Click on TV Show, tick. Millions for lawyers, tick. Now can we do some actual justice to the sub-postmasters? | Marina Hyde

IIn her closing statement to the Post Office investigation this week, Paula Fennells once again added the ridiculously brutal murder to her list of failings. Or as the former CEO’s lawyer Put it down“She has no desire to point fingers at others.” Oh, Paula. It’s great to finally hear the finger pointing that it’s been turned off – but it’s been too many years and too many prison sentences too late for that. In fact, as we bid farewell to the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry, to give it its full name, it is clear that the main request should be: Let this not be the end of it. Justice has not yet been achieved.

It’s interesting to think that at this time last year, ITV hadn’t even broadcast Mr Bates v The Post Office, the drama that finally sparked public outrage over the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British history, and led to immediate action from Various groups of society. Strong people who could have done something before, but didn’t. As the year comes to an end, it’s safe to say that Mr. Bates is now very far behind Most watched drama 2024 – In fact, the most watched pub sport. Very exciting for something so beautifully and brilliantly created from a frighteningly unpromising dramatic premise: a flawed computer system.

I wonder what the total amount of money was charged with over 900 post office employees wrongly accused of stealing from the post office? Whatever the case, it would be less than the £130 million of taxpayers’ money that it was revealed yesterday that the Post Office had spent on lawyers alone, in this investigation alone, to defend its indefensible actions. This figure does not yet include costs for the current tax year, during which the investigation continued.

Once again, serious money is flowing in a direction other than the victims. Two decades after he first objected to the government-owned Post Office’s assessment of its branch account deficit, Alan Bates is still waiting to receive full and appropriate compensation from the British state. So do the vast majority of other victims, who remain trapped in a bureaucracy that doesn’t feel a million miles away from the corporate psychopathy that led them to ruin and/or prison in the first place. Only about one in 10 wrongly convicted post office operators have done so He agreed to the final settlement. Not of course those who died or They took their own lives While this story continued its stubborn and often doomed path. Now Bates says they may have to go back to court.

One of the most false pieces of evidence presented to the inquiry was a text message to Fennells from former Royal Mail chief executive Moya Greene. “I thought you knew,” Moya wrote to Paula. “How could you not know?…I can’t support you now after what I’ve learned.” We must await the ruling of inquiry chair Sir Wayne Williams on who knows what. But the overall answer is: a lot of people. Not only did they know it, they did it. To pin all the anger on Vinyls would be a very convenient mistake. There was an entire level of executives and other employees at the Post Office, at Fujitsu, and beyond, who should have, and should, have known this—and in some cases, clearly did.

But then, the very crucial thing to understand about the post office scandal is that there are two classes of people in this story—the kind of little people who go to prison, and the kind of big people who wrongly send them there, and yet they fail. Up then. After the Post Office, so to speak, Fennells rose to other boards, the New Year Honors List, and the Cabinet Office. You have to honestly believe that leaving the yakuza is easier than being excluded from the upper echelons of business in this country. Earlier this year, it was revealed that Paula – who famously served as an Anglican priest – was the now outgoing Archbishop of Canterbury. Selection for the Bishop of LondonAlthough he never held any serious position in the Church of England. Many of her senior colleagues have also moved on to bigger, better and more lucrative things.

However, not throwing away the old moral scales, but wrongly imprisoning innocent people is a lot worse than stealing a few thousand dollars, right? Post office operators clearly did not do this. The executive class in this story did something truly abhorrent – ​​and yet, no charges were brought against them.

Will they be once Sir Wayne delivers his report? Surely they should be. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the health of our seriously ill society depends on this kind of justice being done. The repeated failures to bring big people to justice for ruining the lives of little ones – and the unexpected traumas that flow from those failures – may turn out to be the defining story of the first half of the twenty-first century.

Every year brings new examples, the effects of which we cannot calculate precisely, but in the name of sanity, we should certainly have at least had an idea of ​​them by now. The failure to hold anyone responsible for the 2008 financial crisis understandably fueled the populist politics that led to some of the biggest shocks and upheavals of the past decade. The idea of ​​“one base for them” has taken various forms, with “two levels” now being the preferred phrase. But a lot of things are two-level. The Post Office scandal is sure to be another one of these, unless a proper number of executives find themselves in court as their hapless subordinates once did – only on stronger evidence.