We live in an era of increasing exposure to harmful threats and risks to individuals, groups, societies, nations and humankind. As the 2024 World Economic Forum Global Risks Report narrates, many of these hazards, whether natural or manmade, are made worse by the failure of public and private authorities to act decisively and appropriately. Many people will likely suffer if and when authorities fail in this duty, and justice for them may prove elusive.

Although the report presents significant contemporary and anticipated future risk exposures, the general picture is not a recent development, as discussed by numerous previous authors, including Ian Glendon, Sharon Clarke, myself, and Ian Glendon and myself.

Paradoxes and deception

The unvarnished reality of 21st-century governance and social, political and economic order presents several paradoxes. For example: 

Authoritarianism and pseudo-democracy

Many governments proclaim that they are democratic, yet some exhibit deeply authoritarian and undemocratic policies, including repression of various groups and individuals (e.g., pseudo-democracies and quasi-dictatorships such as Russia). Some even revel in their notoriety as exponents of “illiberal democracy” (e.g., Hungarian President Viktor Orbàn).

Some democracy-abusers in the US are so extreme that they openly support a hostile foreign state (Russia), which Representative Michael R. Turner suggests repudiates their oath of allegiance. Critics have also censured the ultra-conservative media celebrity Tucker Carlson for his openly pro-Vladimir Putin stance.

Partisan freedoms, subjugation for others

Many political leaders and their supporters publicly espouse individual liberty. Yet, they mean to secure privileged freedoms only for themselves while denying these or even fundamental human rights to their opponents or groups they despise. For example, when Donald Trump was the US president, he notoriously “applied the primacy of inequality and the distinction between predators/winners like himself and victims/losers such as the poor and the vulnerable … Trump appeared to reject the very idea that principal functions of the judiciary exist to ensure that (a) no one, not even the President, is above the law, and (b) government does not abuse its position of power and resources against the human rights of anyone.”

Among a long list of human rights issues, poor access to health care, suppression of abortion rights and weak gun controls have dogged the US for years. In 2024, some 26 million US citizens (7.7%) still lack healthcare insurance. On many issues, powerful ideological partisan groups who dominate politics, legislatures and the media ensure they get what they want. In contrast, they deny the fundamental human rights of others.

Breaking laws and corrupting justice

Many governments, political leaders and their supporters publicly boast of their utmost commitment to the rule of law while flagrantly and persistently breaking domestic and international law. Examples are Israel in relation to Palestinian civilians and other minorities and the Hindu nationalist government in India in relation to the Muslim minority. 

Governments have failed to crack down on corporate and public sector lawbreakers in major scandals. For example, in the UK, the contaminated blood supplies scandal and the Post Office Horizon scandal—see later sections below.

Pathological lying as a modus operandi

Politicians may spin and massage the truth to their advantage while deflecting attention away from inconvenient or embarrassing facts. It is part of the non-articulated “contract” between them and the public. However, some politicians (and other public figures and corporate leaders) go beyond such relatively harmless custom and engage in blatant lying. With these, dishonesty is a facet of their personality, worldview and how they function generally. Individuals with anti-social traits like narcissism, sociopathy or compulsive dominance are likely to employ lies and deception as part of their manipulative cloak to persuade or coerce people to react in a certain way.

For a long time, Trump has had a long record of making numerous false statements. Among the tally are his false claims of fraud in the 2020 presidential election and that he had won. His fibbing has not waned, and new “porkies” emerge weekly, if not daily.

False conspiracy theories, such as the QAnon phenomenon, have been another weapon of political deception and manipulation. Numerous radical-right politicians, public figures and media personalities engaged in disseminating and supporting such theories, frequently promoting them as unassailable facts. An outrageous example was the wild allegation that former First Lady Hillary Clinton had been prominent in an international pedophile ring run by Democrat politicos and centered on a pizzeria in Washington, DC, popular with children. 

Another serial promulgator of false accusations via the radical-right website Infowars, Alex Jones, was held liable for $1.4 billion in compensation to families of the Sandy Hook school gun massacre. Jones, a gun advocate, had disseminated egregiously false allegations about the motives and conduct of the parents, accusing them of being actors, not grieving parents, and alleging that the massacre itself was a fake.

Corporate abuse of employees and customers

Many organizations and companies boast on their websites and adverts that they treat their customers as their number one priority and their employees as their greatest asset, while in reality, they treat one or both categories with appalling contempt (e.g., numerous scandals in the US and UK). Government and official conspiracy are involved in some of the most egregious cases. On January 11, 2024, Fair Observer detailed the multi-decade Horizon scandal involving the UK Post Office and Fujitsu. I will discuss subsequent revelations below.

An underlying pathology

Such paradoxes speak to an underlying pathological psychology in governmental, political and corporate life. Ulrich Beck eloquently exposed such pathology in his famous book Risk Society. His description and analysis of such cases as the Vila Parisi conflagration and environmental catastrophe in Brazil in 1984 and responses to accidental radioactive fallout from the Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria in 1957 are sobering. The distortion of logic warps and twists reality so that up is down, black is white, bad is good, wrong is right, criminal is lawful, unsafe is safe, and extremism is benign. The mass poisoning of the environment and people by industrial pollution is “bad luck.” Unprovoked invasion of a peaceful neighboring state is not war but a “special military operation,” mass killing of civilians by combatants is “collateral damage,” and ethnic cleansing is “social relocation.” Such oxymoronic deception has become the stock-in-trade of pathological leaders of all kinds and their propaganda machinery. Doublespeak, edited by Matthew Feldman and Paul Jackson, focuses on this phenomenon concerning the far right since 1945.

The following are fundamental characteristics of the pathology: 

• Reckless risk-taking by governments, politicians and corporations.
• Ruthlessness, repression and greed.
• Megalomania and political and ideological hegemony.
• The inversion of truth.
• Pseudo-democracy and the crushing of individual liberty.

Three selected cases

Case 1: Contaminated blood

Contaminated blood supplies in the UK infected over 30,000 people with HIV and/or Hepatitis C between 1970 and 1998. A long-term cover-up and a blanket of denial and disinformation contributed to at least 3,000 premature deaths, many of them avoidable. Hundreds of infected patients have still to be informed of the fact.

The recent official independent inquiry report (2,527 pages in seven volumes by retired High Court judge Sir Brian Langstaff) is a damning indictment of morally corrupted officials and clinicians and successive governments who were “more concerned about reputational damage than openness and honesty.” Doctors hid the exposure risks and even blood test results from patients, such as hemophiliacs, and experimented on some (e.g., children) without their knowledge or consent. Crucial records were deliberately destroyed to thwart unwelcome inquiries or investigations. Langstaff’s findings have finally vindicated the victims and their families, who “the Establishment” had long ignored, patronized, and gaslit.  This report is the first significant step in achieving belated justice for the victims.

Case 2: US gun control

The ultra-high incidence of gun-related deaths in the US has long been a source of dismay and disbelief throughout the rest of the world. The US incidence rate is not just marginally higher than in other developed countries but several times higher. For some years, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and other studies, the US incidence rate for all firearm deaths had remained consistently at between 10.0 and 11.0 per 100,000, but by 2022 had risen to 13.3. For 18 of the other 21 high-income countries compared by Grinshteyn and Hemenway in 2010, the rate was less than 2.0 per 100,000. For gun homicides, most of these countries had a rate more than 18 times lower than the US rate of 3.6 per 100,000. By 2019, the latter had risen to 4.38. US writers on this subject have noted that “the US is in a different world.”

Many of the firearm deaths involve accidents, personal and domestic disputes and robberies. However, the US is exceptional among developed countries for the high number of mass shootings by lone actors. Most of these mass shootings involve a relatively small number of deaths (3 to 6), but some are spectacular and involve dozens of deaths and hundreds of injuries. In October 2017, a gunman killed 59 people and injured over 500 at the Las Vegas Mandalay Resort and Casino massacre. In June 2016, another shooter killed 49 people and wounded 58 at the Orlando nightclub. 

The name Columbine resonates as the most memorable school mass shooting (in 1999), but there have been others, such as Sandy Hook in 2012 and Nashville in March 2023. Mass shootings of all kinds increased sharply from 2018 onwards, including in 2023 in Lewiston in Maine and Monterey Park in California.

How can this unedifying claim to “US exceptionalism” in gun homicides be explained? Contributory causes include:

• The US is an inherently violent society, having high rates of homicide and assault even when firearms are not involved.
• Many citizens own firearms out of fear of attack and believe possessing a firearm might deter attack or enable a successful defense against attack.
• Citizens are willing to use firearms to settle disputes and scores, intimidate others or defend themselves.
• Law enforcement officers are uninhibited in the drawing of firearms as a preferred method of detaining suspects for all types of offenses and “if in doubt” the discharge of firearms to disable or kill suspects.
• US citizens have a right under the Constitution’s 2nd Amendment to bear arms and are encouraged to do so by politicians and other interests.
• Firearms are readily available to the public in a largely unrestricted manner (compared to other developed countries).

Numerous studies have shown that the major determining factor across the US (which also applies to other high-income countries) is gun availability (HICRC 2017; Hemenway and Miller 2000; Hepburn and Hemenway 2004; Miller et al. 2002, 2007; Webster and Vernick 2013).

Stringent gun controls and a vast reduction in gun availability may seem an obvious solution, one which other countries have deployed successfully. However, the US is a deeply polarized nation divided into roughly equal numbers of, on the one hand, Democrat voters and other liberals, and, on the other, Republican voters and other conservatives. As a crude generalization, the first group tends to support progressive social policies, including gun control. In contrast, the second group tends not to support such policies. Moreover, Republican politicians and powerful support groups such as the National Rifle Association (NRA) have weaponized the constitutional right “to bear arms” as a rallying political argument against any attempt to regulate that right.

Other objections to gun control include a denial that gun-related deaths are cause for major concern and a refutation of the suggestion that the level of gun ownership or gun availability has any causal link or strong association with firearm deaths or violent crime. Political, ideological, cultural or interest-related perceptual defenses or other cognitive biases drive denial and refutation. 

The gun lobby makes much in its arguments of individual liberty and the individual’s right to bear arms but says little or nothing about the most fundamental human right of all — the right to live. The unfettered availability of guns presents a direct and uninvited threat to the life of anyone unfortunate enough to encounter someone malevolent bearing a gun that they should not possess. In effect, their stated position on guns implies a belief that gun rights (which are not a fundamental human right but a sectoral interest right) are far more important than the human right to life enshrined in the UN Declaration of 1948. 

Unfortunately, over many decades, US federal and state governments and judiciaries have remained persuaded by gun lobbyists not to amend or remove the 2nd Amendment or to do anything substantive on gun control. The primitive fixation on 2nd Amendment rights places their thinking back to its inception in 1791. Then, personal safety threats were much more real and imminent, and there were no formalized law-and-order functions like today. The right to bear arms made good sense in that context, but not so today. Without fundamental ramping up of gun controls, policymakers will likely fail to deliver justice to victims of gun crime in the US soon, and we can expect more gun deaths and mass shootings. 

The attempted assassination of Trump on July 13, 2024, by a gunman armed with an assault rifle, which also killed one bystander and critically wounded two others, should refocus public attention on stringent controls. However, Trump himself has been a longstanding fervent member and supporter of the NRA and the absolute rights of the 2nd Amendment. It is doubtful that this near-death personal experience will cause him to now demand stringent gun controls. Rather, he is more likely to demand greater weaponry and tactical freedom for the police and close personal protection agents, while blaming his political opponents for encouraging attacks on him. He refuses to acknowledge any connection between gun availability and gun crime. To the rest of the world, the paradox of gun primacy so dominating an otherwise civilized society beggars belief.

Case 3: Post office Horizon scandal update

My Fair Observer article “Justice for All?” describes in some detail what has been cited as the greatest miscarriage of justice in British history. Over some 15 years (2000–2015), more than 900 sub-postmasters in small towns and villages across Britain fell victim to a defective and compromised online accounting system called Horizon, installed and operated on the Post Office’s behalf by Fujitsu. Almost immediately after the Horizon rollout at the end of 1999, unexplained accounting deficits were being reported. The Post Office blamed all such discrepancies on the individual sub-postmasters since both the Post Office and Fujitsu steadfastly asserted that Horizon was perfect and incapable of error. Moreover, by contract term, the Post Office held every sub-postmaster liable for such deficits and began a debt recovery program against them. Typically, alleged debts amounted to tens of thousands of pounds and sometimes in excess of £100,000 ($127,000). 

Beyond debt recovery, the Post Office also pursued criminal prosecutions against a large proportion of the accused sub-postmasters. Many were convicted and jailed based on the Post Office’s “incontrovertible” evidence that Horizon was perfect and could not be compromised. Facing financial ruin, loss of job and the stigma of a criminal conviction for theft and dishonesty, some committed suicide.

Over the first decade of this century, concern grew among sub-postmasters, lawyers, journalists and politicians that “something” was not only drastically wrong with Horizon software but also that it could be possible for Horizon or Post Office officials to access individual accounts remotely and alter the financial data. Both the Post Office and Fujitsu flatly denied these assertions. Nevertheless, by 2015, the House of Commons Business Committee forced the Post Office Chief Executive, Paula Vennells, to explain the growing furor and allegations of miscarriage of justice. She still insisted that Horizon was perfect and that there had been no false charges, false convictions or any other damage to sub-postmasters for which Horizon could be responsible.

In a series of trials between March 2017 and March 2019, 555 sub-postmasters sued the Post Office and won every case and every counter-appeal. The Post Office and Fujitsu witnesses came under savage criticism from judges. Since 2019, the initial compensation scheme totaling £57.5 million ($72 million) has been increased several times and could cost taxpayers over £1 billion ($1.27 billion). Since 2019, the number of individual claims has increased to over 900, owing to previously hidden cases. However, it has emerged that compensation scheme administrators have offered sums to claimants of typically less than 20% of their claims even though independent accountants have calculated these. Victims still have to fight for compensation that previously seemed assured and not subject to undue duress. Therefore, many victims have not received financial redress as part of a justice package.

A turning point in public awareness of the Horizon scandal was undoubtedly the screening over four nights in January 2024 of the highly acclaimed ITV docudrama Mr Bates versus The Post Office. The British public was horrified by the revelations, and the real-life Alan Bates, his fellow victims and his stalwart supporters, including several Members of Parliament such as James Arbuthnot, became national heroes overnight. Unsurprisingly, Post Office CEO Paula Vennells and her gaggle of senior executives, Horizon project people and fraud investigators became objects of public disgust and indignation, reflected in news media, social media commentary and pressure on politicians and the government to “do the right thing.” Certainly, King Charles felt sufficiently moved to recognize Bates’s selfless and courageous fight for justice over more than 20 years by appointing him a Knight of the Realm in June 2024. Arise, Sir Alan!

In May 2024, the government felt obliged (or embarrassed enough?) to fast-track legislation to overturn the convictions of all the sub-postmasters wrongly accused. This was a welcome, if long-delayed, step forward in the “package of justice.”

In addition, the government had already set up the independent Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry in September 2020, which became statutory in June 2021. The complexities of the scandal and the amount of evidence collected have inevitably drawn the inquiry out. Public examination of key witnesses has provided riveting viewing for TV audiences, especially since early 2024. 

Further revelations so far include:

• Both Paula Vennells and senior colleagues had known for years prior to 2015 that the Horizon software was flawed and that sub-postmasters Horizon accounts could be, and indeed were being, accessed remotely by Horizon personnel and that entries and account data were being altered unbeknownst to the sub-postmasters and without their authority. Covert audio recordings show that independent forensic accountants personally warned her and senior colleagues in July 2013 that Horizon was defective, that accounts could be remotely interfered with by Horizon personnel and that prosecutions were unjust. Nevertheless, under Vennells’ direction, they relentlessly continued prosecuting, knowing that such cases were false. Alan Bates referred to Post Office executives as “thugs in suits.”
• When the Post Office forced sub-postmasters to “pay back” alleged account shortfalls, the money went into a Post Office profits account. Since these payments resulted from a falsely concocted non-existent debt, they amounted to fraud by deception against the sub-postmasters and possibly involved menaces and intimidation. Put bluntly, the Post Office stole their money. These payments are now subject to a more comprehensive criminal investigation by police and the UK tax authorities.
• The size of the bonuses of Post Office personnel involved in the policy and direction of the investigation and false prosecution of sub-postmasters, as well as those undertaking such work, was related to the size of the “profits” account. Thus, they had a vested personal financial interest in prejudicial, if not malicious, pursuit of the victims.
• In July 2024, the Post Office still refused to acknowledge the innocence of a sub-postmaster despite the quashing of their conviction. When confronted with this repudiation in the official inquiry, former Post Office Chairman Tim Parker was unable to justify such victimization. One former government Business Secretary told the inquiry that Post Office executives were “corrupt,” while another repeated Bates’s description of “thugs in suits.”

It is evident that Vennells, in full knowledge of the truth, presided for years over a deliberate and malicious program to falsely prosecute and crush sub-postmasters without one iota of empathy, sympathy, remorse or guilt. Then, when the evidence became increasingly known outside the Post Office, she orchestrated an additional layer of denial and obfuscation over many more years. Even under robust questioning in the official inquiry in May 2024, she continued to deny, obfuscate and plead “no memory.” She even added bouts of tearful sobbing, but such performative attempts to portray herself as the victim cut little ice with onlookers. Media reports were savage, one describing her grilling as “divine retribution” and that “Ms. Vennells, for all her pretensions to godliness, was the opposite of the Good Samaritan, abandoning those in distress, and is now bent on saving her own skin.” (This alludes to her once being a part-time priest and even a candidate for the job of Bishop of London.)

How such a deeply flawed personality “displaying an incompetence of gargantuan scale” ever became CEO, let alone held onto the position for so long raises yet more awkward questions about corporate governance, staff selection and risk management at the Post Office.

The inquiry will likely not issue its final report for at least another year, thus delaying the criminal investigation into the scandal and any prosecutions. A dedicated national team of 80 police detectives nationwide will now identify and pursue suspects relating to fraud, perjury, perverting the course of justice and conspiracy. Thus, the complete “package of justice” remains elusive for the victims.

[Liam Roman edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.