Speed up justice for Windrush and Grenfell now too
FINALLY we are wising up to the computer culture robbing our society of empathy and common sense.
Finally we are holding up to the light the entitled, administrative soldiers of bureaucracy, emboldened by a digital system churning out the red letters which have, for years, left struggling households crippled with fear.
A week on, the momentum from the TV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office continues to claim heads and achieve long-awaited justice for the victims of that horrific scandal.
Ministers have moved quickly to capitalise on the kudos on offer for clearing the names of the 900 wrongly convicted after faulty IT systems made it look as though money had gone missing.
No10 is terrified by the tidal wave of public anger over a miscarriage of justice that could so easily have been avoided if specific, jumped-up individuals hadn’t been so full of themselves.
No sooner had Mr Bates vs The Post Office finished last week than the Government announced plans to fasttrack the retribution process.
Quite right too. The scale of the scandal is as breathtaking as it is appalling. Never mind the apologies and the handwringing, criminal charges should indeed be pursued.
Let’s now see if the Government can do the same for the victims of the Windrush scandal. Or Grenfell.
A cynic would point to an election year as the reason for ministers’ indecent haste to rip up convention and address the Post Office issue it has known about for some time.
Journalists have campaigned and written hundreds of stories on it for years.
Let’s see what Rishi Sunak and his ministers are prepared to do about these other massive miscarriages of our hopelessly flawed British justice system.
Maybe the magnificent creative brain behind Mr Bates vs The Post Office should get cracking on another one about Windrush.
We had one – Sitting In Limbo – made by the BBC in 2020 but that failed to register anything like this has.
I wonder why.
The impact on the Windrush victims has been identical to that of those involved in the Post Office scandal: financial ruin, homes lost, livelihoods destroyed, reputations wrecked, families devastated.
The Home Office, marking its own homework, ripped lives apart, just as the Post Office did.
For good measure, dozens of Windrush claimants also died before receiving any compensation. Expensive lawyers, hired with the express purpose of grinding down the families left behind, did the Home Office’s bidding.
Rules and application processes were bent out of shape into a legalistic obstacle course, deliberately designed to bamboozle potential claimants.
The system was weaponised against allcomers to defend injustice, moving at a glacial pace to ensure claimants cracked before it did.
To see the Government responding at breakneck speed to the Post Office crisis will be devastating to the people still fighting for Windrush justice.
The latest meeting, the Windrush Manifesto Rally, Influencing The Next Election, will be held at the House of Commons in London this week.
A GoFundMe campaign remains ongoing to fund the Windrush Judicial Review. Help is still needed for scandals in plain sight.
We also need a drama about Grenfell on the go with justice still not forthcoming for the 72 killed in that horrific tower fire of 2017.
Now that the Covid inquiry has detailed the scale of the incompetence and negligence at the heart of No10, we need another drama about that too. Maybe even the scandal over the sewage spilling into our rivers.
We’ve finally established our system IS for turning. So too is our Government when it suits them.
Now we need to turn the screw.
‘‘ Dozens of claimants also died before receiving compensation