Sporadic conversations with neighbours on the allotment about last week's brutal heat wave - inadequate term - reminded me of something.  I've remembered what.

In  the apocaplyptic science fictions stories I devoured as a kid - John Whyndam's The Kraken Wakes, John Christopher's The Death of Grass and The World in Winter, for example - there were four stages to  whatever it was that was going to end  Life As We Know it.

At first, only the maverick boffin sees what's coming, no one pays any attention. Stage 2: the Powers That Be accept what he says, but are able to discguise what is happening and reassure a gullible public. Stage 3: dawning realisation by Ordinary People of what is happening - but it is still contained, normal life continues, there's no panic as yet and people still plan their lives as before.

We're at Stage 3, now. That's what happened last week.  Ordinary people now know that a quite unprecedented, incredible change is coming that threatens everything, in ways they still cant imagine - but still they jet off the Spain 'to get some sun', they grumble about politicians and wonder how to meet their gas bills....

Stage 4?  Well: you know what stage 4 is.  Don't you.

​We live in an age saturated with corporate scandals, public and private sector both, marked by greed, lies, callousness and cover up. But amongst them all, the Post Office scandal stands out.

It has lasted the best part of two decades and has destroyed the lives of many hundreds of innocent people. But what most distinguishes it is the ferocious, secretive and completely pointless cruelty of the Post Office towards its own people. It’s rightly been called the greatest miscarriage of justice in modern British history. I was wondering what it reminded me of: of course, it's Stalin's Great Terror, as recounted by Orlando Figes. Of course, these victims were not being tortured or executed, but there’s the same sense of loyal, innocent servants of the State being hounded by the State towards oblivion, for no reason whatsoever.

In brief: the Post Office introduced a new computerised accounting system, Horizon, around 2000, rolling it out without proper testing, and knowing it to be highly defective, operating it in a way that was both chaotic and secretive, and then when it generated false balances in sub Post Offices, hounding hapless and innocent sub postmasters by demanding they make good the difference from their own funds, then terminating their contracts, prosecuting them, sending many to prison and seizing everything they own, all the while denying that there were any problems with Horizon and - this was truly diabolical - telling each sub postmaster that nobody else had any problems with the system.

The Post Office was able to do this because they retained their own private prosecution system in house. For all other crimes the decision to prosecute and handling of prosecution had long been separated out from the police and given to the Crown Prosecution Service, and one sees from this story how necessary that separation is. The Post Office refused to give those accused access to the data that might have saved them and made use of an absurdly oppressive and unfair contract which few of them had seen in full, or if seen, understood.

As prosecutions mounted, and innocent sub postmasters and pace mistresses were driven into bankruptcy, mental illness, shame, imprisonment, ill health and in some cases suicide, the Post Office lied and lied and lied. It denied that they had retained the ability to change figures in individual sub Post Office accounts centrally, without telling the account holder. It denied there was any problem with Horizon, but in fact it was overwhelmed bad tsunami of errors and bugs. It deliberately suppressed all mention of independent reports which confirmed that there were serious problems. It deliberately failed to disclose material in its possession which was its duty to disclose in proceedings. The conduct of the Post office at senior and middle management levels was truly wicked.

Gradually and over many years a series of curious reporters, most of all Wallis, were drawn into investigating and eventually exposing and overturning these injustices. But one is not left with a sense of wrongs righted for two reasons. Too many people have had their lives shattered , their reputations destroyed, years spent in prison, savings and houses seized. Compensation cannot compensate for all that. And secondly there is at the end of it no justice: of a wide cast of wicked people at senior and middle management levels in the Post Office and in Fujitsu and in in the sub post masters own representative body, which took the side of the Post Office against its members, none have been brought to justice in any way. They simply retired on nice pensions and averted their eyes from the evil they had done. The current statutory inquiry will one hopes give some of these people a very unpleasant public grilling, but probably no more than that. Some of them deserve to be imprisoned: they wont be.

This account of the scandal is outstanding in every way. It is long - some 800 pages on Kindle - because the scandal went on for long time, and was endlessly complicated, but it is a surprisingly easy read. Wallis breaks it up into quite short chapters, without breaking the narrative flow telling the stories of many of the individual victims in a way that is simply devastating. You cannot believe that such things could be allowed to happen: nor did the victims themselves, until they did happen.

Wallis sets out to explain 2 sets of complicated, technical things: the operation and faults of the Horizon system itself, and the intricacies of the many court cases, one on top of the other. He does so very fully, without dumbing down come up but in a way that's surprisingly easy to follow. This is a very great skill. On top of that there's the thrill of the chase, with false turns, blocked routes and sudden breakthroughs, as a motley crew of reporters gradually begin to uncover the true horror and scale of the scandal. (One of the things I very much like about the account is the way the author gives full credits to other journalists.)

One is left wondering, as ever, why people behave this badly? After all there was no question of financial gain, either to individuals, or the Post Office as an organisation (the same cannot be said of Fujitsu, whose appalling behaviour has not been fully recognised, and seems to have been motivated basically by money).

No, the main motivator seems to have been that old, old vice, tribal or group thinking, us against them, ‘them’ the outsiders who don't understand our problems, who want to do us down, when we're doing our best, ‘them’ who have only bad motivations and who must be defeated at any cost.

A warning from history indeed.

Execution of disgraced mandarin. No Oxbridge College for him!

Someone asked me the other day, in relation to my recent posts about the ghastly mix of incompetence and cruelty in the Home Office, whether I thought civil servants who failed should be sacked. 

in general, no. I saw that policy or I should see instinct at work under Michael Howard, a man whose first thought under fire was to interpose the body of one of his servants between himself and the bullets.

It is a bad policy for several reasons. As Putin has discovered, it leads to people telling you what you  want to hear rather than what you need to know, and to people doing what is safe rather than what is necessary. 

Moreover, in large complicated organisations dealing with complicated matters, failure usually involves many people in varying degrees of culpability.

Moreover , if somebody is in a role where they are completely incompetent, there are questions about the person who appointed them and the person who managed them.  

Moreover, the emphasis needs to be on learning from failure not on  punishing it, and the second tends to get in the way of the first 

Sometimes, too, failure at a very senior level is inseparable from ministerial failure, eg failure to  set the right priorities or provide necessary resources.

But equally I do not think it is healthy for there to be no consequences whatsoever in the case of egregious failure, which  is what happens in the civil service. At senior level, it is almost unknown for anybody to pay any penalty whatsoever. As far as I can ascertain no permanent secretary has been made to resign or be demoted since before WW2.  Usually a senior civil servant who has failed on a big scale is promoted at exactly the same pace as if they had succeeded. That can't be right.

(Case in point, Antonia Romeo, Senior Responsible Officer for the single greatest disaster in justice policy in a generation, the probation privatisation programme, that had to be expensively cancelled after years of critical inspection reports, has now become..... Permanent Secretary at the MoJ.  Equality of opportunity was not supposed to  mean promoting failure on an equal basis with success.)

The circumstances in which I think there should be a penalty of some sort for failure - I'm talking of failure to do the job or deliver a reasonable  service, not something like fraud, sexual harassment etc - are as follows. When someone does something or fails to do something which they ought to know will cause serious failure, or serious harm. When someone covers up or lies about serious failure. When someone allows a serious failure to continue over a period , without doing anything about it or reporting it . And when a senior person takes delivery of a report exposing serious failure and is charged with ensuring that there is an improvement, fails to do so.

Outside of those circumstances, failure should be treated as an inherent aspect of work. It should be acknowledged,  if necessary apology made, its causes should be ascertained and put right, which might mean more resources, doing things differently, retraining, or moving someone. But in most cases not punishment. But note that - public acknowledgement, public apology.

An anonymous email, probably from a civil servant, once accused me of believing I was always right.  He had obviously not read my book, of  which a few copies are still available incidentally, which is full of my reflections on what I did not get right, or not right enough. I've never had any in inhibition about owning up to my failures.

That is in part because I had the enormous privilege of working for three quite outstanding leaders, different in many ways, but united in their total integrity. Richard Tilt, Martin Narey, Phil Wheatley. These were not men who needed to be driven reluctantly to admit failure at. They were the first to announce it, driven by consciousness of the moral imperatives of their work,  and the need for leadership.

People at the top who cannot admit to and own failure are a danger to all around them. They are certainly not  leaders. Unfortunately the senior civil service is full of them, including  the Permanent Secretaries of the Home Office and of the Ministry of Justice.

(By the way, do you know that Antonia Romeo is widely tipped for the next Cabinet Secretary? I put that in here because, sadly, some journalists who profile her fail to mention this in the published article.  In point of fact, I think she has every qualification, in terms of how the job is now understood.)

My family has banked with First Direct, a subsidiary of HSBC, since it started and it's been a good bank.

Not any more.

Today the FT reports that not only has HSBC decided not to wind down its operations inside Russia, as most banks have done,  but it has edited its reprots to remove the word 'war' about Ukraine and replace it with 'conflict' and also talks of regretting casualties 'on both sides'. You know, like when Nazi soldiers were shot while executing Jewish partisans. 'On both sides'.

Apparently it's much more profitable to be the only big western bank still operating in Russia than to quit.

Well, I cant and wont stomach that and I'm closing all our accounts today. It's a bore, but when I look into the eyes of a child orphaned by HSBC's  client, what else can I do?

If you bank with HSBC or First Direct I urge you to do likewise

Matthew Rycoft, head of the Home Office, a man who last year described the Home Office as 'a beacon of light for the vulnerable'. 

A thing that has become increasingly apparent, and is brought into sharp focus by the Ukrainian refugee crisis, is the astonishing incompetence, at the most basic level, of the British State. In the refugee context, it is incompetence mixed with carelessness.  (Conceivably, the two naturally go together. If you don’t care what happens to people, why care whether what you do works or not?)

A lot  of this, clearly, is due to ministers – Priti Patel,  a woman fired by pathological hatred of the most vulnerable, but who  is also surprisingly dense; and of course Johnson, who doesn't do detail and doesn't care about anything except himself.

But it's increasingly clear that there is a deep seated and very basic incompetence at official level also.
For example, the decision even some  weeks into the crisis that one official would be adequate at Calais, with  no need for a Ukrainian interpreter, and no need to set up a visa processing office there. Then the bizarre idea of setting up one at Lille but concealing its whereabouts, and the decision that  visa processing  did not need reinforcing at other locations in Europe, and that there was no  need for Ukrainian translation of the  visa documentation, are all surely  the actions of officials.

The new scheme for allowing  people to house  in their homes Ukrainian refugees not eligible for the previous scheme is equally shambolic. No thought was given to how hosts and refugees would be matched up. The idea that charities and faith groups could somehow do this was not brokered with them  at all before the announcement, and they are  simply not equipped or resourced to do. As a result all sorts of ad hoc arrangements are growing up, and I know  from my own experience of using them that they are wide open to abuse of various kinds, but equally worrying, there is nothing to support people whose immediate instinct  is to offer a home with thinking through what that will actually mean for them.

And very worryingly, nothing has been done to put in place the specialist resources needed to support refugees themselves, and hosts. Oxford council tell me that government did not talk to or even inform local government before the announcement - parts of a pattern of pathological centralization which is a mark this government. Or rather,  a pathological centralization of decision making, combined with the casual assumption that local authorities can always sweep up the mess thus created. And of course, many of the services most  urgently needed for refugees, such as housing, social care, mental health services, are precisely those services most badly damaged by Tory cuts. Nor is any source of help identified full cases where either host or refugee come unstuck, and a new home is needed urgently.

What is striking is that these are not complex or technical issues, but very basic and  very obvious, and exactly the sort of thing that an hours brainstorming would put up on the whiteboard as issues which simply had to be tackled. I mean, there was a room full of Home Office officials, and someone said, let’s allow people to welcome Ukrainians into their home, just as long as they already know the Ukrainian in question, and the person chairing that meeting said; good idea, that’ll work well.

The excellent reporting by Amelia Gentleman of the Guardian details what such breath-taking incompetence means for the traumatised war victims:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/25/ukrainian-refugees-frustration-grows-over-long-wait-times-for-uk-visas

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/mar/09/anger-and-exhaustion-as-ukrainians-turned-away-by-uk-in-calais
 
Refugee families sleeping in cars at Calais, with little to eat. Being forced to go to Paris just to fill up a form. Some, God help us, leaving safety to return to Ukrainian cities under siege because their money has run out while waiting for dozy Home Office officials to process their applications or just to answer the question: how long?

The officials seem utterly without shame, and are – of course! - never held to account, never even named. Well, let’s make a start here:

Glynn Williams DG Migration and Borders
Amma Haddad DG Asylum protection
Tony Eastaugh Immigration Enforcement

(Since you ask: there are 10 ‘Director Generals’. And an unbelievably 68 Directors  - I’m quoting from the last official Home Office organisation chart. This from the Department that cut 20,000 police officers.)

The institutional incompetence of the British state, which is been growing this past decade or so, no doubt  has many causes, including the pathological hostility of ministers towards their own servants, their unwillingness to listen, consequent timidity of  civil servants, and a decline in the calibre of people who are willing to serve in such circumstances, so that third raters rise to the top. (I mean, which of us would choose to work for Priti Patel, rather quit and than do something useful – a dustman, for example.)

Yet the times are going to require much more of government, not less.

Expect more failure.

This is a strange book, and a bad one: indeed, so bad, it's embarrassing. I’m sorry to say that, because Roy King* has had a very distinguished career indeed in criminology, and accomplished much. But there is a phenomenon which I have seen before, of someone so eminent in their field that no one feels able to tell them that they have produced something that simply won't do, and which if published, will embarrass them. Ultimately, this is a failure by the publisher, who should have saved King from himself. [* I am not acquainted with the work of his co-author Lucy Willmott.]

The book sets out to chronicle what it calls the growing crisis in prisons and probation since 1991. Most of it is devoted to a  very full chronology of the period, interlarded with summaries of interviews with very many of the key players, at very senior level. It's a remarkable achievement to have got so many to agree to be interviewed, and the chronology will be extremely helpful to historians, through read at one go it is incredibly depressing. There is then  a short passage  of diagnosis, and then suggestions as to what needs to be done.

There are three main reasons why this is a bad book.

The first is that, for book that sets out to be a history, it's strangely unhistorical. It is utterly bizarre that it takes 1990 as a starting point for the progressive decline of these services, because that year actually saw the worst crisis in the prison system in history. Here's what I said in my book:

“In 1987, some 19,000 prisoners were held two or three two a cell designed to hold one, with those prisoners enduring the squalors others defecating into buckets inches from their bunk, the bucket remaining there for many hours. And not just at night: in many prisoners, prisoners were locked in their cells most of the day... hundreds of prisoners had to be held in police cells …. The reality of prison life is vividly recalled by a governor at Strangeways prison, pre-riot:
    ‘the smell of excrement and urine at slopout, the abysmal food that we served,  the relationship between staff and prisoners where every second word was ‘fuck’,  prisoners weren’t  treated with respect, they weren't treated with decency …..the place was run for the benefit of staff earning massive amounts of overtime at fantastic cost, where racism and brutality was rife’
“Management was appallingly weak.  The POA was both powerful... yet anarchic... The POA seemed opposed to anything that made prisoners lives better. Governors only control their jails  with the agreement of their POA  branch... In October 1990 there were industrial disputes at 70 prisons... Both governors and the POA felt a huge gulf between them and headquarters, headed by career mandarins with no experience of working in prisons. ‘Management’ as such barely existed: headquarters did not set standards that prisons  should operate to and had little information about how prisons are actually doing, or where and how resources were being consumed.  Yet... it was gobbling up money like a black hole... HMPS had dramatically increased both spending and staffing... yet regimes did not improve: they got worse.
“Not only did the service provided appalling conditions and impoverished regimes, it was barely under control. In one year there were 67 acts of concerted indiscipline and 49 incidents where prisoners got on the roof... each year hundreds escaped and thousands absconded... In 1986 this unholy mix of poor conditions, union irresponsibility and management incapacity exploded when management at last tried to get a grip on staffing levels... There was disturbances at 40 prisons, several were partly destroyed 45 prisoners escaped …. There again serious riots several prisons in 1988 and 1989.  In 1990 the entire prison system erupted the most serious breakdown ever known One of the largest prisons in the country , Strangeways, was destroyed and held by rioters for four weeks as prisoners demonstrated the incompetence and impotence of the prison service from the prison roofs the TV news”.

So to take 1990 is the start of a growing  crisis which finally came to a head around 2020 is absolutely perverse. In one passage the book suggests that politically things were much better before 1990 - which begs the question of why then the  entire prison system nearly collapsed in that year, with the worst riots ever known? I see in these statements the same denial of reality of the left wing mantra that all evils started with Thatcher: you can only believe that if you wipe your mind of any recollection of the politics, and economics, of the 1970s.

A second denial of history is that the book seems to take it for granted that things just got worse through the period 1990. However there is  overwhelming evidence that the prison system, and I would argue probation, were in a much better state by middle to end of the 2000s. This was achieved precisely through political leadership (Straw and Blair) as well as the outstanding management leadership of Narey and Wheatley, together of course with a great deal more money. I'm not - of course -  arguing that prison or probation services in 2010 were excellent, overcrowding was still extremely high, but I think it's incontrovertible that they were in much better state than they had been in 1990. (Or rather, I would say that in 1990 there was no knowing whether probation was doing well or not: it is simply the practise of criminologists to assert that it was all much better then, the lack of any evidence not bothering them a bit. That the prison service was appalling in almost every way in 1990 is  a matter of record).

In fact there is a strong argument that even today, the prison system isn’t nearly as bad as it was in 1990: the old punitive POA culture and the institutionalised brutality by staff on prisoners, the open racism, has largely gone, management exists, information exists and attention is paid to what’s happening in prisons a way that wasn’t at all true in the 1980s, and so on.

In other words, the arc of this book’s narrative is fundamentally out of line with reality.

The second thing that makes this book so bad is the weird lack of reflection, lack of interest in the wider picture and most extraordinary for such eminent researchers, lack of interest in research. This takes various forms. Perhaps the most extraordinary mission is a lack of reference to what was happening to crime over this period. We know  from the British Crime Survey, that the long post War rise in crime in this country petered out around 1995, and was  followed by the most extraordinary and pretty much unexplained drop in crime: a fall of about 75%. A 75% drop in crime! This goes unremarked on in this book.  Yet it should prompt the question of why this extraordinary drop in crime went hand in hand with increased punitiveness in sentencing.

Likewise the fact that this drop occurred across much of the developed world at the same time is pretty conclusive evidence that the drop had nothing to do with justice policy or indeed social policy, which differed so much between countries. This in turn should have prevented the authors from making the casual statement, entirely unevidenced, that the ‘answer’ to crime lies in ‘social policy’. Not only does what is known as the ‘ crime drop’ contradict that, but it also calls him question whether there is in fact today any ‘crime problem’ to be ‘solved’.  

Indeed one of the major omissions of the book is  the lack of interest in what was happening in British society, that might have brought about such a drop in crime, while nevertheless increasing punitive attitudes. Nor is there any awareness that public concern about crime as an issue seems according to the British Crime Survey to peak in the 2000s, but now be at rather low levels. There is at least a possibility that in looking for ever-increasing punitiveness, the Tories are flogging the wrong horse. Likewise is complete lack of interest it was happening in other countries at the same time. Also the near total lack of interest in the connexion between prisons and probation and what's happening ‘ upstream’ in the criminal justice system. There's a very strong argument to my mind that if you did think the criminal justice system was a tool for reducing crime -  which I do not, and in that agree with the authors -  then the means lie not in punishment but in increasing the very low number of crimes resulting in some sort of sanction of the offender, and the very long delays the justice process often incurs. None of this surfaces at all in this book. Yet criminologists are the ones who often (rightly)  berate ministers for not taking an overview of the criminal justice system.

The authors suggest en passant that the criminal justice system cannot affect crime levels nor can prisons or probation service reduce re-offending – though so casually that I can’t be sure. As it happens I agree on both points. But this isn’t argued, just passingly mentioned. Yet is a huge difference from what every politician and most criminologists believe: most criminologists believe that a much batter correctional system could bring reoffending rates down. But if it is accepted, doesn't that raise  the most profound questions - such as what then is the role of prisons and probation to be, and how should we use them? All that is pretty much skated round here.

The third great weakness in the book - and this is where it gets embarrassing, - is the quality of analysis. Indeed, there's a terrible imbalance between the very short passage of analysis and the many pages of description and reporting that have gone before. Some of this is so awful look one can hardly bear to recount it. But here goes. There is a passage on ‘ British democracy and  the separation of powers’  which drifts all over the place. Even on third reading I cant tell you what it means. I think it favours separation of powers but I cant be sure.  I think it’s arguing that ending FPTP would make parties more moderate and justice policy more thoughtful and moderate: a point of view, but does the 2010 Coalition support that?  (BTW the authors do not notice that there is no such separation: because the Executive have 100 MPs on the payroll vote, and another 100 kept silent by ambition to replace  them. To a practical extent ignored by the theory, the Executive IS the legislature].

The book rightly draws attention to the high rate of ministerial churn, but then cuts the ground from underneath itself by saying that isn't really the problem. The possibility that there's been a serious decline in the calibre of civil servants is not acknowledged, still less explored. The book rightly charts negative changes in political behaviour, such as an increasing tendency of ministers on  appointment to forget everything done before then and instantly to announce some new panacea, the increasing confrontational nature of politics, unwillingness  to take advice, and  policy produced through mere assertion without genuine consultation or  thinking through. But without asking itself why these changes came about come out or whether they've occurred elsewhere. I’d say that changes in the media, and indeed increasing confrontationalism in British society as a whole are part of the same picture and there is plenty of poll evidence of a profound polarisation in culture and politics here and in the US.  A large part of the population don’t want to listen,  or to find common ground. We may actually have the sort of politics we deserve.

Where the book fails most is when it comes to proposals for the future. It goes much like this:  politicians ought to be nicer to each other and more honest with the public and think things through better and not interfere so much. Yes, what a nice world,  but without real analysis of why things are as they are or how to change them is just Pollyanna-ish. Then there’s  a strange diversion on problem solving courts, where first of all is recognised that they've not been properly evaluated, but then that proposed as ‘ an exciting way forward’, someone’s hobby horse doing an extra lap. There is a great desire for an old style Lord Chancellor who is a lawyer but  not Minister of Justice, possibly with wig, but there's no explanation  why or how this would bring any benefit.

We should make less use of prison – yes, yes, but how, given current politics, and the  polarised, confrontational state of British society?

Strangest of all is the passage on the management of prison and probation. There is  first the  proposition, which I've never seen convincingly argued, that probation must be ‘locally based’, and locally accountable - perhaps it should, but I haven't seen it properly argued. Then it suggested that there should be an  Agency for prison and probation, or perhaps two agencies, which seemed to be centrally funded and  controlled, not locally , as previously argued - this is left entirely unclear. It is  to be accountable to an ‘eminent person’ as chairman, with horrid, horrid politicians excluded and certainly no attention paid to the Daily Mail. I’m not sure I agree with that:  what happens in prisons  is very much a political issue and it would be wrong, and futile, to try to regard his somehow technical management one, which the technicians could just get on  with. But more to the point, the idea that we could move to such an arrangement given the political climate in which we unfortunately operate at present is simply ludicrously  adrift from reality.

Finally there are two passages which rob the book of any remaining credibility:

First it is seriously stated that David Faulkner was ‘one of the wisest of civil servants in the Home Office’. This is taking him very much at his own estimation! And the CJA 1991 is supposed to be his ‘crowning achievement’. Legislation that fell to pieces before the ink was dry, largely because those required to operate it hadn’t been convinced, and achieved…what exactly?

Second and even less forgivably, the 1990 White Paper is made to say “prison can be an expensive way of making bad people worse”. This is what it actually said:

"Nobody now regards imprisonment, in itself, as an effective means of reform for most prisoners….. For most offenders, imprisonment has to be justified in terms of public protection, denunciation and retribution. Otherwise it can be an expensive way of making bad people worse."

Meaning: prison has its uses,  but not for cutting reoffending. The truncated version quoted by the authors has quite a different implication: prison is useless. Is it conceivable that the authors simply didn’t check the text?