Fight the good fight

The little people must be sacred to the big ones, and it is from the rights of the weak that the duty of the strong is comprised.

People of my generation spent much of our youth being told that too much TV would addle our brains, give us square eyes and turn us into unfit couch potatoes. Sometimes though, seeing something on the small – or big – screen is what is needed to really hammer something home.

There are several extremely informative websites, a podcast, a BBC Sounds serial, a You Tube Channel and a rather large book, as well as thousands of  words – including some of my own – on the subject of The Great Post Office Scandal. However, it strikes me that what will really make the general population sit up and take notice of this horrendous scandal is the four-part serial being screen on ITV this week.

Mr Bates Vs The Post Office is compelling viewing. Even though you may want to turn it off halfway through for fear of spontaneously combusting with anger, or sticking a foot through the telly screen. I’ve written about this appalling scandal before, and I probably will again.

The inquiry is still ongoing into how thousands of sub postmasters were systematically bullied, lied to and betrayed by the organisation they worked for. An organisation that is government owned, and had, in theory, government oversight. An organisation that was so in thrall to Big-Tech that it couldn’t conceive of anything being amiss with a new, computer software system. Or, an organisation that was so convinced of its own moral superiority that it could not be seen to be wrong or mistaken. Even though, the Horizon system that was the root cause of all the accounting errors was found to be unfit for the purpose for which it was originally bought – at huge, huge cost.  Horizon was intended to be a way of paying people’s pensions via swipe card, instead of handing a little book over a counter every Friday. It was supposed to reduce the swathes of paperwork feeding those little books generated. It didn’t work. So, to save – money, face, – who knows – the Post Office, and, probably Fujitsu the developers (who needed the Post Office to still buy it), decided to repurpose it as a system for electronic accounting, stock-taking and transaction. This is despite the fact that there were serious doubts, as far back as the early 2000s, as to its effectiveness.

The sub postmasters were lied to again and again, told that they were the only people having trouble with Horizon, that their branch systems were completely closed, and that there was no way that anyone at Fujitsu could gain access to them. They were hounded out of their jobs, their homes, their marriages, in a couple of cases their lives, and into jail, criminal records, and bankruptcy. The Post Office obfuscated, ‘lost’ evidence, and played delaying tactics, in the hope that people would, either give up or run out of money to fight for compensation. It found no evidence of theft or false accounting in some cases, yet pushed for prosecution anyway. It squashed the forensic accountancy report that it funded itself when the findings were not to its satisfaction, and it was only thanks to a leak to the BBC that the full Second Sight report was released.

I could, in all seriousness, write pages and pages about this, about the disgracefulness of it all, about how angry it makes me feel that a trusted institution could treat its own employees so callously. For we do still think of the Post office in rather twee, Miss Marple terms, as the heart of communities, the place where you can buy stamps, and birthday cards, send parcels, pick up your pension and have a bit of chat across the counter with someone who you know and trust. At the sub postmaster level that’s probably still true. Yet at the Post Office Limited level, the organisation has gone corporate. Gone rogue, one might even say.

As yet, no-one apart from the sub-postmasters have had to deal with any serious consequences. No-one had been found responsible, although there are police investigations into two of the people at Fujitsu I believe.

I can only scratch the surface with the space  and time – and mental bandwidth I have here. I urge you to watch the programme Mr Bates Vs The Post Office if you aren’t already. It’s on ITV at 9pm, with parts 3 and 4 on today and tomorrow, and all four episodes are available on ITV X.  Plus, if you want to find out more, this Evening Standard article is a good starting point.

Then there’s there is Nick Wallis’s excellent book The Great Post Office Scandal , The Post Office Scandal website , the BBC Sounds serial which is excellent, but will make you shout at the radio, and probably cry with frustration along with the participants, a Private Eye special  and any number of newspaper articles. But be warned. You will get angry. You will get very angry. And you should. We all should.