“It was a scandal hiding in plain sight.” “The result of a series of choices, the culmination of state neglect and corporate misconduct.” “Most assumed they were caught in a bureaucratic tangle; few suspected that thousands of others were facing the same difficulties.” “It’s a strange sensation, repeatedly telling the truth and being told repeatedly that you’re lying.” “Our representatives chose again and again not to act on the mounting evidence.” “This is a story about who is listened to and who is ignored in Britain.”
These could be quotes from an article about the post office scandal. In fact, they have all been adopted Show me the bodiesPeter Apps’ gripping account of the Grenfell fire, and The Betrayal of the WindrushAmelia Gentleman’s brutal examination of the human consequences of Theresa May’s ‘hostile environment’ policy.
The deep public outrage sparked by the ITV drama Mr. Bates versus the Post Office has forced the government to take extraordinary measures to exonerate hundreds of wrongfully convicted sub-postmasters and expedite compensation.
However, the Post Office scandal is just one in a series – from the Hillsborough stadium disaster to Grenfell, from the NHS contagious blood tragedy to child sex abuse in Rotherham, from the English language tests fiasco to the horrors of Windrush – all of which different, but all revealing certain underlying themes. Some are about corporate greed, others about official crimes or government neglect. And something about both. What they all have in common is the lack of public accountability for the outrages that have destroyed the lives of so many people.
Experts had been warning about the dangers of flammable cladding for at least 30 years before the Grenfell inferno.
In the case of the Post Office, there is talk of forcing Fujitsu, the company responsible for the defective Horizon accounting software, to contribute to the compensation scheme. Public anger has forced former Post Office CEO Paula Vennells to hand back her CBE.
But despite many of the facts having been known for years, until last week little action had been taken to speed up the process of exoneration or compensation. The facts were known when the government awarded Fujitsu new contracts, including one to expand the use of Horizon software and another to run the Police National Computer. They became known when Vennells received her CBE in 2019. Only after sensing public outrage in an election year did the government see fit to act quickly.
Greed and indifference, the refusal to listen to the ‘little’ people, the desperation of those ignored, the disdain, even contempt, for lives destroyed – all these themes form a pattern seen in virtually every previous scandal, including both Grenfell and Windrush. As Apps describes in his book, experts had been warning about the dangers of flammable cladding for at least thirty years before the Grenfell inferno. The warnings were brushed aside by official carelessness and the pursuit of profit. Companies falsified tests, hid the results, and knowingly marketed potentially deadly products. Regulators became entrenched in the sector they were supposed to regulate. Politicians became obsessed with the need for deregulation.
The Windrush scandal was caused by a desire to crack down on immigration. In 2012, the Home Secretary, Theresa May, launched the ‘hostile environment’ policy that turned doctors, teachers and landlords into unofficial immigration officials tasked with making life unbearable for anyone who might be an ‘illegal immigrant’.
Ministers were warned that not only those deemed “illegal” but “Anyone who looks foreign”, in the words of Communities Secretary Eric Pickles, could go into a frenzy. Once again the warnings were ignored, and once again they were sadly prescient. Thousands were made redundant, made homeless, denied NHS treatment and benefits because they lacked the papers they did not need when they arrived from the Caribbean as British subjects in the post-war decades. Many were deported. Some died in exile.
As in other scandals, authorities denied there was a problem until forced to do so by the sheer volume of evidence, belatedly creating mechanisms for redress and compensation. But here again, following the pattern, the policy was almost designed to be slow and mean. Last June, four years after the start of the compensation scheme, only one in four of the 6,348 applications submitted had been paid out.
The most cynical development is the government’s erecting obstacles to obtaining compensation for injustice
The common thread running through these scandals is also the lack of public accountability for wrongdoing. Grenfell campaigners are frustrated not only because there have been no criminal charges, but also because companies whose products fueled the fire continue to make huge profits. The four former Tory ministers invoked the Grenfell inquiry to justify their actions, or lack thereof. Gavin Barwell, James Wharton, Eric Pickles and Brandon Lewis – have all been knighted or ennobled since the fire.
In the Windrush scandal, Amber Rudd resigned as Home Secretary, not because she oversaw the abuse, but because she had misled parliament about targets to boost deportations. The architect of the policy, May, became prime minister. In her memoir, unironically titled The Abuse of powershe blames everyone else, from the 1945 Labor government to the ‘overzealous’ civil servants, for the problem she has created.
Perhaps the most cynical development is the government’s erecting obstacles to obtaining redress for injustice. In 2014, Justice Secretary Chris Grayling rewrote the law so that those found by the court to have been victims of a miscarriage of justice would not receive compensation unless they could prove their innocence “beyond reasonable doubt” – effectively replacing the presumption of innocence with the presumption of innocence. suspicion of guilt.
This was exactly the way the Post Office went about accusing subpostmasters of fraud: they couldn’t prove their innocence, so they had to be guilty. Coupled with austerity policies that have reduced legal aid, access to both justice and redress has been eviscerated over the past decade.
It’s impossible to watch Mr. Bates versus the Post Office without feeling a sense of anger at the injustice and cruel mendacity of those who have power over us. The sub-postmasters have been courageous, tenacious and, although it certainly doesn’t feel that way to them, happy. Without the TV drama and the outrage it caused, they could face official injustice for years to come.
At the heart of the matter remains the question of “who is listened to and who is ignored”. Kimia Zabihyan is an advocate for Grenfell Next of Kin, which brings together the immediate families of those who died in the fire. Nothing irritates her more than the indifference of government agencies to the needs of ordinary people. “Our experience since the fire,” she notes desperately, “is that the lack of accountability is now so built into the system that it has corrupted every level of our society.”
• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist