London Diary: Racism behind Asian postmasters’ prosecution?

Much of Britain’s privatised post office network is run by expats from the subcontinent, especially Indians. So, when what has been billed as the ‘most widespread miscarriage of justice in UK history’ came to light, Indians accounted for the bulk of victims.

The scandal relates to more than 900 postmasters who were wrongly prosecuted for false accounting based on information from a flawed computer system called the Horizon introduced in 1999.

It was later found to have a bug which caused it to falsely record shortfalls in the day’s collection—sometimes running into thousands of pounds.

Despite postmasters complaining about the system, bosses accused them of stealing money, insisting that there was nothing wrong with the IT system, ruled by the High Court as ‘not being remotely robust’.

It has now emerged that the postmasters may have also been a casualty of institutional racism because of their ethnicity. Anjana and Baljit Sethi used to run two branches, which they told the BBC, “went from business success to financial ruin”.

Their son Adeep said his family were “not surprised” about the use of racist language in the investigation, which has become a “drip feed of scandal after scandal”.

The Post Office has apologised for using racist terms to describe postmasters wrongly investigated, after an internal document showed that fraud investigators were asked to group suspects based on racial features.

Dozens of convictions have since been overturned and many sub-postmasters are in line for compensation. Some were driven to commit suicide and some died while fighting for justice.

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Back to school to read those signs

Looking for signs of racism or sexism in your white, male, middle-class boss? Watch how they react when you’re talking. If you see them rolling their eyes or looking at their mobile phones, it can be evidence of sexual or racial discrimination.

Or, at least, those are some of the things that British civil servants are being trained to avoid doing when listening to their non-white/ female colleagues at staff meetings, as these can be interpreted as ‘microaggressions’.

‘More than £160,000 have been spent by the government since 2021, hiring private sector consultants to train staff to see these perceived slights’, revealed an investigation by the Times.

The training was introduced after a spate of complaints about microaggressions brought to employment tribunals by ethnic minority and female employees.

A British woman of Indian descent complained that she was the victim of racial discrimination when bosses raised their eyebrows at each other while she was talking.

With no official definition of ‘microaggression’, public servants are being given several meanings. One group was reportedly told: “Microbehaviours are tiny, often unconscious gestures, and tone of voice which can influence how included (or not included) the people around us feel.”

Most said that the training did nothing to enhance their awareness and they would not recommend it to others.

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A storm in a tea cup? Not quite...

One wonders how old-fashioned Brits, who think they alone know the ‘right way’ of doing certain things, would react to the Indian style of making tea.

They would probably choke on their ‘perfect’ cuppas at the sight of tea leaves, milk, sugar and water being thrown into a pan and boiled into a thick brew.

Right now, however, the targets of their scorn are their allies across the pond— Americans who microwave their tea rather than doing it the good old British way, i.e. brew it in a nice china kettle before pouring it into a previously warmed cup, preferably using a filter.

Even the US ambassador to London, Jane Hartley, has been dragged into the row. She told a British American business reception that great damage had been done to her country’s reputation after a TikTok video of one of her compatriots making tea in a microwave went viral.

At least one Briton was so concerned that they sent Hartley a kettle with the message: ‘Please stop making tea in a microwave. It is so uncivilised.’

Hartley, on her part, was quick to distance herself from such ‘uncivilised’ behaviour. “I never microwave my tea,” she said, adding for good measure that her favourite blend was English Breakfast.

Can diplomacy get any richer?

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Decoding political spin

Politicians are known to be notoriously evasive when answering difficult questions, but Britain’s Labour Party leader Keir Starmer, the country’s putative next prime minister, has raised it to a whole new level.

Asked to clarify his party’s ambiguous views on the war in Gaza in an interview with the British Vogue magazine, he said: ‘We all want a ceasefire. We all want the hostilities to end. We all want to get the hostages released.

That will end with serious politics and the sort of discussions I’ve been having with the political leaders who, in the end, will bring this about.’ Capiche?

And, lastly, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s income jumped by more than £250,000 last year as he earned a total of £2.2 million—a 13 per cent increase mostly from share sales and dividends from his investments, according to his tax returns.