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.
The prime minister is looking to get some credit for the plan to exonerate everyone who was falsely convicted and expedite the payment of compensation. Whatever sums are paid out, no amount of money can give people back the years of their lives that have been stolen from them. It is tragically too late for those who died waiting for the justice they were so long denied. It is thought that around 60 of the victims have already passed away, at least four driven to suicide by the anguish inflicted by an arm of the state grotesquely abusing its power.
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”.
Justice for the victims of Hillsborough and their loved ones was long delayed by the inclination of far too much of officialdom and far too many politicians to side with powerful Goliaths rather than the citizen. Unaccountable power unleashed the suffering endured by the casualties of the Windrush scandal. It is again to be found at the heart of this one. Civil servants who were supposed to scrutinise the Post Office’s senior management gave them the benefit of the doubt when they relentlessly and falsely denied there was anything malfunctional about the Fujitsu software, while disdaining to take seriously the “little people” who were protesting their innocence. Ministers with supervisory responsibilities came and went, swallowing the lies told to them by the Post Office, rather than asking themselves the commonsense question: why have so many upstanding members of local communities with no previous convictions for dishonesty been accused of thievery?
The judicial system is also in the dock. The Post Office pursued its reign of terror over branch staff using private prosecutions, a weapon that allowed it to be claimant, investigator and prosecutor in cases from which it could derive a financial gain, a pernicious conflict of interests. Trials of the falsely accused were conducted on the legal presumption that computer-generated evidence should be treated as completely trustworthy unless the defence can explicitly prove that it is faulty. That remains the rule today, even after so many notorious examples of large IT systems being riddled with bugs. The process for correcting miscarriages is so cumbersome and forbidding that only 93 out of more than 900 Horizon-related convictions had been overturned by the end of last year.
Having let this go on for so long, politicians from Rishi Sunak downwards are falling over each other to try to blag a bogus halo by hailing the campaign led by Mr Bates and declaring that he deserves a knighthood. There’s less enthusiasm at Westminster for acknowledging a collective failure to wake up to this scandal much earlier. A few politicians campaigned for the victims with laudable vigour, notably James Arbuthnot of the Tories and Labour’s Kevan Jones. Those who most conspicuously neglected to act are in the line of fire. A huge bucket of ordure has been poured over the head of Sir Ed Davey for not doing enough during his stint as minister responsible for the Post Office. A fortnight ago, Sir Ed’s problem was that many voters did not have a clue who he was. I bet his name recognition among the public has since soared, but for the most damaging of reasons. Tory MPs have made a big effort to paint him as a villain of the piece and demanded he surrender his knighthood and quit as leader of the Lib Dems. This has nothing to do with sympathy for the victims and everything to do with the imminence of a general election. Sir Ed, who has never been shy of clamouring for other people’s resignations, isn’t helping himself by refusing to say sorry.
Truth to tell, though, the political guilt is spread much more widely. An unusual feature of this scandal is that its taint is on more than one party. This is a large part of the explanation for why none was previously keen to give it the attention and profile that it deserved. Over the past 25 years, there have been 15 business secretaries, one Lib Dem, six Labour and eight Conservative. Politicians from all three parties have held ministerial responsibility for postal affairs. Tories chucking stones are doing so from glass houses.
The false prosecutions started when Labour was governing and continued into the time of the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition. By 2019, the Tories were running the shop alone, and the scale and harms of this scandal were well known to ministers, but they moved at a pace that would shame a slug rather than make an energetic effort to ensure that wrongful convictions were reversed and the victims received restitution.
Nothing was done to induce Fujitsu to cough up a penny in recompense and only now is the company coming under pressure. The line from the justice secretary is that the Japanese-owned multinational should repay the “fortune” that will be spent on compensation and other dimensions of this terrible business should the public inquiry find it culpable. That’s a sudden change of tune. Rather than penalise the company, the government allowed it to retain the prestigious status of key “strategic supplier” even after the exposure of the scandal and awarded it further lucrative public contracts, to the tune of nearly £5bn since the damning high court judgment in 2019. Paula Vennells, the disgraced former chief executive of the Post Office, finally relinquished her CBE last week only because national fury had grown too fierce for her to continue to resist doing something that should have happened long ago.
The government expects a mass exoneration to take the heat out of public anger, but justice will not be properly done until there is condign punishment of all those responsible for inflicting devastating cruelty and hardship on so many innocent people. They endured it for so long because politicians who should have been alert to what was going on were asleep at the wheel of state.
• Andrew Rawnsley is the Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
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