. Culture which went so wrong that caused The Post Office Limited to declare war on the Sub Postmasters. What Ariely explains is that you can believe the most outrageous things, in the light of contradictory evidence, if the circumstances are right. This led the community of investigators to think that Sub postmasters were thieves and even when presented with proof to the contrary they chose to ignore it. Even if they had doubts about the veracity of Horizon, there was a fight for the greater good. In their minds sub postmasters were crooks and they had it coming to them.

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I suspect the “them and us” nature long predates Horizon.

If you run a small retail business you can do quite well for yourself. You work hard. My parents ran shops and it is proper work. You either have to manage staff or know that if you go on holiday you have to shut the shop and not earn. When people called to ask what time we closed my father would usually say that he’d wait for the customer.

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To the people working at The Post Office, the sub-postmasters were rich. They lived in nice houses drove expensive cars and maybe sent their children to private schools. If you have a lower managerial job you’ve no sense of the work, or rewards for running a shop. You assume that the shopkeeper works similar hours to you, the occasional sick day, today, maybe work-from-home a couple of days a week, and generally coast.

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But they somehow can afford an E-Class. So you form the suspicion that the sub-postmaster is stealing.

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There is a class war trope that all rich people are crooks. I once had Ken Livingstone tell me, of the Ruben Brothers “You don’t get to be that rich without being dishonest”. He’s wrong but then he’s also vile.

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The belief might be reinforced by stories that the shopkeeper is, like most people running a cash business sometimes not declaring everything. The cabbie I used last night was delighted to take notes.

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On one side you have a Post Office which is under huge pressure from the government to at least break even. On the other, you have sub-postmasters who feel that they are under the cosh of the organisation but are doing well financially.

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And you have a cold war that just needed to be lit.

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It was Horizon that lit that.

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To The Post Office, it proved what they had suspected: the sub-postmasters were ripping them off. With an ingrained deep belief that sub-postmasters were on the make, each new case wasn’t a cause for pause, and thinking if this was right. It was evidence that what the institution had suspected was correct all along.

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This is why it’s a failing of culture. The zeal with which the individuals pursued the victims was driven by a feeling that they were right. When you have deeply held beliefs, you ignore evidence in favour of what you perceive as justice. The fact that sub-postmasters were richer than the investigators thought they ought to be was all the evidence they needed. And it didn’t matter that an individual sub-postmaster might not be that rich, this was a class war.

I've often wondered why The Post Office appointed Second Sight, but now I understand that in their bones the Post Office fraud investigators believed the sub postmasters to be criminals and thought that Second Sight would provide the evidence.

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Under the model and psychology explained in Ariely’s book, there would have been a clanship among investigators. Each trying to outdo the others in pursuit of the cause. Ariely tells of anti-vaxers who called for his murder.

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We’ve not seen any written evidence that points to this but the behaviours that Ariely describes map onto the way Post Office Limited staff treated the sub postmasters. It’s tribal and I have a solution, but not for this posting.

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This is just my theory. It’s why it went wrong. Of course if you want to understand how it went wrong there is no better source of information that Nick Wallis’ book “The Great Post Office scandal”.