It took a good television series to give face and human pain to a scandal whose complexities 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 asked postcards to bring them back to the present (…) This is the true power of dramatic art (which is increasingly less publicly funded). The moral is: We need to subsidize the arts.”
I wish people would stop saying gloomily that it took television to bring sub-postmasters to the top of the agenda. This is (as I think Libby Purves said) the true power of the arts and theater (expertise that lacks funding). The message is: We must fund the arts.
– Mary Bart (@wmarybeard) January 8, 2024
Mr Bates vs the Post Office, the first episode of which aired on ITV on January 1, sparked anger and sadness among 3.9 million viewers. Renowned British actor Toby Jones (star of films such as Capote and El Topo) gave a face and a voice to the battle that Alan Bates waged against the British government for two decades.
Actor Toby Jones stars in the series “Mr. Bates vs. the Post'.Fox
“Arrogance and Ignorance”
Post offices in the United Kingdom are franchised and run by independent owners who are subcontracted by Post Offices Limited, a company owned by the British government. In the late 1990s, the company's management 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 purpose, but poorly developed and poorly tested, which immediately led to duplicates and errors that changed the accounts.
Between 1999 and 2015, more than a thousand office owners were brought to trial for fraud and embezzlement. The liabilities identified by the system ranged from thousands to tens of thousands of euros. Very high numbers for the small domestic economy of the franchisees. In many other cases – 3,500 in total – the courts were not appealed to, but those affected feared losing their licenses, mortgaged their homes, dipped into their savings or went bankrupt. Hundreds of them had criminal records for years. Many had to serve labor sentences for the benefit of the community. At least four suicides are directly linked to the case, which has been described by the British media as “the biggest miscarriage of justice in the history of the United Kingdom.”
Exterior view of a post office in St. Albans, England.PETER CZIBORRA (Portal)
“I've always said it was a question of arrogance and ignorance. I had not [la dirección de Correos] neither the competence nor the experience required to implement such a computer program. “It could have been a good thing to help modernize the company, but I think that, among other things, they bought the cheapest system on the market,” the real Alan Bates, who founded the Alianza association, told Good Morning Britain from ITV program. by Justice for Subpostmasters (Subpostmaster, the English term by which franchisees are known).
For years he fought in court as a representative of a group that included at least five hundred victims. The postal management tried its best not to become ridiculous, which almost translated into a desire for revenge against subcontractors who questioned the company's professionalism. “They had the money, the muscle and the power in the face of small owners trying to challenge them,” Bates says.
In 2019, the British justice system ruled in favor of a group of victims. Two years later, a higher court upheld the verdict on appeal. The convictions were declared unjust, paving the way for possible compensation. However, the British Post Office has been very slow to pay throughout this time and has continued to fight individual claims in court, to the detriment of the public purse. Of the nine hundred court rulings, only 142 appeals were completed. Almost €28 million in compensation has been paid, but dozens of victims have already died without seeing a single pound sterling.
In all this time, salt was rubbed into the wound when it was revealed that some compensation had been significantly reduced following the imposition of taxes. Or that almost two million euros in bonuses were paid out to Correos managers and one of the indicators used to measure this remuneration was precisely the effort with which the franchisees' claims for damages were addressed.
A million signatures
A million Brits have already signed a petition welcoming Rishi Sunak's government to strip the Order of the British Empire from Paula Vennells, who, in addition to being a former businesswoman and former Anglican priest, was chief executive of the Post Office from 2012 until 2019. “New evidence has shown that the Post Office was involved in a massive cover-up that resulted in the wrongful conviction of hundreds of workers who were jailed, bankrupted and in some sad cases even took their own lives,” he told Chris Wormald , President of the Parliamentary Commission on the Confiscation of Assets and Privileges, which is responsible for promoting the deprivation of honorary positions.
The Prime Minister himself, Rishi Sunak, has confirmed that he has tasked his government's justice chief, Alex Chalk, with looking at how to speed up the delivery of help and compensation to victims of the scandal.
And the political repercussions are never-ending. The current leader of the Liberal Democratic Party, Ed Davey, who is currently in full swing given the looming electoral defeat of the Conservatives in elections scheduled for later this year, was Secretary of State for Postal Affairs between 2010 and 2012. and many of the victims called for his resignation.
Actor Toby Jones has admitted he was one of the millions of people who ignored the scandal for years. When I heard the word “post office” on the news, I couldn't help but stop paying attention to something that was bound to be as dull and uninspiring as the institution itself. “It's shocking to understand how scandalous this matter is. And when people watch the series and we have done our job well, they witness a desire for revenge and a sense of futility in everything that happened, and you wonder how it is possible that none of this was talked about anymore he said.
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