Power to the ordinary people

The appalling treatment of the sub-postmasters by the Post Office seems to be entirely consistent with other scandals, such as contaminated blood, Windrush, and the Grenfell fire. The common factor is that none of those affected had any connections or wealth. They were “ordinary people” and it was not until someone with connections and more influence took an interest that something was done. Until then, their plight was effectively invisible.

The standard tactic for dealing with any matter embarrassing to the government (whether Labour or Conservative) is to delay the inquiry for as long as possible. Where compensation is an issue, claimants are forced to jump through difficult and protracted hoops. Rather perversely, some such schemes are administered by the very departments that first caused the problem.

Finally, someone from the government is bound to say that “lessons will be learned” as a result of the relevant inquiry. But, in reality, we all know that there is little, if any, chance of any lesson being learned when ordinary people without influence and/or power are caught up in such scandals.

I'm always struck, after sometimes decades of fighting for compensation, by how much power the state has. ministers come and go, and the government changes, but the advice from civil servants who have been there for years, never changes. And that might really get to the heart of the problem. That is why injustice drags on: it’s often those who made the decisions in the first place are charged with righting the wrongs. We have a distant and unaccountable bureaucracy incentivised to save both money and face. 

But any politician promising greater respect for the public, as Starmer does, risks simply running the same machine – stuck in its centralised-globalised muddle of shoddy outsourcing, false economies and groupthink. There is no determined desire to be accountable or really learn and work to change the culture. Why does justice take so long in some of these cases? I can’t help feeling they’re just waiting for people to die and let it all be forgotten.

What I find truly dispiriting is that there are so many examples of the inability of our public institutions to spend our money wisely and ensure that senior people are held to account for delivering what they should effectively and behaving honestly in the process.

I’m not sure our elected representatives realise that, when they speak in grave, hushed tones of the biggest miscarriage of justice in British legal history, the rest of us are wondering why it took an ITV drama to get them to this point. Was it “public ‘apathy’” that was the biggest hurdle to fully understanding what was going on? Some say that this is the case but they are kidding themselves. Apathy implies that people don’t care. I think people care very much. The challenge facing all political parties isn’t apathy. It’s despair. And I put that down to our present administration. A pox on them all.