⁴for the word of the Lord holds true, and all his work endures. ⁵He is a lover of righteousness and justice; the earth is filled with the Lord’s unfailing love.

Psalm 33:4-5 – The Revised English Bible

¹These are the words of the Lord: Maintain justice and do what is right; for my deliverance is close at hand, and my victory will soon be revealed.

Isaiah 56:1 – The Revised English Bible

¹⁶Six things the Lord hates, seven are detestable to him: ¹⁷a proud eye, a false tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, ¹⁸a mind given to forging wicked schemes, feet that run swiftly to do evil, ¹⁹a false witness telling a pack of lies, and one who sows strife between brothers.

Proverbs 6:16-19 – The Revised English Bible

³²Be generous to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you.

Ephesians 4:32 – The Revised English Bible

Photo courtesy of Pexels – Sl Wong

Quite a few of my regular readers have contacted me about the Post Office Scandal. Several have told me that they’ve been moved to tears by hearing how these poor people have been treated. Some have reported becoming very angry.

Maybe one of the reasons why this issue has touched a nerve with the public is because it’s an age-old story of good against evil; justice against injustice. The story has scarcely been out of the news since it first fired the public imagination.

It also seems that more details are emerging, almost on a daily basis.

It’s now necessary to cover some of these major moral issues in more detail. I have to warn you that if you think the situation is bad, then sadly it’s probably worse than you thought.

• When and why did we decide to abandon the longstanding legal principle (in England and Wales) that those charged in criminal cases are ‘innocent until proven guilty beyond all reasonable doubt’?

This doctrine lies at the very heart of our legal system, and it’s served us well for many centuries. So how have we ended up where we are, with so many Sub Postmasters convicted with no evidence given against them, other than computer reports that showed that sums of money were ‘missing’?

One of the main reasons must be that, as many who’ve had a brush with the law will attest, the law is now so focused on process, that any connection with natural justice is hidden below multiple layers of legal complexity. This situation has deteriorated massively during my lifetime. I simply can’t understand how a judicial system that convicts on such thin evidence, can possibly claim to be finding people guilty beyond reasonable doubt.

The Post Office chose at an early stage in this scandal, to offer the Sub Postmasters what they thought would be an attractive ‘plea bargain’; namely that if they agreed to plead guilty to ‘false accounting’ they might avoid being found guilty of fraud, a more serious offence, carrying a serious risk of an extended jail sentence. Obviously by pleading guilty, they had to pay back all the sums that they were told they had stolen. I’ll be exploring further in Part 3 the role that’s been played by our national ignorance of how IT works. This offer of pleading guilty to a lesser offence was misused, to prey upon their sense of unease and guilt that automatically stemmed from a belief that: ‘The computer must be right; I must have done something wrong, even if I don’t understand what that might have been’. They were also deliberately misinformed that no other Sub Postmasters were suffering from missing amounts, which added to any existing feeling of doubt and added to their sense of isolation. The immorality of this approach by the Post Office leaders takes the breath away. Many of those accused lost everything that they had, at this stage.

If you think that this attempt to prey upon the feelings of the accused was not deliberate, then consider what has already come out in the enquiry. One Post Office lawyer said: ‘It’s to be hoped the case will set a marker, to dissuade other defendants from jumping on the Horizon-bashing bandwagon.’ Another Post Office lawyer told one of the accused Sub Postmasters: ‘We will ruin you’.

It’s only become clear in the last few days that some of those involved in Post Office Ltd were actually paid bonuses for convictions made and sums recovered from those falsely accused. This must be one of the key features of this case: we discovered during the ‘Credit Crunch’ in 2008 that it’s only too easy to incentivise people to act immorally. The immorality of this, by those who signed off this bonus scheme, is off the scale.

We’ve recently been told by Sir Ed Davey, the leader of our Liberal Democrat party in the UK, who was the Minister responsible for the Post Office at a critical time (as part of the coalition government under Prime Minister David Cameron) that he sees no reason to apologise, as he feels he was ‘lied to’ by the Post Office.

This statement absolutely must be challenged. I should make clear that I’ve never been a non-executive Director, which is probably similar to being a government minister. But I was an unpaid Trustee of several charities, and an unpaid governor of a Federation of Schools for many years. Such appointments are pointless and have absolutely zero value, unless the person in question acts as a ‘critical friend’ to the organisation and asks as many challenging questions as they can dream up. It’s not difficult to spot when answers fail to inspire trust. In this case, if I’d been a Post Office non-executive, probably the first question that I’d have asked was: ‘How many of these cases are there, in comparison with our previous historical pattern?’ When it became obvious that the number was over 100 times higher, the loudest alarm bells should have been ringing, and should have led to many further probing questions being asked.

In addition, it’s been revealed that Sir Ed refused to meet the representative of the accused. Let’s face it, if you cover your ears to the facts, you can’t claim to have been misled; you’ve simply failed to carry out your own due diligence.

My view, which you may find uncompromising, is that if Sir Ed Davey didn’t ask any such questions, or seek to inform himself, then he’s revealed himself to be completely unfit for public office; even as an MP, let alone as an aspiring Prime Minister. To claim that it’s not your fault and yet completely refuse to hear the evidence, is again immorality of the highest order.   

• During the course of my lifetime, the drift has become inexorable towards organisations feeling that the only thing that matters is that the organisation itself survives and that this is more important than the well-being of the people employed by it, or those it’s supposed to serve?

Peter Sewell, who managed the team providing data for prosecutions of Sub-Postmasters, was asked by one of the lawyers at the public enquiry whether he personally saw it as his role to defend Fujitsu. ‘I guess I did, but not purposely,’ was his answer. He was then asked whether it was important to defend Fujitsu in the face of questions about the integrity of its Horizon system. He replied: ‘We all protect our own companies.’ He didn’t add ‘right or wrong’ but he might just as well have done so, for sadly that’s been the effect of what he and his colleagues were doing.

One of the features of recent decades has been the advent of an ever-increasing number of international and global organisations. Who had heard of the World Health Organisation until a few short years ago? A few other older examples (from a far from exhaustive list) are these: the EU, NATO, the UN (with its various parts like the UNHCR), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Bank for International Settlements (which seems to have complete legal immunity in the UK!), the ECHR, and the World Economic Forum, which as we know has been meeting this week in Davos. It seems to me that that in recent years, these organisations have shown the following characteristics:

• They’ve become more belligerent and more greedy for influence (in the last few days, NATO has said we need to prepare for war with Russia! May God help us.)
• They’ve adopted responsibility for ever-increasing regulation, often deliberately cutting across existing nationally-adopted regulation and claiming that their organisation’s powers trump those of any and all national governments.
• They’ve become increasingly remote from the views of the people that they were initially set up to serve
• They’ve extended their powers without gaining or even seeking, authority to do so

But possibly the one characteristic that increasingly characterises these organisations (and even much older national ones, like the House of Commons and Church of England) is that they now behave as if only one thing matters: that the organisation itself survives and expands its scope. The way they achieve this is to enforce obedience, implement ‘Groupthink’ and reinforce hierarchical pressure. If you’re an employee and you don’t comply, then you can forget any hopes that your career will progress. It’s sad to report that this is now even taking hold of some of our charities. If you disagree, think about these two examples: the RNLI and its involvement in illegal immigration and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, who’ve become champions of bird-chopping windmills. 

If we look at how and why this has taken place, then we need look no further than selfishness, extended to organisations. ‘I look after myself in my private world’ translates in the corporate world into: ‘We must defend ourselves against everyone and everything that may adversely impact our organisation, even if we know we’ve caused the problem.’ It needs hardly be stressed that such an opinion is deeply immoral and cuts across every tenet of Christianity, which calls us to uphold and support others in need.

•  When and how did we adopt a position where so many of us are smugly certain that we’re right and others are not just wrong, but plain evil, if they disagree with us?

It seems to me that we’re rapidly becoming more remote from each other. One of the reasons why I argued against the lockdowns, is that it seemed to me that they accelerated this most unhealthy change. Where is our sense of duty towards our neighbour? Where is our commitment to looking after those who are less fortunate than ourselves? Since the start of the Gaza conflict, I’ve seen and heard terrible things from both sides about ‘the other side’ and I’ve written on this blog about my fears of how this could play out. We have less respect for those with different opinions, and there’s an increasing tendency (that’s deeply immoral) to see such people as unworthy, sub-human, beneath contempt. Those of my generation need no reminders of where such views have led, historically. How can we have failed to learn this lesson that cost so many lives, so few years ago?

I fear that social media may be one influencing factor in all this; if you look at others in public places, it’s common to see people totally absorbed in their electronic devices, seemingly oblivious to others around them, even their own family members and loved ones. Where does this end?

The heart of Christianity and many world religions has always been the ‘Golden Rule’:

‘Treat others as you would like them to treat you.’ (Luke 6:31)

We reject this deeply moral exhortation by our Saviour Christ at our greatest peril.

The remaining three moral aspects of this deeply distressing story (the issues about trust in technology, why we’ve abandoned truth and finally the issue of the ‘jobs gravy train’) will be addressed in my next blog in about a week’s time.

Gracious and loving Lord, guide us to see that your values can help us to avoid such distressing issues and that only through you can we regain the morality that is essential to our wellbeing. Amen