Euan McColm: MPs and MSPs have been shamed into talking about Post Office Horizon scandal

Glacial response by MPs and MSPs says much about the political class and petty point scoring serves no-one, least of all the victims

The story of how hundreds of sub-postmasters were hounded for thefts they had not carried out has gripped the nation for almost two weeks now. Rolling news channels compete to bring us the latest interview with the latest victim to speak up and we can’t get enough. This is one of those stories that cuts through.

The more we learn about how The Post Office ignored evident flaws with the Horizon computer system used by staff to to balance their books and proceeded to drag innocent people into court, the more infuriating the whole thing becomes.

If you’ve watched the the ITV1 drama “Mr Bates Vs The Post Office” which tells how hundreds of sub-postmasters fought back against the corporate might of an institution more concerned with the protection of its reputation than the fair treatment of ordinary people, you’ll understand why this issue has come to dominate our national discussion: few of us may have experienced the sort of torture endured by those sub-postmasters but all of us, surely, have some experience of bureaucratic intransigence. It’s all too easy for us to imagine ourselves trapped, as hundreds of Post Office workers were, by a system that cares nothing for the

truth.

Inevitably, there have been attempts by some politicians to score points over this scandal. Why, ask some MPs, didn’t current Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey agree to meet sub-postmasters when he was the relevant minister in 2010? (His answer: he was misinformed about the situation by The Post Office. And he deeply regrets matters.)

Meanwhile, in Scotland, First Minister Humza Yousaf has deployed a fully unconvincing “nothing to do with me, mate” in the face of legitimate questions.

Interviewed on BBC Radio’s Good Morning Scotland on Friday, Yousaf repeatedly pointed out that responsibility for The Post Office is completely reserved to Westminster, a statement that invited a weary “so what?”

As a prosecuting authority in England, The Post Office ran cases against hundreds of sub-postmasters but the institution also reported dozens of people to the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service in Scotland. This was happening while Humza Yousaf was a government minister. The least we should be able to expect, surely, is that Yousaf displays a little curiosity about what went on.

We know, thanks to the efforts of campaigning sib-postmasters led by Alan Bates, that The Post Office proceeded with prosecutions in England despite knowing of legitimate concerns about the Horizon software system which was incorrectly calculating massive losses in branches across the country. This being so, are we reassured that, in all its dealings with Scottish prosecutors, The Post Office was honest?

We are told that concerns were raised within the Crown Office about convictions based on evidence generated by Horizon in 2013 and that, two years later, a decision was taken not to prosecute in cases which hinged solely on information created by the operating system.

None of that begins to address the cases of numerous Scottish sub-postmasters prosecuted in the years before that decision was taken.

The presumption at Westminster now is that the vast majority of convictions of sub-postmasters painted as thieves by the Horizon system then hounded by The Post Office are entirely innocent. I can seen no good reason that the same cannot be said of those convicted in Scotland.

Given the justifiable suspicion that The Post Office was not upfront with the Crown, there’s good reason to support full reviews of all relevant interactions. If The Post Office was misleading fiscals in order that they’d recommend prosecution, that would be s very serious matter, indeed.

We could, I think, do without the grubby political point-scoring currently playing out. The truth is that, when it comes to The Post Office scandal, a plague is invited to descend upon the houses of all major political parties. Problems with Horizon has already led to criminal cases on the watch of the pre-2010 Labour government. Matters got worse under the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition at Westminster and the SNP at Holyrood. No major party may unilaterally declare itself free of any responsibility for the abject misery visited upon so many innocent people.

Let’s not forget that – a small number of campaigning MPs aside – the politicians now falling over each other in the scramble to be seen to care about – and to be helping – the victims of The Post Office scandal were silent on the matter little more than a week ago.

Those politicians have known the truth about this scandal for years. That they have only felt the need to address the unfair and glacially slow compensation scheme and to begin asking questions about culpability because of a television drama doesn’t speak especially highly of them, does it? Surely they didn’t need a TV programme to tell them just how awful the circumstances in which countless sub-postmasters and their families found themselves were?

All of the bleak facts about The Post Office scandal – the hounding, the depression, the bankruptcies, the suicides, the wrongful imprisonment – have been in the public domain for years, during which time politicians have largely been happy to ignore the way in which compensation schemes have failed victims. MPs and MSPs are now talking about this issue because they have no choice. The plight of the sub-postmasters matters to them, before anything else, because it matters to voters.

While MPs at Westminster look at introducing legislation to automatically clear all sub-postmasters convicted on the basis of evidence taken from the Horizon system, Humza Yousaf should be initiating a full audit of all communications between The Post Office and Scottish prosecutors. And if it transpires that fiscals were misled, police should be invited to step in.