What can we learn from the Post Office scandal publicity (including TV)?

I wonder if there's also something in the disclosure of evidence rules. I'm not sure how this works in private prosecutions, but a public prosecution requires full disclosure on both sides. Of course people may try to game it, but there's a real risk of live cases collapsing and convictions being ruled unsafe if it isn't provided. The Post Office seems to have withheld, concealed, and lied about the existence of evidence on an industrial scale.

 

As far as I can see the rules were in place but the lawyers advised that they could be ignored - which seems to me a criminal offence if ever there was one.

 

One of the thigs I found damming was the external lawyer warned the post office of it's duty to disclose. Yet they persisted with hiding the evidence e.g. by imposing a condition of no written records of meetings. I wonder if part of the problem is the high evidential (criminal) standard combined with a need to demonstrate intent (to mislead the court)?

 

Thank you.

 

I only started watching "Mr Bates vs the Post Office" last night. After watching it my husband mentioned something I was completely unaware of.

Did you know that courts legally have to assume that computer systems are operating correctly? And my interpretation of this is that people on trial have to prove that it isn't. How is someone who has never worked with computers (in a programming context) supposed to do that? And this law about computers always being correct seems to completely ignore the fact that programs are written by people who are fallible and can often be incompetent.

https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10151259/

One of the groups lobbying for this law assuming that computers are infallible was - the Post Office.

 

Just watched the beginning of Andy Burnham's press conference today.

He talks about the drama the 3 girls and the accompanying documentary and how it influenced his decision to establish a wide ranging review.

He said the report published today was hard to read and... "It is only by facing up fully and unflinchingly to what happened in all of its horrifying detail that we can be sure of bringing about the whole system culture change that is be necessary on this issue."

Also makes me think of Sophia Mirza as I believe he was Health Secretary at the time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HTMS9Pe09o

 

The Times has an article today headed "Help blood victims like postmasters MPs demand."

More than 100 MPs from across the political spectrum have demanded that Rishi Sunak speeds up compensation for those given contaminated blood.
MPs have written that this is a worse scandal than Horizon.
Thousands died in the 1970s and 80s sfter receiving contaminated blood products.

edit: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/...-up-compensation-for-infected-blood-bc9lt89kd



edit 2:From the online article- not sure if it is open to all

"Seb Carrington, the actor who played Alan Bennett in The Crown, has written a drama about the infected blood crisis. His brother was infected with hepatitis C through his treatment for haemophilia. Carrington also has haemophilia.

He said he had submitted it to broadcasters, but was told by one that it would work better as a documentary and another that they had a lot of fact-based drama on their schedules already." Something we may wish to note.?

 

I wrote to my MP (yet again) say that I was struck by the parallels between the PO scandal and the injustices to which people with ME/CFS have been subjected. He has said he will write the the Minister responsible to ask (yet again) if they will ring-fence funding for high-quality ME/CFS research, proportional to disease burden and to compensate for decades of underinvestment. I know what the answer will be but I think it’s important to keep the issues on the radar of as many ministers and MPs as possible.

Edited response from my MP:

[Edit to add: my MP is Jeremy Quin]

 

Thank you @Robert 1973. A good move to keep MPs informed and if possible, involved.

 

Interesting legal point demonstrating the complexity of the available PO scandal narratives: Could the Post Office sue its own former directors and advisers regarding the Horizon scandal?

And a piece by journalist Gavin Esler on narratives and the human face (covers political stuff but examples seem relevant to a wider discussion on narrative structure) The UK post office scandal shows the power of stories when they are humanised

 

Important similarities in tactics with ME/CFS vs how Post Office 'handled' the issues (and some of these common tactics if they can get away with it used in other circumstances)

The first obvious one is the

'noone else is having these problems' or 'you are the only one with money missing' being very key at the beginning with the sub-postmasters

vs for ME/CFS the PRing of 'Support Groups lead to worse outcomes/you shouldn't be talking to other pwme' various inferences and lines in guidelines and articles from the BPS, both directly (to pwme) and indirectly (pretending to GPs and laypersons this is a sign of some sort of mental issue cause/the old 'mass hysteria' source)

and of course when you think of the PACE trial and the advice of GET and the false beliefs and sleep training nonsense, making it seem like those who admitted to others that 'it didn't work for them' would be seen as ....what? because they didn't ever check harms or long-term effects, and we have a system where there is no independent collection of actual reaction to how treatments worked as people assume GPs would do or some physician is doing and therefore would be a backstop checking and feeding in that something didn't work etc.

You would have had to have been either left with no choice (that ill you can't hide it) or a very brave or naive person 10 years ago to forcefully keep telling most GPs that the GET made them worse. And I do think we need to list and log the potentially catastrophic 'threats' or 'perceived threats' involved with that - because it is the cornerstone of how I think this was all eventually built and held up by coercion techniques influencing what even pwme themselves could dare think (because if saying soemthing else would get you forced into x, you can only make the best of it).

WHich again feels like the parallel with how the sub-postmasters paid in their own money or did other things rather than very few who e.g. like Mr Bates just refused to sign their accounts (and he had his post office removed from him).

 

From what I've read, some GPs made people feel that treatment for other issues was effectively contingent on following their advice about ME. This is a slippery one, because if a complaint is made it's the patient's word against the doctor's.

You can almost hear the get-out:

"We're very sorry if that's the impression you were given." (Always in the third person, of course.)

 

I've wondered this, too. There's been no suggestion that someone, e.g. at Fujitsu, was siphoning off the money themselves, yet wouldn't this be a possibility?

 

I don't think that is possible.I am fairly sure that the 'money' that the PO claimed had been stolen never existed. Nothing had ever been paid in. That ought to be clear from the bank accounts of people who were supposed to be the source. But if it was supposed to be money paid in in cash it would be more difficult.

 

There was a documentary episode after the drama, called "Mr Bates vs the Post Office : The Real Story" which I watched last night. It didn't give much more detail than the drama did, but one thing I learned is that the money/assets seized from the Postmasters would probably have gone into a Suspense Account (whatever that is). Eventually it would have gone from there into Post Office profits.

 

Surely that's the money that sub postmasters were forced to pay as the system said they were short.

It is not the fictional money that the system said they were short itself.

 

Once the subpostmasters have paid the money to the post office it is real money. The subpostmasters are X pounds poorer and the Post Office are X pounds richer.

 

A further bit of the history - very first News exposure was on the very small audience S4C Welsh language channel, 10 years before the key legal decisions were arrived at: Twitter sorry - https://twitter.com/user/status/1746149573205135769

 

That was real, but the shortages weren't.

There were several bugs, but what collapsed the prosecution's case was that Fujitsu staff were making adjustments to branch accounts without the sub-postmasters' knowledge. The money in your till will look short if someone rung up non-existent sales while you weren't looking.

It's where you put transactions that need checking because they might be duplicates or errors. Or where you'd put an advance payment for which you haven't raised an invoice yet. It's just a way of temporarily putting anomalies to one side so they don't throw out the rest of the figures.