Scanning the Horizon

It says something about the state of affairs in modern Britain that it takes a TV docu-drama to force to the forefront of public consciousness a scandal which has remained unregarded and unresolved for decades.

Quite what it says I'm not entirely sure - nothing very good I suspect - but ITV's recently-aired four-part mini-series, Mr Bates vs the Post Office, certainly hit the mark in stirring the nation's conscience and making the long-running saga of Fujitsu's malfunctioning Horizon accounting software a cause célèbre. In a properly functioning democracy it shouldn't have taken a TV dramatisation to succeed where various parliamentary and ministerial enquiries have failed over a twenty-year period to bring a monstrous injustice to a satisfactory conclusion. The fact that it did is both an indictment of our democratic system and a vindication of our free media working at its best.

In this case, truth really is stranger than fiction but there are other outstanding injustices which, one suspects, wouldn't necessarily lend themselves to such compelling dramatisation, or move the public in the same way. For example, the contaminated blood and Windrush scandals or the Grenfell Tower and Hillsborough disasters, all of which are equally dreadful but somehow touch the public less forcefully than the suffering inflicted on 900 innocent sub-postmasters and mistresses. The plight of haemophiliacs and post-war African-Caribbean immigrants, or scores of dead council tenants and football fans, seems not to carry the same appeal to writers, producers and directors, or call forth such outpourings of public sympathy and anger.

This probably has a lot to do with the cosy place the Post Office occupies (or at least did) in the British psyche. This venerable and trusted institution was at the heart of even the smallest communities, at least until efficiency savings led to a controversial wave of sub-post office closures. Even so, the system that survives offers such a vast range of services that, even in this digital age, many of us find ourselves standing in a post office queue patiently waiting to be served by a human being for something we could probably do ourselves online.

The thought that those friendly and reliable folk, dedicated public servants and pillars of their communies, serving us behind the counter day in, day out, could have been engaging in widespread, systematic fraud and theft was a huge blow to our sense of trust, and pride, in our public services. It appeared that yet another formerly-admired public institution, like the Royal Family (Prince Andrew), parliament (expenses, cash-for-honours, bullying et al), the church (sex abuse), the Co-op Bank (the 'Crystal Methodist'), even the beloved NHS (maternity unit failures), was unworthy of such trust. This can only have added to our growing sense of insecurity and cynicism as a nation, which ill-prepared it to face the Covid pandemic.

Oddly enough, that experience actually seems to have done something to restore our battered sense of trust in our community. Even though it was apparent our Prime Minister was an utterly incompetent nincompoop, who couldn't be trusted to run a whelk stall let alone a country in crisis, we still turned out to join him in clapping those key workers who saw us through the worst of it. Meanwile, he and his Downing Street team, it later emerged, were partying hard and breaching lockdown restrictions with impunity.

As more information arises about the Horizon scandal, so too do worrying questions about the rottenness of our systems. For instance, Paula Vennells, the Post Office CEO who presided over the scandal that saw thousands of her key staff questioned, wrongly dismissed, disgraced, imprisoned, surcharged, bankrupted and some even driven to suicide, may now have handed back her CBE but why was she awarded one in the first place when serious doubts about her tenure had already emerged by 2019? As for the growing calls to award Alan Bates a knighthood in recognition of his campaigning role in bringing this scandal to light I feel that he might consider it an insult rather than an honour given the way the same establishment has treated him and his colleagues.

For Vennells, the revolving door of cronyism extends further than her just getting a gong (or giving one back, for which there exists no formal mechanism anyway) and huge bonus payments. As an Anglican priest, she is also in line to become the next Bishop of London. Really, you couldn't make it up! It beggars belief that she would be confirmed in that position now but, given the brass neck and tin ear of our ruling elite (look at Liz Truss' resignation honours list), it's by no means impossible. Were she to be, she would also gain a seat in the House of Lords, the Upper Chamber of the British Parliament, and become a legislator as one of the Lords Spiritual. God help us all!

Talk about being rewarded for failure.

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