Make the Post Office boss keep her CBE... as a reminder of how justice was strangled
JUSTICE will never be done to the victims of the Post Office computer scandal. What they have lost is irrecoverable, in some cases more than others. Years of what could have been happy and contented lives have been stolen. Good names have been snatched away and grudgingly returned years later. Innocent people have been locked away in prisons, a horror very hard to forgive. Marriages have been torn apart. In some appalling cases these illtreated people understandably lost their minds or took their own lives.
I will not join in the easy call for the removal of the CBE awarded to the former Chief Executive of the Post Office, Paula Vennells. I think she should be forced to keep it, as a lifelong reminder to her and to the rest of us of how justice and mercy have been strangled in this country.
Resigning her medal is too easy, too simple and too quick. We – and she – have to come up with ways of ensuring that she (and others) may consider how they may spend the rest of their lives trying to put right the wrongs they have done. This is for their good as well as for ours.
All of us, in our own ways, have such a duty while we live. But in
her case it is especially heavy. As someone who has preached the Gospel of Christ in church, she will know in detail that there are many things she can and must do.
As the prophet Micah asked thousands of years ago, ‘What doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God’ – such simple demands, but how many in high office now know of them or seek to obey them?
My concern is for the future. Like millions of others, I watched the ITV drama on the Horizon outrage, and was constantly switching from anger to grief, to occasional joy at the shafts of light which pierced the awful gloom. And I wondered if I would be able to see, and ready to oppose, another such injustice if it was brought before me tomorrow.
I thought of all the times some government department or corporation has blithely informed me (as the sub-postmasters were told) that ‘nobody else has complained’. I thought of the growing powerlessness of the individual in Britain in the modern age, as government, police and business have hidden themselves behind electronic walls which keep out all the cries of pain and misery, but still let the money through. We have gone so wrong, and we can only get back to civilisation if we restore the presumption of innocence as the keystone of all our law. For that principle forces us to refuse to run with any crowd, to question any certainty, to doubt all official statements, to side instinctively with the weak against the strong and to recognise that we are most unlikely to know the full story. And surely that when we see people such as Alan Bates (so brilliantly portrayed by Toby Jones on ITV) wrestling with giants, that we do not take the side of the giants.