Fujitsu contract was a Japanese recipe for disaster mixed with all the usual UK ingredients

“Who is he whose chin is but enrich’d with one appearing hair” who has not cursed corporatism? 

One has so many things to dislike. Things largely accelerated by the toxic death ripple of lockdown and the masquerade ball of social conscience. #BeKind as we shut your branch and rip out your cash machine. Deserted customer care centres forever experiencing “unusually high call volumes”. The bad primary school teacher tones, no longer content with firing the staff, they’ll sack the customer too. 

What is the perfect corporation? A people-free automation from production to fulfilment. Even the dividend paid silently, electronically, in the deep dark night.  I, Robot. 

And yet, while part of the Venn diagram, that’s not quite what corporatism means, for all that we’ve folded it into a synonym for big business. 

What it means, of course, is capture. And capture of state or organisation by interest groups. And, oddly, it had at its heart a quasi-Communist collectivism. No surprise then that one of its most successful exponents has been Woke. Though that’s come up late on the rails because, way ahead, a dot in the distance, is what we think of as the corporation.

Think Eisenhower’s industrial military complex. Or the EU. Their very essence is the relationship with the company. The big ones anyway. 

And big counts because 18,500 Consolidated Liberator bombers or 600,000 Willys Jeeps is a lot of solution, a lot of money and an awful lot of vested interests. 

Scale and solution. The corporate offering. And it shouldn’t be dismissed because, as in wartime, we welcome it. As, most of us, welcomed big pharma’s capacity to produce in double-quick time an effective Covid vaccine. Meanwhile, at consumer level, which of us hasn’t staggered, tearfully grateful from some benighted region of the world into the welcoming arms of a Guinness, a Heineken or a Hilton. Ubiquity of standard. The globalisation of taste.  

Not all of which might be condemned as entirely bad. Though the impact on the small trader, the regional offering, ingenuity, creativity, genuine market choice and the capacity of the small to influence the large is obvious from macro to micro. It compels a stark choice between niche specialism or vastness. At which point, the niche specialist is likely to be bought by the giant next door. 

But, to the procurer, boxes are ticked and, yes, I use that expression advisedly and all condensed into an oft-repeated corporate aphorism: “Nobody got fired for hiring IBM.”

One of those boxes, particularly to government, looks like adding free market virtues to state decision-making. On behalf of the taxpayer, we do as the consumer does and look along the shelves for the very best the market has to offer. 

Except, of course, that the free market long ago succumbed to constant consolidation. Take mobile technology. I once worked on the transition between One2One, famed largely for its advertising, and its acquisition by Deutsche Telekom’s wireless division, T-Mobile. At the time engaging in an acquisition rampage across Europe and beyond and its great rival was France’s Orange. And yet now, to quote the Spice Girls and I very rarely do, two become one in the form of EE which, itself, has been folded into BT.

The consumer rationale – as it was when One2One died a death – is a greater resource and an enhanced offering. But of consumer choice, scant mention. 

Similarly, a government defence buyer looking for submissions for a new aircraft might once have chosen between offerings from de Havilland, Bristol, Hawker, Avro, Blackburn, Gloster or English Electric. All of whom, in the aftermath of the war, were perennial and pioneering record holders for first, highest, fastest, most vertical and, one might add, most stylish both in civil and military manufacture. 

Forcibly consolidated for many of the same reasons that rationalised the mobile phone market, one sees scant evidence that this has been reflected in more efficient procurement or similarly world-beating aircraft. Governmental ineptitude combined with the weary chasing of British Aerospace or “our European partners” is embedded. Anyone seen my Nimrod?

Nor is procurement sufficiently interrogatory about reputation. I’m just taking an example off the top of my head here but let’s say, Fujitsu.

As The Spectator helpfully revealed, its reputation in Japan is awful, implicated in system failures for ID cards, the Tokyo stock exchange, ATMs and various other projects.

Crediting the BBC for its investigative journalism, The Speccie says: “The BBC cites Satoshi Nakajima who worked at NTT (Japan’s premier telecommunications company) before becoming a foundational member of Microsoft. Satoshi characterises Fujitsu as a zombie company staggering on thanks to its close relationship with the government. The cozy relationship ensures its continual profitability despite the ossified company culture and inadequate tech capabilities.”

Comforting though it is to find that an inability to deliver an IT system functionally, on time and on budget is not a uniquely British problem, it’s a shame nobody brought this to the attention of the Post Office when it hired Fujitsu to install its system in sub post offices to all the horrendous effects we now know. 

It’s not like Fujitsu doesn’t have previous, having been embroiled in Lorenzo, the failed NHS patient data system.

Swirled into this Japanese recipe for disaster are all the usual UK ingredients. Political heedlessness encouraged by arrogance, vast contracts, unaccountable consultants, honours and post-politics advisory roles on lucrative fees. 

A ghastly SNAFU in which we have been invited to watch an unspeakable troilism between the head of a business, a minister and a corporation. 

Think of the children. And the offspring of this awfulness are the falsely condemned and financially broken of “the sub post office community”.

“What a carve up!” As Jonathon Coe might have said. Except he thought it was all down to Margaret Thatcher who famously mistrusted corporations, as she did all vested interest,  and threw a hankie over a model BA jet when the airline abandoned the Union flag. I wonder what happened to the world’s favourite airline. Consolidated, I should think. 

Meanwhile, as, once again, the tax payer gets bent over, the dividends get paid, the minister ducks the issue and the dishonours are even, it’s worth remembering the old music hall wisdom. 

“It’s the same the ‘ole world over

It’s the poor what gets the blame

It’s the rich what gets the pleasure

Ain’t it all a bleedin’ shame.”

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