Another day, another scandal in Britain’s collapsing public sector. Today’s concerns the country’s courts. A BBC investigation has turned up an internal report, not for public circulation, from HM Courts & Tribunals Service (HMCTS) about an IT bug that deleted or hid information on hundreds of pending cases.

The problem itself was bad enough: Britain’s state IT capacity is very poor, worse than many comparable nations. Things get deleted or disappear; vital information is stolen or hacked. The administrators of these systems are so often simply not up to it. But how this disaster was handled appears to be even worse.

This particular software error, found in ‘case-management software’ variously called Judicial Case Manager, MyHMCTS or CCD, according to the BBC, meant that some data was

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