The Collapse of Soviet Britain

Western democracies are in terminal self-destruct mode

1. Introduction

The Post Office Horizon saga, recently dramatised by ITV as the four-part mini series, Mr Bates vs the Post Office, has increasingly scandalised the UK over the past week.

Following the introduction of a new IT accounting system in 1999, hundreds of franchised sub-postmasters, who were mandated to use a product not fit for purpose, have been persecuted by the Post Office ever since. After being accused of theft and fraud, many were prosecuted, some were jailed, and others tragically driven to suicide.

Paula Vennells, Keir Starmer, and Ed Davey

Paula Vennells, CEO of the Post Office between 2012 & 2019, has now “handed back” the CBE she was awarded in 2019, after a petition demanding that she be stripped of it reached over a million signatures.

Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey has so far refused to voluntarily relinquish his knighthood, after also being accused of failing to respond appropriately to the scandal when he had ministerial responsibility for the Post Office between 2010 and 2012. For him to do so would surely mean the end of his political career, and be a PR disaster for the Lib Dems in an election year, but he is certain to come under more pressure in the coming days, especially as details have now emerged about his repeated failure to assist one of his own constituents. Keir Starmer is also somewhat in the spotlight over his (in)actions as Director of Public Prosecutions between 2008 and 2013.

There are two particular aspects of the tragic Horizon tale which merit detailed discussion. Firstly, it has been an obvious and spectacular miscarriage of justice, perpetrated by criminals and liars at both the Post Office and Fujitsu, the Horizon system vendor. Secondly, and perhaps less obviously to most, it perfectly illustrates the complete inability of the public sector and ‘big business’ in general to deliver any major project in the 21st century.

We will address the second point first.

2. Incompetence & Bureaucracy

With all the emotion surrounding the Post Office scandal, it is easy to overlook the simple truth that none of it would have happened if the Horizon system had been fit for purpose in the first place. Unfortunately though - since the much-publicised failure of the London Ambulance Dispatch System back in 1992 (7 years before the initial Horizon rollout) - it has increasingly become the norm for IT systems to be implemented that are poorly designed, poorly built and poorly tested.

There are many specific reasons for this, to do with IT development methodologies, insufficiently qualified staff, constantly changing technologies and more. However, the key point is that the IT industry is by no means unique in its track record of failure.

In recent decades, Britain has progressively become almost totally incapable of successfully delivering major infrastructure projects, with those that have been completed subject to major delays and overspends.

Having built the the world’s first nuclear power station at Calder Hall, opened in 1956, we have not commissioned a new nuclear plant since Sizewell B in 1995. The M25 was completed in 1986 and our newest motorway, the M6 Toll, in 2003. The Channel Tunnel opened in 1994 and the HS1 railway in 2007, after several major funding crises.

The most recent major infrastructure project to be delivered was the Elizabeth Line (Crossrail), which took 13 years to build and was finally completed, 4 years late, in 2022. The next is due to be Hinkley Point C, now slated for delivery in 2028 at a most recently revised (upwards) cost of £32.7 Billion.

Following massive cost escalations and delays, HS2 (high speed railway 2) has been repeatedly downgraded. After Rishi Sunak’s government finally scrapped the Manchester extension last year, all that remains - with a projected cost of who knows what (latest estimate ‘up to £66.6 billion’) and a completion target between 2029 and 2033 - is the original ‘phase 1’ line from London to Birmingham. In 2013, the entire project including the links to Manchester and Leeds, was estimated at £37.5 billion in 2009 prices. Tellingly, HS2’s executive chairman Sir Jon Thompson is reported to have said (emphasis ours) “this is a systemic problem. It’s not just about HS2, it’s about large projects that the Government funds”.

Plans for a new runway at Heathrow, first proposed in 2009, have been bogged down in political disputes and environmental red tape for years. Only a naïve optimist would bet on a third runway, or any new runway at one of London’s airports, ever being built - let alone a brand new airport (the so-called "Boris Island") in the Thames Estuary.

The wheeze of adding a “Smart” prefix to crazy public infrastructure initiatives has also, inevitably and predictably, hit the buffers. Planned Smart Motorway conversions have been halted amid serious safety concerns (who could ever have seen that coming!), while the latest estimate (as of 2019) for the relatively trivial, much delayed, Smart Metering rollout is now an eye-watering £13.4 billion (£13.1 billion for domestic premises, or almost £500 per household).

It’s not just major infrastructure projects. Brexit isn’t really “done”, the boats haven’t been stopped, nothing ever gets done expeditiously in today’s Britain, and virtually nothing ever works properly.

Equally, it isn’t just the UK. We have seen no supersonic replacement for Concorde worldwide, the most recent Boeing 737 Max 9 shambles follows on from previous scandals with essentially the same aircraft (“lessons learned”, no doubt), and the latest NASA moon rocket appears to have failed. An under-construction high speed railway in California seems to be afflicted by similar financial and bureaucratic travails as our own HS2.

In short, the modern West has lost the plot, along with any ambition to continue the centuries of human progress that has benefited billions in today’s world.

Yet the vast majority of the “professional classes” could not care less - they behave as lazy, cowardly herd animals, happy to keep their heads down and “go with the flow” to avoid having to take any responsibility for results. Rarely is anyone ever held accountable for failure, as the cases of Paula Vennells and Ed Davey have shown.

Those who do care - who insist on higher standards and that people be held account for the jobs that they are paid to do - risk being labelled as bullies, misogynists, racists or some other ludicrous neo-Marxist label, as the likes of Andrew Bridgen and Dominic Raab would attest.

Aspiration has been replaced by hypocrisy, as talking heads in politics and media shed crocodile tears at the treatment of sub-postmasters who “weren’t listened to”, while simultaneously promoting totalitarian censorship of “misinformation” about the Covid and Climate scams.

3. Lies, Cover-Ups and Corruption

People at the Post Office and Fujitsu knew there were issues with the Horizon system from the outset, as proven by the need for a remote access team to secretly (and illegally) adjust transaction details, while simultaneously insisting that no such activity existed, or was even possible.

This is shocking, and tragic for the sub-postmasters affected. However, as we have seen in multiple cases in recent years, such brazen dishonesty and criminality are common place in today’s world.

Today’s “woke” professional classes are pre-conditioned to believe that failure (or at least lack of success) is acceptable, and that presenting a sow’s ear as a silk purse is totally normal. Consequently, when the inevitable disasters happen, nothing - other than DEI transgressions, which remain the one absolute “no-no” - is ever their fault and it is not their responsibility to fix anything.

So egregious cover-ups don’t generally begin as such. First, we get incompetent and lazy individuals simply engaging in personal “arse covering”. In cases such as Horizon, they deny to their bosses that they signed off on an insufficiently tested IT system, that they omitted key design features in order to deliver “on budget and on time”, or any other of the depressingly common sins in the world of (IT) project delivery.

But because, being incompetent and disinterested, they never understood what they were doing in the first place, their “harmless white lies” can easily spiral out of control, if and when their secretive attempts to bodge things fail. The lies progressively become greater, the “conspiracy of silence” broadens as more and more senior personnel are drawn in to protect reputations and share prices, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is how a scandal such as Horizon is born.

Fujitsu are a massive services company, with continuing £multi-billion contracts with the British government - despite suing the government for £700 million after the cancellation of the NHS patient records project in 2008. On the cancelled project, Tory MP Richard Bacon is quoted in the Telegraph as saying “The contracts were let [awarded] in an enormous hurry, in total secrecy, bound up with huge confidentiality clauses and it was only after they were all signed – quite rapidly after – that people became aware that the contracts would not deliver what was required.”

How can it be that our government machine continues to provide £billions in work contracts to a company that recently sued them for £700 million? Seemingly the UK has outsourced so many critical responsibilities to Fujitsu that it can no longer operate independently of them. Who is likely to have the upper hand in ongoing contract negotiations - the government, or the global services company on which it is now totally dependent?

Which (very senior) civil servant is ultimately responsible for this corrupt arrangement, and why haven’t they been publicly fired yet?

And where have we seen this all before over the last few years?

Covid was sold - and is still being sold - as an unprecedented deadly plague, necessitating totalitarian propaganda and censorship, unconstitutional stay-at-home orders, business closures, and coerced vaccinations. In the absence of the explanations we have given above, the number of brazen lies beggars belief, including:

• Deliberate suppression of likely lab origin.

• Inflated infection/case fatality rates.

• Preparation and readiness.

• Denial of prophylactic and therapeutic treatments, including Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin.

• Veracity of PCR testing at 30+ cycles.

• Safety and efficacy of vaccines.

And contracts with vaccine providers? Exactly as with Fujitsu, secretive and effectively fault-free on the vendor side.

So we end up with economies tanked, lives and livelihoods ruined, child development set back by years, and excess deaths massively elevated to this day - with mRNA jabs as prime suspect, but with Moderna rewarded for failure, just like Fujitsu, with further lucrative UK government contracts.

In terms of the scale of its impact, the Covid scandal dwarfs Horizon, but are our sanctimonious politicians demanding that whistle-blower voices be heard? Of course they’re not. After having “learned the lessons” about the evils of propaganda and censorship from the Horizon scandal, the entire corrupt bandwagon rolls on without missing a beat.

In exactly the same way, an invented climate emergency, and a consequent necessity for Net Zero lunacy, are being sold as a reason to award dodgy contracts to wind and solar farm developers - with the true costs of the renewables scam being “socialised” within the 2/3 of your bill that does not relate to wholesale (i.e. generation) costs.

Breakdown of a typical domestic electricity bill (https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/search/data-charts)

We are being robbed blind by corrupt “entrepreneurs” and their funders, with our uniparty politicians completely complicit.

5. Conclusions

To those of us who have observed the descent of the UK into a dysfunctional ‘woke’ bureaucracy over the past several decades, the Horizon debacle is shocking but not surprising. It is an egregious example of a disease afflicting every aspect of British public and corporate life, mirrored to a greater or lesser degree in many other Western nations.

It is beyond serious dispute there are some totally immoral autocrats and oligarchs at work in today’s world. It’s easy to highlight obvious evils from the likes of Bill Gates, George Soros, Klaus Schwab, Antonio Gutteres, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, King Charles and others. Regardless of MSM gaslighting and “fact checker” disinformation, these people are tyrants intent on confining all of humanity to “little lives” in their 15 minute cities with extreme rationing of energy and “resource intensive” food products.

Ultimately, though, the Horizon scandal is a story about a lack of leadership, and a pandemic of amorality, fuelled by neo-Marxist globalist dogma, which has totally infiltrated our public institutions and large corporate bodies. Woke professionals virtue-signal about everything, while actually caring about almost nothing.

As Jon Thompson, of HS2, said, “these are systemic problems”, and they affect not only £billion projects but the most basic public services. You can’t get an NHS appointment, potholes aren’t filled, waterways aren’t dredged or drains unblocked, trains and buses run late, or are cancelled. It’s almost endless.

At present, we do have one or two systems that generally work well; for example the energy supply industry has provided safe, reliable, and reasonably affordable, gas and electricity for decades. But not for much longer. The lunatics want to destroy that too with their insane cult of Net Zero, to address a “climate emergency” that does not exist.

If we continue to let them get away with it, we are mad. We used to laugh at the Soviet communists, eating borscht and driving around in their primitive Trabants and Ladas, but in the 21st century West, nothing works. The joke is now on us.

Even the Soviet Union, though, managed to avoid some of the dangers now facing Britain and our fellow European nations. Our national identities are being rapidly diluted through mass immigration, with attendant risks of Islamist terrorism and the pernicious introduction of parallel Sharia law. The streets of our major cities are the battleground for competing foreign ideologies and crackpot “green” movements funded in large part by dubious, non-British actors. Violence and general anti-social behaviour are rife.

On the Horizon scandal we must, obviously, provide justice for the innocent, and hold the guilty properly to account. The former may happen, but the latter is unlikely to. It won’t really make any difference though, we are a country in terminal decline.

Welcome to Soviet Britain.