I will have to watch Mr Bates vs The Post Office on catch-up, I have had a busy time of it lately. This isn’t a review of the series, it’s a comment on the power of TV drama.
I am pleased that the Post Office Horizon scandal is finally getting noticed. It is a national scandal and that Fujitsu and the Post Office have got away with it for so long is an indictment of the British Justice System that has too often been seen to look after its own.
If you want to read an in-depth report on what actually happened , I’d recommend this.
Private Eye remain the scourge of the establishment , not least because their writers know the establishment.
You can also read the report here and download from SlideShare.
For me , the story is about the continuing power of television to make a difference.
This story has been in the “public domain” for two decades. But it is not till the current series of programs , being screened on ITV at peak time, that the scandal has escalated.
The power of TV drama trumps PDFs from Private Eye and that is right. But without the ongoing work of Private Eye and many others, the scandal would have been lost from sight. Which is presumably what those responsible for it had hoped for.
Indeed , those in position to look into the matter and deal with it earlier, seem to have been blind to the possibility that organisations like the Post Office and Fujitsu could be anything but truthful.
“I regret not doing more. I feel, to be honest with you, I was deeply misled by Post Office executives.”
Ed Davey responds to former sub-postmaster Alan Bates, who wants to know why the former minister didn’t do more when he was minister for postal affairs. @MattChorley pic.twitter.com/die7dFGPnZ
— Times Radio (@TimesRadio) January 3, 2024
Ironically, one of the things that people buy at Post Office Counters is a TV licence. While ITV – who made this – do not get the licence money, they are its secondary beneficiaries.
While Private Eye and others have campaigned for the accused post office workers, it has taken a TV series and most powerfully a TV drama, to exercise the general public,
Mainstream television still has the power to bring us together like nothing else. Youtube, Amazon and Netflix and other streaming services sit behind the main channel listing, but we are still attracted to programming – the timed event of a first release.
And so long as we have mainstream programmers who are prepared to devote airtime to subjects such as this scandal and do so in an even-handed manner, we have a good reason to pay the TV licence.
Justice lost in the post
If you want to read the judgement made in favour of Mr Bates and against the Post Office, you can read it here. It’s dry stuff and though it gave the right result, it did not result in general justice. We learn this week from the BBC that
to date, 93 convictions have been overturned and of those, only 27 people have agreed “full and final settlements”.
Some 54 cases have resulted in a conviction being upheld, people being refused permission to appeal or the person appealing withdrawing from the process, according to the Post Office.
Even worse
The executive chairman of Hudgells, one of the law firms acting for the claimants, says the TV drama has been instrumental in encouraging new cases to come forward.
“The majority of [those 50 new enquiries]… were not prosecuted but lost their livelihoods, lost their homes,” he said.
“But there’s a small handful of people who were convicted that have come forward, three in total at the moment, which is obviously a tiny number proportionate to those that are still out there.”
That it takes the power of a TV drama to get the wrongly treated to come forward and stand up for themselves , reminds me just how heavy the weight of the justice system is on ordinary people and how so many of us are cowed into accepting injustice because we implicitly trust the system,
The “system” is more than the obvious scapegoats who we now demand are stripped of honours and property as well as reputation. We will not change the system by retribution but we may empower more people like those who are mentioned above to get up and stand up for their rights.
As well as there appearing to be an IT scandal, I’m frankly surprised there seems to be little or no comment about the apparent legal scandal.
When a group of 555 sub-postmasters “win” a class action and the Post Office negotiates a £58m compensation settlement, £46m of it goes towards legal costs leaving the sub-postmasters with less than £12m.
Had some lawyer proposed that division to me, I think I would have said they’d got it the wrong way round. The sub-postmasters should have got at least £46m, while the lawyers and others can fight amongst themselves over less than £12m.
Surely all legal costs should have been awarded to the claimants and therefore paid by the Post Office, and then quite separately, compensation should have been separately awarded to the claimants themselves. What is crushingly devastating is how those in charge of Fujitsu and the Royal Mail have escaped proper scrutiny, and how little if anything has been done to launch a criminal investigation into the likely wide scale cover up that led to the wrongful conviction of so many innocent people. This silly petition about Paula Vennells losing her CBE is a sideshow. It is not retribution motivating the outcry against Vennells and her colleagues though. Rather it is the quest for justice and punishment for their grievous wrongdoing. Quite how she is allowed to be the Chair of the Imperial College NHS Trust is a scandal. She should never be appointed ever again to any public sector appointment, and should be disqualified from holding any board director position as an unfit person. This is not retribution at all, it is to protect people from the harm that self interest can wreak on others.
I do agree with you that there is a difference between retribution and “setting things right”. People in senior manager positions need to feel a duty to do the right thing that surpasses their duty to their shareholders and their own careers. Above all, we need senior people to ask proper questions and stand up for what is right.
Would the Ark pension scandal not make an equally good TV drama?