The Labour government elected in 1997 reviewed the proposal of the previous Conservative government to put in a new computer system for the Post Office and the benefits Agency. By 1999 with problems already emerging with the initial contract  they decided to cancel the Social security part of the contract and rebase the Post Office contract.  They agreed revised terms with ICL for the Horizon project shorn of the other features of the original proposal.

Following Horizon computer  roll out in 1999 to 2000 a number of sub postmasters already went into deficit on the computer numbers. The Post Office prosecuted 41 in 2001 and 64 in 2002. These prosecutions continued throughout the Labour years up to 2010, and for  most of the five years of the Coalition government 2010-15 under 3 Liberal Democrat Ministers. Prosecutions stopped in 2015 . The  Conservative majority government elected in 2015 did not preside over any. Over the period 2010-15 increasing attention was drawn to alleged errors in the system by sub post masters, and in articles published in Computer Weekly. An independent investigation opened in 2012 led to four reports between 2013 and 2015. These reports drew attention to problems with the system but were not accepted by the Post Office. There were attempts from 2014 to resolve some of the disputes by mediation. It was these growing doubts that could have led Ministers to ask more questions and deter premature prosecutions  before the issues over the computer properly answered.

Things only  started to change meaningfully for the sub postmasters following victories in courts in 2019 , 2020 and 2021. The courts came to accept that there were problems with the Horizon software and some of the successful prosecutions needed to be overturned. In 2020 the government set up a full enquiry into the scandal, and set up the first compensation scheme for victims.

This was all profoundly shocking. Honest people serving their local communities well had their reputations damaged, lost their businesses, in some case were sent to jail wrongly, and  four committed suicide. The courts made wrongful judgements finding people guilty of fraud or false accounting when they had done no such thing. What should  we learn from this  bitter experience and what changes should now be made?

1. The Post Office and other nationalised industries should lose the right to prosecute people or companies. They have too much power. They should refer allegations  to the police and prosecuting authorities rather than handling them themselves.
2. Chief executives of public services should not  be paid large private sector style bonuses as they are bank rolled by the state and often have monopoly powers over customers. They do not take the same risks as CEOs of competitive large companies and are rarely removed from office for incompetence.
3.  Ministers will be ultimately held to blame for the actions of a nationalised business. Ministers  control their access to public funds and may wish to direct their activities in the public interest. To reflect these truths the  importance of Ministers should be clearer and their accountability for these matters should be direct to Parliament. Ministers need to manage the managers.
4. The current review should consider how the public sector might get some financial redress for its losses imposed by Horizon  from both the computer company supplier and the well rewarded senior management who got bonuses as if they had done well.
5. The review should examine if the published Post Office accounts were accurate for the period concerned and see how the sums obtained from sub postmasters for alleged losses were recorded.

I wholeheartedly condemn slavery. Today there is more work to be done to combat what is called modern slavery. There is not much specifically modern about the traffic in people who are bound to employers in low wage slavery in illegal occupations or working illegally because they did not gain legal entry to the country concerned. There is slavery and criminality behind the drug trades, the exploitation of some women and the passage of people illegally to new countries for the profit of the people traffickers. There is slavery in some illegal businesses employing illegal migrants and exploiting them over hours, pay  and living conditions as they are outside the legal protections of our society. These  are the slaveries we should oppose and prevent. These are the slaveries we can do something about. They are a blot on our generations.

Past slavery was horrific, but there is nothing we can do to ease the burdens or compensate the victims when they are long dead. Many past societies were slave based. The UK faced slavery  and serfdom from the Romans, Normans, Barbary pirates and others, just as it worked with other countries to promote slave plantations in the eighteenth century. The UK turned from such practices with a successful anti slavery Parliament led campaign, helping the world to new standards of conduct.The Royal Navy played an important role in stopping the trade in people.

I do not expect compensation  to be paid to the UK by those countries that invaded us, enslaved people, took their lands and abused them. Our attention should be on the present and future. There are too many current day abuses which we can do something about which should be our priority. We cannot put right the conduct of people who died hundreds of years ago which we condemn.Our ancestors fought against their  enslavers at the time and lost . The Roman legions and Norman army were powerful oppressors. However much you want to change that you cannot.

“The team at Facts4EU.Org have published a 2-part report on electric vehicles (EVs) in which I am quoted and which readers may find interesting.

Part I (https://facts4eu.org/news/2024_jan_electric_scalextric) is about the new law which came into effect on 03 January, about which relatively little has been written.

Part II (https://facts4eu.org/news/2024_jan_electric_scalextric_2) draws on the experience of one motorist who was forced to sell his EV after just 5 months and buy a petrol car instead. Readers will recall I published this motorist’s comments recently.”

Dear Colleague

Environment Secretary Steve Barclay yesterday announced measures to improve transparency in food labelling and make sure high-quality British food stands out from the crowd.

The plans, announced at the Oxford Farming Conference, will empower consumers to make informed decisions at the supermarket shelf and online, while backing British farmers producing food to world-leading standards of taste, quality and animal welfare.

The plans include a consultation on proposals to make food labelling clearer, such as highlighting when imported products do not meet UK welfare standards, and help ensure food produced to the highest standards is consistently labelled. The Environment Secretary will also speak with major online retailers to identify ways to better support online customers to understand the origin of their food products at the point of purchase, including the option of a Buy British Button.

Please click the following link to find more information on the measures, and to read comments from the Environment Secretary: DEFRA News: UK Farming Schemes upgrade and Food Labelling announcements today (4/1/24) (cloud.microsoft)

All the time we have a global system of national accounting for carbon dioxide production the UK will come out well from the numbers and China and India will come out badly. UK policy has driven a lot of  heavy energy using industry out of our country to force us to rely on more imports. The imports from China mean more CO 2 produced in China and less in the UK. The UK has stopped most of its coal based electricity production and come to rely more on imported electricity.  Given this is the approved system why don’t the green campaigners rejoice at the UK’s success in driving down its CO 2 output?

According to global figures China accounts for 30% of manmade CO 2 in the world and the UK under 1%. China’s increase  in CO 2 output in a typical year exceeds total UK output for that year. These numbers do tell us a truth about CO 2 and should encourage the campaigners to pressurise China to do far more than she is doing. They could turn their attention to the Chinese Embassies if they do not fancy trying  a protest in China itself. China and India do rely on coal much more than the advanced countries to generate their power. They are opening new coal power stations and mines.

One of the reasons many people who accept the climate change theory do not do more in their own lives to buy green products is their sense of futility given the way CO 2 worldwide continues to expand whatever action the UK government and consumers take. Despite all the COPs, law changes in advanced countries and the resolutions in world bodies world CO 2 output continues to expand as the tenth anniversary of the Paris Agreement draws near. So why do Green campaigners attack our own country instead of concentrating on the sources of so much CO 2 growth?

We live under the tyranny of the Bank of England and OBR. Politicians have given powers away to these so called independent bodies, only to discover they are unable to make accurate forecasts whilst recommending policies which lurch us from high inflation to no growth. Many of the electorate take the more traditional view that Ministers are elected to sift the advice and make good decisions. If inflation is too high or growth is too low voters blame the government. As we approach the next election voters face the problem that the main Opposition party thinks the problems of inflation and growth require more powers to be surrendered to the very bodies that have caused much of the bad outcomes so far. Why take more of the same medicine when it has proved to be harmful so far?

Over my time as an MP to date  the record of the Bank of England has been poor for much of that period. The Bank along with the Treasury, the CBI and the Labour party nagged the Conservative government of the 1980s into the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. All the time I was Margaret Thatcher’s economic adviser we stayed out of this system, which was obviously going to be destabilising and damaging as I set out in a booklet before the event. When they had their way it gave us first a rapid inflation as the Bank created money to try to keep the exchange rate down to the limits of the scheme, and then caused a deep recession when they had to arrest the inflation with an intense money squeeze to try to save the pound. That wrote off the period 1988- 94 and ended the Conservative government.

In the period 2005-8 the Bank allowed a massive expansion of credit as the Treasury went for an increase of spending and borrowing at the same time. The Conservative Opposition warned the government that this was dangerous and inflationary. So it proved. Then the Bank did the opposite and squeezed money and credit too hard, threatening the solvency of the banks. I warned against such an extreme lurch, but they were determined. Only when some of  the largest banks in  the land were teetering on the edge of collapse did they relent. They had to undertake a very expensive bail out of leading banks brought on by their own folly. As Gordon Brown was an important influence on the thinking behind decisions he ultimately had to take it was fitting Labour were thrown out of office for the big crash of 2008.

In the response to the covid lockdowns the Bank understandably made a  large amount of money available to prop bond markets and offset some of the damaging economic consequences of widespread closures. Unfortunately the Bank continued with this policy throughout 2021, recovery year, in a way that was bound to be inflationary. So it proved. Now they are trying to overcorrect by taking large losses on bonds they paid too much for and reducing  the money supply.

What a pity the experts of the Bank have not yet learned from these dreadful boom/bust swings that creating too much money or allowing too much credit is inflationary, and allowing too little brings on a  recession. This is a clear case where expertise needs to be challenged, and experts with better forecasting records should be listened to more.

Many people who accept the science of climate change do not buy electric cars and heat  pumps because they do not see how that lowers CO 2. The establishment and the main parties all hold the same strange idea that forcing more people to buy these two products will in some way cut world CO 2. It is difficult to see how this would happen given current limits on renewable power.

If I bought a new electric car today and plugged it in to charge it the grid would need to call up more gas fuelled electricity to handle the needs of my recharger. We are usually using all the renewable power we can produce. If I spent a lot of money on a heat pump that too would require grid power to fuel it. How does it make sense to burn the gas in a distant power station and lose some of the energy in transmission when I could burn the gas directly in my home boiler and capture more of that energy as usable heat?

For the establishment view to  work we need much more renewable power to power the grid, with reliable ways of storing green electricity for days and times when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining. We are someway off that situation. Before demanding we switch cars and heating systems government and the energy industry need to decide how to make storing renewable power economic. There would then be a long period of gaining permissions and implementing the work necessary to put in extra renewable capacity, extra grid capacity, and the approved ways of storing. These might be the production of green hydrogen with all the additional changes that would then require, or more large battery installations, or more pump storage systems. None of this is easy to do, quick to complete or cheap.

There also needs to be whole lifetime accounting. Ripping out a gas boiler and putting in a heat  pump uses large amounts of energy to make or scrap or install or remove the products. Much of the work  today is undertaken by suppliers using fossil fuels . This CO 2 needs to be accounted for. Early retirement of gas boilers or petrol cars may add to world CO 2 from the CO 2 involved in their replacement. It has been shown you would need to do a high mileage for a number of years in an electric car, recharging it from renewable sources, to cut overall CO 2 compared to running your older petrol car for longer.

The Horizon scandal is a good extreme case of what can go wrong when too many Ministers and MPs accept official advice and believe experts, only to discover later that the official advice and expertise is badly wrong and doing grave harm.

I am all in favour of expertise. If I was ill I would seek advice from a doctor as they know so much more than I about diseases and health problems. I would also be aware of the need to ask what the side effects of treatment might be and  what the record of success has been if treatment was proposed as ultimately I would have to make the decision about what to do.

Valuing experts does not mean that experts are always right. Indeed, in the areas I know best where I have some expertise of my own I am well aware of the divergence of opinions amongst the experts. This makes a Minister’s job both very interesting and very challenging. Advisers advise and Ministers decide. Sometimes a Minister needs to ask for a second opinion or a different expert view. Good Ministers are generalists but they have a sense of when the expertise is well based and when it could let them down. Good Ministers also wish to achieve good results for the public they serve. That too can demand changing experts to get a better answer.

I and a few other MPs, impressed by the work of  James Arbuthnot, asked questions about Horizon from early days of the problems emerging. We all knew good honest local PO managers and could not believe some of them were accused of fraud and false accounting. As we realised the numbers involved I asked how senior managers of the Post Office and senior officials in the sponsor department could think there was suddenly a big outbreak of fraud around the same time as a new accounting system was introduced. It was also strange that no evidence came forward of these alleged fraudsters suddenly having bloated bank accounts or stuffed wallets of their own, going on a  spending spree from the profits of crime.

It was frustrating that so many senior officials and Ministers stuck to the Post Office line.  In future blogs I will look at other very worrying examples of where establishment thinking based on errant expertise is doing damage. As readers will know, I have been challenging establishment thinking over inflation, growth, reductions of CO 2, energy policy and migration amongst others. When people say they want change in the way we are governed, they are often seeking change in the controlling theories and policy prescriptions. When all the main parties accept the same expertise which turns out to be wrong democracy is damaged.