'Your justice is in the post - and we all know they rarely bother to deliver'

11 January 2024 , 12:34

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If everybody had cared a bit more about the thing they care about so much now, simply because Toby Jones put his cross face on, it might not have taken so long

The Prime Minister is going to exonerate everyone and give them £75,000 each. So that's all fixed then.

To hear Rishi Sunak grandly announce the resolution of the Post Office scandal, you'd think he'd spent his 8 years in Parliament battling single-handed up the hill of institutional failures and official denials to right the greatest wrong in British history.

But he didn't. He hasn't. And he won't.

Not just because the money on offer is a tenth of what many lost when the Post Office hounded them through the courts, nor because it's tacked to a contract that says they have to give it back if what the government considers to be convincing new evidence comes to light. But because, in Britain, scandals are a way of life.

The number of MPs in Parliament who take on a scandal that's affected a constituent and fight for it to their dying day is in single digits. The number of Parliamentary committees devoted solely to unpicking or resolving a great injustice is nil. In general terms, Parliamentary attention is only given to a scandal when it's box office - with a celebrity, or a TV drama, attached.

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The media, which is the last resort of those choked and wronged by the Establishment line-to-take, has fewer pages, minutes, and staff to do the dogged investigating which unpicks the problem, and all too often is so busy running to keep up with their rivals that there's very little time, bandwidth or resources left to actually go one better.

And the public is so used to scrolling the news, rather than sitting down with it, that if it's not exciting enough to hold their attention in the first five seconds of a social media clip, it'll be gone. That's why a handful journalists have, since 2009, exposed the Post Office scandal, over and over again, to, in the words of one of them, "a clanging silence".

If everybody had cared a bit more about the thing they care about so much now, simply because Toby Jones put his cross face on, it might not have taken so long.

You don't want to make him angry (ITV/REX/Shutterstock)

Very few scandals are born, thrive, and are covered up in under a year. Probably Boris Johnson's Partygate is the only one to have been birthed and exposed in under a decade. And with the Post Office, 20 years of wrongdoing, 14 years of reporting, and 5 years of relative inaction have covered every political party in equal ordure, so none of them wanted to touch it.

But now it's an election year, and suddenly everyone needs to be on the winning side. There are briefings, policy positions, and public pronouncements. And, even more importantly, they all get picked apart by the other side and the Press, which is how we know that Rishi's settlement offer still isn't a cheque in the post, nor a clearing of all those who weren't convicted, and therefore cannot be exonerated, but lost their good names, homes and livelihoods anyway.

There are no briefings on who knew the Grenfell Tower cladding was effectively kindling. There are no policy positions being pushed out on perjury allegedly committed by police officers at Orgreave, no investigation into who knew how much in government about the truth of Hillsborough, no pledge to instantly compensate those - knowingly, not accidentally - given infected blood and had their medical records falsified to hide it.

But it is still an election year. And there are many thousands who watched Mr Bates vs the Post Office and were angry, not just at the injustice it portrayed, but that their own injustices weren't getting anywhere near the same attention from the public, the Press, or the politicians.

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I've lost count of the number of times people have said in the past week that the nuclear veterans' battle for the truth would be over, if they just had an ITV drama. I know! They're not interested! It's a complex tale, difficult science, winning concessions from the Ministry of Defence is like pulling teeth from a fossilised T-rex, and they could all stand easy if anyone had bloody paid attention to the past 40 years in which the Mirror has been shouting from the rooftops about how they were victims of human radiation experiments. But hey ho. Maybe Toby Jones is booked up.

The infected blood inquiry, which has been dragging on even longer than the Post Office one, is due to report back in March. Having already ordered interim payments of £100,000 to victims, and been ignored by the PM and his Chancellor, the chances are Sir Brian Langstaff is going to rip them a fresh one. Word has it, not only is he going to deliver a massive bill to the government, but will also demand an impossible-to-ignore legislative change - to give every public official a legal duty of candour. In other words, to force them to tell the truth, or go to jail.

One would have thought that was already a condition of being a police officer, NHS worker, Post Office chief executive or building inspector. And that no-one could quibble with it. But when a government finally bows to a scandal, as it has this week, it never bends the knee all the way... it's always only *so* far. So it's 'in the fullness of time', and 'subject to review', and 'something must be done'. And as the news moves on to something else, so the commitments, timescales, and compensation packages all get watered down. Real change never seems to quite appear.

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So scandal after scandal rolls out of the factory, mutating and morphing as it gobbles up people and money, generates the lawyers' fees and gives politicians a chance to prove they DO listen, honest, even if it is only in an election year.

We can't all expend all our energies on all the scandals, as has happened this past week. We would lose our minds. But we also can't keep waiting politely for someone to notice they must all end, because that'll mean we already have.

The state is not an entity, but a system. Its machinery can be repaired, destroyed, replaced. Yet whenever a scandal happens, a bit of grit in the cogs becomes unmanageable, no-one gets the tool box out. Sometimes the people involved are ground to dust, and sometimes, like the Post Office, that part of the state just becomes non-functional.

There needs to be a Parliamentary committee devoted to ending these outrages.. There needs to be a duty of candour on public officials, and guidance from the Prime Minister down that every press office in the land, from the MoD to the local town council, treats a problem presented to them by a journalist as an opportunity to make the machinery better, rather than an attack on the threshing machine by the peasants. There needs, too, to be a Public Advocate who will fight the legal battles which Hillsborough families, Grenfell victims, nuclear veterans, and sub-postmasters had to find a way to fund themselves, when government ministers failed them. True justice means forcing improvements to the machinery, and nothing less will suffice.

Because otherwise all that happens is they tell you justice is in the post, and it somehow never arrives. When we all know that they very rarely bother to deliver.

* As we don't yet have a duty of candour, or a Public Advocate, please donate if you can HERE to the nuclear veterans' crowdfunder. They're taking the government to court, and they need your help.

Fleet Street Fox