I AM pleased that ITV has made a drama out of the Post Office scandal – Mr Bates vs The Post Office – which started on Monday evening, featuring Toby Jones.
But it shouldn’t really take a TV series to raise public awareness of what is surely the largest scandal involving the British state in modern times.
This was no isolated miscarriage of justice.
It was a dogged campaign to prosecute hundreds of honest, hard-working people when even a brief consideration of the facts should have indicated that they were innocent.
More than 700 sub-postmasters were prosecuted, with many losing their freedom, their livelihoods, their life savings and their reputations — and all because of a faulty IT system which the stuffed shirts at the top of Post Office management couldn’t bring themselves to believe was falsely recording losses.
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Pillars of the community
Many of those affected can never be compensated because they have since died.
At least one suicide has been linked to the scandal.
Yet even now the Post Office continues to drag its heels paying out to its victims.
Not one senior manager has yet been held to account.
Paula Vennells, who was chief executive from 2012 to 2019, even clings on to her CBE.
How on earth can so many good people have been dragged through the mud without someone at the top of the Post Office asking themselves: “Are we sure that there has been a mass outbreak of criminality among people regarded as pillars of their community — or might we have got this wrong?”
The signs that something was amiss with the Horizon IT system were there from the beginning.
Within weeks of it being installed in post offices in 1999, sub-postmasters themselves were reporting strange inconsistencies in their accounts.
Yet instead of investigating the system properly, Post Office management decided to prosecute the very people who were reporting the problems.
Worse, rather than go through the Police and Crown Prosecution Service, it decided to launch its own private prosecutions instead.
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Many sub-postmasters, in spite of knowing they had done nothing wrong, were persuaded to plead guilty to false accounting in return for having theft charges dropped.
But many were jailed anyway — and their admission to false accounting merely allowed the Post Office to claim back large sums which the sub-postmasters didn’t owe.
Unbelievably, the Post Office was still maintaining there was nothing wrong with its IT system, which was built by Japanese firm Fujitsu, 15 years after the problems first emerged.
It seemed to have blind faith in the technology — and an innate distrust of its own sub-postmasters.
Thankfully, some prosecutions have since been overturned.
But surely every single conviction of a sub-postmaster as a result of the Horizon IT system is now unsafe.
True, there may be one or two genuine fraudsters among the 700 who were prosecuted.
But letting them off would be a small price to pay for restoring the reputations of decent people whose lives have been destroyed through no fault of their own.
The scandal is revealing for what it says about the public sector.
The Post Office, for anyone fooled by the privatisation of its one-time parent company Royal Mail, remains in government hands.
Far too many people in Britain subscribe to the left-wing view that public-owned agencies are essentially benign.
You might expect profit-driven corporations to misbehave, according to this view, but public-owned ones will always behave decently.
True, there are some pretty rotten private companies around — like the energy companies caught out last year for forcibly switching people on to pre-payment meters that charged them higher tariffs.
But it is hard to find a case where a private utility company has misbehaved so badly and over such a long period as did the Post Office.
Private utility companies, after all, do tend to have some kind of regulator breathing down their necks.
Not so the Post Office, which was able to launch hundreds of private prosecutions without anyone holding it to account.
Anything but benign
Surely the Crown Prosecution Service could at least have raised an eyebrow at what was going on.
But it isn’t just the Post Office.
What many see as the worst-behaving High Street bank is the one still majority-owned by taxpayers.
NatWest, which was saved with a huge taxpayer-funded bailout in 2008 and whose Global Restructuring Group went on to drive good businesses to ruin in the name of trying to help them, was also involved in last year’s debanking scandal.
Then there are all these councils raising millions through fines for the most minor of traffic violations, such as straying into bus lanes or being caught in yellow box junctions.
Last week, Dutch haulage operators launched a lawsuit against Transport for London after racking up £65million of fines for Ulez — a scheme they say they knew nothing about and which was only advertised on small roadside signs.
If one good thing comes out of the Post Office scandal it will be that many more of us realise that agencies of the Government can be anything but benign.
Sometimes they can behave worse than the foulest private company.
No one should be fooled that we would be treated better were utilities to be in public hands.
