Builders Merchants Journal – BMJ Publishing to Builders Merchants and the UK merchanting industry for more than 95 years
At ev’ry word a reputation dies
Future historians may well look back on the decades at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st as the Cover-Up Years. The decades when wrong-doing – whether deliberate or simply people doing a bad job – was hidden, obfuscated, smothered in paperwork and swept under various carpets. In most of those cases the perpetrators went on to either be rubbish somewhere else or to bigger and better things: higher-paying jobs, more prestigious directorships, public-funded golden-hued retirements, even honours. You can probably guess where I’m going with this.
Today is the first day that Paula Vennells, the former head of the Post Office, is giving evidence at the Post Office Inquiry. Finally, you might think. The woman with all the answers. The woman with whom the buck should have stopped, during those years when hundreds of sub postmasters were sent to prison, bankrupted, vilified in their local communities, and in some cases hounded to the deaths, for stealing money from the Post Office. Except they didn’t. It was glitches in the Post Office’s own computer system, Horizon, that was ‘disappearing’ money from the accounts, facts systematically, categorically lied about by both the Post Office – including Vennells herself – and Fujitsu, the Japanese IT giant behind the Horizon system. This has become known as one of the biggest British miscarriages of justice. You know this. I’ve written about it enough times.
The bottom line is that all this happened on Vennells’ watch and the buck, to repeat myself, was her’s to hold onto. An email has emerged, according to ITV News, which shows that she was aware of possible problems with the prosecutions in 2013. Yet those prosecutions continued for a further six years. It may or may not prove the be the smoking gun that undoes her.
Vennells did in her witness statement express her remorse, expressly apologising to Alan Bates, Ian Henderson, Ron Warmington, and all those who kept on campaigning. “With hindsight”, she said she would have done some things differently. Easy to say that now.
What’s so depressing is that the Post Office isn’t the only scandal that was covered up, as we found out this week. The inquiry into the thousands of patients transfused with infected blood for years concluded this week with the statement by Sir Brian Langstaff, that it was ‘not an accident” and that the NHS and governments refused “to accept that wrong had been done”, and that the scandal had been covered up for years.
Add this to the number of cover-ups with maternity services round the country, the way the water companies seem to be unable to stop pumping gazillion gallons of crap into our rivers and seas, all the time trousering the dividends…
There is a management culture, going back years, decades, of ‘not on my watch’, of ‘sweep it away and hope that I’m out of here by the time the whatsit hits the fan’, of ‘I’m right, and I will ignore everything that indicates I’m not’, of ducking responsibility – this goes for those in business, in the civil service, in government.
Compare and contrast all this with a guy who left his job this weekend. A man who put his heart and his soul into the role he’s carried out for nine years. A man who didn’t get every single result that he worked for, but who nevertheless has left that role with the love and respect of those invested in his success or failures. A man who did his job to the very best of his ability, and departed, head held high, tears in his eyes, joy in his soul, and love for his team and his fans in his heart when he knew that he could do no more. A man who knows that, while there are those who believe football is more important than life or death, it is just a game. A beautiful game, but just a game.
If you can be anything in life, be more Jurgen.
PS: I just watched Craig MacKinley MP take his place in the House Of Commons after losing his hands and feet, and nearly his life, to sepsis. It will surprise no-one to hear that his speech made me blub. Puts a lot of stuff that seems important into perspective.
