It was a very dull and gloomy day when we woke up yesterday and after our thorough soaking of the day before, a day when we had to make difficult decisions whether to venture out and risk another soaking or stay confined indoors. Now that the vernal equinox is over, there is still a month to go before the clocks go back and the gloomy mornings do make it a little difficult to get oneself up and going in the morning. Nonetheless, we had both had a fairly good night's sleep and after we had breakfasted, it was evident that the rain was going to be falling steadily so I made a lightning visit down to the supermarket just to collect our copy of 'The Times'. Whilst listening to Radio 4 in the background this morning, reference was made to the fact that the ex Defence secretary, Ben Wallace, was going to give evidence to the Afghan enquiry. The Afghan Inquiry is a British public inquiry that is investigating extra judicial killings by British special forces in Afghanistan between 2010 and 2013. The inquiry is examining night raids carried out by UK special forces, specifically known as Deliberate Detention Operations (DDOs). Intrigued by an enquiry of which I had never heard, I thought I would investigate how many public enquiries are taking place in the UK at the moment. I knew, of course, about the ongoing COVID enquiry and the last phase of the Post Office Enquiry is due to resume this Monday but when I consulted the internet, I discovered that there were no fewer than 17 enquiries taking place at the moment. Some of these are admittedly very small scale such as excess deaths in a Scottish hospital but I was amazed at the number. I think that in the UK that after a very public scandal we say that we must have an enquiry but the pressure must first build up for the enquiry to take place, then the enquiry itself might take a year or more and then there is a period of time in which the report has to be written up. After publication of the report, the Government indicates that it will either accept or 'consider' the recommendations. But the net effect of all of this is that when redress is sought and one thinks of the Hillsborough football disaster, the enquiry is so long after the event that nobody actually carries the can or is effectively punished. Some miscreants ought to end up behind bars (and one thinks of the lies told by the Post Office) but this never happens. In the case of the 'Bloody Sunday' enquiry, the inquiry was set up to establish a definitive version of the events of Sunday 30 January 1972 and was set up in 1998, reporting some 12 years later in 2010 at a cost of £21.6 million and with a report running to 5,000 pages. So the report was published some 38 years after the events of 'Bloody Sunday' had taken place and evidently some of the key army personnel were either dead or retired. This was admittedly a long and expensive enquiry but it fits a pattern where the greater the scandal, the longer it takes to report upon it. In theory, the idea of a public enquiry is that 'lessons must be learnt' but by this stage, so much water has flowed under the bridge that any lessons cease to retain their relevance.
As it was such a dire day weather-wise, we decided to stay at home and have a nice quiet day. This was perhaps just as well because after the thorough soaking we received yesterday and then entertaining our friends yesterday afternoon, I think that Meg needed a little recovery time. She did seem somewhat sleepy this morning but gradually recovered as the day wore on. For lunch, we took the carcass of the chicken left over from yesterday's meal and made a fricassee of it, together with some chicken gravy which we served on a small bed of rice and some petit pois. This was absolutely delicious and we enjoyed it tremendously. For our post lunch entertainments, I now consult the TV schedules for the night before and see what I can get on catch-up TV. The Politics programme of 'Question Time' resumed last Thursday evening so we saw the re-run of this and then after this treated ourselves to a retrospective of the life and humour of Victoria Wood which is both entertaining and informative at the same time. I remember seeing Victoria Wood together with a neighbour in the De Montfort Hall in Leicester where she brought the house down. Here she sang 'Let's Do It - The Ballad of Barry & Freda' which must be one of the finest comic songs of all time with some hilarious one liners in it. It is interesting to reflect that she admired the monologues of Alan Bennett and there is something both about the northern edge and self deprecation that runs throughout both of their work. She could also be deprecating about her Northern roots with a brilliant one liner from a TV announcer apologising to the people in the North of England with the acid comment 'It must be awful for them'. And of course the 'Two Soups' sketch is still remembered by many of us of a certain age, even though it is making fun of an elderly deaf waitress.
The enquiry into Post Office 'Horizon' scandal resumes again today and just when we thought that all of the reported problems were just a part of history, we find in a report published today that some problems are continuing. The vast majority of sub-postmasters operating Post Offices (92%) reported 'some form of issue' with Horizon in the last year. More than half (57%) said they had experienced unexplained discrepancies, with 19% reporting unexplained transactions and 14% experiencing missing transactions. When resolving those discrepancies, more were dissatisfied (48%) than satisfied (19%). In the past, this has provided some quite compelling viewing and I wonder if the last phase of the enquiry will generate more eventual revelations. The thing that sticks in my mind when witnesses have to take the stand and to account for their past actions, how often even when confronted with the evidence (often in the form of an evidence trail facilitated by emails), witnesses have selective amnesia and suddenly find that they 'cannot remember' Some of this must be undoubtedly due to the passage of time but there must be multiple occasions when the inability to remember is just a convenient cover for their own shortcomings.
© Mike Hart [2024]