Destroying the brand to save it

By | February 14, 2024
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Troops marching through a village during the Vietnam War. Location and date unknown. (AP Photo/Eddie Adams)

Companies spend a lot of time talking about their brand(s). But to most journalists the word is meaningless. The word both groups are really thinking about is reputation, as that captures its true importance, since it’s the hardest asset to build up and the easiest to lose. Think of it that way and you’ll understand better about how seriously to take any inquiry from a journalist exploring potential wrongdoing in your organisation.

Once again I’m turning to the British Post Office saga for material to demonstrate this. The case, as readers will know, is about the wrongful persecution and prosecution of those running the company’s post offices, accusing them of theft and fraud when its Fujitsu computer system showed accounting shortfalls.

Yes, the story already feels a little as if it’s now in the rear view mirror. But it so painfully highlights what can go wrong when a company misunderstands what ‘brand’ is, it deserves another airing. And it is still laying waste, with terrible consequences for the lives and reputations of nearly everyone involved, from the legions of lowly sub-postmasters who went to their graves unabsolved, to the apparatchiks and executives who must now take their turn to feel humiliated and ashamed.

For 20 years the Post Office prioritised the preservation of its ‘brand’, believing that without it the company would lose its most valuable customers, two government agencies that provided much of its income (the Department for Work and Pensions and the Driving and Vehicle Licensing Agency.)

But, fatally, it viewed the sub-postmasters as the threat, not a new computer system.

The cottage industry

The flawed logic is easy to see in testimony given back in 2015, when the problem was already 15 years old, but still far from tipping in favour of the beleaguered sub-postmasters. The General Secretary of the National Federation of SubPostmasters, George Thomson, was asked by a House of Commons committee whether sub-postmasters were still experiencing problems with the Fujitsu IT system at the heart of the matter.

“We do £350 million a week,” he told the committee. “We pay out £18 billion a year for the DWP in Government benefits. The DWP would not have re-awarded the Post Office card account contract, which pays out £18 billion a year, in the last month if they thought for a minute that this computer system was not reliable.”

George Thomson before the Select Committee Hearing 2015

On that he was right. But ensuring that was the case, he told the committee, was not about checking whether the computer system itself was reliable, but in suppressing the voices of those who said it wasn’t. “We have to be careful,” he said, “that we are not creating a cottage industry that damages the brand and makes clients like the DWP and the DVLA think twice.”

Senior Post Office executives were more polished in their description of the situation. But the bottom line was always the same: We need to preserve the brand, whatever it costs, even as it became increasingly obvious that the brand bore little relationship with the underlying reality.

It’s important to remember this wasn’t gradual. From the outset the Post Office chose to believe the system was not at fault, the sub-postmasters were. In one early adopter Post Office, the Horizon system was installed in January 2000. By July it had a shortfall of £30,000, and auditors closed the Post Office. The sub-postmaster was later convicted of false accounting. (Source)

The branding iron

For this approach to work, it needed its own internal logic. The computer system could not have problems if every sub-postmaster reporting shortfalls was a likely criminal. You had to have one, not the other. Rob Wilson, then head of criminal law at the Post Office, wrote in an email in 2010: “To continue prosecuting alleged offenders knowing that there is an ongoing investigation to determine the veracity of Horizon could also be detrimental to the reputation of my team.”

His team’s reputation could take a hit if it was using the law against sub-postmasters while another part of the Post Office was investigating whether, indeed, those same sub-postmasters may have a point when they said the IT system was faulty.

His conclusion: don’t investigate Horizon. Don’t look for something you don’t want to find.

But if that was the case, why investigate the sub-postmasters at all? Why not write off the shortfalls, keep quiet and move on?

The answer, it turns out, is two-fold.

Firstly, money. In 2003 the Post Office was trading at a loss, putting pressure on staff to recover debts and making that part of performance-related targets. (Source) Indeed, when sub-postmasters added their own funds in desperate efforts to redress the computer-derived losses, such “unexplained windfalls” were quietly transferred to the bottom line. In the words of one sub-postmaster: “as a result… top executives are showered with bonuses and honours.” (Gordon Martin, of Moor Falmouth: Source)

Gordon Martin, giving evidence to the inquiry, 24/2/22

And then of course, there’s reputation. If it’s a battle between the reputation of the sub-postmaster or the Post Office, the big guns would have to come out. “Cases raised for investigations will be limited to those likely to seriously damage the brand or reputation of the Post Office,” one internal Post Office document declared. Source Any legal action was not about recovering money, since that was already flowing in, but in ensuring that no sub-postmaster should challenge the sanctity of the brand. They needed to be silenced.

The ultimately fatal logic of wagon-circling ensured the Post Office was committed to ruining hundreds, thousands, of lives. “It seems that people within the Post Office did everything possible to protect the reputation of the Post Office,” said Sam Stein, a lawyer working on behalf of the sub-postmasters, “and, whilst doing so, did everything possible to destroy the reputation of their own staff. The Post Office broke people. They broke good, honest, people. Some did not survive.” (Source)

The witness statements submitted and interviews conducted show just what this meant, as individuals’ reputations were trashed to destroy this “cottage-industry” of sub-postmasters damaging the Post Office brand.

Pauline Thomson, sub-postmaster of Matfield, Kent from 2004 to 2008, said “some (customers) would ‘cut me dead’. Some people would blank me.”

Tahir Mahmood, sub-postmaster at Selly Oak, Birmingham, between 1999 and 2005, and sentenced to 9 months’ imprisonment, described how “the impact (was) greater to my reputation within the family than outside it. At family gatherings, I could hear people gossiping about me or staring at me.”

Mary Philp said she still takes a detour to avoid the village in Fife, Scotland, where she was sub-postmaster, (Source) “because I still feel the effects of the humiliation of wrongful accusation and the unjustified judgement of the community there.”

The whipping stick

On the surface this seems absurd. To protect “the brand” the company attacks the only Post Office people the public see, so for them they are the brand. So the Post Office seemed intent on destroying its own key resource — those in the field actually providing the service. To those on the front-line it was baffling. “We’re the ones standing at the front of the counter, taking the abuse from the customers, to put money into the Post Office to make them the global brand or the big brand that they are,” said Kevin Palmer, sub-postmaster in Rayleigh, Essex, from 2007 to 2016. (Source)

But it may have seemed logical. The Post Office, in effect, was shoring up its brand by exploiting and then trashing those of its own people. One anonymous witness described it thus: “We postmasters have been abused for our honesty and loyalty to the Crown and the Post Office reputation. The Post Office used this honesty and loyalty as a whipping stick.” (Source)

But so long as the Post Office’s reputation held fast, it was a winning strategy. And the sad reality was — and possibly still is, if some conversations I’ve had — that in a battle of brands between the Post Office and local pillars of the community, the former would win out. “I can remember friends and acquaintances had a difficult time believing that I was completely innocent and thought that a respected institution such as the Post Office must have had some reason to suspect me,” Jean Smith, manager of East Boldon Post Office, Tyne and Wear, told the Post Office Inquiry. Source

Reputations crumbled to dust.

“I was totally devastated. My job, business and reputation destroyed in one day,” said Nicola Arch. (Source) “I literally lost everything overnight. Money and property and business is one thing, but losing your reputation and dignity is another,” said Robert Ambrose, sub-postmaster in High Wych, Hertfordshire, 2010-2012. “My reputation and the reputation of my family is more important that money to me. I want my reputation back,” said Heather Earley, sub-postmaster at Newtownabbey, County Antrim 2011 to 2017. (Source)

Heather Earley speaking to the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry, 18 May 2022, in Belfast

The burden they were carrying was especially heavy, because in many cases the Post Offices they ran were closed down, leading the local community to see the sub-postmasters as responsible for losing a precious local resource. “For many years, I have always felt that there was a stain on my reputation as suspicion fell on me when Post Office Limited closed the office after I left and moved it to a large convenience store. The community saw this as a betrayal as the post office had been the centre of the village for decades,” said John Bowan, sub-postmaster at Pontyclun, Wales, from 1998 to 2004. (Source)

The strategy is, in hindsight, absurd. It has helped decimated the Post Office’s network of post offices. In 2000 there were 18,000. In 2022 there were 11,635. The perverse logic required to protect a position essentially led to the point where to challenge that thinking would have meant ripping up the company and starting again. But while it may seem absurd now, it’s clear that no senior Post Office executive considered it so, for nigh on two decades.

The culture may have come from the top, but as it seeped through the company no one could ask the fundamental question: are we backing the wrong horse here? Is the computer itself at fault, and if so, does that mean everything we’ve done has to be unravelled? No-one internally, or appointed externally, could afford to ask that question — until, eventually, the public woke up to the biggest miscarriage of justice in British history.

In short, the logic could not unravel itself — it required a hefty push from outside.

And to me that’s the worry.

The wagons

The logic, I fear, is embedded in much brand or reputation management. I don’t claim to be an expert on such subjects from within PR, but I do know what it looks like from a journalist’s point of view. I have experienced some of the flawed logic at play when, as a journalist, I’ve approached a company with a story that sets off alarms about brand and reputation.

If a journalist finds something apparently wrong in an organisation, and asks for an interview, the usual reaction from that organisation is to try to discourage the journalist from writing about it — either by denying the story, presenting evidence that apparently contradicts the story, or by challenging the journalist’s understanding of the story.

When I interviewed the CEO and his team at a major chemical manufacturer about a quirk in their company structure that suggested there had been an illegal pay-off, a flunky left the room and ten minutes came back with a document that he said provided an innocent explanation for the incident. The single page of A4 had no letterhead, no date and no signature, and was warm enough to suggest it just been typed or printed. I’m not sure how they thought I might react but it definitely wasn’t the way that I did.

On another occasion I interviewed the senior executive of a global telecoms equipment manufacturer and challenged the company’s line on allegations it had stolen firmware code from a rival. The PR head later sent me what he said was proof that the code was originally developed by the company. It took me about five minutes to discover that there was an earlier version of the code, provably written by the rival. To his credit, the PR person didn’t debate the point.

I get it. It’s perhaps understandable that the first reaction to a possible negative story would be to circle the wagons and head the journalist off at the pass (at the risk of murdering the metaphor.) I am the first to admit sometimes this works: sometimes there just is no way to confirm a story and it ends up languishing.

But this never ends well. A journalist will always pull at the string eventually. In the case of the Post Office its internal logic may have been a useful holding pattern had it gone back to check the allegations more thoroughly — and address them. But it didn’t. It continued to harass sub-postmasters and closed its eyes to the obvious logic that computers must be at least partly to blame for all these shortfalls reported by unblemished sub-postmasters.

The problem is that this circle-the-wagons approach puts down roots and becomes a fortress. Defending it becomes part of the raison d’être of the organisation. A judge described it thus: “A theme contained within some of the internal documents is an extreme sensitivity (seeming to verge, on occasion, to institutional paranoia) concerning any information that may throw doubt on the reputation of Horizon, or expose it to further scrutiny.” (Source)

Staff could see no one would be fired for this behaviour so it became institutionalised, even up to 2022, when Chris Trousdale, sub-postmaster at Lealholm Post Office, Yorkshire, told the inquiry: “They let us suffer for longer – even now, you can read the Post Office dribble that they put out and you think: you’ve got no contrition, you’ve got no remorse, you’re just in brand protection 101 mode, that’s all you’re interested in.” (Source)

It was clear that none of this was accidental. John Breeden, a Post Office employee, was asked by the inquiry about where this culture of protecting the brand image at all costs came from. “In my view, it came from the top.” (John Breeden was an employee of the Post Office)

With the executives still toeing the same party line, the rank and file were empowered to persecute sub-postmasters, especially those that refused to bow down. Suzanne Palmer, sub-postmistress in Rayleigh, Essex from 2004 to 2005, recounted how she was still hounded even after she was found not guilty in court. The Post Office refused to reinstate her, losing her her home, her business and her credibility. “The Post Office tried to do all they could to ruin my reputation, even to the extent of saying that if my manager gave evidence on my behalf they would prosecute her as well,” she said. (Source)

The furnace and the wrench

The Post Office, in short, became the prison of its own ‘reputation management.’ Which to me demonstrates how flawed any strategy is that doesn’t first address the underlying truth of an allegation that threatens an institution’s brand.

In the case of the Post Office, its reputation lay in how well it could deliver the services of its clients — the mail, pensions, driving licences etc etc. That meant, and still means, that the company is essentially in the business of maintaining two pipes. The first pipe is the one between itself and its sub-postmasters channeling services. The other pipe is between its sub-postmasters and the customers of those services. The success of one depends on the success of the other. If Mrs Birchsquirble of Llanybydder can’t get her pension then the system has broken. Ultimately the reputation of the Post Office — its brand — depend on whether that service can be provided.

The Post Office, like many a company I’ve either written about as a journalist, or worked with on the other side of the fence, confuses brand and reputation and sees both as something that is ‘managed’, an amorphous mass that can be separated from the institution itself, massaged and spruced up, given a dash of paint, a new logo, renamed if necessary, helped along by crisp mission statements, press releases, friendly or sponsored coverage, and by avoiding pesky journalists asking difficult questions.

I would argue the opposite is true. Reputation is forged in the furnace of real-world events, where institutions and their leaders tackle, and are seen to tackle, challenges where they exist. I admit that we journalists failed to notice this story until it was way too late, but even then, some soul-searching and tough questions from senior management might have led to the brave but necessary investigation, which would have saved countless millions, hundreds of prosecutions, and quite a few lives. It’s never too late to use a journalist’s questions as a wrench to force open some cupboards.

Forget managing reputation in circumstances like these. I wrote a few weeks ago about a company trying to deliver water to Jakartans after state utilities were privatised. That story caused significant upheaval and not a few departures. But the story wasn’t wrong, nor was it misleading. The problems were there for anyone to see. Yes, perhaps another journalist might have put a more positive spin on it, but the problem wasn’t a PR problem. It was the result of an internal failure to recognise the scale of the problem the company faced, and deal with it before inviting a journalist in to view the wreckage. If I hadn’t written about it, the story would have come out anyway.

Reputation is not a shiny new façade or cladding on a crumbling edifice. Reputation is built and maintained by doing things right. It’s like that saying about when to plant a tree. Even when it seems it might be too late, it’s still better than later. Later, and your reputation will be the worse for it, even if you’re all vested up and on your desert island in the sun.

It took a judge to see what the Post Office had become by burying its head in the sand. Speaking back in 2004, Judge McFarland took a swipe at the company’s disastrous and eventually reversed rebranding as Consignia a couple of years earlier, and saw its effort to prosecute a sub-postmaster for what it was. He told the court: “The Post Office case was just as much of a sham as its rebranded new image of the nation’s most trusted brand.” (Source)

It was true, but it would take nearly another 20 years for that to become widely known.

Un-circling the wagons

So what are the takeaways? My argument is that the Post Office, as a case study, is different only in the extremes — the lengths the company went to protect its brand, the length of time it took for the truth to be widely acknowledged, the number of people wrongly persecuted and prosecuted, the sheer size of the scandal and its impact.

Beneath the surface there are lessons we can all learn.

It’s important to understand why this story became so big and dragged in public figures and governments. It was because journalists wrote about it. Not as many as there should have been, and not as soon as we should, but that was a function of the distributed nature of the crime. None of the victims knew — for years, in some cases for the rest of their lives — that there were other victims as well. As I’ve mentioned in earlier pieces, sub-postmasters, by virtue of their job, are spread out around the country and have no formal or natural mechanism for connecting to others. (The union which was supposed to do that abandoned them.)

Furnace | Andrew Otto | Flickr

So we need to remember that in the majority of cases like this it’s nearly always the result of journalists doing their job well. Journalists will always, eventually, find out. So it naturally points to the absolute necessity of taking journalists seriously when they come knocking at your door. It’s not enough to fend them off thinking they and the story will go away. It might, for a while. But never forever.

This means that when a journalist makes this approach, with allegations of illegality or other transgressions, the case needs to be assigned to someone of sufficient seniority to handle, and if necessary to investigate. Is there some truth in what the journalist is reporting? In the case of the Post Office, it’s clear that there’s an institutional knowledge about the problem, but that prejudice and self-preservation have created a bunker mentality, where the truth is intentionally shut out (by seeking only confirmatory noises from those who know about the computer system that it’s not to blame) and the victims themselves, the sub-postmasters, treated as criminals.

So it goes without saying — although it appears it needs to be said — that ignoring a journalist who approaches with a story will ultimately be fatal. After acknowledging the journalist’s request and learning what you can about what their angle is, the question to ask, then, is: is there something that I don’t know that the journalist does? Are my own staff keeping information from me? More often the reaction is both to push away the problem and root out the leak within the organisation. Both of these are likely to be counterproductive, but are often in the interests of several layers within the organisation — mostly those who would not ultimately carry responsibility if the allegations ended up being true.

The Post Office showed us that the company confused brand for reputation. If the brand could be protected, the company’s reputation would remain intact. But that’s not how it works. Brand is what you deliberately create in order to distinguish your company, or product, or service, from others. Reputation is what you gain through your actions, your responses, your statements, your finances.

Reputation is what you have left after you’ve done everything you feel is necessary to do. It’s not something to be ‘managed’. It’s an ongoing measure. And yes, the truism is just that: it’s the hardest thing to earn and the easiest thing to lose.

I don’t know how the Post Office should have handled the case. But I do know that its really fundamental error, the one that marked the point of no return, was when the company started harassing and threatening journalists. Instead of seeing this as an opportunity, a chance to un-circle the wagons and see if the allegations were true, they took the other route. After that the issue was not whether, but when, the truth would come out, and there would be no reputation left to manage.

Politics, polarisation and pity parties: the Post Office scandal unpicked

By | January 15, 2024
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This is the second in a series of pieces trying to explain what happened in the UK’s ongoing Post Office scandal and why it matters. The first was about the lack of media coverage the story received for the first 20 years. (It can be found on How Journalists Think, on the Loose Wire Blog and on my LinkedIn feed. )

This one was intended to look purely at the technological side of things, but first need to understand the human element in all this — how a project like this happened in the first place, and why so many serving and former employees of the Post Office failed to come forward and address the scandal at any point in the 20 years it was churning sub-postmasters out of the legal meat-grinder.

By way of reminder, some brief background:

A flawed computer system in the UK led to the conviction of at least 700 individuals who ran small Post Offices, and while nearly 100 of those have been overturned, at least 60 sub-postmasters have died without seeing justice or compensation, at least four by their own hand. All were prosecuted on the basis that a computer system set up by Fujitsu, Horizon, worked perfectly and so could not have been responsible for the errors that led to sub-postmasters being accused of creaming off funds in their Post Office account.

The Post Office, currently being dragged through an enquiry, prefers to call the scandal the “Horizon IT Scandal”, presumably because it doesn’t include the words “Post Office.” It euphemistically refers to the fact the system was riddled with bugs and at least one backdoor as being “primarily concerned the reliability of the Horizon computer system used in post offices and issues related to Postmasters’ contracts and the culture of Post Office at the time. It’s a bit like the owners of the Titanic telling a post-sinking enquiry that the episode “primarily concerned the reliability of the ship.”

What it doesn’t say is that Post Office staff supposed to help subpostmasters navigate the system would say the system was not to blame, no one else was having any problems with it, and insisting the subpostmasters cover any discrepancies. And then charging them with theft.

It’s a grim tale that has been burning slowly in the background for 20 years, with only a handful of dedicated journalists (and sub-postmasters) pushing for justice. And it’s probably too early to draw some lessons, but one thing is clear: It was not in the interests of the company, the Post Office (owned by the government, but with its own board, effectively separating itself from its owner), and Fujitsu, the company providing the system (the contract is worth £2.3 billion, and is still ongoing), to admit that the system was flawed. But beyond that there’s more.

Pre-history of a scandal

It probably comes as no surprise that the project was doomed from the start. This is not to say that hundreds of innocent people would be convicted, but the project itself was deeply flawed, even before it was built.

Here’s a brief account of what happened. I’m indebted to Eleanor Shaikh, whose dogged research and excellent analysis is one of those small demonstrations of heroics that should be properly acknowledged and rewarded. (You can find the fruits of her research at the: Justice for Postmasters Alliance resources page.)

The company that became Fujitsu UK was something called ICL, itself a Frankenstein’s monster cobbled together by government in the 1960s desperate to keep Britain’s once-great computer industry alive, a British flagship to compete with IBM. ICL survived mostly through government contracts; the government took a 25% stake in the company in the 1970s and, at least for that decade, ICL flourished.

In 1968, with government encouragement, ICT was merged with all the UK’s remaining mainframe computer manufacturing companies to form ICL.

By the early 80s it was in trouble, but Margaret Thatcher overcame her free-market instincts to give it loan guarantees to maintain a British computer industry. Around this time it abandoned some of its in-house development to buy Fujitsu chips. In 1990 Fujitsu cemented its hold on the company by buying a 80% stake in 1990. ICL was now, to all intents and purposes, Fujitsu UK.

Around the same time the Post Office was beset by fraud — losing nearly £100 million between 1991 and 1992 to fraudulent social security (welfare benefit) payments. The government, which owned (and still owns) the Post Office devises something called Project Horizon in 1993, which it hoped would handle the £56 billion more securely through a swipe-card system atop an automated process . A contract worth £1 billion was put up for tender in 1994. IBM competed but ICL-Pathway (the name of Fujitsu at that time) won, signing the deal in 1996.

The Goal Postmen

In less than a year Fujitsu was burning through £10 million a month, but had nothing to show for it — not even in a controlled environment could to demonstrate a “satisfactory, sustained environment”. The Post Office and the Benefits Agency kept moving the goalposts — 323 formal requests to change the original contractual requirements over three years — and it was clear that Fujitsu did not have the capability to do it. At the same time the project was becoming more ambitious, wrapping in other functions a sub-postmaster currently did by hand. By January 1998 the government was considering ditching the whole thing.

A few months later the Benefits Agency served Fujitsu with a formal notice of breach of contract. Fujitsu refused to accept the notice and then threatened to stop working on the project altogether unless it got a better deal. The Benefits Agency delivered a coup de grâce when it announced it was ditching swipe-card payments for direct payments to bank accounts. As Shaikh puts it: “In one swoop, Fujitsu’s potential income from the project had been reduced to zero. On top of that, the Post Office was looking at losing a third of its customer base overnight.”

This put the government in a difficult position. During 1998 Fujitsu had bought the remaining shares in ICL so there was no ignoring it was a Japanese company. The future of Horizon was kicked up to Prime Minister, Tony Blair, to make a decision. ICL — Fujitsu UK — was by now not only completely in bed with the government, but it was hogging the sheets: It won a £200 million contract with the Department of Trade and Industry for something called “Project Edgar”, and signed another called “Project Libra” with the Lord Chancellor’s Department; the following year it signed a £680 million contract with Customs and Excise.

The Domino Effect

But Horizon was still the big fish, and if it got away it was widely accepted in Whitehall, according to Shaikh, “that ending the contract in its entirety would spell the downfall of ICL”. The Japanese government was not unaware of this fact. The real head of Fujitsu UK, Michio Naruto, collared the UK ambassador to Japan and left him with a clear picture: “any threat to ICL’s continued viability would have profound implications for jobs in the UK and for bilateral ties,” the ambassador warned. (Naruto would later earn a CBE for his troubles, a rare gong for a Japanese national.) Blair’s government, desperate not to upset the Japanese and to prevent a domino effect of collapsing ICL-related projects, scrambled around for a solution. The Treasury, in particular, was keen to keep the Post Office on an even keel — a rare profit-making enterprise in the government’s portfolio, it had contributed some £2.4 billion to government coffers since 1981.

But the Post Office was not enjoying the ride. Even as ministers were scrambling around it couldn’t make the system work, and blamed Fujitsu, which it blamed for a lack of support, design and documentation. In early 1999 it concluded :”We have been unable to gain a high level of assurance in the adequacy or suitability of the service.” The Benefits Agency were out, and the Post Office wanted out too. At some point this month senior members of Fujitsu marched in to see Blair, and while we don’t yet know what happened there, they had put the PM on notice: make a decision by May. Blair, terrified of the optics should they scrap Horizon, upset the Japanese, derail any number of other Fujitsu projects and write off hundreds of millions, possibly billions, of pounds, ordered the project go ahead.

Appalling people

By October, ready or not, “full automation” had begun as Horizon computers were rolled out. As Eleanor Shaikh put it:

This is how, at the behest of the Prime Minister, Horizon’s untested core of dubious provenance came to be the IT backbone of the nation’s iconic Post Office. It was a politically expedient deal which cemented ICL/Fujitsu as the trusted supplier of IT in the foundations of New Labour’s Modernising Government agenda.

The Post Office leadership quickly pivoted. While the board remained unimpressed by Horizon, there were salaries to be earned and the big ticket project gathered a momentum all its own, with little regard for the sub-postmasters themselves. Frank Field, then a minister for welfare reform, warned parliament in 2000 that something was seriously off. He reported that the board had little appetite for serving the post offices and those who ran them. Karl Flinders (another hero of Post Office coverage) wrote that Fields said: “I did not merely talk to colleagues and read the papers, I visited the project partners. Had it been my responsibility to do so, I would have sacked the members of the Post Office board, who were appalling people. They were short-sighted and partisan.”

The people problem

Indeed, the story of Horizon from the point at which it was clear it was not going to go away is largely a story of human failure on an epic scale. We know how badly the sub-postmasters suffered, and we have taken aim at some prominent villains in the piece, but the egregious behaviour of nearly everyone involved in the Post Office begs some serious questions.

“What awful people.”

How, for 20 years, could an institution remain indifferent and unquestioning about the litany of failure — to properly install a system, to properly train and support those using it, to question whether so many postmasters were on the fiddle (and if so, whether the recruitment that sourced these people was flawed), to raise any questions within about the appropriateness of this conveyor belt of cruelty? I am happy to be corrected, but I could find no whistle-blower from within the Post Office during this period, despite its own promotion of World Whistleblowing Day. (Richard Roll, who spoke out in 2015, was an employee of Fujitsu. The only case I can find is one at Royal Mail, which was split from the Post Office in 2012, and even then that person was dismissed after raising concerns, leading to a court case in which Royal Mail was ordered to pay her £2.3 million in compensation.)

We need to look at the institution itself, which employs under 4,000 people. What were they doing in these 20 years? And the Fujitsu teams working on the project? What were they doing? The moral bankruptcy did not just exist at the top. They were the ones who led, but everyone else followed. Where were the whistleblowers from within the Post Office themselves? I know it is distasteful, but I can only compare it with the most studied (and still poorly understood) case of moral blindness in recent history: Germans both during and after World War II.

Mind your language

Firstly, there is the phenomenon of identifying one group as “the other”, making it both easier and more bureaucratically acceptable to prejudge them and justify what amounts to persecution. Dehumanizing always starts with language, argues Brené Brown, citing David Livingston Smith (Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others) and Michelle Maiese (Autonomy, enactivism, and mental disorder: a philosophical account) , and this can be easily seen in the way the Post Office treats, both formally and informally, the sub-postmasters. In one email written by then Post Office investigator Gary Thomas they’re described as “all crooks”, when he explains why he’s pleased to get his hands on some particular emails:

“Because I want to prove that there is FFFFiiinnn no ‘Case for the Justice of Thieving Subpostmasters’ and that we were the best Investigators they ever had and they were all crooks!!”

(Once again, thanks to Nick Wallis for the great detective work, and journalism, where much of this stuff comes from. )

This notion of sub-postmasters as of a particular type, an ‘other type’ of person, can be found in the official document: where one required investigators to categorize (PDF) suspects ethnically — including terms such as ‘Negroid types’, “Chinese/Japanese types” and “Dark Skinned European Types” (and don’t get me started on why Siamese, a term that went out when Siam became Thailand in 1939):

img

This might be put down to excessive bureaucracy, perhaps, but there was clearly racism and contempt among those managing the Horizon system and working with sub-postmasters. Amandeep Singh, who worked for a year on the Horizon help-line, staffed by Fujitsu employees, described the situation thus:

Postmasters right from week one would be upset, crying frustrated as they struggled to reach equilibrium on the transactions. The floor on these days was most toxic with vocal characters in Squad A, unchallenged by managers who looked away as all Asians were called Patels, regardless of surname. Shouts across the floor could be heard, saying “I have another Patel scamming again”. They mistrusted every Asian Postmaster. They mocked Scottish and Welsh Postmasters and pretended they could not understand them. They created a picture of Postmasters that suggested they were incompetent or fraudsters. \

“I know nothing”

Then there’s the “this wasn’t something I was involved in so I know nothing” defence.

Some have presented themselves to the enquiry — intentionally or unintentionally — as witless. They didn’t know what was going on, anything they signed was written by someone else, they felt slightly bad about what was happening, but not enough to do anything about it. Jarnail Singh, once head of criminal law for the Post Office, who was even reluctant to acknowledge that he fulfilled that role. “I know if I had to go to court and actually physically see these people, then I wouldn’t be able to do the job. I think I would have left a long time ago. At the end of the day, this was a paper exercise,” he told the inquiry. This is not a million miles from what historian Hannah Arendt called Schreibtischtäter or desk murderer, where bureaucrats stay insulated from what they’re enabling, ordering or approving.

A stone’s throw from this is the tendency for those in position of authority to claim wrongdoing wasn’t something they were aware of. Michael Keegan, who was Fujitsu UK CEO from May 2014 to June 2015, leaving the organisation in 2018, successfully appealed to the Independent Press Standards Organisation, IPSO, in 2022 over news coverage that he said inaccurately linked him to the Post Office scandal, arguing that he did not have “line management responsibility” for the Post Office account in this period, and that he had only learnt of the sub-postmaster’s litigation from press coverage in 2019. (Keegan previously worked for the Royal Mail Group/Post Office, and had joined Fujitsu UK in 2006.)

While I am not suggesting he was responsible for the Horizon project, it does require a leap of faith, given its size and value, that he was unaware of the massive wave of prosecutions underway, especially as he previously worked for the Post Office. Ignorance, real or imagined, of what is going on beneath someone in a senior position of course is nothing new. Adolf Eichmann claimed he was ‘a mere instrument’ in the Holocaust, saying he “was not a responsible leader, and as such do not feel myself guilty.” Eichmann was in fact one of the main organisers of the Holocaust. (Just to be clear, I’m not likening Keegan’s role in the Post Office to that of Eichmann in the Holocaust, just that claiming you did not have ‘line-management responsibility’ and therefore were not responsible is nothing new.)

Self-victimisation

Then there is ‘acquired’ victimhood. We now know who the victims are of the scandal, although there may be thousands more who have not come forward, or may have passed away. But that has not stopped some people from claiming victimhood for themselves. Take, for example, the above-mentioned Gary Thomas (I am again indebted to those who did the hard yards on this story, this time to Nick Wallis. He and others covered this story for years when no one was interested.) Thomas had once been a counter clerk before rising, if that’s the right word, to the Security Team (the ones responsible for the heavy treatment of sub-postmasters) in 2000. After the quashing of 39 sub-postmasters’ convictions in 2021, he wrote to the then chief executive of the Post Office, that he, too, was a victim, because he had now found out that all the evidence he gave “was incorrect and lies.” He concludes:

Can I ask the question and enquire why we have all been completely cast aside and left with not so much as a letter of communication or an apology whatsoever ?

Whilst compensation is being correctly awarded now to these Sub-Postmasters, I feel the employees instructed to conduct these prosecutions, arrests and searches have been completely overlooked.

The claiming of victimhood by those who might be more accurately described as those on the delivering rather than receiving end is well-documented in the academic literature. Harald Jähner, in his book Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich 1945–1955 describes the feeling of many post-war Germans:

The fate of victimhood that people volubly assigned to one another – known in sociology as ‘self-victimisation’ – stripped most Germans of any obligation they might otherwise have felt to engage with the Nazi crimes committed in their name.

Elsewhere, Michael Zank writes on Daniel Jonah [Goldhagen’s ] book Hitler’s Willing Executioners (https://www.bu.edu/mzank/Michael_Zank/gold.html) that

The prevailing attitude in Germany after the war was self pity, an attitude which left little if any room for attention to the greater suffering of others.

Conclusion

I was pondering the merits of such distasteful comparisons but sometimes a spade has to be called a spade. The abrogation of responsibility, and the apparent lack of empathy on display from a procession of officials and officers before the inquiry makes me think that, while ultimately it’s our worship of the computer that made this scandal possible (which I promise to address next time), confining it to that lets a lot of people off the hook. Those at the top made a series of very poor decisions based on political expediency, and greed, while those in the middle or lower reaches of the companies involved would seem to have either looked away, claimed ignorance, bad memory or deep ineptitude, in order to exonerate themselves.

Those corridors, too, need to be explored, investigated and cleaned.

And we need to draw lessons from how these projects are born, and how those who should be asking tough questions — and refusing to implement clearly wrong-headed and vindictive processes — can be encouraged to do so, and held responsible if they don’t. This isn’t going to end if a few gongs and bonuses are clawed back.

Thanks for reading, and, as usual, your comments and tips are very welcome.

Why did journalists ignore the biggest miscarriage of justice in British legal history?

By | July 3, 2024
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Why do journalists not cover some stories — even massive ones — and can they be persuaded to?

I’m writing about the UK’s Post Office scandal elsewhere, but for this column on How Journalists Think, I wanted to explore why most UK journalists ignored the country’s biggest ever case of legal injustice for nearly 20 years? And what lessons can be learned about how journalists approach stories — and how PR can help them pay better attention to stories that matter?

“Anyone coming new to this scandal disbelieves it: can it really be that bad?” Neil Hudgell, lawyer, speaking to Sky News.

I’m not going to explore how the Post Office might have told their story differently. It’s clear that the failures were systemic and I’m not sure how anyone with a decent understanding of the situation would have agreed to defend the indefensible.

So I’d like to look at it from another point of view: why did this story get so little media coverage for so long? Why did hundreds, possibly thousands, of sub-postmasters 1 go unheard, uncovered, for so long?

This is a tough one. I’ll throw up my hands first and say I didn’t cover the story and yet I recall reading about it in Private Eye while I was in Asia working at Thomson Reuters — so this must have been around 2014. So I could have followed it up — particularly as the company most involved was a Japanese one. But I didn’t.

Why?

A big story from the get-go

Let’s do a quick timeline first to set the scene and disprove any canards that somehow this story wasn’t a big story until much later. The crime began quickly. This IT system was rolled out starting in October 1999. Six sub-postmasters were prosecuted in 2000. (Let that sink in; within a year of a complex IT system being installed the Post Office was already prosecuting those using it.) Prosecutions based on Horizon IT were regular2:

2001: 41

2002: 64

2003: 56

2004: 59

2005: 68

2006: 69

2007: 50

2008: 48

2009: 70

But despite the numbers media coverage of the issue was patchy, and when journalists did cover the story, they focused on the prosecutions. The Daily Mail, for example, covered the case of Jo Hamilton in 2008, where fellow villagers had raised £9,000 to help keep her out of prison, and whose presence helped persuade the judge to make sentence for false accounting a non-custodial one. Even then, anyone reading the story would be left a strong impression that Hamiton had somehow squirrelled or frittered away some £36,000. The story concluded by quoting a spokesperson for what was then Post Office owner Royal Mail Group: “Sub-postmasters are in a unique position of trust and it is always disappointing when that trust is breached.”

The law won

This is the first hurdle that journalists would face with cases like this. However cynical journalists are — and we can be — the law is the law, and if someone is found guilty of something it’s very easy to now write of them as guilty, and very hard to accept protestations of innocence. After all, this is the Post Office, a government-owned enterprise, and these are serious courts and judges. Even if you believe there might be a miscarriage of justice, you need to persuade your editor of not just the merits of the case, but that you have enough evidence to support a story pushing it. And in cases like Jo Hamilton’s, the sub-postmasters had all admitted a degree of guilt. It’s very hard for a journalist to then listen to why they aren’t really guilty. (After all, everyone in prison says they didn’t do it, and frankly there’s an inherent bias among journalists against those kinds of stories. A journalist is much more likely to take such a story seriously if the case has been adopted by some credible organisation looking at miscarriages of justice — of which there were none in the first decade at least of the Post Office scandal, as far as I’m aware).

Skin and scope

Looking back now, watching how a nation which showed little interest in the story for much of the century suddenly become deeply angry and upset, it’s not hard to see both why it’s compelling now, but raised little interest less than a month ago. It’s because of two things: the scale of the scandal, and the deeply personal, harrowing, individual tales of its victims.

These are two key elements that journalists look for in a story. We want the story to be significant, and that means we want to define its scope. How big is this? “Big” could be defined lots of different ways, but for simplicity’s sake here it’s going to start with quite a simple question: how many sub-postmasters are there and how many of them are having this problem? Each of these individual stories, if taken alone, not repeated elsewhere, is a sad story, but ‘Computer problems lead to false imprisonment of one sub-postmaster‘ is — sadly — not going to really move the needle (interestingly, it could still make a powerful TV drama, but that’s not what we’re discussing here. We’re trying to get serious journalists willing to commit serious resources to this story.)

So a journalist needs to start off with the sense that a significant number of sub-postmasters may have been affected by this problem. Which should be easy, right? All they would have had to do would be to call up the Post Office, or, failing that, dig through court records. For some reason this didn’t happen. First off, this was the noughties, when much of government was not online — court judgements were made available for free and in one place only in 2022, as far as I’m aware.

More likely, an interested journalist might ask the victim themselves whether they’re the tip of a bigger ‘berg. And this is where the problem arises. No journalist could not be affected by the pathos of these individual stories, but individually the victims do not carry much credibility, at least to the casual observer. So, how do you persuade a journalist that you — or your client — are not some lone nut? Especially if you’ve already pleaded guilty to something, however minor, maybe even done time? This was the challenge facing any of the now more than 400 sub-postmasters who might want to try to clear their name. Therein lies the answer, or the beginnings of an answer: scale. If they could club together and present a story about the systemic, mass injustice taking place journalists might take an interest.

The shame factor

The first hurdle is the shame and trauma that many victims felt, making them understandably resistant to seeking attention.

Either in the backwash or the full churn of persecution by the Post Office and courts, enduring the tut-tuts and stares of neighbours convinced of their guilt, many must have wanted the ground to swallow them up, and indeed many died in the process, either naturally by their own hand. Since the ITV drama aired more than 100 people affected by the Horizon scandal have come forward. Their lawyer Neil Hudgell says “they’ve been completely petrified.” But up to 80% of them suffer in silence, according to this this opinion piece by one of the lawyers helping victims. It must also be said that many journalists were prone to chase and harrass sub-postmasters who had been convicted, and the stories threw up lurid headlines which can only have compounded the victims’ trauma.

Even if they did want to get their story out, they were largely alone, and at least initially had no idea there were others suffering. The problem was that few of the sub-postmasters knew any other sub-postmasters. Their union was entirely funded by the Post Office and was less than useful. Sub-postmasters, almost by definition, are remote workers, contracted by the Post Office but not in any meaningful way a community. Even as late as 2011 chats on bulletin boards for Post Office and Royal Mail workers only hinted at what was going on, with a few commenters suggesting that cases were not one-offs: “This is very strange and not an isolated incident,” said one in March 2011, after a suspended jail sentence was handed down to Duranda Clarke, a sub-postmistress from Saffron Walden. Commenting on another story in December 2010 about the imprisonment of Rubbina Shaheen, a sub-postmistress from Shrewsbury, another asks: “Is this not a problem with the computer system? Maybe our subbies could comment.”

Breaking out of the isolation

In other words, the scale of the problem was hidden from those in the midst of it, even a decade into the scandal. This is why the role of Alan Bates, the centre of both ITV’s documentary and fictionalised programmes (both worth watching), is so important. Bates, the sub-postmaster who had been fired by (and lost most of his savings to) the Post Office in August 2003, set up a website for fellow victims the following year, and sent a letter to Computer Weekly, a respected British publication then edited by Tony Collins, author of the classic Crash: Learning from the World’s Worst Computer Disasters (1997), about the problems he had been having with Horizon. But it was only when — four years later — another sub-postmaster, Lee Castleton, sent an email to the magazine that Collins prodded one of his younger staff journalists, Rebecca Thomson, to take a look at the story.

The resulting story was the first to explore the Horizon problem and the apparent injustice behind it, rather than the court cases. But even then the story sat in a folder for a year. Thomson would later say that their biggest fear was the possibility of Fujitsu suing if they mentioned the company. And despite interviewing seven former sub-postmasters for the piece, it didn’t feel particularly substantial: “All we had was the testimony of the Postmasters and a handful of experts saying, “Yes, this looks suspicious but we have no way of knowing what the actual problems are”,” she told Nick Wallis. The story was eventually published in May 2009.

And nothing, outside follow-ups by a few trade publications, happened. Mainstream media showed no interest in the story. As shown above, even habitués of Post Office forums did not appear to be aware of the story and the implications. Only because of the efforts of Alan Bates, did the cause remain alive. The Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance was formed in 2009, and the JFSA.org.uk domain registered that November. The website was active sometime before early 2011, and is still up and running.

Nick Wallis fell into the story by chance, asking a taxi driver for any interesting stories he could follow up. He proved to be, along with Computer Weekly’s Karl Flinders, the most tenacious in staying with the story when many would have given up (or been forced to by their editors.)

Formidable foes

And this is the second problem in terms of getting journalists interested. There are two formidable foes on the other side of the barricades. Fujitsu are one: a huge Japanese multinational employing some 125,000 people. The company had taken over ICL, once one of Britain’s shining tech stars, and made £22 million in profits last year and had its contract to support the Post Office’s Horizon system extended last year.

But there’s a much bigger giant in the UK context: The Post Office. And here is where the sub-postmasters’ story becomes hard to digest: The alleged bad guy is Postman Pat. The story being presented by the sub-postmasters is that they are being gas-lit, wrongly prosecuted, denied justice by the courts and forced to return money they never had in the first place. By one of Britain’s best loved brands, an institution that is etched into the hearts and memories of most Brits. (To give you an idea of how much: when it rebranded itself Consignia in 2001 the Post Office was forced by public derision and protest to reverse the decision within a year. At the time the Post Office claimed it ranked “30% higher on average than many high street brands for being easy to deal with, helpful, knowledgeable and personal.” The Post Office, though clunky, was the place most Brits turned to for at least some of their needs, and for the most part it worked.

For a journalist this is hard to swallow. For the sub-postmasters’ claims to be true, the Post Office would have to lying about a number of things — that the Horizon system was robust and working fine for everyone else, that these cases were isolated, that the ‘guilty’ sub-postmasters were actively conducting fraud, that no-one could access the Horizon terminals remotely and alter data, etc. This was a tall order for any journalist, as Rebecca Thomson discovered. It did not have that first ring of authenticity, that enticing sense a journalist would get that a) this is a great story and b) it sounds like it could be true. As Karl Flinders, who has covered the story for Computer Weekly for a decade, told a documentary commissioned by one of the law firms involved in helping victims: “Every time I write a story, I can’t believe what I’m writing. I think this can’t be true.” In journalists’ terms, it never passed the “sniff test”.

The dangers of algorithms

This was not helped by two other factors.

Often, when the legal outcome of Horizon IT cases were covered, they were lumped together with stories about real sub-postmaster fraud, at least in the eyes of journalists and their publications. Take this piece, for example, from the BBC website, reporting in 2010 about the sentencing of Wendy Buffrey, a sub-postmistress from Cheltenham:

Buffrey’s conviction was overturned but she is still fighting for compensation. The stories pinned to the bottom of the story, however, include one about a similar Horizon IT case, that of Peter Huxham, a sub-postmaster in Devon, who was found guilty and later took his own life, but above one that was a real case of fraud, by a sub-postmaster in London in 2005.

It may have been an algorithm that juxtaposed the headlines, but in the minds of readers, and journalists, the two stories blend together. A journalist trying to persuade an editor of the merits of looking at the sub-postmasters’ story will inevitably be presented with a Google search that throws up a confusing mess of results.

A related factor is that because the sub-postmasters — and the courts — had not been told of Horizon’s fallibility (to use a polite word), both would be looking for an answer to where the missing money went, not realising it never existed in the first place. So they would find themselves forced to admit fraud, which is when they would be pressed to point fingers themselves: in the case of Huxham, the Devon sub-postmaster, he said it might have been “his former wife, his children, or a cleaner.” The judge, understandably, rejected the explanation as “absurd or ridiculous.” Huxham was sentenced to 8 months in prison, succumbed to alcoholism and died alone in 2020. His son has applied to have his case reviewed.

A journalist looking at such a case at the time would reasonably ask why he pleaded guilty and blamed others when he was innocent? Once the complete story is know the answer is tragically clear, but many journalists must have decided to pass on what seemed such a complicated story.

Protecting the brand

This was compounded by the doggedness of the Post Office in “protecting the brand.” It has been relentless in its attempt to police and suppress the story. As mentioned above, their intimidation of sub-postmasters has meant that at least 100 of them — probably many more — have stayed silent, possibly for decades. “They’re scared after dealing with the Post Office once, and all that that juggernaut has brought with it, catastrophe, damage, destruction of lives, and they’re completely petrified of coming out of the woodwork again,” Neil Hudgell, one of the lawyers, told Sky News.

It needs to be borne in mind that the Post Office contains not only the commercial function — the business — but also had investigative and prosecutorial function. This historical oddity essentially makes it be everything but the judge in the legal process. As barrister Paul Marshall wrote in a 2021 paper (PDF):

the Post Office had a direct commercial interest in the outcome of the appeals, similar to, but also different from, its direct commercial interest in its prosecutions (that included brand protection). This is a most unusual circumstance. There is no recorded example of a commercial enterprise having an interest in the outcome of a large number of conjoined appeals where it was the prosecuting authority.

All three arms of the Post Office were trying to achieve the same thing: preserving the brand. The heavy-handed way they went about it made journalists think twice before taking it on.

A sense of the Post Office’s reach can be gleaned from this anecdote from Wallis’ book: When, in 2016, he tracked down Rebecca Thomson, the journalist who had first broken the story back in 2009 but had since moved on to PR, he sent a public message to her Twitter account asking her to follow him so they could share private, direct messages. She did so, but not before someone claiming to be from the Post Office had contacted her boss reminding him the Post Office was one of the company’s clients, and that Thomson “might like to tread carefully.” (Around that time the Post Office had about eight PR companies to its ‘roster’. To give you an idea of what they do for their money, read this sponsored content piece in The Grocer, titled How the Post Office has evolved its offer to meet changing needs and published in September last year. It mentions ‘postmasters’ 18 times , but not once does it address the historical injustice and the ongoing legal shenanigans.)
If journalists did ask questions the Post Office “routinely sent warning legal letters to journalists planning to write about the issue,” according to Ray Snoddy, a journalist at InPublishing. (I have not been able to corroborate this independently.)

There’s another wisp to this story, that Neil Hudgell asks in his company’s excellent documentary, released on Vimeo last year, which I would recommend watching. The question he asks is one that still hasn’t been answered, and serves both as a lure and a warning for journalists: why? “The Post Office admit that they got it wrong. They admit incompetence. They don’t say why the did what they did. And that’s a really important piece of the story that no-one has ever wanted to even begin to address.” It’s a question a good journalist would ask at the beginning of a story, and indeed might be sufficient for them to not consider the story credible. Why would an institution go about destroying the very people it depends upon, its sole network to end-users, and why would it go to such lengths to defend a computer system it didn’t want in the first place?

I will try to address this in the companions to this piece, but it’s still up for grabs — and any journalist approaching this story ten years ago, even 20 years ago, might have just considered the question a step too far, since it would seem to undermine the credibility of the sub-postmasters’ story. Surely no institution would do this, so why should I believe you?

A hopeless case?

It’s a grim, sorry tale, but the heroism involved — of the victims, their families, those that supported them, the less than handful of journalists that covered it extensively, the lawyers that stood up for them, an MP, two forensic accountants — is now being recognised, and offers a glimpse of how this story might have reached a wider audience sooner.

Twenty years on, we are now in a connected age, and so it’s easier for those with similar experiences to find each other. But it’s by no means a done deal. The UK is still a London-centric country and many of its journalists share the same bias.

But it’s not impossible. This was a story that barely caused a ripple until this year, so it’s important to keep that in mind when you are facing problems getting interest in one you want to tell. Some quick bullets to bear in mind, based on the above. The two best ingredients are what I call skin and scope:

  • Skin is the human dimensions to the story. I’ve wept a few times watching the documentaries and drama — it’s hard not to, when you realise that a sub-postmaster is almost by definition a communal soul, dedicated and deeply honest. These are key ingredients to any story, and bringing these people to life for journalists is a key step in persuading them it’s worth their while.
  • Scope is the scale of the story: how many people does this affect? How big could this be? This doesn’t have to be as massive as the scandal eventually ended up being: The Computer Weekly story that first broke it had only half a dozen or so cases. In this case, that was enough — and to be honest should have been enough to make other journalists take note. Help the journalist pin down this part of the story by doing your own research: how many other companies are doing what your client is doing? How much money will be spend/saved/earned? How many countries are or might be affected? How many users? While your client may think they’re unique, it’s rarely the case, and a journalist might be reassured they’re not the only ones doing it.
  • Doggedness: At any point in this saga Alan Bates, or Nick Wallis, or Ron Warmington, or James Arbuthnot, or Karl Flinders, may have given up. We’re talking injustices that stretch back nearly a quarter-century. But they continued to chip away, confident that one day the story would gain the attention it deserved, and an outcome its victims deserved.
  • Anticipate the obstacles a journalist may face: I’ve listed them all above, and not every story is going to face the same ones, but they can be distilled to a few:
    • The Google effect: what does your story look like if a journalist (or her commissioning editor) Googles it? Be ready to explain why the story has or hasn’t been covered before, why there are stories that seem to contradict or dilute your angle, etc. Anticipate.
    • The sniff test: how does your story smell to a journalist? What might put them off? Be ready to explain and address.
    • The foes: Who is the journalist going to come up against in reporting the story? It might not be as dramatic or formidable as in the Post Office case, but it will still have to be addressed. A regulator? Other companies that have tried and failed to do the same thing? Outstanding debts? Competitors who claim to do it better?

The Post Office scandal, hopefully, will change a lot of things in the way Britain handles cases like this, and hopefully it will spur journalists on to cover similar stories. Of which there are many still waiting to be told. You may not have anything as dramatic you want to share, but understanding why this story remained largely unreported for so long might help you better understand what things look like from a newsroom’s perspective.

  1. they’re call sub-postmasters for historical reasons, but they are the ones running each Post Office ↩
  2. The Great Post Office Scandal, by Nick Wallis, Bath Publishing 2021, Timeline ↩

Bubblenomics

By | December 21, 2023
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Cory Doctorow is one of those people I’ve never met, but I think of as one of the Elders of Web 2.0. Someone who was there for the first bubble (the one that popped in 2000/1) and so has seen the fundamental subterranean dynamic of Silicon Valley-inspired innovation.1 I was there as well, though not from such a lofty perch. But even from the other side of the world I could see what he describes in his most recent piece about bubbles. There are bubbles that leave nothing behind, and those that leave an interesting residue that becomes the foundation for the next layer of innovation. And that one, now 23 years old, was one of those.

He describes how the bubble left behind lots of university dropouts, whose education in HTML, Perl, Python was financed by the influx of VC money in the late 1990s. Now all these young folks were jobless, but had a bedrock of expertise and the helter-skelter experience of startup-land. As Doctorow writes:

People started making technology because it served a need, or because it delighted them, or both. Technologists briefly operated without the goad of VCs’ growth-at-all-costs spurs.

This I could definitely feel from afar. I’ve bored readers for years how the stuff that came after the bust was much more interesting, and solid, than what came before. A lot of it was what could be called infrastructure: open source stuff for behind the scenes (MySQL, Apache, Linux, Python predated the crash, but usage ramped up in the early 2000s), web content management (RSS, blogging platforms, social bookmarking), file-sharing and media (BitTorrent, Podcasting). Social media — essentially what we think of today as the web — was built on these tools.

So what of it? Doctorow argues that AI right now is a bubble. And not the kind that will yield much residue. He says “the massive investor subsidies for AI have produced a sugar high of temporarily satisfied users”, but the apparent eco-system that is flourishing around the likes of OpenAI should not be mistaken for some thriving hotbed of innovation. Everything relies on large language models, the largest of which are expensive — to make and to run.

The question, then, is will people be willing to pay for this once the hoopla is over? For Doctorow this is the key question, which will determine whether the bubble that bursts leaves a useful legacy, or a bubble that leaves nothing behind (for him Enron, or crypto — more of that anon.)

As he points out, the thing that got me so worked up almost a year ago now is the major stumbling block: who would use LLMs to make big decisions when it confabulates and hallucinates? But remarkably that is still the technology’s selling point: to replace or make more efficient existing people/machines/processes. Using an LLM to look at an X-ray should make the process more expensive, Doctorow argues, because an LLM cannot (or let’s say, should not) be treated as accurate. The radiologist would need to spend time on her own assessment and then spend time on the LLM’s diagnosis.

But as Doctorow says, that’s not the business model. AI is being presented as a money saver, a chance to shed those useless people and create content, analysis stuff, process stuff that is just about good enough. AI’s promise is not better quality, it’s the promise of profitable mediocrity.

So Doctorow argues, AI is a bubble and not a good bubble. When it pops, nothing will be left that can be repurposed, apart from some of the stuff that’s going on in the open source and federated learning space. If you want to take a look at what generative AI might look like without all the expensive servers, check out FreedomGPT, an open source GPT, which works pretty well, so long as you’re not in a hurry.

I suspect Doctorow is right; I believe that we’re essentially playing with subsidised toys, and if the true cost of delivering those toys to us is reflected in the price, we’re not going to be willing to pony up. It is, after all, a fancy search engine, a fancy but less reliable Wikipedia (another phoenix from the dot.com ashes), or an unreliable way to populate eBay listings.

Doctorow is dismissive of crypto, which as mentioned above he dismisses as a bubble on the scale of Enron. I have to declare an interest: I have had clients in the space, but I do agree the space is largely driven by greed, and much of the DeFi world is focused on the wrong things. And each crypto winter so far hasn’t really concentrated minds on what might be useful and enduring out of all this effort.

One day, though, I think it will provide the bedrock of a better infrastructure for transferring and trading value over the internet, and that is something that still hasn’t been fixed. Libertarianism has become so engrained in the philosophy of crypto that the original motivation behind Bitcoin, which I see as more akin to the early 2000s mood of “why can’t we just build something simple to fix this annoying problem, and forget about trying to make money out of it?”, has somehow gotten lost. But yes, I can quite see how people might have lost patience with the space.

In fact, I think something similar might happen with AI. Yes, it’s too early to worry too much about “AI safety” as it’s generally meant. AI is not about to remove us as impediments to efficiency. But I do think AI can, in the wrong hands, cause serious damage to us as tools of information warfare. I’ll talk more about that on another day. For now there’s this: Why are we suddenly talking about an AI catastrophe?, and this: Generative AI: Another way at looking at our new overlord.

I don’t think we should assume that the only route to artificial general intelligence, AGI (the version of AI that most closely mimics our own intelligence) is through the brute force and black box of LLMs. I think ChatGPT may have filled in some of the terra incognita ahead of us, and it may fall to more agile, logical approaches to start navigating that world.

For now, I think it’s still worth playing with these tools while they’re still available and priced for ordinary joes like us. Only by exploring them and kicking them until they break will we understand what might (and might not) lie ahead.

  1. Inspired does not necessarily mean led, but I’m differentiating it from the innovation that has taken place elsewhere, both before and since, and I’m extremely reluctant to join the throng which feels that Silicon Valley is the only source of tech innovation.) ↩

Behind AI’s latest bout of chaos

By | November 20, 2023
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The last few days of chaos at OpenAI have illustrated some deeper chasms within the tech world about the future (and ethics) of artificial intelligence. That it seems to have ended with Sam Altman and his crew out of the company is only a resolution of OpenAI’s chaos, not those in the industry itself.

Behind it lie the problems I have highlighted in previous columns (here, here and here. My blog is here, Substack here.). The most recent points out that the big announcement at Sam Altman’s big shindig before the blow-up, a roll-your-own ChatGPT tool, was deeply and dangerously flawed.

In a nutshell, what is happening is this: (ex) CEO Sam Altman and his cohort, despite some public hand-wringing about the need for government supervision of artificial intelligence as it (supposedly) nears a general human-like intelligence), wants to move quickly and break things, running out ChatGPT tools and gizmos that give it a strong commercial footing in the race to dominate this AI summer.

His opponents, led by another co-founder Ilya Sutskever, who used his position as director of the board to push out Altman, apparently feeling that he was moving too fast and operating without the say-so of the board. The Economist summarizes the situation well, outlining the dividing line between “boomers” — who want to accelerate the development and rollout of AI — and “doomers”, who fear that might unleash an AI that threatens us all.

The Economist also points to the commercial underpinning at work — those calling for acceleration tend to be somewhat further behind OpenAI in the race, while doomers are further along. This suggests two things: a ‘freezing in place” of AI development would leave OpenAI with a massive advantage. It also suggests that the further along you are, the more scary AI seems to be. And at the centre of it all, Altman personifies the schizophrenia of the industry: he talks of guardrails but clearly wants to move quickly. The promised land beckons.

Fast and spurious

How this plays out I’ll leave to the reporters. The weekend has been nuts, and it doesn’t look like anything is settled as I write. The most likely outcome, however, is we get more players in the field, more investment, and an imperative for greater speed.

This doesn’t mean things will get better. I signed up for the pro version of new AI product, perplexity.ai, which promises a better search engine, learning in the conversation about what you’re looking for and doing a better job of finding it. It’s sleek, and fast. But it’s not what it thinks it is. In the midst of a conversation about AI’s ‘black box’ problem, where it clearly grasped what was meant by the term in that context and provided useful answers, I asked it to “provide some concrete cases where the black box problem was the cause of a serious accident with physical effects”. It offered me this:

The black box problem has been a significant factor in various accidents, particularly in the context of truck and car accidents. Black box data, which records information about a vehicle’s status and operation, has played a crucial role in understanding the circumstances surrounding accidents and assigning liability. In truck accidents, black box data has been used by law enforcement, accident investigators, attorneys, and insurance companies to determine fault and reconstruct the events leading up to the accident. Similarly, in car accidents, black box data has been utilized by insurance investigators, personal injury law firms, and accident reconstruction experts to identify the party at fault and provide crucial evidence for legal cases.

The lack of transparency and understanding of how deep learning systems make decisions, known as the black box problem, has also been a concern in the context of AI. This issue has implications for safety, trust, and ethics, particularly in high-stakes applications such as autonomous vehicles, medical treatments, loan approvals, and job interviews.

In conclusion, the black box problem has had tangible effects in accidents involving trucks and cars, where black box data has been instrumental in understanding the causes of accidents and assigning liability. Additionally, the lack of transparency in AI decision-making poses significant challenges in high-stakes applications, impacting safety, trust, and ethical considerations. Efforts to address the black box problem are ongoing, including the development of explainable AI and the consideration of regulatory frameworks to categorize potential AI applications based on risk.

Black in the box

I’m no rocket scientist but it seems to be conflating two quite separate ideas — the black box in AI and the black box in airplanes. I pointed this out and perplexity.ai acknowledged the error.

You are absolutely right, and I appreciate the clarification. It seems there was a misunderstanding in my previous response. The term “black box” in the context of AI refers to systems with internal workings that are invisible to the user, making it challenging to understand how the AI arrives at its decisions or predictions. This lack of transparency has significant implications for accountability, trust, and ethical considerations, particularly in high-stakes applications.

The black box problem in AI is distinct from the concept of black box data recorders used in transportation, which are valuable for postmortem analyses in the event of accidents. These recorders capture information about a vehicle’s status and operation, aiding in the reconstruction of accidents and the assignment of liability.

I apologize for the confusion, and I appreciate your understanding. Thank you for bringing this to my attention.

In other words, perplexity.ai is no better or worse than a search engine. It’s not surprising: it’s essentially an amalgam of OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Anthropic’s Claude 2 (which does a better job of writing and summarizing.) Reviews have recommended it if “real-time data and trustworthy information are your priorities”. And it’s the brainchild of Aravind Srinivas, a former research scientist at OpenAI.

Look, I like perplexity.ai, I like Claude, I like ChatGPT. I do believe this stuff is the future. And I do, more cautiously, believe that down the track we may face some sort of existential threat from AI. But to me that’s not the issue right now. The issue is that by running fast and breaking things, this breathless, ego-driven race to be the first to plant a flag in the LLM summit, we’re all going to suffer, where error-strewn products are rolled out and companies, terrified at being left behind, feel duty bound to build their APIs into everything.

That’s where the pain will be first and we should be focusing on that.