Getting Their Reputations Back--The Royal Mail Horizon Scandal Staggers to the Finish Line, Thanks to ITV**

A bit more than three years ago, I wrote a post, When Computers Rule, about the Royal Mail scandal involving Fujitsu's Horizon software and the plight of hundreds of UK "sub-postmasters" who'd been accused, prosecuted and convicted for fraud because, once the Fujitsu software system was implemented for Post Office management, their accounts and their books went completely out of whack and showed thousands--sometimes tens or hundreds of thousands--of pounds of funds missing in their daily reporting to the mother ship.

A word to the wise: the Post Office in the UK operates differently than it does in the States, and there are over 11,000 of these “sub-post offices,” usually operating out of small general stores, chemist shops, or newsagents, dotted all over the country, often in out-of-the-way villages (think Agatha Christie mysteries) which would otherwise be underserved. The people who run them are contractors, not employees of the Royal Mail. And the post office itself is used for purposes unheard of in the US–you can go there to pay your utility bill, perform banking transactions, and get your welfare payments, as well as buy stamps and send off letters and packages.

Diligent observation, and reporting to the post office, on the part of the sub-postmasters that their end-of-day reconciliations weren't balancing fell on deaf ears. TPTB preferred to believe that their chosen--at great public expense--IT system must be perfect and that the sub-postmasters were guilty of fraud, and they simply refused to validate their own software, preferring instead to threaten and bully the sub-postmasters into submission, and into--in many cases--making up the shortfall from their personal finances, even to the point of selling their houses or ruining their own financial circumstances in order to avoid the opprobrium of a trial or the appearance of shady dealing.

Over the next several months, things got worse. And so I wrote another post, in April of 2021, Which Office Do I Go to, to Get My Reputation Back. By that time, things had begun to tilt a bit in the sub-postmasters' favor, and "panels," "inquiries," "experts," and so-on, were beginning to imply that perhaps the course of true justice--like that of true love--didn't run [all that] smooth. I don't expect this was much of a relief to those whose lives had already been ruined, or those who'd already committed suicide from the social shaming. Or even to those who, like dozens of the sub-postmasters who'd taken on this rather gentle career option late in life and post-retirement, had already died with their names under a cloud.

In my 2021 post I mentioned that:

Politicians, of course, are now jumping on the bandwagon from all sides amid calls to strip the Royal Mail’s former chief executive of her CBE honor (awarded for services to the Post Office), and to require her to pay back the millions of pounds she collected in bonuses while overseeing this travesty.

Of course, calls to "strip" Paula Vennells of her CBE (Commander of the British Empire) medal went nowhere. And yet, 24 hours ago (some 33 months after I first reported the public's and the media's reporting on the necessity), she turned it back of her own accord. No word yet on if, or when, she'll pay back her ill-gotten gains. (Also, TBC, the monarch has to revoke the honor, if her thus-far empty gesture is to have actual meaning. But it's a start.)

And today, Rishi Sunak, Prime Minister of the UK, indicated that he'd support a mass overturning of the "guilty" verdicts imposed on more than seven hundred sub-postmasters and the name-clearing of hundreds more between 2000 and 2015, as there simply isn't evidence that they did anything wrong. (Working their way through the courts, one at a time, over the course of many years, only 93 convictions have been overturned so far, and far fewer than that number have received any compensation for the ruination of their own lives and their families' lives.)

What has caused this sudden disturbance in The Force? A force which--otherwise and typically--might have taken years, perhaps decades, to discombobluate? (You have only to look at Baroness Hallett's Covid inquiry, which is expected to take several more years to decide whether or not the British response to the pandemic was appropriate or not. By the time the findings are released--with any luck for them--most of those concerned will be, at the very least, out of public life, or--more usefully--dead, and calls for reprisals will also go nowhere, because, after all, "what difference, [at that point, would] it make?"

But, not this time.

What's got Britain so exercised today (to the point that the Israeli-Hamas war has become almost a footnote), is a four-part ITV television drama series, Mr. Bates vs The Post Office.

I'm sorry that's what it took. But I'm glad the point finally seems to have been made.

Perhaps there's a lesson in here somewhere.

For those who can't follow this in The Telegraph because of the paywall, here's an write-up from the Daily Mail. Truly heartbreaking.

And now we have calls for Mr. Bates to be awarded a knighthood. Sure. Either that or--even trade--just give him Paula Vennells's CBE.

**Seventy years ago, ITV was known as "the rough lot," because it wasn't the BBC, and because it was a commercial network supported by advertising rather than by an enforced taxation fee. Today--and only perhaps it's less beholden--it's one of the more honest British networks. Tempora mutandur.