The Great Post Office scandal is now getting full exposure thanks to the ITV dramatisation, but I remember listening to the BBC Radio series about this a few years ago. I was driving, listening to the podcast with my mouth wide open. ‘Can you believe this?’, I cried out to my wife and kids. ‘This is beyond the pale!’.

I believe Private Eye and other journalists ensured the story bubbled away for the years prior to this.  For anyone picking up on the story, early or late, we all asked the same question.

‘How could this happen in our country?’

It is, without doubt, one of the biggest stains on our county’s sense of decency and fair play. It is also the biggest malfunction arising from the whole era of technocratic, market-based, ‘loadsamoney’, so-called ‘reforms’ that have vandalised our society and undermined our moral sense of solidarity. It is Mrs Thatcher’s legacy.

This Christmas, there have been further (albeit, far less consequential ones) examples of this hyper-capitalism, this disdain for the customer, or client (let’s get the words right) and, increasingly, employee.

We flew to Spain with Ryanair. The whole experience was dreadful. As I get older, the preparation for the flight gets more fraught. How many bags have we booked? What size do they have to be? Why do I have to pay to choose a seat? Can’t you just allocate me one?!

I booked four flights, one of which would be for my son on the way over, but for another son on the way back. Surely just change the name, no?

Oh, how naive. For this name change would incur a charge of £118, Yes, just to change a bloody name. Now, I don’t know the administrative time it would take for someone to change the name on the flight manifest, but surely not £118 worth? This is pure profiteering, and shows absolute disdain for the customer.

Our New Year’s Eve dinner party (a Spanish tradition for my wife, her sister and her husband) cost at least 50% more than last year, but the quantity and quality of food, wine and music was significantly poorer. It felt they were rushing though it with no thought for the customer. A reminder than desperate capitalism is not confined to the UK and Ireland.

We’ve arrived back to parking charges. Again, a minor infraction from one of my boys (trying to get to his university lecture) is charged at £50 with threat of this rising. This is entirely disproportionate. He’s threatened with jail. What?

Then there is the whole PPE scandal, another morality tale of vulture capitalism. Baroness, or is it Lady, Mone. How could that happen?

And then I look at the decrepit state of our roads, our trains, our high streets, our Health Service, just everything. And exacerbated by our terrible weather (out of the government’s control I admit, but climate change?… just saying).  

So what has this all got to with education?

Well, I feel there is a strong link. Just in the way many operators in the private sector see people as rocks or stones, to be split open revealing something inside that they can go on and sell. Ore, or jewels. We are being mined.

So it is that our education system has allowed some (but thankfully not all) to see children, or staff, or parents, yes parents, as vehicles to deliver a target, an outcome, a performance measure. Any collateral damage, the splitting of the rock, is insignificant in the pursuit of these (often arbitrary, and forever changing) targets.

I think of the death of Ruth Perry. This might, should, be the moment when all of us have stopped and thought, ‘What on earth are we doing?’. Treating people as sedentary stones to be ravaged. Collateral damage.

It’s time for change. We have to dispose of this rabid capitalism, and return to something more in tune with people and their communities.

As Lee Castleton, one of the postmasters so horribly slandered in the Post Office scandal, said on the Laura Kuenssberg show this morning, ‘It’s not about money, it’s about people.’

It’s time for change.