The abuse of unaccountable power is at the wicked heart of the post office scandal

To the widely voiced reasons to admire Alan Bates, the heroically dogged leader of the campaign to achieve justice for the victims of the Post Office scandal, let me add another. The man is the master of understatement. When the government was finally impelled to announce that it will legislate to quash hundreds of wrongful convictions, he remarked: “It’s about time.” After the wicked things that were inflicted on the casualties of this scandal, most of us would have inserted at least a “bloody” into that response.

This swamp of malignancy has been devouring innocent people for a quarter of a century. Twenty-five years have passed since the Post Office started its vicious persecution of branch managers by falsely accusing more than 3,000 of crimes that included fraud and theft. The Post Office was the real thief, and not just of the money extorted from those upon whom it preyed. It ruined reputations, livelihoods and health. Marriages were wrecked, family homes lost. Many were bankrupted and the Post Office stole the liberty of the 236 who were imprisoned. The term “miscarriage of justice” is much too tepid to describe this shocker. It was a perversion of justice.

More than four years have gone by since Mr Bates and his fellow campaigners won a significant victory in the high court when their case exploded the deception that there was nothing defective about the Horizon accounting system supplied to the Post Office by Fujitsu. The judge found that the software was not “remotely robust” and the Post Office was in “denial” about its flaws. The police started investigating in 2020 and a public inquiry was established the same year. More than two years have elapsed since dozens of false convictions were overturned by the court of appeal in a ruling that declared all of the Horizon-related prosecutions were “an affront to the conscience of the court”. And yet it is only now that the conscience of Westminster has been sufficiently stirred for the government to propose remedies. And only after the intense public outrage generated by the compelling ITV drama, Mr Bates vs The Post Office....

A mounting pile of evidence suggests the government-owned organisation and its corporate collaborator sought to conceal their own blunders to protect their brands, profits and the reputations of senior executives at the expense of innocent people. There are parallels with how South Yorkshire police tried to cover up its deadly mistakes at the Hillsborough football stadium disaster by smearing its casualties as hooligans. For the title of his report into that scandal, the Right Reverend James Jones, a former Bishop of Liverpool, chose “The patronising disposition of unaccountable power”.

(More at link; by Andrew Rawnsley in 'The Guardian'):

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