Post Office Horizon scandal must be a turning point - Joyce McMillan

We must challenge the ideologies, systems and culture that led to these abuses not rage and then forget

At last, after almost 25 years of campaigning, the UK’s epic Post Office scandal has surged to the top of the news agenda, where it belongs.

It took a television drama to do it, in the end; writer Gwyneth Hughes’s magnificent ITV series Mr Bates vs The Post Office, starring Toby Jones, has been broadcast over the last four evenings, causing such outrage among viewers that an online petition demanding the withdrawal of the CBE awarded to the Post Office’s former Chief Executive, Paula Vennells, has already reached more than 100,000 signatures.

Mr. Bates vs The Post Office tells the story of heroic former sub-postmaster Alan Bates, who like hundreds of other sub-postmasters and mistresses between 1999 and 2016, was wrongly accused of losing or stealing substantial sums of money from the Post Office business. Many of the people involved faced the loss not only of their livelihood, but also of their homes, their life savings, and their standing in the communities they had served; and the Post Office subjected them to brutal forms of summary justice that contributed to the suicide of at least one individual, while many others were wrongly prosecuted or imprisoned, or simply bankrupted.

The case, in other words, is now recognised as the greatest and most widespread miscarriage of justice in British legal history; and as Alan Bates understood from the outset, the culprit was the Post Office’s new Horizon computer system, manufactured and managed by the Fujitsu corporation, and installed in Post Offices across Britain from 1999 onwards. At almost a billion pounds, the system represented a costly investment for the Post Office; and the refusal to acknowledge its failures triggered a culture of lies and cover-up that spread from Fujitsu through the Post Office management, raising profound questions about power, accountability, transparency and justice in our increasingly computer-driven society.

It’s certainly no surprise, to begin with, that this story has struck such a profound chord with a public increasingly at the mercy of machines which only a small technocratic elite fully understand. It is not yet known who - at Fujitsu or the Post Office - originated and authorised the lies, mainly delivered via a standard script on the Horizon telephone helpline, that were used to bamboozle, bully and frighten sub-postmasters and postmistresses into trying to pay for non-existent shortfalls, and in some cases into pleading guilty to crimes which they had not committed.

Whoever did so, though, was operating in a corporate universe without decency, ethics or accountability; and their conduct, should act as a red flag warning to governments everywhere that unless they unite to tax and regulate these corporations expertly and properly, they can and will abuse their power to maximise profit, regardless of the human consequences.

The principal actor in the scandal, though, is undoubtedly the Post Office. In its relationship with Fujitsu, it seems to have been either incompetent to assess the performance of the system it had bought, or simply unwilling to make any negative assessment of it; either case represents a profound failure of basic corporate responsibility.

In terms of its relations with sub-postmasters and postmistresses, its conduct seems almost inexplicably cruel; the presumption of guilt, the attitude and manner of the inspectors sent in to enforce the termination of contracts, the abuse of the Post Office’s police-like powers to bring dubious and unjustified prosecutions - all seem more like the operations of a police state, than of a reputable public corporation. And again, their behaviour should act as a red flag in terms of the management culture - snobbish, contemptuous, besotted with profit at the expense of ethics or legality - that seems rife in some areas of British corporate life, and was notably present in the banking sector both before and after the 2008 crash.

In that sense, the Post Office seems like a conspicuous victim of the great 1980s ideological shift towards the myth that private enterprise is always and everywhere better and more efficient than taxpayer-funded public service; and the tensions created by that fundamental untruth seem to have led to some intense doublethink. Paula Vennells herself, chief executive from 2012-2019, often talked in glowingly sentimental terms about the vital community service provided by Post Offices across the UK; yet she also presided over the worst and most brutal kind of corporate management practice against her own key workers.

So now, after an unconscionable two decades, I suppose we should be glad that some elements of Britain’s rusty system of checks and balances have finally creaked into action, quashing some of the convictions wrongfully obtained, and finally, in 2020, setting up a public inquiry.

Justice delayed, though, is essentially justice denied; and the suffering of the victims of this scandal represents a profound warning signal about a system, and a society, tipping dangerously off the rails. Despite the courage and integrity of the central characters, the tale of Mr Bates vs The Post Office cannot help but portray a society full of those who, for the sake of a quiet life, will simply go along with - or even begin to enjoy enforcing - a brutal and mendacious might-is-right commercial culture, with all the sheer personal cruelty and cult of inequality it inevitably entails.

The explosion of anger over the story told so powerfully on our small screens this week therefore represents a vital moment of decision for society and politics across these islands; a moment when we either resolve to understand and challenge the ideologies, systems and culture that led to these abuses - or we rage and then forget. Removing Paula Vennells’s CBE might be a first step towards real change, in other words. Yet it could also be the kind of empty gesture that leaves a whole rotting system and culture unanalysed and untouched; and - in the absence of exceptional heroes like Alan Bates and his colleagues - still free to wreck lives, at will.