Both Labour and the Tories are turning their back on victims of the #PostOfficeScandal
Keir Starmer: yet another own goal – but this one suggests he’s not interested in representing the people. Why is he in politics, then?
Politicians from both Labour and the Conservative Party yesterday proved that they cannot be trusted to give justice to the sub-postmasters whose lives were ruined by the Post Office scandal.
That scandal has been explained to millions of us in a fact-based TV drama, Mr Bates vs The Post Office, broadcast on ITV last week.
The show made clear that hundreds of sub-postmasters were falsely accused and convicted of stealing large amounts of money – that never actually existed – on the basis of evidence from the faulty Horizon computer system that was built for the government by Bracknell-based Fujitsu.
The system was not secure, meaning Fujitsu staff were able to break into it and alter financial information without sub-postmasters knowing about it (according to the drama).
A vanishingly small number of the wronged sub-postmasters have been compensated; their convictions overturned. The Post Office (which is wholly owned by the government) has been dragging its corporate feet over it.
Meanwhile the money taken from the scandals hundreds of victims (they were ordered to pay back the cash that they hadn’t stolen) is believed to have made its way into Post Office Limited’s profits.
Labour leader Keir Starmer – himself a lawyer and former Director of Public Prosecutions – was challenged about the scandal yesterday. Rather than say that everybody who had been wronged deserved to have their convictions quashed, their money returned and significant sums paid to them in compensation, all he could say was that their cases should be “looked at”:
This is the Keir Starmer I had a bit of an argument with over the Twitter Joke Trial back in the day. Unable to see the wood for the trees. If they’ve been wrongly convicted, their convictions should be overturned. https://t.co/mzdecLAwsi
— Prof Paul Bernal (@PaulbernalUK) January 8, 2024
People have “looked at” these cases for more than a decade!
They deliberately chose to do nothing about it and will continue to make that choice until somebody lights a fire under them.
Clearly Sir Keir Starmer won’t be the one to do it.
Nor will Bim Afolami – himself a corporate lawyer before entering politics and becoming Economic Secretary to the Treasury.
He tried to claim that everybody who had been targeted by Fujitsu’s flawed system and the Post Office’s lawyers had received compensation. When the presenters of ITV’s Good Morning Britain made it clear that is simply wasn’t true, he tried to tell them he meant to say that the government was trying to compensate those who deserved it as soon as possible:
Remember that all the rightfully deserved compensation is being paid by YOU.
Fujitsu who caused the errors, they‘re not paying a penny, in fact they sued US for £700m for refusing to give them more contracts because of this.
RT if Fujitsu should be made to pay. https://t.co/x9RzeDQzXm
— BladeoftheSun (@BladeoftheS) January 8, 2024
There was no credibility to his performance.
This Writer wouldn’t trust either Afolami or Starmer to lift a finger on this matter.
They don’t seem to be interested in looking after the interests of the citizens of the UK.
It just doesn’t seem to be what they got into politics for.
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I don’t need an ITV drama to convince me that neither the Conservative nor the ‘Labour’ party can be trusted on important or lesser issues. Dogma and politicking is their modus operandi, people come a long way down the list. I won’t be surprised if the revolution starts on polling day!
Orgreave, Hillsborough… same old story. It doesn’t matter for how long or how strenuously you push it, the British State is terrible at holding its own institutions to account. I’m massively in favour of the public sector overall, but one area where it needs radical reform is accountability where it fails to law-breaking levels.