Mr Bates vs. The Post Office

A brilliant portrayal by Toby Jones, and a magnificent exposé of an appalling episode in British public life, one which has yet to be brought to a satisfactory conclusion, and probably never will.

We live in Australia, where of two recent Royal Commissions, one uncovered massive wrongdoing by the banks, which resulted in many ordinary people losing their homes and their life savings, and more recently a flawed computer system called 'Robodebt' punished hundreds of thousands of innocent and vulnerable people, and led to several suicides. But were these ever made right? Well, tragically you can't ever undo the suicides, but did people ever get back what they lost, and were the guilty ever punished?

Of course not! Don't be so silly!!!!

The guilty were bankers in case one and politicians and senior civil servants in case two. Not a single one was ever charged with a crime, let alone convicted. No banker ever did time, nor did any politician. You see, they and Paula Vennells belong to a different class from us, a privileged class for whom the law simply does not apply. They live their lives of luxury, draw their enormous bonuses, and eventually retire with huge hand-outs, while we all struggle down in the mire.

My prediction is that Sunak will say that it is not within his power to rescind the CBE of Vennells, and that it would not be "in the public interest" for her to be prosecuted and sent to jail for all she has done.

Nothing to see here, just let's move on.

That innocent postmasters did jail time, and some were driven to suicide, was just collateral damage in setting up a new 21st century digital post office, and Vennells will no doubt still be praised to the sky for all her wonderful achievements in doing so.

People in Britain were once ruled by feudal aristocrats and royals. Now they are ruled by feudal politicians and executives. Not a lot has changed in all these centuries.

This is not really a review, but it's hard to write one while feeling so angry.

So here's the review. Brilliantly acted, very tight script and screenplay to fit so many years into four episodes. Toby Jones for a top award.

10/10, and deserves 20/10.

A spectacular miscarriage of justice affecting hundreds of ordinary people. The Post Office, in fact a government department, persecuted their employees for what turned out to be, their faulty computer system. The computer company and post office are shown to be heartless liars who made enormous efforts to cover up their mistake and hide the evidence. Eventually the employees achieve the truth and expose the errors. Some minor financial settlement is achieved that in no way compensates the hundreds of people whose lives have been ruined. A true David vs Goliath story that was quite upsetting to watch, not least because it is true!

If you're not moved by this story you probably fit the job description for a job in the Post Office, or maybe our government? It's a truly shocking story and identifies some names who should hang their heads in shame whilst also pinpointing some of the good people in our society. I read one paper review that claimed the dramatisation lacked drama. Lacked drama! There's drama enough in this story to stand strong, how it wrecked lives and enriched others, the slow slog through molasses in search of the truth, but maybe some people aren't happy without some crash bang wallop? This is a very human tale of massive injustice and corporate cover up. Surely now there's momentum to bring justice and apologies to those still around to receive it? Fingers crossed ...

It's true. All of it.

My dad was a victim. Turned up at his shop and demanded £54,000.

Ransacked my parents house and took away anything of value.

Forced my parents to sell their shop (to the post office!).

My parents had to leave their home behind, in disgrace, and try to start a new life elsewhere. They barely went outside for the next 20 years.

The people missing from this drama, are the investigators, who had a financial incentive NOT to investigate.

Their annual bonus was based on the amount of 'missing' money they could recover, so instead of investigating, they just demanded cash.

This four-part ITV series appears to have really captured the British public imagination, the furious reaction to it has seen the show's cause taken up in the national press, highlighted in the nightly television news, seen questions asked of the P. M. and indeed filtered directly through to the mood of the people on the street.

The crux of the matter was the appalling mistreatment of sub-postmasters up and down the country following the enforced imposition of the new Horizon computer system on them by the State-owned General Post Office. In a significant number of cases, the system threw up financial irregularities for no good reason, implicitly stating that when the business owner did their daily cash-balance they were now mysteriously in debt to the GPO and were contractually obliged to make good the shortfall, out of their own pockets. These sums, although they started relatively low, soon grew exponentially to significant levels often into 5-figure amounts leaving the postmasters, after exhausting the almost non-existent and unsympathetic help-line assistance of the I. T. company responsible for the system's installation, Fujitsu, found themselves taken to court to repay their so-called debt.

For pretty much all of them, this meant not only financial stress and indeed ruin, with many remortgaging their houses or putting in their own and even their families' life-savings to meet the "debt", but of course as respected members of the community often at the social hub of the towns and villages they served, their good names were dragged through the dirt with their families suffering alongside them. Sadly, for some, the strain understandably proved too much with a number suffering mental health issues, as we see one poor man commit suicide and another woman enter a state of chronic depression which saw her too attempt suicide and require ECGT to assist her recovery.

It took one of the middle-aged victims who with his wife lost his own post office and, now relocated to the scenic backdrop of the Carnarvon Hills, to decide to fight back, specifically by trying to find out if he was the only one afflicted by the malfunctioning computer system, as he'd been officially told there had been no other complaints registered.

By getting an article published in a national computer magazine - these were obviously the days before social networking - he learns of others like him who've suffered a similar fate and so starts to organise a protest group to take their collective complaints up the ladder. Helped in this by a sympathetic M. P., they gradually make headway but not before the establishment tries to block them, using some distinctly unsavoury, indeed sometimes sinister tactics to try to make the issue go away.

But thankfully, for once, truth will out and with the help of an initially reluctant and nervous whistle-blower at Fujitsu testifying to their ability to remotely access the owners' accounts, the group finally won their case and accepted a multi-milllion pound settlement, without admitted liability naturally, although sadly about 80% of this was eaten up by the all-too-familiar "legal-costs". Still, the judgement did mean that all their false convictions were cancelled on appeal, thus restoring their good names and clearing the criminal records of those who'd fought and lost their earlier cases but even so, this was still a shocking indictment of the abuse carried out in the name of the state by faceless, uncaring, some of them even ennobled executives who couldn't be bothered to examine these low-level complaints and check if their "foolproof" system could somehow be at fault.

It must have seemed a bit of a tough proposition bringing what on paper seems such a dry subject to life on the small-screen, but by focusing on the different human-interest angles and contrasting these with the uncaring response of the empowered civil-servants, it made for gripping television. Helped by a sympathetic ensemble cast, headed by the redoubtable Toby Jones being ideally cast in the title role as the little David who decided to take on the national Goliath, it certainly stirred the blood of my wife and I who are both now pleased to see the issue back in the public eye.

We too now hope for further restitution for the affected parties, even as we're told over the end credits that four of the victims committed suicide and many others have died in the over twenty intervening years. Almost as importantly we hope too that those who in their jobs-worth way inhumanely stopped the truth coming out and yet have escaped any public censure far less conviction for their part in the scandalous cover-up, get their individual come-uppance.