Harjinder Butoy,[1]
'All who were convicted following a trial had grim
punishments imposed upon them, including in some cases immediate sentences of
imprisonment. Lives were ruined, families were torn apart, families were made
homeless and destitute.'Reputations were destroyed, not least because the
crimes of which the men and women were convicted – theft, fraud, and false
accounting – all involved acting dishonestly. People who were an important,
respected and integral part of the local community that they served were in
some cases shunned.
Jason Beer QC
Behind every great fortune, there is a crime.
—Balzac
The Great Post Office Scandal, a door stopper of a book
weighing in at 544 pages, catalogues at great length the numerous campaigns and
legal cases that finally made the Post Office admit there was the elephant in
the room. Post Office executives spared no cost in defending their position of
prosecuting innocent people for crimes they did not commit.
Nick Wallis's book highlights the shocking and criminal
actions of the Post Office, who deliberately prosecuted Postmasters and Postmistresses
despite knowing full well that their Horizon computer system was faulty. The
Post Office bosses jailed, ruined the lives of and caused the suicides of many
people in a manner that would not look out of place in a Nazi courtroom.
As Rory Cellan-Jones said in his review, "hundreds of
sub-postmasters have had their reputations besmirched, their livelihood and
liberty taken away and been sent into a spiral of depression that has in one
instance ended in suicide, all because of a misplaced faith in the wisdom of
computers".[2]
In 1999 The Post Office introduced a computer system called
Horizon designed by Japans Fujitsu. It sought to revolutionise how Post Offices
worked, but in reality, it produced a nightmare that made Dante's Inferno look
like a tea party.
During the four years after its introduction, the system
miraculously began to find incredible levels of fraud. Instead of investigating
whether the system was malfunctioning, the Post Office went to extraordinary
lengths not only to cover up the fault but by 2014 had 736 people prosecuted. Both
the Post Office and Fujitsu lied through their teeth to protect a malfunctioning
computer system, even denying that Fujitsu employees had any power to intervene
with branch transactions. The Post Office deliberately withheld evidence that
prevented workers from having a fair trial.
The book is meticulously researched and well written. Wallis's
tenacity in pursuing the Post Office is a sight to behold. The book is an
engrossing account of how the Post Office was forced to admit that it deliberately
ignored and covered up Horizon's malfunction. The Post Office's hands are dripping
with the blood of many workers.
Wallis did not break the story, but he was one of the few
brave souls to break the wall of silence surrounding the scandal. Initially
contacted by Davinder Misra, the husband of Seema, who was pregnant and in prison.
She was accused of a shortfall in her account of £74,000, and was jailed for 15
months for theft.
Trade Union and
Labour Bureaucracy
The reason the Post Office could jail people like Seema and
many more is down to the fact that the Labour and Trade union bureaucracy never
lifted a finger to stop it. At no stage did the unions involved either the
Subpostmasters trade union or the CWU(CommunicationWorkers Union) call for
strike action to prevent people from being jailed for crimes they did not
commit. At no stage did the CWU expose the rotten Labour governments that presided
over this miscarriage of justice on a grand scale.
This crime against the working class began under the
Blair-Brown Labour governments. Gordon Brown became PM of the Labour government
on 27th June 2007.
The union bureaucrats of the CWU fully shared the essential
thrust of Blair and Brown's right-wing policies. They shared Labour's
pro-business agenda, which included allowing innocent workers to be jailed and
ruined by a Government-owned company without lifting a finger to help.
Conclusion
The Great Post Office Scandal is not an easy read, not just because
it is too heavy. I hope it gets a wide readership. Wallis will donate money
from the sales to fund the court cases still to be undertaken. Aside from that,
it is an important book. It is conversational and contains many interesting
vignettes, sometimes making it read like a crime novel.
The book works on many levels. It is attractive for the
general reader, and academics will find much that interests them. From a legal
standpoint, many lawyers will find this a goldmine.
While this scandal could be compared with other crimes
against the working class like Enron, Theranos, Wirecard that has devastated so
many lives in the pursuit of profit, it would be a mistake to believe that the
Post Office is just a bad apple in an otherwise healthy basket. The decisive
question that is not raised in the book, let alone answered, is what driving
forces within the capitalist economy could have led to the situation where The
Post Office could pursue and jail innocent people and act with impunity.
What was the role of the Labour and Trade Union bureaucracy
in allowing the Post Office to act with such impunity? The answer to these
questions will not be found in the book or in the current enquiry, which will
be another will be a whitewash.
Why has no Post Office executive has been held personally
accountable, let alone jailed? The Post Office Chair and CEO are still in their
jobs, and the previous CEO, Paula Vennells, was given a CBE and a cushy job as
Chair of Imperial College NHS Trust. CEO Paula Vennells was given a £5 million
golden handshake and a CBE for "services to the Post Office and
charity". Workers must reject this phoney enquiry and must demand a worker's
inquiry.
