Over and over again, these past few weeks, I’ve heard the following two questions: (1) what caused the Post Office scandal, and (2) why did it take a tv series for it to become so widely and publicly known?
This article attempts to answer the first of those questions, and I will grapple with the second -including a look at the power of the media – in a second article, next week.
I have carefully kept under the radar most of my legal career, but not long ago I joined the LinkedIn campaign, and since then I’ve posted about different strands of the scandal on an almost daily basis. I first learnt about it some years ago, from articles I read from time to time, mostly in Private Eye and sometimes in the broadsheets, but the game-changer for me was Nick Wallis’s 2021 book ‘the Great Post Office Scandal’. As I read this tome, paced more like a thriller, I couldn’t begin to comprehend either why or how the scandal had happened.
This has been been puzzling me for a while, but I had a light-bulb moment yesterday when I read this news article.
Raymond Grant, who gave evidence to the Statutory Inquiry yesterday, was a former Post Office investigator in charge of the case of William Quarm, a sub-postmaster on the Scottish island of South Uist. Notwithstanding the quashing of Quarm’s conviction for embezzlement by the Court of Criminal Appeal in Edinburgh, Mr Grant wasn’t buying it: he told the Inquiry in no uncertain terms that he still thinks the sub-postmaster is a thief.
Why is this relevant? I believe that it is a microcosm of everything that has gone wrong here: so many of the protagonists – from top to bottom – have simply been unable to change tack. In essence, they can’t be shifted from their view that because the sub-postmasters have easy access to monies, many of them can’t help themselves from taking it. This is notwithstanding the well-publicised fatally flawed Horizon system, and the ruling of a panel of senior judges who overturned Mr Quarm’s conviction. To Mr Grant, and others like him, those empirical facts don’t change a thing, and Mr Quarm is still guilty of stealing money from his till.
So let’s briefly analyse other examples of that inflexibility of thinking in the broader context of the scandal:
In summary then, there were obviously different and a multitude of causes behind the Post Office scandal, and this short article can’t even begin to do justice to addressing what those are. That said, I have tried to point to a consistent theme of tunnel vision, group think, and stubbornness on the part of so many people, who, in the case of a wide number of the protagonists, can properly be described as bad actors. All of their actions – or failures to act – contributed on so many different levels to explaining not only why the scandal arose in the first place, but why it is still on-going and unresolved.
Hopefully, public outrage is going to change the paradigm, and justice will start to be done. And let’s not forget there are so many unsung heroes out there – I will name check you in a future piece but you know who you are – without whose sterling efforts, the can would still be being kicked down the road.
In closing, watch this space for my next Passle article, and one by tech partner Raoul Lumb about the Horizon issues, and the likely impact that the scandal will have on updating statutory provisions about reliance on computer evidence.
The Media Bill is currently at Committee stage in the UK House of Lords and is expected to become law this summer. In only a year from now a number of Video On Demand (VOD) services seen by viewers in Britain will find themselves designated by the UK government as Tier 1 services.
Read moreOn 21 October 2022, the government announced that it was backing the Protection from Redundancy (Pregnancy and Family Leave) Bill.
Read moreBy now, everyone is likely to have heard of ChatGPT: the generative AI module which has taken the world by storm, with its ability to review and analyse a vast amount of content to produce a coherent stream of consciousness that is not too dissimilar from a human’s.
Read more