Tag Archives: Royal Mail

Britain’s unwritten constitution and its, ahem, challenges

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You’d think Britain was a careful country. It’s concerned enough with health and safety to make a lot of jokes about it. (Or them if that’s a plural. The words have melded together so solidly in the national consciousness that it’s hard to tell.) It’s survived long enough to be obsessed with its own history, which keeps those of us who share that obsession occupied happily. Somehow, though, it got careless with its constitution and never wrote it down. 

Yes, that is embarrassing, but the country makes do with something called an unwritten constitution.

What’s an unwritten constitution? Well, it has words, it’s just that they’re not on paper. Or not any one piece of paper. They’re on lots of pieces, in lots of places, and I’m not convinced any two people agree on which pieces, which places, or which words. What everyone agrees on is that it’s made up of statutes, rulings, precedents, treaties, and a yellow onion aging gently in the back of my refrigerator. And because Britain takes itself and its history seriously (most countries do), people who’ve grown up here consider this normal. It’s only people like me, who having wandered in from other places, say, “An unwritten what?? Is that even possible?” 

It is: what exists must be possible, but its unwritten state puts a lot of pressure on precedent–not to mention on me, as the keeper of that onion. Precedent becomes not just history and habit and revered tradition but (I’m repeating myself but this is central, so bear with me) an element of the constitution itself. And that leaves everyone wondering which precedents go into the constitution (who knows? It’s not written) and which ones get filed under Anomalies.

Irrelevant photo: I have no idea what this shrub is, but it’s growing outside a neighbor’s house and it flowered in late January. I’m impressed.

I’m writing about this now because not because the status of the onion has changed (sleep well tonight: it’s fine) but because a recent political and legal uproar has brought it into focus–again.

 

The uproar

I’ll tell you the tale in a minute, but before I do I have to ask, Don’t I sound clever when I use words like anomaly? Hell, I even spelled it right without the help of my spellcheck. 

Thanks. Now I owe you the tale. 

In 1999, the Royal Mail introduced a new computer system called Horizon, which was made by Fujitsu and cost a billion pounds to install. I hope that included the purchase price, but you know, a billion pounds doesn’t go as far as it used to, as you’ll have noticed the last time you were in the supermarket. It definitely doesn’t include the legal costs of what turned out to be a royal fuckup. It’s way too early to calculate those.

Horizon was used by sub-post offices, which are post office counters set up in corner shops and village shops–mom-and-pop operations for the most part–and the users soon started reporting glitches. Serious glitches. The kind of glitches that said, “Your calculations are off by a few thousand pounds today.”

Since their contracts with the post office said they had to make up any shortfall, you should picture sub-postpeople tearing their hair out, weeping, shouting, and calling the post office to report a problem.

And to each of them, the post office said, “Geez, no one else is reporting any problems. It must be you.” The post office not only didn’t look for the source of the problem, it demanded its money and it prosecuted people for financial shenanigans.

Businesses were lost. Marriages were lost. People went broke. Disaster entered people’s lives in multiple forms. Some 4,000 sub-postpeople were accused of theft, fraud, and false accounting, 900 ended up in court, and a lucky 236 went to prison. Eventually, sub-postpeople contacted each other and compared notes. They discovered it wasn’t just them and went public with their stories.

Anyone in Britain who stays awake for the 6 o’clock news heard about this years ago, and Parliament started hearings on the issue in 2021. The hearings ground on quietly until–I’m serious here–the BBC aired a TV show dramatizing the sub-postpeople’s fight, at which point, politicians said, with one voice, “You’re right. Somebody ought to do something.”

Then they remembered that they were the somebodies in charge. That’s even more embarrassing than forgetting to write down your constitution.

Shocking revelations from the hearings jumped from obscurity to page one of pretty much any paper you can think of. Except, maybe, the Sun. We all collectively found out that Fujitsu knew about the program’s glitches as early as 1999. We learned that the post office not only knew about the glitches but edited witness statements from Fujitsu so they didn’t acknowledge the program’s bugs. We learned that the post office didn’t disclose relevant information and now claims it’s not realistic for them to work evenings and weekends all these years later to find it. I could go on, but you get a feel for the shape of this mess, right?

With that sort of thing floating into public view, suddenly all the ways of addressing the problem that either weren’t necessary or weren’t possible before became not just possible but politically necessary, and if they weren’t exactly done they were at least promised, which in PoliticalLand is the same thing.

On the symbolic level, the former head of the post office gave back her CBE, an acronym that stands for Commander of the British Empire. 

What would the British Empire have done if she’d issued a command before giving back her award? Nothing. It doesn’t exist anymore. As far as I can figure out, all the CBE gives a person is bragging rights and a medal. If those matter to you, it’s important. If they don’t–well, you can put it on the table next to an egg, a sausage, baked beans, tea, and toast and you’ll have a small-scale version of an English breakfast, although I don’t recommend eating the medal. Or the beans.

On a more practical level, the government jumped in and promised compensation and said it would introduce a bill to overturn all those convictions for fraud etc.

How much compensation are we talking about? One former sub-postmaster says it would cover 15% of his losses. Another called the offer offensive and cruel. A third said it wouldn’t cover the interest on what she was owed. But let’s nod nicely to that little game of three-card monte (you’ll want to keep your hand on your wallet as we get close) and move on. We need to talk about the bill to overturn the convictions, because that’s the one that raises constitutional problems.

 

Why? What’s wrong with doing justice on the cheap?

At first glance, a bill to overturn unjust convictions looks good. Sweep a forearm across the table and shove all those convictions onto the floor, where they’ll land alongside the egg, baked beans, sausage, tea, CBE medal, and broken crockery. Labour–the opposition party just now–in the person of its leader, Keir Starmer, jumped in and said yes, the bill’s a great idea, and walked out of Parliament with baked beans sticking to his shoes. 

I was tempted to write that everyone strode off into the sunset singing “Rule Britannia,” only–did I mention that the empire’s dead and gone? What’s more, the Commons’ Defense Committee estimates that Britain’s army would run out of puff after only a few months of fighting a more or less equal power. So we’ll find some other song. “Goodnight Irene,” maybe. One verse goes, “Sometimes I live in the country / Sometimes I live in the town. / Sometimes I take a notion / To jump into the river and drown.”

You’re right. I shouldn’t be allowed out in public, but have faith, someone will come up with the right song. I look forward to fielding comments on the subject. Y’all are almost as irresponsible as I am.

In the meantime, the proposal has some built-in problems. If anyone really did steal money from the post office, the bill would overturn their convictions along with those of the innocent. In an effort to iron out that wrinkle, the government proposed that no one could get their compensation without swearing to their innocence. In writing. That way, if they turned out to be guilty, they’d end up back in court, because (ironically, given that the context here is an unwritten constitution) putting a statement on paper and swearing to it can be legally binding. 

That brings us to a new wrinkle: the sub-postpeople are understandably wary of swearing to anything. They don’t trust the courts, the post office, or the goodwill and sanity of bureaucrats or the government. They may be reluctant to open themselves up to another unfair prosecution. 

Larger than that, though, is the constitutional problem: Britain’s courts are independent of Parliament. In other words, politicians can’t overrule them, but here they’d be doing exactly that. This is written down exactly nowhere, but it’s a longstanding precedent and part of our invisible constitution.

What happens, then, when a new precedent comes along and overturns the old precedent? Irresistible force; immovable object. I never did know the answer to the question of what happens when one meets the other. The best I could do is say that either one turns out not to be immovable or the other one turns out not to be irresistible. I also don’t know what happens when a new precedent tries to elbow out an old precedent. Are they equally powerful? What does the constitution have to say?  The answer depends on interpretation, and on who gets to do the interpreting.

Ken MacDonald–sorry, Lord Ken MacDonald, the former Director of Public Prosecutions–explained the issue by saying, “What we have is Parliament seizing from the courts and the judges the right to say who is guilty and who is not guilty. And the problem is that once this dam is burst–we can all see it’s being done for the best of reasons here–who’s to say how such a process might be used in the future?”

It’s not unreasonable for him to worry. The government’s already going nose to nose with the courts over a bill to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda. The Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional and right away a right-wing edge of an already right-wing Conservative Party called for Parliament to overrule the court and review the courts’ authority over the government. It called for the prime minister to “step up and do whatever it takes.” 

Depending on how recently you’ve had the wax cleared out of your ears, “whatever it takes” can sound either down-to-earth and practical or threatening. To my ever-so-clean ears, it sounds like a call for the courts to be swept aside when they get in the way of a party’s political agenda. 

To date, the prime minister has tried to placate the right without ripping up the invisible document that’s supposed to govern the way he governs. He’s introduced a bill that declares Rwanda to be a safe place to deport people to. The idea is that if Parliament says it’s safe, then it is, so the Supreme Court won’t be able to say it isn’t.

No, I didn’t make that up.  

The bill passed the House of Commons and is, I believe, currently being eviscerated in the House of Lords. If I’m right–and I don’t know how the vote there will go–it couldn’t happen to a nicer bill. The problem is that the Lords can only hold the bill up, not chop it into little pieces and put it on the compost heap. 

If you begin to get a picture of vocal sections of the country calling for the introduction of an authoritarian regime, then you’re standing in the same museum I am, and looking at the same picture. Precedents aren’t hard to find on the international scene, and they’re influential although they don’t get to become part of Britain’s constitution. 

The bill may not be necessary in any case. There’s a way to overturn the post office convictions without chopping holes in the invisible constitution: the Court of Appeals could speed up the appeals process by trundling in retired judges to help and hearing the cases in large batches, a bit like chocolate chip cookies in an industrial oven. But that doesn’t give anyone political credit for getting things done, so where’s the fun in it?  

Meanwhile, back at the post office . . .

. . . they’re still using the Horizon software. In fact, the post office paid £95 million to extend Fujitsu’s contract for two years. Or some amount along those lines. The article I pulled that from is full of numbers, and numbers and I aren’t on good terms. If you want serious numerical reporting, go follow the link and don’t bother me. What I can tell you is that Horizon’s still full of glitches and the post office is trying to replace it but seems to be trapped. It spent £31 million trying to move the work to Amazon–and failed. 

If the post office ever gets out of this mess, is the story over? Hell no. Last Sunday’s paper announced that the software used by Ofsted inspectors periodically wipes out everything they’ve put in, leaving them to recreate days’ worth of work from memory. 

Ofsted inspectors? They’re the folks who go into schools and rule–often on shaky grounds, if the reports I’ve read are correct–on whether a school is failing or fabulous. The school’s future depends on their judgment. Schools aren’t told when the inspectors are working from memory, so if they challenge an inspector’s conclusions, they can’t use that as evidence.  

An Ofsted spokesperson said, “Everything’s fine. Go back to sleep. We’ll wake you if we need you.”

A quick history of the Royal Mail

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People in England have been able to send each other letters since 1635, but the Royal Mail traces its ancestry back further than that, to 1516, when Henry VIII made Brian Tuke Master of the Posts.

Actually, Tuke wasn’t just made Master of the Posts, he was knighted Master of the Posts, which makes it all sound much more important, as if he got to trot around on a white horse, wearing armor.

What Tuke really got to do was set up a network that carried mail for the king and the court and not for nobody else, thanks. What did anybody else matter? If Joe Commoner wanted to tell his granny that he wished she was wherever he was, he’d have to wait more than a hundred years, by which time the message would have been pretty much irrelevant. On top of which, postcards still wouldn’t have been invented. The first one was made in 1861, in Philadelphia, which also hadn’t been invented.

But back to the Royal Mail. In case the restless marrying habits of this particular Henry haven’t engraved him in your memory, he was the son of Henry VII, who became king by defeating not just Richard III (that’s the king Shakespeare didn’t like) but also Richard’s horse and Richard’s horse’s shoe at Bosworth Field, thereby condemning Richard to be buried in a parking lot and putting his–that’s Henry’s–son in a position to send letters around the country in an organized way.

To the victor’s son go the letters. And from the victor’s son come the letters.

Irrelevant and beautiful light painting, “Light Dance,” by Nassima. Used with the artist’s permission and my thanks. You’ll find more of her work by following the link.

That bit of background was as irrelevant as the light painting, but I thought I’d toss it in anyway. And if the references are too culture-bound for outsiders to follow, they’ll stop now, so you can read on safely.

When James VI, the king of Scotland, became James I of England as well, one of his concerns was to keep control of Scotland once he’d moved himself and his court to London. Scotland was a long way from London. There was no telling what his nobles would get up to while he was gone. So one of the first things he did was to set up a royal postal route between London and Edinburgh.

The postal service was opened to the public in 1635 by Charles I, who gets bad press on for a lot of reasons (high handedness, suspicions that he was, gasp, Catholic, conflicts with parliament, a political tin ear, a goatee) so we might as well drop this feather on the positive side of the scales. You’ll probably have figured this out, but he accomplished it well before he was executed.

The deal was that you could mail a letter for free but there was–as there always is–a catch: The person you sent it to had to pay for it. If they didn’t pay, they didn’t get the letter. The cost depended on how far the letter had traveled, so an account had to be kept for each letter.

But junk mail hadn’t been invented and getting a letter was an event, so if someone wrote to you, it meant something. If you had the cash, you’d think twice or thrice, or even fource (no, it’s not a word–after thrice the English language hurls itself on the floor and goes into spasms of regret) before you turned one away.

The letters were carried on horseback and on foot, and the service had six routes, with posts along the way where the person carrying the letters would leave anything for the area and pick up anything that was headed their way. Exactly what happened to the letters once they were left at the posts I haven’t been able to find out. It’s one thing to keep enough footpower to deliver the king and court’s letters anywhere in the kingdom. It’s a whole ‘nother gig to assemble the footpower to make the entire kingdom’s letters deliverable. Even at a time when most people couldn’t write and damn few could afford to pay for a letter that found its way to their door.

The information’s probably out there somewhere but I haven’t figured out the question that will lead me to it. If anyone wants to give me a shove in the right direction, I’d be grateful–for whatever use that is.

Thomas Witherings ran the service at this point and he was charged with making sure a letter could reach Edinburgh and come back to London in six days. He was to build six “Great Roads.”

During the Civil War, Parliament took the service away from him and gave it to Edmund Prideaux, whose politics were a better fit for the time. In other words, Ed wasn’t a royalist. What he was was the second son of a baronet.

What’s a baronet? The lowest rank of British hereditary nobility. They’re (oh, the shame of it) commoners but can use the title sir.

Remember that. I’m sure you’ll find it useful as you wander through life. 

You’d think overthrowing a king would involve dumping the entire tradition of hereditary nobility, but you’d be wrong.

Edmund expanded the service, increased its efficiency, and faced down an assortment of competing carriers that left him stamping his metaphorical feet and complaining to parliament.

In 1653, the contract went to someone else, but Ed had made a tidy piece of change by then and Cromwell made him a baronet, just like his daddy and big brother, for “his voluntary offer for the mainteyning of thirty foot-souldiers in his highnes army in Ireland.” 

You might want to notice that by then Cromwell called himself “his highnes” there. And that he didn’t use apostrophes. Or that whoever wrote that for him did and didn’t.

In 1655, the postal service was put under the direct control of the secretary of state, who was Cromwell’s spymaster, John Thurloe, and he was sweet and helpful enough to deliver letters between conspirators, having made sure to read them first. Before that, the tradition was to keep conspirators from communicating at all–or at least that was the aspiration.

Then in 1660, when Charles II was on the throne, the General Post Office was set up. It was publicly owned. A year later, the post mark was established, showing the place and date a letter was mailed and–okay, it all gets a bit boring after that. In 1771, the service covered England, Scotland, and Wales. It took another century before Ireland was added.

No comment needed.

We’ll skip the years here to keep from drowning in trivia. Coaches were used. The name Royal Mail was used. Uniforms were introduced, and railroads and steam ships. Mail reached throughout the empire and the commonwealth for the first time.

It was 1839 before the sender paid for the letter instead of the recipient. Standard rates were introduced, and in 1840 so was the first adhesive stamp, the penny black. Britain was the first country to introduce a stamp that would stick to paper and is still the only country that doesn’t bother to put its name on its stamps.

The guy who invented the adhesive stamp was knighted. He got to trot around on a white horse and wear armor but was far too understated to do either. As far as I know.

With the penny post, the number of people using the system grew massively.

More trivia: Pillar boxes were introduced (they’re round, freestanding, iconic mailboxes used throughout Britain), but the first ones were green, not red. Wall boxes came later. Those are post boxes but they’re set into walls. Both types have the initials of whoever was on the throne when they were set in place, and people collect them.

What does it mean to collect a box when you can’t pick up and walk away with it? It means you go see it. Maybe you take a picture of it. You know where it is. You feel a personal connection with it–maybe even friendship and communion. Where I come from (the U.S.), one mailbox is just like another mailbox, but people can be very possessive about the British ones. A post box was taken out of our village (long story) and people actually know where it went (to Wales, where it’s in storage). They’re not interchangeable Lego pieces. They’re individual. They have personalities. I don’t know whose initials are on it, but I’ll bet you someone in the village does.

After that, you have to be more and more of a postal geek to care about the milestones. Parcel deliveries were added. Postcodes were introduced. That was gradual and started in 1959. They allow for machine sorting. It’s not until 1968 that first and second class service was introduced. The theory is that second class mail can be thrown under the counter in a crisis while first class is waved through, but I’m told there isn’t much difference in how long it takes them to arrive.

Then in 2011, the whole mess was ninety percent privatized.

*

What was it like to send a message during the Middle Ages–and I’d assume for a while afterward, before the Royal Mail was opened to all users? According to the Short History website, “During the Middle Ages, towns, universities, monasteries and trading companies all had their own messengers, some of whom were protected by royal decree. The Papacy had its own courier system, in order to keep in touch with its clergy and churches across Europe. Bishops were required to send regular messages through to Rome, and in return, received papal messengers from Rome. Only the wealthiest individuals and organizations could afford private courier systems, because of the need for horses, accommodation and travel expenses. This meant that messengers often worked on a ‘freelance’ basis, taking messages from several different sources and competing with other messengers to be the first to deliver important news.

“During particularly sensitive times, such as war, messages were often sent in coded form, or hidden about the person of a messenger who would adopt an innocent disguise, such as that of a pilgrim. Information could be hidden in clothing, a walking staff or even a person’s shoes. Envoys were often required to carry valuable gifts to present to the recipient of their message, and such items again had to be hidden during the journey. Gifts had to be selected carefully, to make sure that they were suitable for the recipient’s rank and status and the messenger would also be presented with gifts to take home on his return journey.”

I don’t know how authoritative that is. It sounds convincing, but I’ll leave it to you to judge.

Medieval messages would often not be written down–most people were illiterate–but messages that were written would have been sealed, and many would have been sent with a passing merchant or pilgrim. The most important ones, from people with money (who are always more important than people without money, she said cynically), would have been sent with a messenger.

No one had addresses, and people didn’t necessarily stay where they were expected to. Monarchs especially traveled. They had multiple palaces. They went on progress, forcing their nobles to feed and water (or more accurately, alcohol) the entire damn court. They went off to fight battles. Messengers had to scurry around looking for them.

Pigeons were also used, but this only worked if the message was going to what the pigeons considered home. You couldn’t whisper a name in a pigeon’s ear and expect it to search the person out.