British Watergate

On New Year’s Day Britain’s television viewers were presented with the first episode of a new television drama series, “Mr Bates vs the Post Office” on the Independent Television network (ITV). Over the course of the following three evenings, 16.6 million households streamed the four-part drama series on the ITVX streaming platform. The drama recounts the true story of how hundreds of the UK’s Post Office local branch managers were fobbed off by the national executive when they reported mistakes with the Post Office’s accounting programme, and were held accountable for the deficits in the resulting figures.

The airing of the television drama series has pitchforked the scandal back onto the front pages of British newspapers. For years, several newspapers, media outlets and websites – most notably Private Eye, a British fortnightly satirical and current affairs news magazine – have doggedly presented the unbelievable evidence. The source of this outrageous wrongdoing was the rollout of Horizon computing software, which was created by the extremely well-compensated Japanese company Fujitsu, across UK Post Office branches. Malfunctions in the system created the impression that money was missing, and subsequently, between 1999 and 2015 more than 900 sub-postmasters were prosecuted. Many were pressured into ‘repaying the shortages’, innocent people were fired, or convicted of false accounting. Some lost their homes, and/or went bankrupt. Others were ordered to perform community service or sent to prison. Hundreds of lives were ruined. The Post Office was the complainant, investigator (sleuths were paid bonuses for each scalp) and beneficiary in this matter; speaking of conflict of interest.

The ‘Mr Bates’ of the title of the television drama, is Alan Bates, a sub-postmaster, who locked heads with the Post Office elite in 2003. Mr Bates first reported problems with Horizon in 2000, and eventually had his contract terminated in 2003 when he refused to sign off accounts that his branch had had a shortfall and comply with obligations to repay the ‘losses’ from his own pocket. Mr Bates then led a 20-year uphill battle against the Establishment, spearheading the campaign group Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance (JSPA).

“All the meetings with MPs, letters to the minister, more ministers than you can shake a stick at, years and years and still nobody in power hears a word we say,” Mr Bates (who is portrayed by Toby Jones in the dramatization) tells his partner, Suzanne, in the television series, which broke the record for audience figures set for a drama by the BBC’s “Line of Duty” sixth

season aired in 2021.

Writing in the UK’s Telegraph newspaper, on the 9th January, Allison Pearson reveals the depth (or rather height) of the Establishment’s high handedness in the scandal. She penned: “In 2010, replying to what he called an ‘offensive’ brush-off from Sir Ed Davey, now the leader of the Liberal Democrats then the minister for postal affairs, Alan Bates wrote: ‘It is [precisely] because you have adopted an arm’s length relationship… [that] you have enabled them [the Post Office] to carry on with impunity regardless of the human misery and suffering they inflict…’ He urged Davey not to simply ‘listen to civil servants’ nor to act without questioning the Post Office’s claims. (An embattled Sir Ed now insists the Post Office was ‘lying on an industrial scale to me’).”

The average candidate at the National Grade Six Assessment Examination could have picked up that the sudden increase in “fraud prosecutions” among sub-postmasters had coincided with the introduction of the Horizon software accounting programme. The question remains, why didn’t someone higher up in the handsomely compensated management team connect the dots? Was it because they had a vested interest in seeing the programme work?

In December 2019, a High Court judge ruled that Fujitsu’s Horizon software contained “bugs, errors and defects” and there was a “material risk” that shortfalls in the Post Office branch accounts were attributable to the system. In September 2020, the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry was set up as a nonstatutory inquiry, and following a request from Sir Wyn Williams, its chairman, it became statutory in June 2021. This development conferred more power on the committee, including the ability to compel witnesses to give evidence. The proceedings which were set to conclude last August are still ongoing and are scheduled to be completed this year.

The sub-postmasters involved in Bates & Others vs Post Office were the first victims of the outrageous affair to receive any money from the Post Office. In 2019, they reached an out-of-court costs settlement, not compensation since the Post Office did not accept liability. In September 2023, the Rishi Sunak administration announced that those who had had their convictions overturned on the basis of the Horizon evidence would receive £600,000 in full and final settlement.

As Ms Pearson stated, “The Horizon case is so farreaching, such a spider’s web of cronyism, corruption and perjury – from the highest levels of government to the judiciary, lawyers, investigators, the board of the Post Office, its previous chief executives

and senior officials, the board of Fujitsu and the company’s systems analysts who lied when they said it wasn’t possible to access a sub-postmaster’s account – that the scandal has been called the British Watergate.”

One judge, who has described the case as “the widest miscarriage of justice in British legal history,” stated that the prosecution of petrified men and women by the Post Office was an “abuse of process” and “an affront to justice”. As more and more sordid details are being revealed, the public voice of resentment over the scandal continues to escalate. Yet to date, no one has been charged in this public disgrace. Since the airing of “Mr Bates vs the Post Office”, the public groundswell of over a million signatures on a petition forced former Post Office Chief Executive Paula Vennells last week Tuesday to announce that she was returning her CBE. Campaigners also want the 2012 -2019 CEO to return the £2.93 million she received in performance-related bonus payments in lieu of a pension.

As Ms Pearson astutely pointed out, “...the gilded, frictionless class to which Vennells belongs floats from one plum job to the next, never held to account for the destruction they leave behind while the little people try to salvage what remains of their lives among the ruins.”

Here, we bear witness to a similar trend developing where the untouchables are allowed to disburse the country’s natural resources in the manner of a court appointed receiver executing a fire sale of foreclosed assets with only his predetermined percentage compensation in mind. Changes in government only render more promises to pursue and hold accountable the prior perpetrators, producing mountains of paper from not acted upon COIs.

This blatant abuse and flaunting of power by the modern day politician resembles a 21st century Barnum & Bailey Circus, always on the move, looking for the next set of suckers. Last week, Moscow. Today, Washington. Next week, London. Next month, Georgetown. The greed is insatiable. However, as is being demonstrated in ‘British Watergate’ and as the Guyanese saying goes, “Moon ah run, til day ketch am.”