Today: institutional accountability and justice in Britain, and why it turns up slower than a Southern Rail train in a snowstorm. Britain loves to brag about being a nation of fairness, decency, moral backbone, the mother of parliaments, the birthplace of the modern legal system. But if you actually look at the last seventy years of British scandals – the ones that destroyed lives and broke families and exposed rot in institutions we pretend are sacred – you find a pattern so consistent, so blatant, so depressingly predictable that it almost starts to feel engineered.
Justice in this country, when it comes to its institutions, isn’t just slow. It isn’t just reluctant. It isn’t just incompetent. It’s strategic. It’s delayed on purpose. It’s managed, massaged, stretched, postponed, deflected, and only reluctantly half-delivered when the state runs out of excuses. We’re not dealing with a system that fails. We’re dealing with a system that functions exactly as designed: protect the institution, delay the truth, apologise when absolutely necessary, and hope everyone dies before compensation becomes adequate.
Look at the Post Office Horizon scandal. The biggest miscarriage of justice in modern British history. Hundreds of postmasters accused of theft, fraud, dishonesty. Ordinary people who ran their local branches, served their communities, knew everyone by name – suddenly treated like criminals because a malfunctioning bit of software decided to hallucinate accounting errors. People lost their savings, their homes, their reputations, their marriages, their children’s futures. Some went to prison. Some took their own lives. And the Post Office – that wonderful national institution we were all raised to trust – spent two decades insisting that they, the victims, were the villains.
Think about that. Twenty years. Two decades of denials, cover-ups, “robust legal action”, and smirking executives insisting the system couldn’t possibly be wrong while it spat out error after error like a cursed slot machine. And when the truth finally surfaced, when they realised the narrative couldn’t hold anymore, when public outrage went nuclear – what was the official response? Shock. Surprise. A tragic misunderstanding. As if two decades of crushing innocent people was just an unfortunate clerical hiccup. As if hundreds of destroyed lives were a minor administrative overstep. As if they hadn’t known from the very beginning that something was wrong.
But they did know. They always know. These institutions don’t delay justice because they’re confused or overwhelmed or short-staffed. They delay justice because it’s their most potent weapon to deny accountability. Delay is their go-to when the truth is dangerous and the consequences are expensive. If you can drag a scandal out long enough, victims die, memories blur, documents get mysteriously lost, public outrage fizzles out, and the whole thing becomes “complex” and “historic” and “regrettable” rather than “holy shit, this was a deliberate institutional betrayal.”
It’s even more obvious with Hillsborough.
Ninety-seven people killed. Families grief-stricken for decades. And what did the state do? It blamed the fans. It smeared them. It lied. It falsified reports. It manipulated evidence. It spread narratives designed to protect the police instead of the public. And then it spent thirty years – thirty years! – refusing to admit the truth that was obvious on day one: the victims were just that, victims, not perpetrators. The only people responsible were the ones in command.
Thirty years of families holding up photographs of dead sons and daughters while politicians, police forces, and lawyers hid behind “ongoing inquiries” and “pending reviews” and “legal sensitivities.” Thirty years of grieving parents getting older, weaker, more tired, while the state perfected the art of bureaucratic suffocation. Thirty years of watching people die one by one, never getting to hear the truth spoken aloud by the institutions that covered it up.
And when justice finally arrived, it was a fucking joke. It arrived as a footnote. A shrug. A headline. A closing paragraph in a government-commissioned report written so carefully it could have been carved out of stone. That’s not justice. That’s timed decay. That’s the state running out the clock.
And then there’s the nuclear veterans. The people who were on Christmas Island when Britain was testing nuclear bombs like a bored teenager playing with fireworks. Young men serving their country, told everything was safe, everything was controlled, everything was fine – while they were being exposed to radiation levels no one bothered to measure until decades after the fact. Men who developed cancers, whose children were born with horrific health conditions, whose families suffered generational trauma. And what did the state do?
It denied everything. For sixty years.
Sixty. Years.
Imagine the coldness required to look an ageing veteran in the eye and say, “No, there’s no evidence your suffering is linked to the nuclear tests,” when you’ve spent half a century making sure no one can gather any evidence in the first place. Imagine watching entire families crumble under the weight of genetic damage and insisting it's all coincidence. Imagine hiding behind secrecy laws, missing paperwork, and “insufficient data” while people who served the country you’re meant to protect are dying in agony.
But again, that’s the strategy. Delay until the witnesses die. Delay until the records disappear. Delay until the victims can’t stand up in public and shout anymore. Delay until the scandal stops being a scandal and turns into a history lesson. And then, when everyone affected is either dead or too tired to fight, you announce a review. A study. A commission. A statement in Parliament delivered in that slow, somber tone politicians use when they’re pretending to care. And the whole country nods along as if something meaningful has happened.
And then, after all that, after decades of cruelty and denial and delay, the government finally announces compensation schemes. Except the compensation is always too slow, too small, too conditional, too bureaucratic, and too late. The Post Office victims were sent cheques that couldn’t even cover their legal fees. The nuclear veterans waited so long that some lived just long enough to see the country admit they weren’t lying, before dying without ever seeing a penny. And the Hillsborough families? They got truth eventually – but not justice.
Justice delayed isn’t just justice denied. It’s justice, intentionally avoided. And if justice only arrives after decades of suffering, after families are destroyed, after lives are lost, after generations have been scarred – then it isn’t justice at all. It’s a belated PR clean-up.
The deeper you look, the clearer the pattern becomes. It’s not that the system breaks down in moments of crisis. It’s that the system only breaks down for ordinary people. It works just fine for the institutions tasked with protecting themselves. It works just fine for the powerful. It works just fine for the managers, the executives, the ministers, the senior officers who sign off on decisions that ruin lives and then quietly retire with honours, pensions, and memoir deals.
If you think this is all ancient history, wait and watch closely – Grenfell is heading exactly the same way. Years of inquiries, years of reports, years of experts pointing at the same obvious failures, and when the truth finally does emerge, it’ll come packaged as a sombre, sanitised narrative that insists no one is to blame, everyone acted in good faith, lessons have been learned, and no further questions will be taken at this time. The families will age, the truth will be delayed, and the state will quietly hope the public eventually forgets that an entire tower burned with its inhabitants inside while the people responsible for the cladding industry were already drafting their defences.
And what’s truly maddening isn’t just the slowness. It’s the way the slowness is dressed up as virtue. As caution. As thoroughness. As respect for due process. When in reality it’s none of those things. It’s cowardice disguised as professionalism. It’s self-preservation dressed as procedure. It’s delay masquerading as diligence.
Imagine if the justice system in this country actually moved with speed when ordinary people were involved. Oh wait – it does. When you’re poor, when you’re powerless, when you’re one step behind on your bills or one step ahead of a parking fine, the system becomes a Formula One pit crew. Letters arrive instantly. Bailiffs appear like summoned demons. Benefit investigations move at the speed of light. But when the state itself might be to blame? Suddenly everything slows to a snail’s pace, wrapped in red tape, tied to committees, pushed to inquiries that take longer to produce a conclusion than it takes to raise a child.
If Britain delivered justice fast and appropriately, half of its institutions would collapse under the weight of their own wrongdoing. The police would be in crisis every decade. The Ministry of Defence would be writing compensation cheques like it was signing autographs. The Post Office would have been restructured twenty years ago. Local councils would be in court weekly. Government departments would be gutted. The whole house of cards would wobble.
The British state has turned delay into an art form. It knows that if you drag things out long enough, people give up. People lose hope. People run out of money. People lose their health. People lose their will. And most importantly, people lose their audience. The public forgets. The news cycle moves on. The scandal becomes background noise. And the state survives.
And that’s the part of this that really gets under my skin – the survival instinct of institutions always winning out over a basic sense of humanity. The Post Office protected itself instead of the people who ran its branches. The police protected themselves instead of the families at Hillsborough. The Ministry of Defence protected its legacy instead of the nuclear veterans who served under its orders. Every time, the same logic applies: institutions believe they matter more than the people they claim to serve.
We talk about these scandals like they’re isolated tragedies. But they’re not. They’re symptoms of a culture. A culture where the people in power would rather destroy lives than admit they were wrong. A culture where mistakes are not corrected but concealed. A culture where transparency is treated as a risk and accountability as a luxury. A culture that sees victims as PR problems and truth as a reputational hazard.
The damage goes far beyond the scandals themselves. Every delayed apology, every withheld admission, every grudging payout delivered decades too late chips away at the public’s belief in the idea that Britain is fundamentally fair. It erodes trust. It corrodes faith. It turns cynicism into the default setting – which is fucking worrying.
What happens to a country when cynicism becomes entrenched? People stop believing their institutions can be fixed, so they don’t fight them – they simply walk away from them. They stop voting, stop engaging, stop caring, because why would you participate in a game you’re convinced is rigged? And when that happens, corruption doesn’t just continue – it accelerates, because no one’s watching anymore. The rot sets in quietly, confidently, knowing the public expects nothing better. Then the real dangers turn up – the extremists, the opportunists, the charismatic arseholes who promise simple answers to complicated problems. An apathetic, cynical nation is the perfect breeding ground for anyone who wants power without scrutiny. Cynicism dissolves the social contract; it tells people that if the government doesn’t play by the rules, then neither should they. It kills collective action because everyone assumes everyone else is too jaded to bother. It kills hope because imagining a better future feels childish. A country that stops trusting doesn’t just lose faith in its institutions – it loses faith in itself.
So what do we do? The honest answer is bleak. We have to build a system where institutions don’t get to investigate themselves. We have to build timelines that don’t let the state run out the clock. We need independent bodies with teeth, not inquiries designed to pacify the public. We need a culture that values truth over reputation, people over institutions, accountability over optics. But right now, we don’t have that. We have the opposite.
And until that changes, this cycle will continue. More scandals. More victims. More denials. More delays. More public apologies delivered long after the people who needed them have vanished from the world. More destroyed families honoured only in hindsight. More truth arriving decades late to a room full of empty chairs.