• Inquiries

It’s not the only one. The smell of two other scandals have been lousing up the place for years. The Post Office one is a comparative newcomer, the problems having first been reported a mere twenty-five years ago. Hillsborough happened thirty-six years ago. Top of the pile, however, is the infected blood scandal, the first cases of which were in the early 1970s.

That’s a combined total of about 115 years. It’s as if we were still arguing about who was responsible for the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 (actually, a lot of people are, but not in a public inquiry).

Justice and compensation for these three issues seems as far away as ever. Really, one is almost left feeling that there are senior figures in the police, the NHS and the civil service who don’t want these matters to come to light: but that sort of thing could never happen in dear old Britain, could it?

The one thing that might come out of the Hillsborough Inquiry, in the absence of prosecutions, would be the so-called Hillsborough Law. This would “create a new legal duty of candour on public authorities and officials to tell the truth and proactively cooperate with official investigations and inquiries.”

It appears amazing (a) that this is not already something guaranteed by other laws and (b) that such a matter needs to be legislated for at all. The inference is that, left to their own devices, public authorities and officials would do the opposite: a depressing but probably realistic thought.

With the Post Office scandal, Computerworld reports that the police are considering corporate manslaughter charges against the companies involved. The article says that the first part of the Inquiry’s report “concluded that the accounting fraud prosecutions were a factor in at least 13 suicides, with a further 59 people telling the inquiry that they’d contemplated taking their own lives.”

It’s understood that eight suspects are currently being looked at. If any of these prove to be the hopeless senior lawyers that we saw trip themselves up at the Inquiry, they’d be well advised not to try to defend themselves. The police added that it is also looking into charges of perjury and perverting the course of justice.

It would seem wise to keep both fields of fire open. Corporate manslaughter, I understand, normally involves health and safety issues where there is an obvious duty of care which has been breached. Proving what is reasonably foreseeable and how any risks would be mitigated would be tricky, as would drawing a clear line between the suicides and the Horizon problems.

This would in turn lead to arguments about access to medical records and probably upsetting allegations about each victim’s mental health or other issues such as marital difficulties. The families have been through enough already.

Perjury and perverting the course of justice, on the other hand, seem far easier nuts to crack. I’m no expert but would have thought that the evidence for this has already come out in the Inquiry.

Don’t hold your breath, though. “Despite this week’s update,” the article concludes, “the Horizon scandal still has some way to go, with trials resulting from subsequent prosecutions not expected until 2027 or later.”

• Delays

2027 would actually be quite fast-tracked. As we said last week, some cases started now won’t come to trial until 2030 the way things are going. As predicted, the Justice Secretary David Lammy has stepped in and decreed that as soon as the legislation can be passed, crimes with a sentence of less than three years will no longer be tried by jury.

This will, it’s hoped, have the effect of reducing a backlog of cases that will soon get into six figures, the cause of which was entirely of the government’s making in the late 2010s.

These thoughts in The Guardian are worth quoting in full, so perfectly do they appear to sum up the problem:

“Now you might have thought that the sensible answer was to fund the system properly. To make sure there were more sitting days. To fix the heating and air-conditioning units. To build new courts and prison stock. To train more barristers and judges, and increase legal aid funding. But that would require a level of time and investment no one is prepared to make.

“People like to moan about the justice system but no one wants to pay for it. So it falls apart. And instead we get sticking plaster solutions that even the government doesn’t believe will really make a difference.”

And now the legal system is going to get clogged up even more by, one hopes, senior PO and Fujitsu figures being dragged into the dock.

There is one irony I can see from this. If the police can frame the charges on the Horizon scandal to be for crimes with a tariff of less than three years then there is, as we also mentioned last week, a much higher chance of a conviction. Mind you, I wouldn’t fancy their charges before a jury either.

So widespread has the coverage of the Inquiry been that would be next to impossible to find twelve sentient jurors who didn’t already have a view on the matter. I think I can guess what most views would be. I’m sure there are people who believe that the top cats at PO and Fujitsu have been shabbily treated but I don’t happen to have met any of them.

• Cost

We’re being taxed like never before – The Financial Times, as reported in The Week, said that “top earners here hand over 45% of their income, the average worker 29%” – and yet it seems that there is nothing that we expect to have provided that the country seems to be able to afford.

The Guardian article quoted above mentioned the justice system. To this could be added, in no particular order, adult social care, children’s services, SEND provision, the armed forces, the police, the NHS, the planning system, social housing, climate change, foreign aid, the environment, local councils, youth provision, state pensions, the railways other than HS2 (which has been grazing happily on the Treasury lawn for years), border security, education and the arts.

Areas that seem to be doing well – none of which are the responsibilities of government – include big tech, the arms industry, management consultants, corporate lawyers and corporate accountants.

I think we can see in these two lists a fairly clear picture of how the world works.

I was going to add financial services into the second pile but thought better. We’re all tied up in this. When people write about, for example, “the greedy Thames Water shareholders” they mean us, via all the ISAs and pension funds in which our savings and future income is invested. Unless we make radical changes to how we save such money as we have, a proportion at least of it will be used for purposes for which we may not intend.

Even buying something as seemingly benign as Premium Bonds could be translated as lending the government money to support weapons firms and pay their grotesquely high consultants’ bills. We’re all complicit.

None the less, the question remains: why can the sixth richest and one of the highest taxed countries in the world no longer afford to provide all these services that even twenty years ago were all taken for granted?

We can’t blame everything on Brexit, Covid, Putin and Truss. I see the signs of vast sums of money around me every day, and would see far more were I still living in Clapham or Islington, and yet all these services are on their knees.

Sorry: no answers but just questions on this one.

• Size

Not everyone agrees that size is important, or doesn’t matter. It is, though, an easy way of measuring something. None the less, you have to be clear what you’re measuring.

For example, which are the three biggest political party in the UK? In terms of seats won, there’d be no argument: Labour, Conservative and Lib Dem. In terms of votes cast, a rather different but equally unambiguous answer: Labour, Conservative and Reform.

There are other ways. How about in terms of membership? Obviously this isn’t quite as definitive as the first two but I’ve not seen any of these figures challenged. This surprised me: Labour, Reform, Green. The respective number of members are 309,000, 260,000 and 175,000. Labour’s has considerably fallen, and Reform and the Greens have considerably grown, in the last five or so years. The Conservatives have 123,000 members and the Lib Dems 60,000.

Clearly the first of these figures is the most realistic under the current system while the second would be were we to have an different one. The third is not to be ignored. The Greens and Reform have between them about the same number of members as do Labour and the Conservatives combined, got about six million votes compared to the big two’s 16.5m but won only nine seats compared to the reds’ and blues’ 532.

Ironically, the only party which got a number of seats remotely proportionate to the number of votes it received in July 2024 was the Lib Dems, which has been most vocal in its demands for electoral reform. I doubt that the Greens and Reform can agree about anything else, but this is one matter on which they might find common ground.

• Change

There’s also the huge elephant on the room in the shape of the House of Lords. This is lauded as a heroic supporter of democracy or a massive impediment to it, depending on what legislation is happens to be considering. The point is that you, and me and all the rest of us have no say in who sits there. To quote Simon Jenkins, writing about the Assisted Dying Bill in The Guardian as reported by The Week…

“It’s a bloated body full of time-servers, cronies and donors, an absurd anachronism that still contains hereditary peers and people who owe their place purely to being senior members of the Church of England. Yes, it still contains many good members and, like other second chambers, serves a vital role in contributing to debate and helping improve legislation. But it cannot continue in this form. Peers have no right to impose their own moral views on the lives of British citizens.”

Were I to be ruling the country, I’d kick out all the hereditary peers and bishops tomorrow. I’d then have eighty percent of the members elected by some PR system half-way through each parliament and the other twenty percent topped up by appointment for ten years by a panel whose composition I haven’t yet decided. Something like that…

• Why the silence?

The National Emergency Briefing on the climate emergency took place last week in Westmister Central Hall. The mainstream media coverage it received could best be described as patchy. Why might this be?

In this article, we take a look at what it said and what it asks us all to do, as well as why the message might be unattractive for newspapers and TV channels as well as the government.

• Trump Trumps

Much like Trump’s second term, the Trump Trumps card game has returned for a second edition. Featuring four new transgressions, the game offers players an updated opportunity to pit the many misdeeds of the world’s most successful felon against each other.

Was eating KFC with a knife and fork more vile than inciting an insurrection? Did blowing up suspected Venezuelan drug boats cause more chaos than denying climate change? Find out by clicking here and claiming a 10% discount for Penny Post subscribers by using the code PPTRUMPS10 when prompted.

• Twenty-two stories

We’ve just published Gravity and Rust, a collection of twenty-two of my stories and parodies. Obviously, I think that, like the above-mentioned Trump Trumps, it’s a pretty damned perfect Christmas gift. If you’re minded to agree then it’s available from any bookshop, in particular the ones in Hungerford, Wantage and Marlborough.

For more information, including a summary of what’s in it, a couple of brief reviews and the ISBN number, please click here.

• And finally…

• Many of us might have wondered why airlines are able so effectively to compete with trains. The answer, according to a letter in The Week, is that there’s no tax on aviation fuel. I never knew that. What a strange thing that RR didn’t decide to raise some money from this in the budget last week.

• The Kremlin Krocodile has decided that the latest version of the US peace plan – I forget which version this is – is not acceptable. The BBCs experienced Russia correspondent Steve Rosenberg suggests that this because KK Putin thinks that he shouldn’t fold on a winning hand.

Two versions of what might happen next were discussed at Penny Post Towers over dinner this evening. The first, from one of my sons, is that if there is a serious peace the reconstruction that will follow will make Ukraine a much better place in fifteen years’ time. My view was that, if anything like this treaty is signed, and if Putin rules that long or is replaced by a similar hardass, then Ukraine will not at that time exist at all. I hope my son’s right but I rather fear he won’t be.

• I’ve never met one but I have rather a soft spot for Pangolins. My latest book about which you’ll be reading more over the next few weeks – includes a parody of Kipling’s Just So stories called How the Pangolin got his Scales. One of the songs I’ve written of which I’m particularly fond, Going Down to Wuhan, is partly about this unusual animal.

Then I saw an advert on p42 of The Week, endorsed by Stephen Fry no less, about the extent to which they’re predated upon by us humans because of their supposed curative properties: which are, to paraphrase the more polite refutation in the text, utter batshit.

The problem is that demand from people who should know better is that an estimated 2.7 million of these animals a year are being captured and exported for their non-existant magic. Many other species are in the same leaky boat. We surely can’t continue to behave as if our supposed needs trump everything else’s.  You can visit this website if you’d like to do something about this particular problem.

• A sobering story, again as reported in The Week (scroll down to the bottom) , suggests that although the dispensing of antibiotics has recently fallen by the NHS, it’s risen from private practitioners. The problem here is that if ABs are used too freely they risk creating bacteria which are immune to them. The article adds that “The UK Health Security Agency received 20,484 reports of life-threatening infections caused by bacteria resistant to one or more key antibiotics in 2024 – up 9% from 2023.”

• The Ashes contest (although it can hardly be so far described) resumes this week, in the arguably even more intimidating atmosphere of Brisbane. Once again I’ll be watching: once again from behind the sofa. Mind you, something seems to have gone wrong with my internet – it’s trying to tell me that England have passed 300, that they’ve put on an unbroken 60 for the final wicket and that Root’s finally scored a century in Australia. Better re-start the Mac, I think…

Across the area

• Balancing the books

It’s coming up to budget-setting time for local councils, an exercise which is going to be a particularly fraught one this time round. The pressures on council finances have been well documented and there seems to be little sign of any help coming from Whitehall.

As it has done in previous years, WBC has launched a public consultation to give residents the opportunity to have their say on how to balance its 2026-27 budget. “The primary focus,” a statement from the Council reads, “is on protecting our most vulnerable residents and minimising the impact on other frontline services. We will do this by transforming how we do business to ensure that all Council services are delivered effectively and efficiently, with a customer-centric approach.

I’m never quite sure what if anything phrases like this last one mean but we’ll let that slide for now.

“Before making any decisions on these proposals,” the statement continues, “it’s important that we hear the views of our residents, communities, and other interested parties to understand how they might be affected by them, should they go ahead.” The current gap that needs to be plugged is about £6.4m.

There are also two specific proposals, concerning adult respite care and hire charges at the Henwick Worthy sports ground, on which the council is consulting.

You can read more by clicking here and also from the more detailed document from which this is linked which will take you to the consultation. You have until 12 January to make your views known.

News from your local councils