So, who is going to get jugged here?

We agree, again, with Marina Hyde here:

I don’t think it is an exaggeration to state that the health of our dangerously unwell society depends on this kind of justice being served. The repeated failure to bring big people to justice for ruining little people’s lives – and the unexpected shockwaves that flow from those failures – may turn out to be the defining story of the first half of the 21st century.

As we’ve said before:

We have been less than happy - and said so - over the years about the Post Office’s Horizon scandal. The original mistake was of such mindnumbing stupidity that it’s difficult to believe a system containing actual live, capable of breathing, human beings made it. The smokeblowing and backfilling over it were worse. So much so that one of us has, in another place, called for substantial punishment:

There’s plenty of blame to go around over the Horizon computer and accounting program and we might include parts of the Post Office management, Fujitsu the contractor and others. But Byng’s historic example shows that the right response is simple. In fact, why not go further back than Byng and go Viking on the guilty?

One of us has also - not wholly jocularly - suggested that we simply jail everyone and see who can argue their way out. Something that Ms. Hyde has noted at one point.

This is, to us, very much more than simply that some got hard done by. We regard this as akin to - note the “akin” - a crime against the very system.

By analogy - again note the “analogy” - we punish, very severely, the crimes of perjury and contempt of court. Not because lying is an unexpected part of life, nor because holding lawyers in contempt is unusual. But because those two are crimes against the very system. The rule of law simply does not work if people will not take it seriously. And we’d all really not like it at all if the rule of law did not hold sway.

Which is the analogy here. Error in a computer program? This is hardly unexpected, tho’ again as we’ve noted the idiocy of the mistake in the first place is hard to believe. But what then followed? We do regard that smokeblowing and backfilling as being akin to a crime in itself - again, note the “akin”.

So, who is going to get punished, how and when? We’re already a decade late on that last. The answers to the other two should be, to our mind, many and lots.

No, it’s not just for the postmasters. It’s because if we don’t go Viking on those who break the system then more will do so in the future. The inverse of that old English wisdom that once you pay the Danegeld you never get rid of the Dane. It took us some centuries to learn that lesson as a nation - let’s not forget it now.

Tim Worstall