NOTES
(1) For example, https://www2.deloitte.com/uk/en/pages/consumer-business/articles/what-next-for-the-high-street.html, from which the chart is taken
(2)  https://www.localdatacompany.com/blog/press-release-brc-ldc-vacancy-monitor-q3-2022
(3) https://www.economist.com/britain/2022/06/02/the-fall-and-rise-of-the-british-market-hall
(4) But see https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/20012132.pubs-lost-oxford-since-1990s/

By the time I got about halfway through this book, I thought to myself: yes, it's ingenious ( the linking of stages in his own life to stages in modern Ireland's history), it’s very well written and it’s very informative - I knew most of the story in outline, but some things were new to me - the replacement of the old Protestant Ascendancy by a new ruling class after independence, the extent and brazeness openness of their corruption under Haughey, and  the wild speculation of the Celtic Tiger years (all of which made me feel that Boris Johnson and Co had something to learn about corruption  and speculation, after all). New to me also, the extent of Irish emigration in the late twentieth century.

But, I  wasn't enjoying the book at all. For the author seemed not merely to disapprove of  much of what the Irish said or did, but actually to despise them. And on his account, that seemed a reasonable response to a society composed equal parts of mediaeval credulousness, obsequiousness to power, sentimental self-delusion and callous indifference to the sufferings of those most in need. It was like a novel where the author has, and generates in you, no interest in the fate of  his characters. Why read on?

What I lacked was a narrative -  a way of understanding this story, that made it more than just  one damned thing after another. And in the last quarter or so  the book, everything changes -  we get that narrative, we see Ireland change fundamentally, we understand why O’Toole  has told the tale in the way that he has.  His thesis, which seems compelling, is that the Irish were unable to think clearly about themselves,  but took refuge either in evasion and duplicity - what he calls knowing but not knowing – or  in grasping at versions of themselves that were however not true, or not wholly true.

The last quarter of the book  describes the destruction, largely self destruction as it turns out, of the things that were keeping the Irish from themselves, keeping them in confusion and in fear. Above all the destruction of the Catholic Church, as a result of exposure of its system of torture and slavery of children and women through the Christian Brothers, the Magdalen Laundries, the mother and baby homes, sexual predation by priests and routine cover-up by the heirarchy. And the overthrowing of oppressive Catholic sexual morality - which as he shows was largely in fact exercise in hypocrisy at the expense of the most vulnerable - through the unstoppable  intrusion, first of American, then European culture, and finally the inrush of immigrants to Ireland from all over the world in recent decades (another thing I had not known).

And in tandem with that, the weakening of the ruling class and the destruction of Fianna Fail, as their  breath-taking corruption and economic mismanagement were so exposed that it could not longer be ‘known but not known’. Growing prosperity, and the ending of Ireland's traditional place as one of the poorest countries in the developed world.

And finally the end  of the old militant version of the nationalist dream, as a result  of revulsion at the excesses of the IRA, at violence as an end in itself,  of the  gradual acceptance  by the IRA that they could not win militarily, and of the the dawning realisation that hardly anyone  in Ireland actually wanted a united Ireland  brought about  the extirpation and forcible driving out  of the Prods, even if that were militarily possible. And that it might be possible, might even be better, to live with some ambiguity about the precise political expression of  Irishness.

Thus far, that might  sound  it was as simple as this: that Ireland had been very  backward, and is  now thoroughly modern. However he's making a much more subtle,  interesting and I think more  universally applicable point than  that. He is describing a  people, a country, which finally manages to see itself clearly, not by replacing one story by another, or by  abandoning the past, or by becoming just like their neighbours, but rather by finding a way of living with uncertainty about its identity and about its future, instead of clutching at bogus identities and bogus beliefs.

This is done in the fascinating final chapter where  he rather wonderfully quotes Keats’ notebooks, of all things, on something he called ‘negative capability’: “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” instead of being “incapable of remaining with half knowledge” (that’s Keats). Or O’Toole: ‘Ireland did not start as one fixed thing and end up as another…. It did not start out as isolated and become globalised.. it grew but it also allowed itself gradually, painfully and with relief to contract, to shrink away from the stories that were too big to match the scale of its intimate decencies. We ended up, not great, maybe not even especially good but......not so bad ourselves”.

It's a beautiful conclusion. But one which is, for an Englishman,  so full of anguish and almost unbearable pain. For we have chosen to go in the exact  opposite direction. At the time of the London Olympics ceremony in 2012, it seemed for a moment that we might have passed peak Churchill, to have found a way of understanding our past in all its complexity without being a prisoner of it, and to welcome change and diversity even if we couldn't fully see where it was leading us. We seemed to accept all that …  and then we didn't. In the Brexit vote, and subsequently, we decided, by such a tragically small majority, to  concrete ourselves ever more firmly back into the past, or rather a highly skewed,  essentially false view of the past. And in electing Boris Johnson, we opted for a kind of Fianna Fail ourselves - open, monstrous corruption, careless erosion of liberties and law, economic mismanagement on a devastating scale. Ireland has gone forward: we have gone backwards. And we chose it. We did it to ourselves.

If  there is any hope for us in this book, it is that the narrative which the new Tory party is  spinning is self contradictory and already falling apart in front of our eyes. Leaving Europe did not make us more free or more prosperous but the reverse. Letting the rich make themselves much richer did not trickle down to the majority.  Once uniquely poised between the US and Europe,  able to mediate between the two, we are now a figure of ridicule or best pity internationally. Internally, we are more hypocritical, more at violently at odds with ourselves,  more confused, more depairing than at anytime I can remember.

All this contains the seeds of its own destruction. Sadly, we lack any politician capable of seeing that , of giving us a sense of hope, on left all right.  And I am not wholly confident that will pull through.  As I wrote after the Referendum, countries can lose their genius, can slide into  terminal decline. But there is some reason for hope: polls show  that the ghastly reaction we are living through is concentrated in my generation, and that the young are more radically minded that previous generations of their age.  I think the time may come when we turn our back on the myths of English exceptionalism and have  the courage to breakthrough, back to the real world, and to our own best instincts. But because we deliberately threw away our best chance,   it will be  very slow and very painful.

And since my generation needs to die first,  I won't be around to see it.

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