#192: Tools of Freedom

Dear Friends
 
Personal effectiveness is a prerequisite for impact. No change can happen unless we are self-aware and self-generating. For it to be more than anxious busyness, it must be yoked to vision and strategy, which in turn are only meaningful when they’re infused with an understanding of the world.

Today, we explore a little of the wider world. It’s mostly a cautionary tale infused with some hope.

/strategy

The seeds of this letter were planted by one of those bureaucratic tangles that we all occasionally experience. You know them. Bouncing between call centres, automated processes, and FAQs, none of which help.

I shared my irritation with my friend, Ralph Freese, who responded ‘Be glad you don’t work for the British Post Office’. It is a horror we need to know.

Between 1999 and 2015, 3500 people faced accusations and 900 were prosecuted for alleged thefts.

These people owned and ran small post offices, franchises of the British Post Office. Erroneously accused, and convicted, they lost their livelihoods. Some went to jail. Many suffered ill health and were rejected by their community. Some ended their lives. Their experience escapes description.

The initial fault lay with a faulty accounting system – Horizon – that identified apparent shortfalls – ‘thefts’. Thereafter, The Guardian says, “the main driver was seemingly a toxic and secretive management culture in the Post Office, with the victims marginalised, dismissed and disbelieved”.

Staggeringly, as late as 2021, the Post Office’s CEO Nick Read was paid a bonus of £455,500, which included £54,400 for the role he played in the Horizon inquiry. He later agreed to pay back £13,600 and then the remaining amount. Not the whole bonus, just the Horizon piece!

Yet, this is not only about the CEO. At this scale, at least dozens had to know an error had been made and actively, or silently, allowed it to continue.

When the numbers reach that scale, there is likely a systemic flaw somewhere.

Sadly, for those accused, they were told they were the exceptions.

This is a warning for all of us, to pause and reflect. It may well be true that some stakeholders, like the then Postal Affairs Minister Sir Ed Davey claims, were misled, yet neither you nor I ever want to be in that position. If the data looks like a trend, you might want to treat it as such.

Thankfully, it is also true that others blew the whistle. And others somehow found the courage to keep fighting and won.

In The Power of the Powerless, Vaclav Havel cautions us, there is no ‘them’ and ‘us’, that “society is not sharply polarized…but the fundamental lines of conflict run right through each person”.

This case is a profound example.

Whilst the technology was initially at fault, dozens of people made hundreds of decisions over years, perpetuating the injustice. It took honourable others speaking out, risking leaks to lawyers and media, finding the courage to fight, telling the stories, that eventually brought justice.

Read more here and watch Mr Bates vs The Post Office, the series that exploded the story into public consciousness, reminding us that story-telling can change the world.  
 
//self

Overlooked, is a New York Times series telling the stories of people, often women, who shaped history and yet were ignored by the Times when they died. It includes journalist and activist Ida B Wells, poet Sylvia Plath and mathematician Ada Lovelace.

If you, like me, have the slightest smidgeon of Englishness in your life, you’ll know The Tale of Peter Rabbit. To be fair, my mother is a Londoner, so in my case, it’s a dollop.

I had the book, part of a mini-Beatrix Potter library, the LP and cassettes, and there may even have been a Royal Doulton porridge bowl. Potter’s creations were a merchandising phenomenon and her story inspirational.

Potter had her book about a mischievous rabbit rejected multiple times. In frustration, she self-published and after two small, but sold-out, print runs, a publisher hopped on board. From there, she built the merchandising empire, that ensured Peter Rabbit was in my bedroom some seventy years later. She did so long before Disney had been born (to be precise Walt was about 6 months old at the time).

When the world doesn’t see what we do, Potter shows us that with will, skill, and a splash of luck, it can be softened and shaped.

/// soul

In December, Roxanne popped into our local second-hand book store – it is a thrill to live near such a thing – and returned with gifts. Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna and Unsheltered, published nine years apart, Lacuna in 2009 and Unsheltered in 2018.

In Unsheltered, oysters get sucked from ‘pearly shelves’, an armchair has ‘ghosts of tea-stains on voluptuous arms’ and when a character’s much-loved mother dies, she reflects “When someone matters like that, you didn’t lose her at death. You lost her as you kept living”.

In Lacuna, when a character is vilified by McCarthy’s hearings and then dies, a friend’s tribute to him is rejected by newspapers, “They ran their own little piece instead. They had no wish to tell what a man has done with his life. That would require honest witness. The simpler thing is to state what he has been called”.  

(Incidentally, the BBC tells us Postal Affairs Minister Davey “refused to meet Alan Bates, the sub-postmaster who led the campaign to expose the scandal, saying he did not believe it “would serve any purpose” – simpler to state what he had been called than listen honestly.)

Reading Lacuna and Unsheltered shortly after finishing Demon Copperfield (which I wrote about here) immersed me in thinking about the prisons we create.

In Copperfield, Kingsolver confronts decades of exploitation that create fertile grounds for addiction and despair, which in turn feed new dividend cycles.

In Lacuna her approach is more oblique, she tells the story of Harrison Shepherd, a young man who works in the home of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo and goes on to be a successful author. Communist only by association, Leon Trotsky was a guest of Rivera and Kahlo, and to the degree that his best-selling books tell alternate histories where colonialism is vanquished, he gets crushed in McCarthy’s hearings.

In Unsheltered, Kingsolver moves us between 2016 and 1871.

In 1871, the protagonists grapple with a world that sees science and evolution as a heretical threat. In 2016, they grapple with a world where the truths they believed in have yielded a world of personal debt and financial precarity.

Although those of the 1800s, like Shepherd in Lacuna, are vilified, in a sense their lives are clearer, they’re fighting for new ideas, there is hope. In 2016, there are no new ideas. The old ones don’t work. Yet, in that definition of insanity, everyone keeps trying. This, arguably, is the world we face.

Beatrix Potter inspires us; we can shape the world. Kingsolver and the BBC caution us; the world can imprison us, our bodies, and our minds. The Post Offices whistleblowers and the storytellers point the way; courage and imagination are tools of freedom.

I hope that we will never face such choices, but I know we will. Perhaps today’s examples will help when we do.
 
All the best
 
Karl

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