Tag Archives: monarchy

A knightood for Bates would undermine what the sub-postmasters have fought for

Posted on by symonhill

I wrote this article for the ‘i’ paper, who published it online on 11th January, with a shorter version in the print edition the next day.

The statistics are shocking enough – more than 700 innocent sub-postmasters were wrongly prosecuted in the Horizon IT scandal – but it is the personal horror stories that really hit home. Seema Misra in Ashford, sentenced to prison while pregnant, who gave birth wearing an electronic tag. Sathyan Shiju in London, who tried to take his own life after being accused of stealing £20,000. Christopher Head in Newcastle, unable to secure another job after being sacked and told to pay £88,000 that he did not have.

It would be an insult to suggest that any amount of money could adequately compensate these people.

Meanwhile, Rishi Sunak seems to be practising government by TV drama, talking seriously about compensation only since the ITV broadcast of Mr Bates vs the Post Office, which depicted former sub-postmaster Alan Bates decades-long fight to expose the Horizon system scandal.

Now there are calls to give Alan Bates a knighthood. He and the others who challenged these outrageous convictions should certainly be celebrated, but the calls for an honour will do nothing to stop something like this from happening again. It just papers over the cracks.

There is a long tradition of using titles and honours to buy people off, or as an easy way to superficially endorse a popular person or cause. The reverse is also true. Former Post Office boss Paula Vennells has returned her CBE. She is no longer a Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

It has been reported that Vennells earned over £400,000 in her final year at the head of the Post Office. This is not true. She was paid over £400,000, whether she earned it is a different question. It is perhaps easier to return a CBE than to pay back an unimaginably large salary. It is also much easier for the Government to give Mr Bates a knighthood than to address the root causes of the problem.

It would also seem that Alan Bates, too, believes this. Speaking about turning down an OBE, he told Good Morning Britain last week: “It would have been a slap in the face to the rest of the group because Paula Vennells, the CEO for many years of Post Office, received a CBE for her services to Post Office. Well, what service has she actually done?”

Worryingly, the highest honour that some people can imagine is to kneel before an hereditary head of state and be tapped with a weapon. It is a ceremony that upholds and entrenches inequality. The irony is that inequality was one of the causes of the Post Office scandal in the first place.

True, the initial cause was a faulty computer system. When one or two sub-postmasters were convicted, senior managers may have assumed they were indeed guilty. But when the number of convictions rose to the hundreds, why did the people in charge not ask questions. Did they really think it likely that 700 sub-postmasters were all simultaneously corrupt?

Part of the answer has been revealed by whistleblowers and Freedom of Information requests. In a document from 2008, Post Office investigators used a racial slur to describe suspects. An Indian sub-postmaster has also revealed that a member of Post Office staff had said that “all the Indians” were defrauding the Post Office. Such comments go beyond unconscious bias. They represent out-and-out up-front racism.

The failure of senior people at the Post Office to question the convictions starkly demonstrates another problem rooted in inequality: the tendency of senior people not to trust their workers or to listen to more junior people. In a hierarchical business, what chance did workers on the ground have of influencing policy?

Until we have democratic, egalitarian workplaces based around mutual respect and co-operation, injustices such as the Horizon scandal will continue. Instead of focusing on knighthoods and CBEs, the best way to honour the victims of the Post Office scandal is to change the way we work.

We need a referendum on the monarchy

Posted on by symonhill

Early in December, I wrote an article for the ‘i’ paper calling for a referendum on the monarchy. This followed weeks of arguments and revelations about Omid Scobie’s new book on the royal family. More importantly, it followed a poll showing declining support for the monarchy as an institution.

Although you can read the article on the ‘i’ paper’s website, I forgot to post a copy of it on here (I need to get bettter at remembering to do this!). The article is below.

One of the most frequently heard arguments for royalty is that they unite the country. Supporters of monarchy say the British public will rally behind a king or queen in a way they never will for a politician or political movement.

This is a bizarre claim for a family that cannot even keep themselves united, producing brothers so disunited that they feel the need to live in separate continents.

We have had another week of scandals about the personal feuds and jealousies of Britain’s favourite dysfunctional family. Amid all the gossip about the private lives of the super-privileged, the views of voters have rarely been mentioned.

So you might not have heard that opposition to the monarchy has reached a record high.

A Savanta poll has put support for retaining a monarchy at 52 per cent of the British population.This compares to 62 per cent in a YouGov poll only three months ago. The number backing an elected head of state now exceeds a third of the population, at 34 per cent (the remainder are “don’t knows”). Among adults under 35, supporters of monarchy are outnumbered by those wanting to elect a head of state, by 43 per cent to 38 per cent.

Royalists can of course point out that 52 per cent is still more than half. What they cannot reasonably claim is that the monarchy unites Britain.

It is impossible to hear the figure of 52 per cent without thinking of the Brexit referendum. In the wake of the vote, Leave voters emphasised that 52 per cent is a majority. Yet not even the world’s greatest optimist would claim that Brexit is an issue on which the British population is united.

This is why we need a referendum on the future of the monarchy.

On the surface, royalists have good grounds to welcome a referendum. Looking at the polls, they may well expect to win. They would have the backing of most of the media – including the sort of newspapers that could be relied on to launch vicious personal attacks on their opponents.

The problem for royalists in a referendum would be that both sides would be expected to be open to challenges and questions. But barring Harry and Meghan’s celebrity-style interviews, the Windsors almost never answer questions, let alone difficult ones. The Dutch translation of Omid Scobie’s book Endgame identified Charles Windsor and Kate Middleton as the two royals alleged to have made prejudiced comments about the appearance of Harry and Meghan’s son Archie. But they are not expected even to respond to this accusation. Whether or not the allegation is true, any other public figure would be expected to comment if accused of racism. Yet they can seemingly ignore it.

Such arrogance would be painfully on display in a referendum campaign. Andrew’s infamous Newsnight interview gives a clue as to how well royals might cope if they were subjected to serious questioning. Alternatively, they would hold themselves aloof from the debate and be seen to treat the rights of voters with contempt.

A referendum would expose the reality that monarchy and democracy don’t mix.

As pro-royal commentators rush to condemn Scobie and Endgame, the focus on family feuds risks missing the main point. Scobie’s premise is that this could be the “endgame” not just for Charles or William but for the British monarchy itself.

Scobie describes the royal family as “debilitatingly out-of-touch, even expendable, with an increasing percentage of the public”. That’s just in Britain. Countries such as Belize and Jamaica – where William and Kate travelled through the crowds standing up in a Land Rover like colonial conquerors – are likely to ditch the monarchy before Charles has got the throne warm.

In light of the latest revelations and polling figures, it’s time people in the UK were allowed to make a decision: do we want a system in which we bow down to our supposed superiors because of an accident of birth, or do we trust ourselves to run society together as equals?