[pjmq]

Pretty much everyone who was not a sub-postmaster involved in the Horizon mess needs to be sentenced. The sheer malice on display here is inescapable.

These people killed people and hid their mess. Plain and simple.

[penguin_booze]

As much as I agree with that and want see that happen, I predict people will get away with not so much as a slap on the wrist. Phrases to look out for are "collective responsibility", "I was only doing my job", "must preserve the reputation of the institution", "limited liability" etc.

[wozniacki]

Yes, indeed. In as many words.

Two things here that come to mind:

1) The lack of muckraking agents in this whole affair - individuals, investigative bodies, the media, non-governmental agencies, British billionaires who have the wherewithal to finance private investigative operations etc. The sheer magnitude of that shortfall is just worrying. For those that are not fully familiar with the scope of the issues here :

    Between 1999 and 2015, an estimated 3500 staff employed by the state-owned
    Post Office service were accused of fraud, theft or malicious accounting.
    
    Almost 700 of them were convicted in courts and some 230 were jailed.      
    Most were legally compelled to repay the amounts they were accused of
    fleecing, resulting in bankruptcies, marriage failures, substance abuse and
    even suicides.

    There was just one not-so-little problem – virtually all of those people
    were innocent.[1]  

I mean how does something like that go on for so long! Especially when lives have been torn apart! Its one thing for public money to be pilfered & squandered. That happens everywhere. But those people have been wrecked, if that article is to be believed.

2) Whats more concerning is the larger question :

   a) if people have been made to put up with these kinds of horrendous miscarriages of justice for
   so long, in a postal services affair, what other miscarriages of justice are there that go 
   unnoticed, uninvestigated and unpunished. 
   b) is this "part and parcel" of middle income British life? do the Brits put a large amount of
   trust in their unimpeachable public institutions? do they pull themselves back, short of calling 
   into question the integrity of those that are tasked with such jobs? (atleast more so than is
   the case in the United States and elsewhere). I ask because I've come across things that seem to 
   buttress exactly that : 

      It is also forcing everyone to pay higher taxes for worse
      public services: The great British Middle Class live in
      a world of petty crime that goes un-investigated let
      alone punished, over-crowded emergency health services,
      and ever-lengthening NHS waiting lists (Britain has one
      of the lowest ratios of doctors and hospital beds per
      patient in the whole of the OECD).  

I have come across this kind of uniquely British reluctance to call a spade a spade, in quite a few other instances as well. Dr. John Campbell of Youtube fame comes to mind but I digress.[3]

[1] Inside the incredible and devastating postal service scandal that could bring down the UK government

https://www.news.com.au/finance/work/leaders/inside-the-incr...

[2] Britain Should Stop Pretending It’s a Rich Country

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/07/18/stagnant-...

[3] Dr. John Campbell

https://www.youtube.com/@Campbellteaching/videos