British Post Office Scandal

[Axe]

8 hours ago, Organgrinder said:

The answer is that the wrongly accused get their money back because it's theirs and not for you or anyone else,  to decide what happens to it.

 

I'm quite sure you would get hysterical if your employer sacked you,  made you homeless, emptied your bank account and then tried to jail you,   when you had done nothing wrong.

The population in general,  has much more sense and empathy than you do and that's why they've gone hysterical.

 

Stop being a Drama Queen.  The media reaction to a television drama problem is hysterical.  They had a special hour long problem on BBC breakfast this morning about the scandal which I switched off. I suggest they bring back the Jeremy Kyle program and invite these postmasters to take the lie detector test and have a ducking stool for those who fail the test. 

[Guest]

2 minutes ago, Axe said:

Stop being a Drama Queen.  The media reaction to a television drama problem is hysterical.  They had a special hour long problem on BBC breakfast this morning about the scandal which I switched off. I suggest they bring back the Jeremy Kyle program and invite these postmasters to take the lie detector test and have a ducking stool for those who fail the test. 

No good you switching it off thinking that no one else could see it either.

Everybody else was watching and later marvelling at how this dozy government suddenly came to life  with a rocket up it's arse.

 

Brilliant idea of the lie test  -  Lets get all the Fujitsu workers,  all the post office bosses, and all the government ministers who should have taken responsibility over those years.

We'll test  'em and then off to the ducking stool with  'em,    finishing up with a good prison spell for lying,   for fraud and for conspiracy.

 

The media reaction was perfectly correct and the governments actions today was proof of this.  They can't get away with their lies and their incompetence any more.

 

[Mister M]

35 minutes ago, Axe said:

Stop being a Drama Queen.  The media reaction to a television drama problem is hysterical.  They had a special hour long problem on BBC breakfast this morning about the scandal which I switched off. I suggest they bring back the Jeremy Kyle program and invite these postmasters to take the lie detector test and have a ducking stool for those who fail the test. 

I don't think it's so much the media reaction, rather it's the public reaction. 

It really has tapped a raw nerve, and I'm not surprised you switched off the telly. You must be gutted all that compensation they're entitled to.

Speaking of lie detectors, it might've been a good idea for your pin-up Bodge Jobson to go on the Jezza Kyle show & take a lie detector test before he became PM. 

Mind you I've often said, if Bodge had been born on a large council estate instead of to a very wealthy family, he'd have been a natural on the Jezza Kyle show: deceitful, lazy, scruffy and can't keep it in his trousers.

Edited January 10 by Mister M

[The_DADDY]

38 minutes ago, Axe said:

Stop being a Drama Queen.  The media reaction to a television drama problem is hysterical.  They had a special hour long problem on BBC breakfast this morning about the scandal which I switched off. I suggest they bring back the Jeremy Kyle program and invite these postmasters to take the lie detector test and have a ducking stool for those who fail the test. 

What a spectacularly ridiculous post.

Well done 👏 

[ECCOnoob]

6 hours ago, Delbow said:

 

Also worth reflecting that if this had happened in a parallel universe where a state company had been set to implement big IT projects and they had been the guilty party, all the calls now would be to privatise it. But as it's the private sector that's done it, now what? Not that I believe the state, certainly in Shīt Britain, is capable of doing a better job in IT matters.

A valid point but don't underestimate the entangled web between state owned and private. 

 

You might find an interesting read up on exactly what (now called) Fujitsu UK division was. It might now be a part of the big Japanese conglomerate, but not so long ago, even during the time of this defective system being in development it was very much ICL.

 

ICL being a company that was set up with heavy government backing, new legislation created by the Wilson administration and support of the Minister of Technology to do their bit for UK PLC and do a bit of willy waving to those foreign manufacturers. 

 

ICL received multiple grants from the government's enterprise board during its time, including one major one to bail it out from collapse.  Even Thatcher managed to get talked round. 

 

It is certainly no surprise why ICL has so many historical and current links to government contracts when the government plough several grants into it and held a 10% shareholding stake in the business for years. 

 

The Home Office, the HMRC, the DWP, the MOD and of course the Post Office were all users of their systems -  so one has to really ask who was pulling whose strings.

 

ICL/Fujitsu may well be private companies but if massive amounts of your work legacy and current is governments contracts  - just how much is said government and/or their agencies involved in designing, revising, demanding, interfering, pushing through and deploying a  defective system.

 

As I have said on other posts, this is more than just a single person and single organisation issue. Much as people love to try and find a point of blame and a head to roll, it isn't going to happen. 

 

People need to start reading and looking well beyond the TV drama and cherry picked headlines.

[Delbow]

7 minutes ago, ECCOnoob said:

A valid point but don't underestimate the entangled web between state owned and private. 

 

You might find an interesting read up on exactly what (now called) Fujitsu UK division was. It might now be a part of the big Japanese conglomerate, but not so long ago, even during the time of this defective system being in development it was very much ICL.

 

ICL being a company that was set up with heavy government backing, new legislation created by the Wilson administration and support of the Minister of Technology to do their bit for UK PLC and do a bit of willy waving to those foreign manufacturers. 

 

ICL received multiple grants from the government's enterprise board during its time, including one major one to bail it out from collapse.  Even Thatcher managed to get talked round. 

 

It is certainly no surprise why ICL has so many historical and current links to government contracts when the government plough several grants into it and held a 10% shareholding stake in the business for years. 

 

The Home Office, the HMRC, the DWP, the MOD and of course the Post Office were all users of their systems -  so one has to really ask who was pulling whose strings.

 

ICL/Fujitsu may well be private companies but if massive amounts of your work legacy and current is governments contracts  - just how much is said government and/or their agencies involved in designing, revising, demanding, interfering, pushing through and deploying a  defective system.

 

As I have said on other posts, this is more than just a single person and single organisation issue. Much as people love to try and find a point of blame and a head to roll, it isn't going to happen. 

 

People need to start reading and looking well beyond the TV drama and cherry picked headlines.

Very interesting, I did not know that.

[peak4]

From another group I visit; I've no reason to doubt the author, though I can't verify anything he's written either.
Certainly the content seems reasonable, and fits in with a basic reading of ICL's history on Wiki, who were after all a major computer mainframe manufacturer, so it seems quite reasonable to use them for large government contracts.

"BBC news topic of the day is the outrageous Post Office postmaster prosecutions. I was an IT recruitment consultant throughout the 90s and I had supplied the Post Office with numerous IT contractors to develop the Horizon Project at its Chesterfield IT data centre. Throughout the entire project It was common knowledge amongst IT developers that the system was problematic. The software development commenced on the old ICL mainframes (ICL was acquired by Fujitsu) but as new technology came to market, other parts of the project was developed on mini computer systems and/or networked micro systems. The integration of the above hardware and various (differing) software languages used is why it has been so difficult to pin-point the errors in calculation. In program mathematics, each individual software languages will use its own unique rules to perform first in order operations to evaluate a given mathematical expression. Somewhere in the above jumble of hardware and software technologies resides the problem, but it is unlikely to ever be resolved as most of the know-how relating to ICL mainframe computers of the day has either retired or checked out. Senior Post Office management absolutely did know that Horizon was riddled with software bugs, and it had been from the very start."

 

Edited by me only to correct spelling typos.

[Delbow]

19 minutes ago, peak4 said:

From another group I visit; I've no reason to doubt the author, though I can't verify anything he's written either.
Certainly the content seems reasonable, and fits in with a basic reading of ICL's history on Wiki, who were after all a major computer mainframe manufacturer, so it seems quite reasonable to use them for large government contracts.

"BBC news topic of the day is the outrageous Post Office postmaster prosecutions. I was an IT recruitment consultant throughout the 90s and I had supplied the Post Office with numerous IT contractors to develop the Horizon Project at its Chesterfield IT data centre. Throughout the entire project It was common knowledge amongst IT developers that the system was problematic. The software development commenced on the old ICL mainframes (ICL was acquired by Fujitsu) but as new technology came to market, other parts of the project was developed on mini computer systems and/or networked micro systems. The integration of the above hardware and various (differing) software languages used is why it has been so difficult to pin-point the errors in calculation. In program mathematics, each individual software languages will use its own unique rules to perform first in order operations to evaluate a given mathematical expression. Somewhere in the above jumble of hardware and software technologies resides the problem, but it is unlikely to ever be resolved as most of the know-how relating to ICL mainframe computers of the day has either retired or checked out. Senior Post Office management absolutely did know that Horizon was riddled with software bugs, and it had been from the very start."

 

Edited by me only to correct spelling typos.

Also very interesting. SF could be a good, informative forum if there were more posts from people who know things and fewer posts from people who know almost nowt.

[hackey lad]

9 minutes ago, Delbow said:

Also very interesting. SF could be a good, informative forum if there were more posts from people who know things and fewer posts from people who know almost nowt.

And fewer posts from rats

 

[Mister M]

Also last summer, unbelievably, it emerged that the current CEO of the Post Office had actually run a bonus scheme to reward executives for cooperating with the inquiry – surely their most basic civic and moral duty. This was at the same time that 81-year-old former subpostmaster Francis Duff finally received £330,000 compensation for having lost everything during the scandal – only for the official receiver (part of the Department for Business) to immediately claw back £322,000 of it to cover bankruptcy and owed income tax. He couldn’t afford to heat his home last winter.

We have seen heroes emerge from the Post Office scandal. Now focus on the villains | Marina Hyde | The Guardian

 

Utterly shocking.