When Alan Bates ploughed his savings into buying a rural Welsh post office, he was hoping for a quiet life. He would have time to walk the hills of Snowdonia, he thought, while his partner could pursue her love of arts and crafts.
But all that ended abruptly when a new Post Office computer system identified an apparent shortfall in their takings. The decision to fight back cost the couple their livelihood, but helped expose perhaps the biggest miscarriage of justice in British history. It was caused by a faulty computer system, but aggravated by years of corporate backside-covering inside the Post Office, which heaped shame and ruin on hundreds of innocent people by prosecuting them for supposed false accounting, thefts and fraud they’d never actually committed. Perhaps you already knew the whole blood-boiling story, of course. But perhaps, like millions of others, your eyes were only really opened by last week’s spellbinding ITV docudrama Mr Bates vs the Post Office.
Rishi Sunak now says he is exploring how to “make things right”, perhaps by exonerating victims en masse instead of making each apply individually to have their convictions quashed before they can begin the long, bureaucratic process of securing full compensation. Some have died without seeing justice. So why, many want to know, did it take a TV drama to spark action? Why weren’t real people, talking about real bankruptcies and breakdowns and suicides, as compelling as actors pretending?
For this was no bolt from the blue. Led by the BBC, Private Eye and Computer Weekly, media outlets have been slowly chipping away at the story for almost 20 years now – none more doggedly than the reporter Nick Wallis, whose book The Great Post Office Scandal was serialised three years ago in the Daily Mail, long exercised by what it saw as an assault on the honest small shopkeepers of middle England. Thanks partly to the efforts of a cross-party parliamentary campaign led by the former Tory minister James Arbuthnot, there is a public inquiry under way, and the Metropolitan police are four years into an investigation. It’s the sort of complicated and slow-burning story – requiring patience and expensive lawyers and perseverance in the face of outright lies in return for very little glory – that old-fashioned journalism was born for, but which you’ll never hear about if you get your news from whatever goes viral on X/Twitter. A better question is why, given so many people were at least vaguely familiar with the story, it somehow never reached the same urgent political tipping point as, say, bringing back blue passports.
In her book The Abuse of Power, which is about why genuinely terrible wrongs take so long to right, Theresa May writes of her decision (as the incoming home secretary) to honour an outgoing Labour government’s commitment to a Hillsborough investigation, despite one nameless colleague arguing it was “all so long ago that it was best to let sleeping dogs lie”. Often the wheels of justice grind slowly because victims are stigmatised and institutions close ranks, reckoning that if they stonewall long enough then eventually their misdeeds will be deemed too ancient to exhume. But perhaps the most common reason nothing gets done is that doing something would be expensive, and governments are instinctively reluctant to pay out for their predecessors’ mistakes.
Half a century on from the contaminated blood scandal, in which 30,000 people were given blood products contaminated with HIV or hepatitis C, ministers have accepted the moral case for compensation and made some interim payments, but have still argued the rest should wait for the conclusion of the public inquiry. Other campaigns never even get this far: think of the British veterans who say they suffered high rates of cancer and birth defects in their children after supervising the testing of nuclear weapons in the 1950s and 60s, and are still fighting merely to extract their medical records from the state.
In the case of the Post Office, none of the three parties’ hands are entirely clean, which may help explain why none have made a crusade of this. Public concern about Horizon initially surfaced under a Labour government but intensified under David Cameron’s coalition. Though some are energetically seeking to make a fall guy out of the Liberal Democrat leader, Ed Davey, who was a relatively junior postal affairs minister in that coalition, it’s successive Conservative governments that have presided over the cleanup process. Sunak himself was at the Treasury when Boris Johnson set up the current public inquiry, and admits he signed off on compensation. Though politicians will have been rightly wary of overriding an independent judiciary, cynics will note that the snail’s pace at which the Horizon convictions are being re-examined by the courts – with Post Office lawyers challenging them all the way – doesn’t half spread out the likely nine-figure cost of compensation, whether by accident or design.
One lesson is that the most dangerous period for campaigners can be after they’ve won the long-fought victory, when everyone assumes it’s all now sorted; in a world with too many newer injustices, the bureaucratic grind of actually getting what was promised is easily overlooked. But another is that the difference between campaign failure and success can be uncomfortably arbitrary. Often it’s one unexpectedly human moment that unlocks progress, whether it’s Andy Burnham being booed at Anfield while marking the Hillsborough anniversary and resolving to push one last time for an inquiry, or a photograph that changes the way we view the world. Ironically, in this case it took fiction to get at the truth.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
