As a specialist in attracting bad publicity, the Post Office kept up its record when the assiduous Eleanor Shaikh recently prised out of it - via a Freedom of Information Request - a document starkly revealing how the institution racially profiled the individuals whose lives it ruined in the now well reported Horizon IT Scandal.
The mainstream media rightly latched on to the evidence, although the BBC had a fit of neurotic sensibility and declined to publish the most egregious term. Space plus competing news demands meant that we only saw snippets. So as the document is in the public domain I thought it might be useful to reproduce the entire profiling table, but I reckon it might also be useful to reflect on what this says about the organisation's culture.
Here is the table, an annex to the Post Office Security Operations Team Case Compliance Instruction Form, the latter a manual assisting investigators in dealing with individuals suspected of theft/false accounting:
'Identification Codes
1. White Skinned European Types ie British, French, German, Swedish, Polish, Russian etc
2. Dark Skinned European Types ie Greek, Cypriot, Turkish, Spanish, Italian, Sicilian, Sardinian etc
3. Negroid [BBC phobia] Types ie West Indian, Nigerian, African, Caribbean etc
4. Indian/Pakistani Types ie Asian etc
5. Chinese/Japanese Types ie Malaya, Japanese, Philippino, Burmese, Siamese, Mongolia etc
6. Arabian/Egyptian Types ie Algerian, Tunisian, Moroccan, North Africans etc
7. Not known
Yep, gobsmacking, isn't it?
I will aim off two points that could otherwise be pursued. The first is how on earth the investigators were going to shape their work as a result of an individual falling within a particular type: 'George, an Asian one has just come on the system, so get ready to apply technique [X}'.
The second is how the profiling reveals an uncomfortably teutonic sense of bureaucracy in categorising people. As some of you might have sussed immediately, 'teutonic' is a euphemism, but one can be attacked for doing a full-on analogy.
A short way of moving forward might be to suggest a piece of GCSE Geography coursework: 'Explain the defects in the table below', and indeed you could probably all beat me in compiling a list. I will confine myself to giving a few examples of the awfulness, and then we will get into reflection:
White Skinned European Types: So if you are born in Menton in the south of France you are White Skinned, but if you are born in nearby Ventimiglia over the Italian border you are Dark Skinned.
Dark Skinned European Types: Staying with Italy, if you are an olive-skinned person born in Naples in the South you are Dark Skinned, but if you are not olive-skinned and born in Milan in the North you are also Dark Skinned. Oh, and Sicily is in Italy and Sardinia is in Italy
Negroid Types: Nigeria is in Africa. The West Indies are in the Caribbean. I cannot bear to add more on this one.
Indian/Pakistani Types: India and Pakistan are in Asia, not vice-versa.
Chinese/Japanese Types: Malaya...the former British colony that from 1963 (yes) has been Malaysia. A small point that the classification is adjectival (ie it would have been 'Malayan'), but perhaps it is unfair on the chaps to expect too much. Also Burmese,..Burma officially Myanmar since 1989 (yes), and Siamese...Siam Thailand since 1932 (yes) - could one of the Post Officers have a cat, or maybe a DVD of the King and I on their mantelpiece?
Arabian/Egyptian Types: Admittedly there is the Arabian Peninsula, but boys, haven't we said 'Arab' for a few years now? And I thought that Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco were in North Africa, although with the Post Office's historic certainty of rectitude in the Horizon debacle maybe I should review my thinking. And I suppose that if you questioned the Post Office on what you are if you are born south of North Africa then they could say negroid African, leaving you to ask about a South African born of Dutch European descent and getting the poor things all confused.
Am I poking satirical fun for its own sake? I think not.
The Post Office, whilst apologising for its racism, tried to get out of jail by describing the guidelines as a 'historic document" - the BBC suggested that the guidance was used between 2008 and 2011. Twelve to fifteen years ago. Now I am not a fan of universally judging past attitudes by today's standards - see 'Dated and Hated' from December last year. But is it credible to argue that Post Office management could not reasonably have known better at the time? No.
We could stick to the racism, implicit or explicit, in how the profiling was put together. But I want to take it further into mooting outright and (note paragraph above) unforgivable incompetence. If the Post Office were admitting a soupcon of incompetence, they would then tactically retreat and argue that it was isolated to whichever part of the institution was directly responsible for creating the document.
But we should take this alongside all the other horrid evidence of how the Post Office persecuted innocent people for alleged crimes they did not commit, resulting in lives personally and financially ruined. Forget the motivation for a second, and simply stare at the crass incapability to run an organisation effectively.
What I think would frighten the Post Office is any persuasive view that they have a cultural problem. Culture is a slippery concept, but I find it well-defined as 'how we do things around here'. Culture is seen in how behaviours are encouraged/accepted/tolerated/disapproved of/sanctioned - of course there is a spectrum. Leaders of an organisation have a big part to play in setting and sustaining cultural norms. If an individual is inclined to behave in a perverse way, the question the person may ask themselves is whether they can get away with it. If you are starting to muse, you might be turning your mind to bodies such as the Metropolitan Police or Police Scotland, but we should stick here to our subject.
How far behaviours within an organisation extend to creating a cultural norm depends on at what varied points they occur in the organisation and on how sustained they are. It does become a matter of fact and degree, as lawyers love to say. Issues of culpability for the Horizon debacle are slowly being exposed and unravelled through the Public Inquiry. But on competence, surely the Case Compliance Instruction Form, with its egregious Identity Codes, would have been widely disseminated, and surely individuals at many levels of authority would have had their pawprints on it?
For this reason there must be an argument that the Post Office has consistently been institutionally incompetent, and if that charge holds up then it must surely undermine the Post Office's high-minded utterances concerning its culture and bona fides.
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The author is a writer, speaker, historian, occasional tour guide, and former Managing Partner of a City law firm.