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The Cynic’s Dictionary

June 12 2023

Sexual harassment: Boorish behaviour, unwanted by the target. Not to be confused with flirtation or courtship. Often perpetrated by people who have not recently looked in a mirror or who have forgotten their age or marital status.

Code of Conduct: Having some manners.

Banter: Amusing social interaction between friends and/or colleagues. Not to be confused with bad or offensive language, which becomes “banter” when someone complains about it.

Witch-hunt: The process of making grown-ups accountable for their behaviour.

A kangaroo court: any tribunal, committee or other body which decides something which the person under investigation disagrees with.

Addiction: Bad behaviour turned into an “illness”.

A clinic: A place where “addicts” go to, to hide from the media.

Abuse of power: Bullying. Soon to be classified as an “addiction

Inappropriate: Very popular word covering –

(1) Breaches of social etiquette, such as using fish knives to eat steaks.
(2) Language mistakes e.g. the use of “disinterested” to mean “uninterested”.
(3) Behaviour previously described as “wrong” or “illegal” or “criminal”.

Wrong: Description of behaviour which is either illegal or known by a majority to fall below widely accepted standards of decency. Implies responsibility by the person doing it. Now in high danger of falling into disuse.

Apology:

(1) A short form of words by which a person says sorry for behaviour which is “wrong” (see above). Traditionally starts with the 1st person singular and ends with the word “sorry”. In danger of falling into disuse.

(2) A long form of words by which someone appears to apologise while not in fact doing so. The non-apology apology requires focus on the victim’s reaction while also implying that it is both overegged and may not have happened.

There are many variations of this. Industries where bad behaviour is widespread are fond of adding to their apologies (variant no. (2)) a lengthy reference to all the good people in the industry; see Banking, Parliament, the Police, Journalism.

(3) The “Will this implausible excuse do?” apology: used by sulky teenagers everywhere. Now spreading to adults who should know better. See Diane Abbott who thought that saying offensive comments in a first draft was an adequate explanation rather than revelatory of what a person really thinks.

(4) Other popular excuses and explanations:

  • The culture has changed” – “I can’t get away with this anymore.
  • What might have been acceptable 10, 15 years ago” – “My lawyer drafted this.”
  • Parliament / the police / the CBI / [insert organisation of choice] now needs to look at itself” – “Will this go away if we set up an inquiry and sack someone?”
  • Conduct needs to be improved” – “We must make sure not to get caught again.”
  • I have fallen below the high standards that we require of the [insert organisation of choice]“By the time anyone works out what this means this unfortunate affair will have been forgotten.”
  • We take this [insert misconduct du jour] extremely seriously” – “We do now, given that it is all over the press and social media.”
  • I have reflected on my position” – “My wife / the PM / the Chief Whip has been shouting at me all weekend.”

The time for apologies is over (©Bob Diamond): The time when apologies (see “Apology (1))” should start.

Clarification: either

  • an admission that what you said before was completely untrue (in common parlance, a lie); or
  • an insistence that what you are saying now is what you have been saying all along, even though it is the complete opposite.

Shame: No known contemporary definition. Last heard of in the 1960’s.

Offence, the taking of: the best way of avoiding a debate and/or revealing you have no arguments. It is not actually necessary to be offended, just to say that you are.

We are going to consult on these proposals” – “We know they aren’t popular but we’re going to implement them anyway.”

We have not been consulted” – “We have not been agreed with”

Let me be clear” – “I’m going to be anything but.”

Full and frank disclosure” – “We don’t think they’ve got any more dirt than has already been published but are keeping our fingers crossed that nothing else comes out.”

Any statement saying that an entity’s finances are fine and intended to reassure: usually the precursor to discovery of a fraud or insolvency.

An inquiry: A process by which an embarrassing story disappears from public view.

A report: What a person who had nothing to with the original events has to present to Parliament and/or the media many years later. See the Savile Inquiry Report. See also the forthcoming Grenfell, Post Office, blood contamination and Covid-19 reports.

Lawyers: The people who write inquiry reports. Also, the only people who read them.

Peerage: what the author of a report producing a satisfactory outcome for those commissioning it gets, entirely coincidentally, after the report has been finished. Very occasionally, the peerage is given, again entirely coincidentally, immediately before the report is started (see Ms – now Baroness – Chakrabarti).

Conclusions:  Usually written before the inquiry has heard any evidence.

Recommendations: What you find, if you read that far, at the end of a report.

We are going to consult on these recommendations ” – “We have no intention of implementing them but this will make it look as if we are doing something until everyone has forgotten about them.”

Working group: A group of people unable to avoid being tasked with the responsibility of coming up with suggestions as to how recommendations might be implemented.

The long grass: Where recommendations usually end up. See also “Inquiry”.

Lack of resources: The best reason yet invented for not implementing any difficult recommendations.

Lessons learned: Lessons which are never learned by those who need to learn them.

This must never happen again” – “This must never happen again during my term of office, at least not before I resign/retire and draw my gold-plated, index-linked, final salary pension, or move onto an even more well-paid position.”

Whistleblowing: Something which is frequently talked about but not done anything like often enough. The equivalent of an “extreme sport” in some professions e.g. medicine, politics, finance.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Compliance stories

June 10 2023

Really enjoyed doing this talk and participating in the panel session with Patrick Spens, Alex Viall and Rob Mason.

Interesting thoughts from Patrick Spens on the future of regulation, current governmental approaches and compliance risks firms should be aware of – sanctions, for instance.

And I said more than just what is reported below, of course!

Tell stories to embed compliant conduct, says Carroll Barry-Walsh

The Cheque is in the Post

May 7 2023

Remember the De Lorean fiasco? To provide jobs in Northern Ireland, the then government paid the bouffant-haired car designer to set up his factory there. It collapsed a few years later amidst missing money and fraud. Arthur Andersen, the auditors, who admitted missing obvious fraud signs, were banned from government work and sued. It was only when Blair won that the ban on AA was lifted and a risible settlement agreed. (Doubtless entirely coincidentally, AA had provided free advice to Labour in opposition. A “scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” approach to favours has never restricted itself to one party.)

Fast forward a quarter of a century. Fujitsu, whose Horizon accounting system used by the Post Office, was responsible for the largest miscarriage of justice in British history, has suffered no similar penalty. Indeed, no penalty at all. Far from it. It has been rewarded with more lucrative government contracts; it has not paid any compensation; no company official has been held responsible.

Why? Well, one answer is that AA’s failures harmed the government. Whereas Fujitsu and the Post Office only harmed some lowly sub-postmasters and mistresses. A cynical take. But an accurate one. The brutal reality is that being in public ownership or a public service does not automatically mean an organization behaves well. Worse, it often means that when it causes harm to others, its primary interest is to protect itself – even at the expense of those it has harmed. This is not new. See how the Aberfan families were treated in the decades after the loss of their children. Or the victims of the blood contamination scandal or many other NHS scandals or Windrush.

This story shows a state – and many of its key functions: the Post Office, owned by the state, the criminal justice system, run by the state, and the responsible Ministers and civil servants – to be malign, incompetent, indifferent to the damage caused, defensive and determined (behind all the paraphernalia of inquiries, reviews, assessments) to delay the allocation of responsibility, effective consequences for those responsible and proper, timely compensation for those harmed. It is no consolation – nor anything for the rest of us to be proud of – that some judges, some lawyers, a few persistent journalists and 1 MP – James Arbuthnot – have battled and are still battling to ensure justice.

There has been a book, a podcast, a heartbreaking Panorama documentary. The Times has written some scathing editorials. The inquiry grinds on, lawyers argue about different compensation schemes, the police investigation into possible perjury by Fujitsu personnel has been announced. But nothing seems to happen. Meanwhile yet more postmasters die – 59 so far. Is that the plan? To wait until everyone is dead, then quietly bury whatever report is produced while those responsible get away with it and carry on making money? Apparently so.

It is cruel. It adds a further injustice to the original one. It displays a contempt for the people who have suffered and are still suffering. It displays an indifference to the human consequences of people’s acts and omissions, something all too easy to forget amongst the mass of wrongdoing patiently unearthed by courts and inquiries. That cruelty consists in holding out the promise of compensation while making the process of getting it long, complicated and difficult. Meanwhile, those responsible, both for the injustice and the delays, suffer nothing, withhold evidence from the inquiry and/or, grotesquely, award themselves bonuses and lie about it. On its website the Post Office says it wants “to remain one of the most admired institutions in the public sector”. “Remain“? “Most admired“? Both delusional and arrogant.

Why has this scandal not been taken more seriously?

  • The very diffuse nature of the tragedy over two decades. Lots of individual stories, all heartbreaking. But no one event or place to focus on. No image. No buried school or trapped fans in a football pen or burnt-out tower. No anniversary. So it is easy for it to fade away into a complicated background, something to do with accounting and IT and legal stuff. No-one is going to sing their heart out for that. No Royal is going to visit and lay flowers.
  • Worse – this was not just the wrong people convicted of a crime. There was no crime.  It is hard to get your head round the fact that hundreds of people were investigated, tried and convicted for crimes that never happened. How can this possibly be?
  • The people to whom this happened come from all backgrounds, all over the country, of all ages. It makes it worse but also means they have no obvious representative to speak for them, no-one to whom they – collectively – matter.
  • No political party has taken up their cause. All the major parties had Ministers responsible for the Post Office who failed to ensure that it behaved competently and then, when the scandal erupted, failed to ensure that it was handled properly. So they hide behind their pathetic claims that they weren’t briefed or didn’t realise or delegated or assumed that others were doing their job and are shocked and appalled and oh dear … blah blah .. and very sorry etc.,. What is the point of these junior Ministers if all they can do is hand-wringing avoidance of responsibility?
  • Far too many groups behaved badly. What makes this so hard to comprehend is the overwhelming scale. Look at all those responsible: Fujitsu, those who developed, oversaw and sold Horizon, Post Office management at all levels, internal investigators, in-house lawyers, external lawyers, IT staff, those knowing something was wrong but saying nothing, Ministers, civil servants advising them, prosecutors, the judges’ ruling that the computer evidence should be believed (one of the stupidest judicial rulings made). All these, through their actions and omissions, are responsible; many continue to be responsible for the delays in giving the victims adequate compensation while they are still alive. Easier to forget or not engage at all.

Among all these failings, two deserve very close scrutiny.

The lawyers

There were obvious problems with the Post Office being its own prosecutor, the confusion between the role of investigators and prosecutors, the failures of those investigators, a lack of clarity about the duties owed and to whom by the in-house lawyers, failures to make proper disclosure, withholding key evidence, failure to speak up, conflicts of interest for the lawyers advising on the compensation schemes, lack of honesty, failure to understand or challenge the accounting and technical evidence (a persistent problem for the legal system – see the Sally Clark case) and so on. Bluntly, the Post Office ruined innocent people by lying, manipulating and subverting for its own commercial advantage the English justice system. Its lawyers were central to that. Many of those involved should be ashamed of – and deserve censure for – their unprofessionalism and behaviour.

The approach to the technical (in this case, computer) evidence

There is a tendency (not confined to the Post Office) to believe there is one technological system which will provide the answer to a problem; and believe only what that technology tells you. Both are foolish, dangerous impulses. (A lesson for us on the cusp of a new technological revolution.) When combined with working back from your desired conclusion (“we’re going to find fraud with our shiny new toy”), miscarriages of justice are all but inevitable. (Something for Holyrood to consider before proceeding with its judge-only rape trial pilot designed to increase convictions.)

What now?

3 people: the PM, the Chancellor, the Business Secretary need to stop hiding behind endless inquiries and legal to-ing and fro-ing and make it a top priority to get compensation paid promptly.

  • Those MPs trying to help their constituents need to badger them until they do.
  • The inquiry into responsibility must be uncoupled from the assessment and payment of compensation.
  • Fujitsu should be given no government contracts until they pay compensation.
  • The Post Office’s senior management needs replacing by honest capable people. A public explanation is needed for why it awarded itself a bonus scheme for complying with an inquiry set up to investigate its own failings and why it lied about it in its public accounts.

Meanwhile, remember the words of Desmond Ackner QC, Counsel for the Aberfan families, to the official inquiry. They apply as easily to Horizon as to a slag heap.

This was a slow growing man-made menace, fed by the indifference of those who should never have permitted its existence. That is the horror of this disaster. There can be no more bitter reminder of the truth and wisdom of George Bernard Shaw’s condemnation

“The worst sin towards our fellows is not to hate them. It is to be indifferent to them. For that is the essence of inhumanity.”

 

Photo by Kutan Ural on unsplash.com.