Clive Walder, Birmingham Socialist Party and retired CWU member
Subpostmasters will be horrified. The UK head of Fujitsu, the company responsible for the Horizon scandal, excellently dramatised in ‘Mr Bates v The Post Office’, has reportedly received a 52% pay rise, bringing his pay up to £591,000 a year.
Both Fujitsu and Post Office hierarchy knew that faults existed. But both organisations maintained the fiction of ‘false accounting shortfalls’, which ultimately led to 900 prosecutions, 230 prison sentences, and tragically, 13 suicides of subpostmasters.
The Horizon scandal revealed much that is rotten about the British capitalism and government. The Fujitsu executive in question is a former senior civil servant, who held government jobs at both the Treasury and Cabinet Office.
There is a pervasive ‘revolving door’ between senior civil servants, government employees, and private industry, with woefully lax oversight and regulation, producing widespread conflicts of interest, and reluctance to investigate possible wrongdoing.
It wasn’t Tory or Labour governments, or Fujitsu, but the determination of ordinary subpostmasters that brought the issue to the public’s attention. Even now, subpostmasters have not had the compensation they deserve. That should be paid in full immediately.
Fujitsu is currently suspended from bidding for UK government contracts. But this isn’t enough.
Under diseased and corrupt British capitalism, public sector procurement is used to drive the profits of contractors like Fujitsu, rather than value for money for us, or the best public services.
To remove the possibility of a repetition of scandals like Horizon, and the scandals of incompetent executives getting rewarded for failure, and ruining the lives of innocent workers, public ownership of all companies that bid for government contracts is needed, overseen by democratic working-class control.
