Accountability. There’s a nice word. It’s kind of biblical. It’s one of those so-called golden rules. An account is about balance and fairness. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. A simple and straightforward notion.
I’d say that means that we expect ourselves to account for errors and misdeeds, and we are often our own greatest critics. In balance then we expect others to account for their errors and misdeeds.
Our society doesn’t have a police officer standing on every doorstep. That would be intolerable. What we call civilised behaviour requires each of us to be accountable for our action, to ourselves as much as to everyone else.
Listening to the story of the Post Office (PO), and its persecution of postmasters, it’s apparent that the innocent individuals first questioned themselves before they questioned the failing computer system that they had been forced to use.
Go back 20-years and Computer Weekly[1] was pointing out that the large-scale transition from a paper-based system to a computer system was going badly wrong. An accountable institution would have urgently investigated and fixed any problems, which are not unexpected in the introduction of a new system. In this case, cover-up and denial seems to have been the strategy. Then blaming the innocent and going to extreme measure to punish postmasters.
The PO did not do unto others as it would have them do unto it. The corporate blindness to injustice and its self-protection mechanisms were the worst of what an institution can be. Now, the appalling injustice is evident to everyone and it’s difficult to understand where accountability was in the past. By cruel imposition, accountability was distorted by the powerful.
I hate to say it but there’s a general lesson in what has happened at the PO. In the last 10-years there are numerous significant national failures where the strategy of blame and going to extreme avoidance measure has prevailed. The billions (£) wasted on personal protective equipment (PPE)[2] during the pandemic is only one case. The billions (£) wasted by Truss in a few days. Don’t start me on the billions (£) wasted on Brexit.
In our democracy the notion is that accountability comes through free and open elections. The argument goes: if you don’t like what they have done you can kick them out. If there is such a thing as natural justice, we might expect that to happen. I remain an idealist in a year of elections.
I sat down in Morrisons[3] yesterday morning. There was a copy of a national tabloid newspaper lying around. I picked it up to read it with my tea. The line it took, on the one hand, is to highlight the injustice of the PO scandal. On the other hand, it did its best to exonerate the current government and cast shadows over the opposition. Not much honest accountability. Conservatives, who have been in power for more that a decade, are swiftly trying to rebrand.
Golden rules are great but political expediency is much in play as we run up to a General Election. I hope that the public will see through rebrand underway. Let’s hope.
[1] https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Post-Office-Horizon-scandal-explained-everything-you-need-to-know
[2] https://www.transparency.org.uk/track-and-trace-uk-PPE-procurement-corruption-risk-VIP-lane
[3] https://groceries.morrisons.com/
John Vincent 