Post Office scandal has exposed the elite’s contempt for Middle England

Ordinary, hardworking people no longer expect to be treated fairly by a venal new establishment class

The Post Office scandal is a parable of modern Britain, a broken society where all too often the best people are taken advantage of by the worst, aided and abetted by a morally bankrupt officialdom. Shoplifters, car thieves, failed asylum seekers and even preachers of hate are frequently let off, but respectable middle-class families are rarely given the benefit of the doubt. The Londonbased establishment was uninterested in Horizon, the greatest miscarriage of justice of modern times, because its victims were the “wrong” kind of people, a mostly suburban social class they could not relate to, persecuted by paid-up members of our new elite.

The hundreds of sub-postmasters who were incorrectly convicted of theft and false accounting were selfemployed entrepreneurs, white or from an immigrant background, determined to better themselves. They were the lynchpin of Middle England, the toilers who make our high streets tick, the purveyors of services to pensioners, the unsung heroes that are in such short supply in modern Britain. In a sane country, these would be the last people anyone would suspect of criminality; and yet in our warped, morally inverted world, dominated by a “machine knows best”mindset, they were fair game.

They weren’t wrongly signing on for incapacity benefits, or stealing from shops, or chanting violent slogans, so they weren’t protected by the politically correct double-standards that have turned Britain into an increasingly unfair society. Yet what were the statistical odds that – suddenly – hundreds of such overwhelmingly law-abiding people would turn into criminals, just after a new, ultracomplex IT system was put in place? Why did so few people connect the dots, and realise that something else appeared to be at play?

The postmasters’ bad luck is that they, the best of Britain, were persecuted by the worst of Britain: the overpromoted corporate-bureaucratic class, the useless apparatchiks of Britain’s Kafkaesque bureaucracies, the unaccountable arms-length bodies, the out of control lawyers, the civil servants and the subsidy-hungry corporations. The most disgusting element of this atrocious tale is that while the subpostmasters were ruined – and in some cases even took their own lives – many of those responsible for their destruction walked away with honours, money, prestige and good jobs. It is this – the rewards not just for failure but for sabotaging others’ lives – that angers the public. They can’t believe nobody has yet been properly punished.

The scandal exposes the deficiencies of all our institutions. Shockingly, the dreadful Crown Prosecution Service, which does too little to fight real crime, launched prosecutions in several cases, some when Sir Keir Starmer was in charge. But more than 700 cases were brought by the Post Office itself in private prosecutions, in a tragic abuse of an ancient legal practice that used to help uphold English liberty. No large organisation must ever again be allowed to wield such power unchecked. The judges, ordinarily so proud of their independence, are now being overruled in one fell swoop by an act of Parliament. For them and the idiot lawyers responsible, this is a day of shame.

The Post Office is fully state-owned but is an independent body, a quango run by a well-paid board. Captured by its own management, accountable in practice to nobody – not voters, not shareholders and not politicians – guilty of calamitous failings, suffering from absurd technical deficiencies, it epitomises what happens when the state pretends to be a private company: we get the worst of all worlds, overpaid, mercenary mediocrities with an all-consuming sense of entitlement. Quangos should be abolished, run directly by ministers and government departments, or privatised.

The scandal is yet another indictment of bureaucrats’ inability to engage in any kind of sensible procurement, as we saw with HS2, during Covid, other failed IT megaprojects and with the MOD. Billions are wasted and we end up with poor, or even unusable systems or kit in return for an ever larger national debt.

It is hard to believe but the damage wreaked by Horizon could have been even orders of magnitude greater: the original private finance initiative (PFI) contract awarded by John Major’s government to Britain’s ICL (later bought by Japan’s Fujitsu) was not merely to computerise post offices but also to automate the system for paying DSS benefits to 28 million claimants, supposedly to stamp out fraud. This second project was killed off, but why was the Post Office element allowed to go ahead?

Our bureaucrats are exceptionally bad at working with the private sector, are often outwitted, inevitably overpay and choose the wrong contractors. The merry-go-round between Whitehall, regulators and Westminster and many of the big global firms is hardly helpful. The civil servants responsible for incompetent decisions are frequently rewarded with a generous pension, a second career and endless gongs. The whole Northcote-trevelyan model is broken. Justice will only be done if many more people are forced to give up their honours. In time, the bureaucracy needs to be utterly reformed along Singapore or New Zealand lines.

Failed outsourcers or consultants are rarely meaningfully penalised, either. How on earth can it be that Fujitsu has been awarded a further £4.9billion in state contracts since the December 2019 High Court ruling that its systems “weren’t remotely robust”? Is the entire British establishment signed up to the idea that failure must be rewarded, and then rewarded again? What a pathetic, rapacious and amoral country we live in – and no, this isn’t real capitalism but a sorry corporatist ersatz.

The buck ultimately stops with the politicians. Some did cover themselves in glory, but most failed to use their great power for the common good. As with the expenses scandal, lockdown and many of the other great blunders of recent decades, this was a cross-party disaster reeking of cowardice, groupthink and excess deference to authority. Sir Ed Davey failed especially catastrophically and must resign as Lib Dem leader. Sir Vince Cable, another overrated mediocrity, proved useless. Sir Keir has serious questions to answer. Why did neither Labour nor the coalition kill off Horizon? Why did it take the Tories so long to act?

Ordinary people no longer expect to be treated fairly by officialdom in Britain in 2024: no wonder they are in such a revolutionary mood.

Allister Heath on Twitter @Allisterheath; at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion

What a pathetic, rapacious and amoral country we live in – and no, this isn’t real capitalism but a sorry corporatist ersatz