A week since ITV’s Mr Bates vs the Post Office aired, and can you hear that sound? Can you feel the gathering thunder of politicians’ hooves, as the herd suddenly migrates towards the great plains of looking busy, of seeming outraged, of suddenly giving a toss?
“Everyone has been shocked by watching what they have done over the past few days,” declared Rishi Sunak on Sunday, acting for all the world like he had found out about the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British legal history from a TV programme. Which he didn’t. Of the pursuit of more than 900 innocent subpostmasters, some of whom were jailed, and the ruined lives of many more, the prime minister explained: “Obviously it’s something that happened in the 90s.” Which it isn’t. Prosecutions of innocent postmasters happened up until 2015, with the coalition government in place for the years in which the Post Office allegedly mounted a full-scale cover-up of the injustice it continued to mete out. Former Post Office CEO Paula Vennells was awarded a CBE in 2019. Which is also not in the 90s. And, just as I was writing this, she’s only gone and handed it back.
The Post Office scandal is about two things. First, the ease with which corporate executives were able to pursue, demonise and destroy completely innocent people, particularly using the justification that technology should always be trusted over humans. And second, the ease with which those bigwigs have been able to escape any accountability themselves for doing something far, far worse than anything they wrongly accused their most junior underlings of. They escaped it for decades, and are still escaping it. It is not just Vennells who has questions to answer far beyond the issue of that CBE. There is a whole host of senior figures from the Post Office, Royal Mail and Fujitsu (which supplied and maintained the Horizon system) who were involved in or stood by the long-term policy of pursuing and privately prosecuting postmasters, as well as successive ministers from the Gordon Brown administration onwards who were made aware of the problems and either didn’t really listen or chose to believe the Post Office. These are all people we should be furiously keen to hear more from.
Not for them the maximum-security prisons, the social ostracisation, the bankruptcies, the mental and physical breakdowns, the giving birth wearing an electronic tag. Ministers come and go but the executives failed upwards. The upper tiers of business in this country seem almost impossible to be cast out from. One simply moves on lucratively elsewhere. A certain status of person in our society can be imprisoned for theft (or for non-theft, as it would turn out). Yet for actions that led to the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British legal history, to the ruination of hundreds of lives – well, not one person has ever even been charged. In a lot of cases, they seem to have been promoted.
At last, one of our many successive governments looks like it is going to do something serious about the compensation and overturned convictions part of the subpostmasters story – but only because they can see the nation demands it. One thing we shouldn’t have any truck with is people complaining that it took a TV drama to raise the issue to outraged national consciousness. I’ve been in touch over the past couple of days with several people either involved in this story, or who produced the earliest journalism on it, and you won’t find a single one of them begrudging the way the scandal has finally gone nuclear. They are simply thrilled that somehow, anyhow, we might be moving closer to resolution for the victims. Forgive me – the surviving victims.
Some thought ITV booking Nigel Farage for I’m a Celebrity would have a huge impact on public life. In fact it won’t affect where he goes from now, one way or the other – that path was already set. But the ITV drama department’s decision to commission Mr Bates vs the Post Office is far more significant, and will be one of those rare TV dramas down the years that has a massive and measurable social impact. The story now leads the news in the mainstream media every single day. Many people found out about it for the first time after watching the programme; many more only registered the scale and scandal of it having seen this complex tale of computer systems and accounting now dramatically rendered. That is public service broadcasting at its best and most powerful.
Those hungry to learn more are directed to the public inquiry happening right now – it restarts this week after the Christmas break – to which the Post Office has repeatedly failed to hand over evidence. From Thursday, the inquiry will hear testimony from a series of those who worked for Fujitsu. Or will it? Last summer, on the eve of a crucial evidence session from a former Fujitsu engineer, the Post Office suddenly found 4,767 documents it had neglected to disclose, so the witness’s appearance was dramatically called off. There are frequently multiple significant documents that lawyers believe the Post Office and Fujitsu are not disclosing, as well as other evidence.
Also last summer, unbelievably, it emerged that the current CEO of the Post Office had actually run a bonus scheme to reward executives for cooperating with the inquiry – surely their most basic civic and moral duty. This was at the same time that 81-year-old former subpostmaster Francis Duff finally received £330,000 compensation for having lost everything during the scandal – only for the official receiver (part of the Department for Business) to immediately claw back £322,000 of it to cover bankruptcy and owed income tax. He couldn’t afford to heat his home last winter.
Meanwhile, I keep reading that the Post Office has been compensating victims (however slowly or in many cases not at all). In fact, two years ago, the Post Office asked the government to step in to pay the bill or else it would be insolvent. The government agreed. So the entity compensating victims has largely been the taxpayer. Us. Again, bit weird to think the then chancellor Rishi Sunak affects to have learned about the story from the telly last week, but there you are. Fujitsu has not paid a penny in compensation, instead picking up billions of pounds of further government contracts and continuing to do so.
Finally (for now), I will say the Post Office scandal has hundreds of human tragedies at its heart – but it is not a natural disaster. These types of victims exist because there are perpetrators, and unless those involved are held to account, we will continue to present as a society with one rule and endless get-outs for executives, and quite another for the little people. The inquiry continues. The story continues. Stay angry, and keep watching.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
