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Palmer Luckey is a right-wing business magnate who is very much involved in the military industrial complex. He described himself as a “Radical Zionist” in one interview.
Luckey wrote this on X with regard to China:
"Taiwan is not the end state for China. All the people who think this fight over Taiwan is the real fight are missing the point. China believes that the Philippines is their territory. They believe that Korea is their territory. They also believe that North Korea is their territory but they like them as a buffer state with South Korea but that would change the moment they could actually capture South Korea.
They even think that most of Japan belongs to them. They think that it's theirs. They've tried over and over for 1000s of years and even today, even publicly, they won't say they own all of Japan but they do maintain they own part of Japan.
It is really dangerous to let people with millennia long ambitions of ruling those areas go unchecked. Because even if you don't give a shit about Taiwan, which you should because our entire economy runs on chips from them and until we figure out how to make them better or as good ourselves we have to keep them around, there's a lot of reasons to make sure we're spooking China on Day 8, Day 80, Day 800."
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Arnaud Bertrand, whose comments I have shared on this blog in the past and who is on X as @RnaudBertrand takes Luckey up on his ridiculous and completely dishonest appraisal of China and some of its history. Luckey’s comments are not accurate and are simply right wing political propaganda, very common among the white nationalists, fascists, Christian nationalists, Nazis and others that are in the Trump menagerie.
Mr. Bertrand writes frequently on China and I think lives there. He is worth following if you are on X. I am not endorsing Mr. Bertrand’s political views (I am not that familiar with them) by sharing this excellent response on China.
This is so ridiculously wrong, I'm not sure where to start.
Arnaud Betrand
At no point in its thousand years long history has China invaded Japan, not once. Japan has however invaded China at least 3 times, most recently of course during World War Two.
China does have some disputed territory with Japan, specifically the Diaoyu Islands (Senkaku Islands), which were part of China until 1895 when Japan annexed them together with Taiwan. These are very small uninhabited islands so it's utterly ridiculous to claim that China "thinks that most of Japan belongs to them".
There's also the question of Okinawa, formerly the Ryukyu Kingdom, annexed by Japan in 1879. To this day there's a strong independence movement on these islands and many inhabitants descend from China (the Ryukyu Kingdom was a tributary state of the Ming and Qing dynasty) but China has never claimed the territory, either historically or today.
China doesn't believe that Korea - North or South - is its territory. Same as Japan, at no point ever in its history has China invaded Korea. It has however defended Korea several times against invasions, be it from Japan during the Ming Dynasty or from the U.S. during the Korean war (which famously led to the creation of North Korea which, contrary to popular belief, is very much NOT a vassal state of China).
China doesn't believe that the Philippines is its territory. They have a dispute over some islands in the South China Sea, most notably the Spratly islands which are claimed not only by China and the Philippines but also, in whole or part, by virtually all the other countries around the South China Sea. Very much worth mentioning: the Philippines' claim over the islands is much more recent than China's and most other claimants' (the Philippines starting claiming the islands in 1972 when China's formal claim dates back since even before the creation of the PRC in 1946).
As for Taiwan, yes, the PRC claims Taiwan and literally all the countries in the world - including the United States - agree under the One-China Policy that Taiwan is part of China (although not part of the PRC). Heck even Taiwan itself officially agrees that it is part of China - its official name is the Republic of China and some 95% of their population are Han Chinese. If you go to the national museum in Taipei, you'll find the world's largest collection of Chinese art and artifacts, brought over by the Kuomintang when they retreated to the island, and the museum claims to embody 5,000 years of Chinese civilization. The reality is that the root of the dispute over Taiwan isn't about territory - it's about which government is the legitimate ruler of China, a civil war that never officially ended. To frame this as some sort of expansionist land grab completely misses the historical context.
All in all, if one studies China's history within its region, it's probably one of the least aggressive great powers in history. Despite being the dominant power in East Asia for most of recorded history, China historically preferred diplomatic influence over territorial conquest. Even during periods of maximum strength, China focused on trade and diplomatic relations rather than colonization or territorial acquisition. You just need to look at the facts: China hasn't fired a single bullet on foreign grounds in over 45 years. Which other country can claim the same in today's world? The list is awfully short.
It's absolutely insane to frame China as this sort of bloodthirsty warmongering power, especially when you're American... And it's even more disgusting to do so when you're yourself literally a weapons manufacturer, as is Palmer Luckey.
Most readers will know the news by now. DeepSeek, a Chinese AI company, released an AI model called R1 that is comparable in ability to the best models from companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta, but was trained at a radically lower cost and using less than state-of-the art GPU chips. DeepSeek also made public enough of the details of the model that others can run it on their own computers without charge.
DeepSeek is a torpedo that has hit the Magnificent Seven US hi-tech companies below the water line. DeepSeek did not use the latest and best Nvidia’s chips and software; it did not require huge spending on training its AI model unlike its American rivals; and it offers just as many useful applications.
DeepSeek built its R1 with Nvidia’s older, slower chips, which US sanctions had allowed to be exported to China. The US government and the tech titans thought they had a monopoly in AI development because of the huge costs involved in making better chips and AI models. But now DeepSeek’s R1 suggests that companies with less money can soon operate competitive AI models. R1 can be used on a shoestring budget and with much less computing power. Moreover, R1 is just as good as rivals at ‘inference’, the AI jargon for when users question the model and get answers. And it runs on servers for all sorts of companies so that they need not ‘rent’ at huge prices from the likes of OpenAI.
Most important, DeepSeek’s R1 is ‘open source’, namely that is coding and training methods are open to all to copy and develop. This is a real blow to the ‘proprietary’ secrets that OpenAI or Google’s Gemini lock away in a ‘black box’ in order to maximise profits. The analogy here is with branded and generic pharmaceuticals.
The big issue for the US AI companies and their investors is that it appears that building huge data centres to house multiples of expensive chips may not be necessary in order to achieve sufficiently successful outcomes. Up to now, the US companies have been ratcheting up huge spending plans and trying to raise mega amounts of funding to do so. Indeed, on the very Monday that DeepSeek’s R1 hit the news, Meta announced another $65bn of investment, and only days earlier President Trump announced government subsidies of $500bn to the tech giants as part of the so-called Stargate project. Ironically, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said he was investing because “We want the US to set the global AI standard, not China.” Oh dear.
Now investors are concerned that this spending is unnecessary and, more to the point, that it will hit the profitability of the American companies if DeepSeek can deliver AI applications at a tenth of the cost. Five of the biggest technology stocks geared to AI — chipmaker Nvidia and so-called ‘hyperscalers’ Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta Platforms — collectively shed almost $750bn of their stock market value in one day. And DeepSeek does threaten the profits of the data centre companies and the water and power operators which expect to benefit from the huge ‘scaling up’ by the Magnificent Seven. The US stock market boom is heavily concentrated in the ‘Magnificent Seven’.
So has DeepSeek punctured the massive stock market bubble in US tech stocks? Billionaire investor Ray Dalio thinks so. He told the Financial Times that “pricing has got to levels which are high at the same time as there’s an interest rate risk, and that combination could prick the bubble …Where we are in the cycle right now is very similar to where we were between 1998 or 1999,” Dalio said. “In other words, there’s a major new technology that certainly will change the world and be successful. But some people are confusing that with the investments being successful.”
But that may not be the case, at least not just yet. The AI chip company Nvidia’s stock price may have dived this week, but its ‘proprietary’ coding language, Cuda, is still the US industry standard. While its shares dropped nearly 17%, that only brings it back to the (very, very high) level of September.
What must enrage the tech oligarchs sucking up to Trump is that US sanctions on Chinese companies and bans on chip exports have not stopped China making yet more advances in the tech and chip war with the US. China is managing to make technological leaps in AI despite export controls introduced by the Biden administration intended to deprive it of both the most powerful chips and the advanced tools needed to make them.
Chinese tech champion Huawei has emerged as Nvidia’s primary competitor in China for ‘inference’ chips. And it has been working with AI companies, including DeepSeek, to adapt models trained on Nvidia GPUs to run inference on its Ascend chips. “Huawei is getting better. They have an opening as the government is telling the big tech companies that they need to buy their chips and use them for inference,” said one semiconductor investor in Beijing.
This is a further demonstration that state-led planned investment into technology and tech skills by China works so much better than relying on huge private tech giants led by moguls. As Ray Dallo said: “In our system, by and large, we are moving to a more industrial-complex- type of policy in which there is going to be government-mandated and government-influenced activity, because it is so important…Capitalism alone — the profit motive alone — cannot win this battle.”
Nevertheless, the AI titans are not yet the titanic. They are going ahead with ‘scaling up’ by ploughing yet more and more billions into data centres and more advanced chips. This eating up computer power exponentially.
And of course, there is no consideration of what mainstream economists politely like to call ‘externalities’. According to a report by Goldman Sachs, a ChatGPT query needs nearly 10 times as much electricity as a Google search query. Researcher Jesse Dodge did some back-of-the-napkin math on the amount of energy AI chatbots use. “One query to ChatGPT uses approximately as much electricity as could light one light bulb for about 20 minutes,” he says. “So, you can imagine with millions of people using something like that every day, that adds up to a really large amount of electricity.” More electricity consumption means more energy production and in particular more fossil-fuelled greenhouse gas emissions.
Google has the goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2030. Since 2007, the company has said its company operations were carbon neutral because of the carbon offsets it buys to match its emissions. But, starting in 2023, Google wrote in its sustainability report that it was no longer “maintaining operational carbon neutrality.” The company says it’s still pushing for its net-zero goal in 2030. “Google’s real motivation here is to build the best AI systems that they can,” Dodge says. “And they’re willing to pour a ton of resources into that, including things like training AI systems on bigger and bigger data centers all the way up to supercomputers, which incurs a tremendous amount of electricity consumption and therefore CO2 emissions.”
Then there’s water. As the US faces droughts and wildfires, the AI companies are sucking up deep water to ‘cool’ their mega data centres to protect the chips. More than that, Silicon Valley companies are increasingly taking control of water supply infrastructure to meet their needs. Research suggests, for instance, that about 700,000 litres of water could have been used to cool the machines that trained ChatGPT-3 at Microsoft’s data facilities.
Training AI models consumes 6,000 times more energy than a European city. Furthermore, while minerals such as lithium and cobalt are most commonly associated with batteries in the motor sector, they are also crucial for the batteries used in datacentres. The extraction process often involves significant water usage and can lead to pollution, undermining water security.
Sam Altman, the previous non-profit hero of Open AI, but now out to maximise profits for Microsoft, argues that yes, unfortunately there are ‘trade-offs’ in the short term, but they’re necessary to reach so-called AGI; and AGI will then help us solve all these problems so the trade off of ‘externalities’ is worth it.
AGI? What’s this? Artifical generalised intelligence (AGI) is the holy grail of AI developers. It means that AI models would become ‘superintelligent’ way above human intelligence. When that is achieved, Altman promises, its AI won’t just be able to do a single worker’s job, it will be able to do all of their jobs: “AI can do the work of an organization.” This would be the ultimate in maximising profitability by doing away with workers in companies (even AI companies?) as AI machines take over operating, developing and marketing everything. This is the apocalyptic dream for capital (but a nightmare for labour: no job, no income).
That’s why Altman and the other AI moguls will not stop expanding their data centres and developing yet more advanced chips just because DeepSeek has undercut their current models. Research firm Rosenblatt forecast the response of the tech giants: “In general, we expect the bias to be on improved capability, sprinting faster towards artificial general intelligence, more than reduced spending.” Nothing must stop the objective of super-intelligent AI.
Some see the race to achieving AGI as a threat to humanity itself. Stuart Russell, professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, said “Even the CEOs who are engaging in the race have stated that whoever wins has a significant probability of causing human extinction in the process, because we have no idea how to control systems more intelligent than ourselves,” he said. “In other words, the AGI race is a race towards the edge of a cliff.”
Maybe, but I continue to doubt that human ‘intelligence’ can be replaced by machine intelligence, mainly because they are different. Machines cannot think of potential and qualitative changes. New knowledge comes from such transformations (human), not from the extension of existing knowledge (machines). Only human intelligence is social and can see the potential for change, in particular social change, that leads to a better life for humanity and nature.
What DeepSeek’s emergence has shown is that AI can be developed to a level that can help humanity and its social needs. It’s free and open and available to the smallest user and developer. It has not been developed at a profit or to make a profit. As one commentator put it: “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.” Managers are introducing AI to “make management problems easier at the cost of the stuff that many people don’t think AI should be used for, like creative work….. If AI is going to work, it needs to come from the bottom-up, or AI is going to be useless for the vast majority of people in the workplace”.
Rather than develop AI to make profits, reduce jobs and the livelihoods of humans, AI under common ownership and planning could reduce the hours of human labour for all and free humans from toil to concentrate on creative work that only human intelligence can deliver. Remember the ‘holy grail’ was a Victorian fiction and later a Dan Brown one as well.
The angry debate over US visas and foreign workers that erupted over the holidays has exposed splits within Donald Trump’s Maga supporters on immigration policy.
The fiery words exchanged between two Trump factions over H-1B visas, which allow immigrants to work in the US based on speciality talents or skills, may just be the opening salvos of a broader war for influence at Trump’s base in Mar-a-Lago.
On the one hand, tech mogul, immigrant, and Trump’s (for now) right-hand man Elon Musk declared his strong support for easing restrictions on these visas, pledging that he’d be willing “go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend”.
On the other hand, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon pilloried the H-1B visa programme as “a total and complete scam from its top to the bottom”.
The controversy isn’t just an ideological clash between right-wing nativists, who view immigrants as threats to US jobs and culture, and big tech titans eager to expand their access to global talent. Instead, it’s a fight for power over the future direction of Trumpism.
“The coalition of the tech right and the nationalist right was bound to be tested,” said writer Ali Breland. The test, it seems, has come even before Trump’s inauguration on January 20.
Maga splits
Just like Democrats are dealing with their own fissures between progressives and moderates following the 2024 election, Maga is trying to settle its civil war over Trump’s signature issue, immigration.
Silicon Valley, as represented by Musk, has made its position clear. It wants to increase the number of skilled-worker visas to bring more tech talent to America’s shores. The policy isn’t new. In 2012, former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney promised to “staple a green card to the diploma of someone who gets an advanced degree in America”.
Splits over skilled worker visas.
Yet the very fact that expanding H-1Bs is the “establishment” stance is what has other Maga-ites steaming. Romney isn’t exactly the posterboy for the Trumpist revolution. Moreover, in his first administration, Trump himself pushed for restricting H-1B visas, a position he now seems to have revised.
In 2016, Trump railed against H-1B workers who he claimed “substitut[ed] for American workers at lower pay”. He has now said: “We need smart people coming into our country. We need a lot of people coming in. We’re going to have jobs like we’ve never had before.”
That Trump’s recent statements sound a lot like they were coming from Musk is sparking worries among Trump nationalists that Maga’s immigration policy is being redefined. For those who believe Musk is influence-peddling for what’s best for his corporate bottom line, his proposal on immigration is exhibit A.
The increasing marginalisation of “America first” nativists, and the elevation of Musk, suggests a departure from policies championed during Trump’s first term. Whether that shift extends beyond immigration is worrying plenty of figures accustomed to wielding power in Trump’s base in Mar-a-Lago.
For the hard right, the concern goes beyond Musk, who’s hunkered himself down in a US$2,000 (£1,622) per night room at Trump’s Florida estate. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Apple’s Tim Cook have both visited Trump since November’s election, and are jockeying for position as Trump builds out his cabinet and priorities for this first 100 days in office.
Meta is even changing personnel to align with the new Trump White House. The company recently announced that it would be replacing its head of global policy, Nick Clegg, former deputy prime minister of the UK and former leader of the left-leaning Liberal Democratic party, with Joel Kaplan, who has his roots in the George W. Bush administration.
Tech titans v nationalists
Silicon Valley and Trump anti-immigration nationalists were never natural allies, and any short-lived coalition was already shows signs of fracturing. Yet it’s not inevitable that Musk and the big tech leaders who currently have Trump’s ear, will retain that clout once his presidency starts – or ends.
As many experts have noted, Trump is more transactional than ideological, and is prone to making decisions based more on polls than a firmly grounded set of first principles. The much-discussed “bromance” between Trump and Musk could rupture over personality or policy differences.
On immigration, Trump might seek a compromise between Maga nationalists and big tech chief executives. Reviving the US-Mexico border wall could appease Maga nationalists who want tighter immigration enforcement. At the same time, expanding immigration pathways for foreign workers with degrees from the likes of California Institute of Technology and MIT could also help court big tech leaders.
The real flashpoint, however, may arise over Trump’s broader, populist approach to resisting hyper-globalisation, of which immigration is merely one part of a larger agenda.
Many within the Maga nationalist right are deeply sceptical of unbridled global capitalism, which is most clearly reflected in Trump’s calls for imposing 10-20% tariffs on US imports and 60% tariffs on imports from China. If there’s one policy that could reduce profits, and hence awake the sleeping giants of Palo Alto, it’s walling off the US economy from the rest of the world.
Keeping visa numbers at status quo levels is one thing. Upsetting international supply chains, particularly to Asia, is another.
The debate over H-1B visas, significant as it may now seem, could ultimately pale in comparison to a broader reckoning about whether the US will retreat further into economic protectionism. If Musk will “go to war” over skilled-worker visas, just think what the big tech titans will do when the stakes are even higher.
Thomas Gift, Associate Professor and Director of the Centre on US Politics, UCL
The massive tech failure that caused chaos around the world raises
important questions about the ownership and control of our digital
world. The relatively unknown, cyber-security firm CrowdStrike admitted
that the problem was caused by an update to its antivirus software,
which was designed to protect Microsoft Windows devices from malicious
attacks.
The outage was caused by just a tiny software update from CrowdStrike
put into Microsoft programs bringing them down globally My ‘techie’
programmer friends tell me that it looks like two very basic coding
errors that should have been spotted and tested before being ‘forced’
onto Microsoft operating systems.
CrowdStrike is a US firm based in Austin, Texas, listed on the US
stock exchange and employs 8500 people with 24,000 clients. As a
provider of cyber-security services, it tends to get called in to deal
with the aftermath of hack attacks. But it also provides protection
from viruses and cyber attacks – but not apparently from its own
programs.
The failure hit banking and healthcare services badly with over 8.5
million machines using Microsoft. Airlines and airport systems failed,
leading to 3300 cancelled flights. Many companies’ payroll systems have
been affected, meaning that thousands of employees will not get their
monthly wages on time. The outage could cost billions of dollars
worldwide and take weeks to resolve because computers will require a
manual reboot in ‘safe mode’, causing a massive headache for IT
departments everywhere
What this outage reveals is the massive dominance of both Microsoft
and CrowdStrike in computer software and cyber security. Microsoft
Windows has about 72% of the global market share of operating systems,
while CrowdStrike’s market share in the ‘endpoint protection’ security
category is 24%. So the world’s information, payments, transport and
communications are dependent on the decisions and operations of just a
few privately-owned ‘for (massive) profit’ companies. As one campaigner put it: “Today’s
massive global Microsoft outage is the result of a software monopoly
that has become a single point of failure for too much of the global
economy”.
One problem arising from this is that there is no diversification of
operating systems. Again, my techie friends reckon that Microsoft
Windows is a very poor operating system vulnerable to bugs and other
coding errors, unlike other systems, including free ‘open source’ ones.
“For decades, Microsoft’s pursuit of a vendor lock-in strategy has
prevented the public and private sectors from diversifying their IT
capabilities.From airports to hospitals to 911 call centers to
financial systems, millions today are feeling the consequences of the
greed and ego of one of the most egregious offenders in Big Tech. When
just three companies—Microsoft, Amazon, and Google—dominate the market
for cloud computing, one minor incident can have global ramifications.”
What is the answer to this? The techies say we need more back-up
systems, say at least two independent providers for their core
operations, or at least ensure that no single provider accounts for more
than about two-thirds of their critical IT infrastructure. Then if one
provider has a catastrophic failure, the other can keep things running.
But it is one thing to have back-up systems, it is another to diversify
into different operating systems that risk being not compatible with
each other. Again, my techie friends reckon that many bugs and outages
are due to different systems operating in one company. That
means there is no one ‘beginning to end’ view. As a result, if things
go wrong in one part of the business tech-wise, the tech teams cannot
see why from the other end of the business process. Too many cooks have
spoilt the broth.
What about breaking up the big tech monopolies? This is a common cry from some: “it is long overdue that Microsoft and other Big Tech monopolies are broken up—for good.Not
only are these monopolies too big to care, they’re too big to manage.
And despite being too big to fail, they have failed us. Time and time
again. Now, it’s time for a reckoning. We can’t continue to let
Microsoft’s executives downplay their role in making all of us more
vulnerable.”
But anti-trust measures that break up large companies have done
little in the past. The major economies are even more dominated by
large companies than they were one hundred years ago. Take the US
government break-up of Standard Oil in 1911, when it controlled over 90%
of the oil sector in the US. Did that break-up lead to the creation of
lots of small ‘manageable’ oil companies globally that worked in the
interests of society? No, because in many industries economies of scale
must operate to raise productivity and for capitalist firms to maximise
profitability. Now one hundred years after the Standard Oil break-up,
we have even larger multi-national energy companies controlling fossil
fuel investment and energy prices.
It’s the same debate with digital banking. Just the day before the
CrowdStrike global outage, the Bank of England reported that its banking
transactions service CHAPS had broken down, delaying many
time-sensitive payments. It seems that the international SWIFT
cross-border payments system had an outage for several hours. And
indeed, there has been a litany of banking system failures at ATMs and
in digital transactions over the last 20 years.
The major banks worldwide spend huge amounts of money on speculating
in the stock and bond markets, but do not spend nearly enough to ensure
that basic banking services for the public (both households and small
companies) work seamlessly. This is sometimes called ‘tech debt’. It
has led some to argue that we need to stop full digitilisation of money
transactions.
Cash remains a safe fallback when digital payments break down. The UK’s GMB Union said “cash
is a vital part of how our communities operate”. When you take cash out
of the system, people have nothing to fall back on, impacting on how
they do the everyday basics.” Cash, it is argued, also provides
more control over people’s money. Martin Quinn, campaign director for
the PCA, said using cash allowed for anonymity. “I don’t want my
data sold on, and I don’t want banks, credit card companies and even
online retailers to know every facet of my life,” he said. Budgeting by using cash is also easier for some”.
And the example of what the Indian government did in 2016 is a lesson
on this. The Indian government abruptly wiped out most of the nation’s
paper currency in hopes of ending ‘black money’ and curbing
corruption. But a November 2017 study
of 3,000 regulated agricultural markets for 35 major agricultural
commodities, conducted during the three months immediately following
demonetization, concluded that eliminating the high-currency notes had
reduced the value of domestic agricultural trade by more than 15 percent
in the short run, settling at 7 percent reduction three months late.
In a largely ‘informal economy’, where the most vulnerable people still
have no access to digital payments, this demonetization was a draconian
measure that did a lot of damage to the poorest people in India.
But again, it would be wrong to conclude that we must go back to
cash. Cash under the mattress may protect against the prying eyes of
the authorities, but it would remain an inefficient method of money
transactions and, as we know, an attraction to criminality. Of course,
violent robbery of personal and corporate cash (as we see in action
films) has now been replaced by the silent extraction of people’s
savings and company accounts by cyber scams. But that does not mean
digitalization of money should be reversed.
The question really centres on who owns and controls our digital
world. The high concentration of that digital power is yet another
reason for the replacement of capitalist corporations by public
companies democratically controlled by popular bodies and the tech
workers in them. We need to bring into public ownership the Magnificent Seven of social media and tech companies
currently led and controlled by multi-billionaires who decide what to
spend and where. Then the huge waste of resources on tech projects
designed just to make money and not to deliver useful and safe systems
beneficial to people’s lives could be reduced dramatically. Human error
would not disappear, but the organisation and control of our
increasingly digital world could be directed towards social needs not
private profit.
The new ITV drama about the Post Office Horizon IT scandal is an incredibly important vehicle for getting the story of what is increasingly recognised as one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British history into public consciousness.
However, viewers might find themselves with one looming unanswered question as they watch: how could this persist, at such a scale, for so long? How could hundreds of people face wrongful termination of their employment contracts, loss of their businesses, bankruptcy and often criminal prosecution at the hands of the same organisation for over a decade, with no one seeming to pay any attention?
The four-part series focuses on a handful of sub-postmasters who defiantly spoke out against the injustices they faced, and who were key players in bringing this scandal to light. Chief among them is Alan Bates, a sub-postmaster from north Wales who established the Justice for Sub-postmasters Alliance and has worked tirelessly on behalf of victims of the Horizon scandal. The efforts of Bates and others have been invaluable – but they are a tiny subset of the overall victims.
Today, we know the Post Office wrongly prosecuted 736 sub-postmasters for theft, false accounting and related charges because of technical faults in the Horizon IT system, and these accusations persisted for 16 years – from 1999 to 2015, which equates to an average of roughly one person charged each week.
By and large, most sub-postmaster victims did not speak out about the injustice they faced. Some took years to come forward, and many still prefer to remain anonymous. As depicted in the drama, the first journalist to help break the story, who was from Computer Weekly, was only able to identify and vet seven victims for her story – and it was published ten years after the Post Office began falsely accusing sub-postmasters of various crimes. So where were the other victims?
Based on a detailed analysis of hundreds of transcripts from the public inquiry and interviews with sub-postmasters across the UK, our ongoing research has enabled us to identify the four main barriers that the victims of this scandal faced when it came to speaking out.
This article is part of Conversation Insights The Insights team generates long-form journalism derived from interdisciplinary research. The team is working with academics from different backgrounds who have been engaged in projects aimed at tackling societal and scientific challenges.
Understanding these barriers can help us understand, more broadly, why miscarriages of justice often take a long time to surface, especially when they happen at the hands of an employer – and even more so in contexts like the Horizon scandal, where people were quick to believe the technology and blame the user.
Sub-postmasters told they were the ‘only ones’
Viewers of the ITV drama will see that accused sub-postmasters were repeatedly told they were the “only one” having problems with the Horizon system, even when cases like theirs were going on all over the country. We found similar accounts time and again within the public inquiry witness statements, with one witness, Katherine McAlerney, representing the experiences of many when she said: “I was told during my
interview that I was the only one who had a problem like this with the system.”
Another sub-postmaster, Margery Lorraine Williams, recalled:
I confirmed that I had not done anything wrong and asked again about issues with the Horizon system. I was led to believe at this meeting that I was the only sub-postmaster who was having problems with shortfalls. It made me feel stupid that I was the only person who had these issues.
However, the ITV drama quickly moves past this period, and we see the sub-postmasters coming together and finding out about each other’s similar situations. While this is a key turning point in bringing this injustice to light, in reality most of the sub-postmasters suffered for years believing what they had been told – that they were the only one – before becoming aware of any other victims.
In her witness statement, McAlerney said: “I believed firmly that I was the only one until about four years later, when I saw an article about the Horizon system and I thought: ‘Oh my god, that is what happened to me.’”
Another key person whose story we see in the TV drama, Hughie Noel Thomas, was sentenced to nine months in prison in November 2006, based on faulty information from Horizon. A few scenes after we are introduced to Thomas in the drama, he is shown meeting with another key sub-postmaster, Jo Hamilton. In fact, this meeting occurred nearly three years after his sentencing.
Thomas has written a memoir in which he reflects on his feeling of isolation over those three years, and how it discouraged him from speaking out. He wrote:
With no mention anywhere else that any other sub-postmaster had been implicated in the same way as I had been, it all seemed completely hopeless. I was all on my own, in a post-prison hell. And it was a terribly lonely place to be, believe you me.
When we interviewed Thomas near his home in Anglesey, north Wales, about this “in-between” period, he said: “After I went to prison, I was in cuckoo land for three years. I was basically silent about everything until I found the others.” In his memoir, he refers to finding out about other victims as “manna from heaven”.
Another victim we interviewed, Janet Skinner – who pleaded guilty to false accounting and was sent to jail for nine months – told us that she felt similarly isolated, and was also reluctant to speak out publicly about the injustice. Instead, she “tried to bury it” because she too was led to believe she was “the only person who was having any kind of issues with the system”.
Being told they were the only one not only discouraged victims from speaking out, it also planted a seed of self-doubt in many of their minds. As Hamilton, a sub-postmaster from a village in Hampshire, told the public inquiry:
I began to feel like I was going mad and that it was entirely my fault … When he said I was the only one, that’s how I did feel … I thought: Oh God, I must be – you know, I just thought it was me.
This cycle of isolation and self-doubt helps explain why most did not attempt to find other possible victims or try to speak out publicly about the injustice – which contributed to the scandal persisting for so long.
‘Spat on, shouted at and shunned’
There are countless examples of victims of the Horizon IT Scandal being stigmatised in and by their local community. While the drama focuses on the heartwarming story of Hamilton, who received an inordinate amount of support from her local community, most sub-postmasters were not so lucky. In fact, they had quite the opposite experience.
Our analyses of the public inquiry statements reveal the local stigmatisation and shame that many felt. There are vivid accounts of sub-postmasters being spat on, shouted at and shunned. As sub-postmaster Nicola Arch, who had worked for the Post Office since 1993, told the inquiry:
In the village, I couldn’t walk through it without people [thinking]: ‘This is the lady who stole from the pensioners.’ It was all in the local papers. I couldn’t go in the supermarket – the whole place would go silent. Village life was so … almost incestuous. Everyone knew everybody. It was a living nightmare to the point where I refused to leave the house … I stayed indoors and never even went out to the shop for 19 months.
Skinner, one of more than 230 sub-postmasters who were wrongly jailed, told the inquiry: “People automatically assume that you are a thief … You have a stigma. It’s people talking about you and pointing the finger at you. ‘Oh, that’s that woman who nicked all the money from the Post Office. Do you remember?’ I’ve heard that so many times.”
In his memoir, Thomas described how it felt to lose his standing in his community. “I felt this immense sense of shame … Shame for myself, shame for my family, and shame for my community to have been drawn into such a scandal.”
We have also collected and analysed local news reports on the early accusations. Common themes include describing the allegations as “stealing from pensioners” or “having their hand in the till”, and the sub-postmasters frequently being labelled as criminals and thieves and exhibiting a “fall from grace” – even when they were not prosecuted.
This sense of shame is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the negative mental health effects that sub-postmasters experienced from being wrongfully accused. A 2023 study found no difference in the severity of mental health symptoms between the sub-postmasters convicted of criminal offences and those who were investigated, prosecuted or pursued in a civil court. Those who experienced a wrongful accusation had similar negative mental health outcomes as those who were wrongfully convicted.
Our research leads us to believe these feelings of shame and experiences of stigmatisation discouraged people from speaking out about the injustice.
Victims were unable to defend themselves
But what if someone did want to speak out and fight back? Those who did faced an impossible task.
Imagine that, tomorrow morning, you walk into work and are called into your line-manager’s office. They accuse you of something and tell you to gather your personal items as you are being sacked. You try to reassure them you’ve done nothing wrong, and you know that if you can access some files on your computer, you can clear it all up. But when you go to your desk, you see that your computer is gone, along with your access to all your IT systems, emails, documents and archived electronic files.
This is the nightmare reality that sub-postmasters who were accused of theft and false accounting often faced. The Horizon point-of-sale IT system provided them with a very limited paper trail to cross-check their transactions – and when they were investigated, everything was seized from them (even their paperwork) with no notice. As one victim, Keith Macaldowie, recalled during the inquiry:
They closed the office when they suspended me, so I couldn’t gain access. They took all of the keys off me for the post office – the safe and the till – and I was locked out of Horizon.
Those who tried to fight the false accusations had a hard time convincing others that Horizon was at fault. As Lee Castleton, a former sub-postmaster from Bridlington who is profiled in the ITV drama, told us in an interview:
I went to court and lost epically. I couldn’t have done any more. I’d been presented with a problem, a problem that I couldn’t climb over [and] couldn’t get my head around. I couldn’t make other people understand what I was trying to show them.
Castleton was bankrupted by his legal ordeal. Because sub-postmasters did not have the information to prove their innocence, many ended up taking plea bargains. One who prefers to remain anonymous told us he took a plea bargain because he “couldn’t prove that I didn’t do it”. After pleading guilty, he said he wasn’t sure even his parents believed he was innocent until his conviction was overturned. Like so many others, he waited decades for his conviction to be overturned. Many more are still waiting.
In May 2021, a BBC news report revealed that former sub-postmaster Parmod Kalia hid his conviction from his closest family members for 20 years. He only revealed to them what happened when his conviction was overturned.
Overall, we found the lack of access to information that could prove the sub-postmasters’ innocence discouraged them from trying to speak out. This finding is particularly pertinent for workplace disputes, especially in the digital age when someone’s communications are usually all electronic and are technically owned by their employer. It is a frightening reality that if you are suspected of something at work, you can immediately lose access to any information that will prove your innocence.
‘The Queen’s business’
At the time these false accusations were taking place, the Post Office was seen by many as “the nation’s most trusted brand”. The high reputation it had in society further encouraged sub-postmasters to think no one would believe them if they tried to fight the injustices they faced. As one of the victims, Nicola Arch, told us:
Working for the Post Office, it was the Queen’s business. It was very respected, very highly regarded. The Queen acknowledges the Post Office — her face is on the stamps. In that era, everyone believed that it was a very prestigious company to work for, very respected … Everyone thought the Post Office could never be wrong.
Skinner recalled a similar experience when we interviewed her. “I think because of the reputation of the Post Office, people believed them over you – even though you were telling the truth … It was a case of: ‘Well, she must have taken the money, or else why would she have gone to prison?’ So [my response] was more buried than fighting against anything.”
It wasn’t only the general public who had faith in the Post Office. Among both its management and audit team at the time – which we know much more about now through the public inquiry – there was a hierarchical culture in which criticism was not welcomed.
Despite individual appeals by sub-postmasters, Post Office managers did not challenge the leadership or organisation, and apparently believed their systems, including Horizon, were infallible. Over and over again, the Post Office made public statements about Horizon being “robust”.
In a 2021 Court of Appeal decision that cleared the names of dozens of former sub-postmasters, Lord Justice Holroyde said the Post Office knew there were serious issues with the system, yet “consistently asserted that Horizon was robust and reliable” and “effectively steamrolled over any sub-postmaster who sought to challenge its accuracy”.
In interactions with sub-postmasters, the Post Office auditors emphasised that the computer could not be wrong, as shown in the following account from Arch’s witness statement to the inquiry:
[The auditor said:] ‘You popped it in your purse.’ I said: ‘No, I didn’t.’ I told him the daily totals were right and I had evidence to show that, but I couldn’t access it. And he replied that he was not interested in what I said as the computer was the most hi-tech equipment you could wish for, and no one else had had any problems with it.
The myth of ‘infallible systems’
The lack of willingness on the part of the Post Office to even entertain the idea that its IT systems might have a problem discouraged sub-postmasters from trying to resolve the issue with the Post Office directly. It also fuelled their self-doubt about whether this “perfect” system really could have any bugs in it.
This last factor is particularly pertinent for disputes around technology, in which people can easily fall prey to what researchers call “automation bias”, a psychological bias in which people readily discount information that does not conform to what technology advises or has determined.
When injustices comes to light, often years after harm has occurred, we often hear people ask: ‘If this was going on, why didn’t they tell someone? Why are they only saying this now?’
In examining this case, we have found there are numerous legitimate reasons why victims don’t speak up – especially when they are intentionally isolated, experience self-doubt, feel ashamed about what has happened, and are not given access to the vital information they need to prove their innocence against a powerful perpetrator.
It all seems so obvious in hindsight. Sub-postmasters were highly vetted and highly skilled people. Post Office employees have given evidence confirming that sub-postmasters were subject to “good character checks”. Statistically, such a high percentage of them being criminals was very unlikely. This alone should have raised concerns about these accusations, both inside and outside the Post Office.
But Post Office management falsely believed their technological systems were infallible, and dug their heels in at any opportunity to recognise this injustice for what it was.
At the end of the day, this is not a scandal about technological failing. It is a scandal about the gross failure of management to stand up for the human beings who had dedicated so many years of their lives working for ‘the Queen’s business’.
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