Pop your teeth-grinding guards in and gather round, because it’s time to talk about the Post Office scandal again. It remains something of a downer that the most widespread injustice in British legal history doesn’t get the full-spectrum fever coverage that is lavished on more frivolous news – but then, the forces formerly known as The Man have always wanted this one covered up. Don’t worry if you’re only belatedly catching up. The second-best time to start absolutely losing your mind that any of it was allowed to happen is right now, while the official inquiry is under way and precisely NO ONE has yet been held accountable for the ruin of hundreds of completely innocent lives, and the causing of deep suffering in thousands more.
Box office-wise, despite its slow burn, the Post Office story has it all. It’s a tale of total corporate psychopathy, a mad Kafka-esque nightmare in which totally innocent subpostmasters, the very backbone of villages and communities, were turned into criminals to cover up the fact that the Post Office’s Horizon computer system didn’t work properly. Each was told by the Post Office that no one else had any problems with the system. Vast sums were effectively looted from them to make up accounting shortfalls, before they were prosecuted anyway. Distraught subpostmasters were imprisoned pregnant, or still in their teens, or on their young child’s birthday, or in their old age, or in high-security jails where they saw and suffered terrible things. At least 60 have died without seeing justice or compensation; at least four took their own lives. Countless victims were driven into physical and mental problems from which they have never recovered.
