How to remedy an injustice ignored by politicians: make a good television series

It took a good television series to put a human face on a scandal whose complexity bored the British political class for two decades and failed to capture the public’s imagination. And what’s so strange about that? The popular classical historian and Mary Beard posted on the X social media platform, “the real power of arts and drama (expertise that is being starved of funding). [The] message is: we need to fund the arts.”

Mr Bates vs the Post Office, whose first episode aired on January 1 on ITV, unleashed the anger and sadness of 3.9 million viewers . The prestigious British actor Toby Jones (star of films such as Capote and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy) gave a face and voice to the battle that Alan Bates waged against the UK government for two decades.

“Arrogance and ignorance”

Post offices in the United Kingdom operate as franchises, operated by self-employed owners subcontracted by Post Offices Limited, which is owned by the British government. At the end of the 1990s, the company’s management imposed a new digital accounting and inventory management system on all these small businesses. HorizonIT had been developed by the Japanese technology company Fujitsu. It was a logical and necessary program in its objective, but it had been poorly developed and poorly tested, which immediately caused duplications and errors that altered accounts.

Between 1999 and 2015, more than a thousand post office owners (subpostmasters) were accused of fraud and embezzlement and taken to trial. The discrepancies that the system detected amounted to thousands, or tens of thousands of pounds. These were very high figures for the small domestic economy of the franchisees. In many other cases — there were 3,500 in total — the subpostmasters were not were not taken to court, but those affected, fearful of losing their license, mortgaged their homes, dipped into their savings, or went bankrupt. Hundreds of them had criminal records for years. Many had to serve community service sentences. At least four suicides have been directly linked to the case, defined by the British media as “the biggest miscarriage of justice in the history of the United Kingdom.”

“I have always said that it was a matter of arrogance and ignorance. [Postal management] did not have the necessary skills or experience to implement such a computer program. It could have been a good thing, helping to modernize the company, but I think, among other things, they bought the cheapest system on the market,” the real Alan Bates explained to ITV’s Good Morning Britain program.

Representing a group that included at least five hundred affected people, Bates fought in court for years. The Post Office management focused all its efforts to avoid falling into ridicule, which almost translated into a desire for revenge against subpostmasters who questioned the organization’s professionalism. “They had the money, they had the muscle and the power in the face of tiny owners who tried to challenge them,” says Bates.

In 2019, British justice ruled in favor of a group of victims. Two years later, a higher court confirmed the sentence on appeal. The convictions were declared unjust, paving the way for possible compensation. All this time, however, the UK Post Office has dragged its feet when it comes to paying, and has continued to fight individual claims in court, at the expense of the public purse. Of the nine hundred judicial convictions, only 142 appeal procedures have been completed. Nearly £25 million ($30.6 million) in compensation has been paid, but dozens of victims have already died without receiving a penny of it.

During all this time, salt has been rubbed into the wound, when it became known that some of the compensations were significantly reduced after taxes were applied to them. Or that almost $2.1 million were distributed in bonuses to Post Office managers, and one of the indexes to measure this remuneration was the degree of effort put into fighting against the subpostmasters’ compensation claims.

One million signatures

One million Britons have already signed a petition to withdraw the Commander of the British Empire honor from Paula Vennells, who, in addition to being a former businesswoman and former Anglican priest, was executive director of the Post Office from 2012 to 2019. Sunak’s government has welcomed the petition. “New evidence has shown that the Post Office was involved in a massive cover-up that led to the unjust convictions of hundreds of workers who were imprisoned, made bankrupt and, in some sad cases, even took their own lives,” said Chris Wormald, president of the parliamentary commission on Confiscation of Assets and Privileges, which is in charge of recommending the withdrawal of honors.

The Prime Minister himself, Rishi Sunak, has confirmed that he has given the order to his government’s Justice chief, Alex Chalk, to study how to accelerate getting aid and compensation to the victims of the scandal.

And the political ramifications have not stopped there. The current leader of the Liberal Democrat Party, Ed Davey, currently in full swing in the face of the foreseeable Conservative electoral defeat in the general election scheduled for the end of the year, was Secretary of State for Postal Affairs between 2010 and 2012, and many of the victims have demanded his resignation.

Actor Toby Jones has acknowledged that he was one of the millions of people who ignored the scandal for years. Hearing the word Post Office in the news meant that I inevitably stopped paying attention to something that, by necessity, had to be as tedious and unstimulating as the institution itself. “It is shocking to understand how scandalous this matter is. And when people watch the series, if we have done our job well, they will witness a desire for revenge and a lack of meaning in everything that happened that makes you wonder how it is possible that all this was not talked about more,” he says.

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