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

It took a good television series to put a face and human pain to a scandal whose complexity bored the British political class for two decades and failed to capture the attention of public opinion. And what's so strange about that? The popular classical historian and popularizer Mary Beard has asked herself on postcards to bring it back to the present (…) That is the true power of dramatic art (less and less publicly funded). The moral is: we need to subsidize the arts.”

Mr. Bates vs the Post Office (Mr. Bates vs. 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 (protagonist in films such as Cloak either The mole) gave a face and voice to the battle that Alan Bates waged for two decades against the Government of the United Kingdom.

“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 nineties, the management of the entity imposed on all these small businesses a new digital accounting and inventory management system called Horizon IT, developed by the Japanese technology company Fujitsu. It was a logical and necessary program in its objective, but poorly developed and poorly tested, which immediately caused duplications and errors that altered the accounts.

Between 1999 and 2015, more than a thousand office owners were taken to trial accused of fraud and embezzlement. The liabilities detected by the system amounted to thousands, or tens of thousands of euros. Very high figures for the small domestic economy of the franchisees. In many other cases – in total there were 3,500 – the courts were not taken, 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 sentences of work for the benefit of the community. 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. She did not have [la dirección de Correos] neither the competence nor the experience necessary to implement such a computer program. It could have been a good thing, that helped modernize the company, but I think that, among other things, they bought the cheapest system on the market,” he explained to the program. Good Morning Britain of ITV the real Alan Bates, who launched the Alliance for Justice for Deputy Post Office Masters association (subpostmasterthe English term by which franchisees are known).

For years, representing a group that included at least five hundred affected people, he fought in court. The Post Office management dedicated all its efforts to avoid falling into ridicule, which almost translated into a desire for revenge against subcontractors who questioned the entity'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 €28 million in compensation has been paid, but dozens of victims have already died without having seen a single pound sterling.

During all this time, salt has been added to the wound, when it became known that some of the compensations were significantly reduced after taxes were applied to them. Or that almost two million euros were distributed in bonuses to the managers of Correos, and one of the indices to measure this remuneration was precisely the degree of effort put into fighting against the compensation claims of the franchisees.

One million signatures

One million Britons have already signed a requestwhich Rishi Sunak's Government views favorably, to withdraw the Order of the British Empire from Paula Vennells, who in addition to being a former businesswoman and former Anglican priestess, was executive director of the Post Office from 2012 to 2019. “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, ruined and, in some sad cases, even took their own lives,” said Chris Wormald, chairman of the parliamentary Asset Confiscation Committee. and Privileges, the one in charge of promoting the withdrawal of honors.

The Prime Minister himself, Rishi Sunak, has confirmed that he has given the order to his Government's head of Justice, Alex Chalk, to study how to accelerate the arrival of aid and compensation to the victims of the scandal.

And the political ramifications do not stop. The current leader of the Liberal Democrat Party, Ed Davey, currently in full swing in the face of the foreseeable electoral defeat of the Conservatives in the elections 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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