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

I think one of the lessons we can learn from the Post Office scandal is the fact that the post office were told by their lawyers not to defend a claim for
compensation:
  • reason why they chose not to defend that case i.e. they had requested a review of the IT system and the specialist employed produced a report which undermined the post office's case; and
  • fact that they identified they couldn't take further prosecutions if the unfavourable evidence was disclosed via the claim for compensation i.e. to settle the case at any cost.
The PACE etc. studies, i.e. of psychological interventions, have been rated as "low or very low" quality i.e. by NICE. We could try to highlight that evidence i.e. if claims are made that these interventions work. Jonathan made the point very well here* - i.e. that the evidence has been evaluated and the verdict was damming. OK we generally operate in the realm of public opinion - but the NICE evidence is still very useful - I wouldn't want to defend it or to come up with lines to defend the Department/Minister who funds research which is "low or very low" quality.

*https://www.s4me.info/threads/chron...c-fatigue-consortium.35388/page-3#post-495447
 
Arnie Pye said:
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.
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In the drama (part 4) there is a scene in a pub with Bob, Alan and Jo. Jo asks Bob again where her money went. He replies:“I think, Jo – can’t prove it yet but I will – the money you gave them, that they claimed you owed them, hung around in some sort of suspense account for a while, while they failed to investigate, and after a couple of years your money – everyone’s money – it just showed up in their profits.”

Jo then asks whether they are incompetent or evil. Alan Bates says it amounts to the same thing but I disagree. A conspiracy to deceive and steal is much more serious than incompetence.

If we ever get our day in court – or at least a public inquiry – I hope it will establish motives/causation. But for now all we can do is establish the facts pertaining to bad research, COIs, smear campaigns, mistreatment, neglect, disregard for safety etc. and let others determine whether those responsible are stupid, incompetent, negligent or malicious.

I am reminded of that Twitter thread with Mike Godwin after someone referenced “the banality of evil”. That would be another good scene for a drama.

[Edited: autocorrect typos and missing words]
 
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Robert 1973 said:
In the drama (part 4) there is a scene in a pub with Bob, Alan and Jo. Jo asks Bob again where her money went. He replies:“I think, Jo – can’t prove it yet but I will – the money you gave them, that they claimed you owed them, hung around in some sort of suspense account for a while, while they failed to investigate, and after a couple of years your money – everyone’s money – it just showed up in their profits.”
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I got muddled up in where I heard that. I thought it was the documentary, not the last part of the drama. I'm impressed you heard that and remembered it so well. :)
 
Robert 1973 said:
If we ever get our day in court – or at least a public inquiry – I hope it will establish motives/causation.
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The test for a UK Public Inquiry is high and requires a combination of public outrage and the interest of the Political class. I wouldn't hold out much hope of ME/CFS being a subject of a high level Inquiry unless profound and deliberate (rather than good faith belief) wrongdoing/criminality can be demonstrated, as we've had nothing to date that would meet that test I don't see much probability that it ever will be met, at least so long as the NICE Guidance holds.

Useful article on the impact of NHS Inquiries where there was evidence of profound systemic cruelty, mass murder and multiple avoidable deaths: https://www.health.org.uk/news-and-comment/blogs/50-years-of-nhs-inquiries

And a Wikipedia list of Tribunals and Inquiries in the UK - where the tests are demonstrable criminality, and/or systemic cruelty and/or individual Institutional failure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_inquiries_in_the_United_Kingdom
 
CRG said:
I wouldn't hold out much hope of ME/CFS being a subject of a high level Inquiry unless profound and deliberate (rather than good faith belief) wrongdoing/criminality can be demonstrated
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It depends on the conditions and the grounds available, and every case is different. WASPI women were told we wouldn't succeed—nothing unlawful happened, laws aren't retrospectively rescinded in this kind of case, and there was unhappiness but not public outrage. However the lawyers could see an avenue that hadn't been explored much before, and we brought the case and got a judgement of maladministration.

There might or might not be grounds for pwME somewhere, I've no way of knowing because it needs a good understanding of various systems and structures—only then can you get creative. But the time's not now, for sure.
 
ITV is apparently planning a follow up documentary to Mr Bates vs The Post Office, to be presented by Will Mellor.
It was the biggest new drama in over a decade for ITV, so there’s no surprise that ITV are planning a follow-up to Mr Bates vs The Post Office. The documentary will tell the real-life stories of the hundreds of sub-postmasters coming forward with their own injustices since the four-part series aired earlier this month.
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https://www.thesun.co.uk/tv/25481866/mr-bates-vs-the-post-office-follow-up/
 
While we may not yet be in a position to do something similar yet, this has certainly help expose systemic failures and cruelty in our current governance culture, of the very kind that we have to deal with.

So when, eventually, we get our turn, the general public are better primed and probably likely to be more receptive and to give us a fairer hearing then we might otherwise have gotten previous to both this Post Office story, and also the Covid pandemic and its consequences.
 
A bit arcane maybe but interestingly uses the NHS as an example - article by David Allan Green identifies a UK structural problem that may or may not exist in other jurisdictions, and therefore suggest actions that could be successful elsewhere but which fail in the UK: Why it’s time to drop the old doctrine of ministerial responsibility

"Imagine the following events elsewhere in the political multiverse. It is the early 2010s, and a junior minister from the junior coalition party decides to second-guess what they are told about Post Office prosecutions. In this alternative reality, the minister then actively goes against what they are told by officials and by the senior executives of the Post Office. The minister even attempts to interfere with individual prosecution decisions. What happens?

The news media scream with headlines: a minister is being SOFT ON CRIME with those who are stealing YOUR money that YOU have entrusted to postmasters and mistresses.

The minister is briefed against by those pointing out that many of the defendants are actually pleading guilty. Illiberals would deplore letting the guilty get away with their crimes, while liberals would fret about whether ministers should even get personally involved in deciding who gets prosecuted for dishonesty offences against seemingly plain evidence. This sterling, do-gooder minister would at best have a frustrating time of it. They probably would have to resign."

More at link: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/...-ministerial-responsibility-david-allen-green
 
I haven't watched the series yet, but I read an article which said that the programme makers have since been inundated with requests from people saying "You think the Post Office scandal was bad, let me tell you about this ... ". We would be at the back of a very long queue. One thing I often need to remind myself of is that, even though we've been appallingly treated, there are many others in similar boats facing their own Kafkaesque versions of disgraceful and blatently unjust treatment by various authorities.

For a good account of how the legal system has gone to shit in the UK in recent decades and a discussion of some of the issues raised in this thread (the lottery and incompetence of a court trial, legal changes to make appeal or compensation almost impossible for the wrongly convicted) I can very much recommend The Secret Barrister.
 
SNT Gatchaman said:
There is a petition underway to make Alan Bates a life peer
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He certainly deserves recognition for his persistence and generosity, but if the character portrayed in the TV series is anything like him, he might see the offer of a peerage as an attempt to shut him up?

(This might be projection on my part. The rebellious bit of me hopes he'd see it as an attempt to shut him up, and tell them he wants justice, not to be made part of the problem!)
 
CRG said:
A bit arcane maybe but interestingly uses the NHS as an example - article by David Allan Green identifies a UK structural problem that may or may not exist in other jurisdictions, and therefore suggest actions that could be successful elsewhere but which fail in the UK: Why it’s time to drop the old doctrine of ministerial responsibility

"Imagine the following events elsewhere in the political multiverse. It is the early 2010s, and a junior minister from the junior coalition party decides to second-guess what they are told about Post Office prosecutions. In this alternative reality, the minister then actively goes against what they are told by officials and by the senior executives of the Post Office. The minister even attempts to interfere with individual prosecution decisions. What happens?

The news media scream with headlines: a minister is being SOFT ON CRIME with those who are stealing YOUR money that YOU have entrusted to postmasters and mistresses.

The minister is briefed against by those pointing out that many of the defendants are actually pleading guilty. Illiberals would deplore letting the guilty get away with their crimes, while liberals would fret about whether ministers should even get personally involved in deciding who gets prosecuted for dishonesty offences against seemingly plain evidence. This sterling, do-gooder minister would at best have a frustrating time of it. They probably would have to resign."

More at link: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/...-ministerial-responsibility-david-allen-green
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Yes.
 
CRG said:
A bit arcane maybe but interestingly uses the NHS as an example - article by David Allan Green identifies a UK structural problem that may or may not exist in other jurisdictions, and therefore suggest actions that could be successful elsewhere but which fail in the UK: Why it’s time to drop the old doctrine of ministerial responsibility

"Imagine the following events elsewhere in the political multiverse. It is the early 2010s, and a junior minister from the junior coalition party decides to second-guess what they are told about Post Office prosecutions. In this alternative reality, the minister then actively goes against what they are told by officials and by the senior executives of the Post Office. The minister even attempts to interfere with individual prosecution decisions. What happens?

The news media scream with headlines: a minister is being SOFT ON CRIME with those who are stealing YOUR money that YOU have entrusted to postmasters and mistresses.

The minister is briefed against by those pointing out that many of the defendants are actually pleading guilty. Illiberals would deplore letting the guilty get away with their crimes, while liberals would fret about whether ministers should even get personally involved in deciding who gets prosecuted for dishonesty offences against seemingly plain evidence. This sterling, do-gooder minister would at best have a frustrating time of it. They probably would have to resign."

More at link: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/...-ministerial-responsibility-david-allen-green
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Hmm interesting proposition but maybe the issue is more specific than 'responsibility' being the problem. They bang on about 'civil servant recommends, minister decides' or something similar. There might be a point that maybe when things were set up, then running things effectively and getting to the bottom of, like an overseer, was what the public were happy to go with. Particularly if it wasn't an issue that could be obviously led back to an initiative or decision made by that said person.

But somewhere in that mix is the whole party and government bit. So you can infer the media twisting (and I'm sure they do) but the issue here was closer to home because it was something apparently related to the government and not a commercial company.

I'm not convinced at all that anyone struggled to sleep at night for the genuine panic that they really thought that the public would find it so feasible that many sub-postmasters had started stealing that looking into the prosecutions was an equivalent to soft on crime. No matter how much the media capitalise the YOUR ahead of money.

I'm also convinced that this was always, from a PR perspective, going to be more about justice than whatever the sum-total 'nicked' was. Let's be honest it isn't like they are saying it is a huge number they actually took off the sub-postmasters now it turns out it probably eventually ended up under profit and losses.

The bigger issue was that noone was thinking about either of those magnitudes but it sounds like they got functionedly fixed on 'protect the system's reputation'. Even though we all now don't know how many/much human hands were involved in that, given that was one unusual 'flaw'.

And that maps to the NHS stuff we've seen over decades too.

Some even mutter, re: Post Office, about the desire for it to be sold off and that 'self-sustainability' and profit and loss statements, and reducing loss-making sites etc being part of that could have been another distraction, but so would a scandal that made management look pretty incapable too (although I'm not confident that audits for such sales wouldn't have picked such questions up when someone is genuinely being employed to make sure a big fish enough to buy it wasn't 'getting sold a lemon').

I don't think for a moment this is anything but niche bubble 'fodder', and they are kidding themselves to stretch for blaming 'the demos' or press for once for such actions. And in the 2000s there was Enron fgs, then finally the banking crisis so as if people thought they'd get hammered by a few sub-postmasters. 2010 afterwards, with austerity, I still don't think postmasters could have been painted into the 'benefit scroungers' type corner either.

I suspect that whoever was leading it just had 'something on' whichever minister at each point, knowing which buttons of threat to push as a warning. They might even have believed such daunting possibilities, but they were strikingly more pertinent than claiming the public would belief postmasters were a bunch of thieves getting let off.

This smacks more of what I've seen of the contaminated blood scandal over the years

I think the source is a lack of answerability to the public on these matters, and responsibility for properly overseeing the day-to-day by asking proper questions of those running these things allowing for 'maintaining the ability to have deniability of knowledge' to bridge the gap between party-political, every 5 years, wanting some change or strategy-level thing vs keeping the house clean and risking dredging up cobwebs that might limit those pipe-dreams in the process.
 
" government knew Post Office ditched Horizon IT investigation"

"By Andy Verity
BBC economics correspondent

David Cameron's government knew the Post Office had ditched a secret investigation that might have helped wrongly accused postmasters prove their innocence, the BBC can reveal.
The 2016 investigation trawled 17 years of records to find out how often, and why, cash accounts on the Horizon IT system had been tampered with remotely.
Ministers were told an investigation was happening.
But after postmasters began legal action, it was suddenly stopped."

More at link: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68146054

This is instructive in how organisations behave once legal action is started against them, and it should be borne in mind whenever it's suggest lawyers be brought in on issues related to ME/CFS, if the organisation has material it believes may expose it to legal claim if that material were to be shared, the response is to close down all access to the material.

Meantime the political dimension becomes ever more fraught: Row with ex Post Office chairman escalates which should be taken as a caution that an issue taken to the political sphere may become focussed on the interests of politicians rather than any harm the politicians should be setting right.
 
Peter Trewhitt said:
Prior to the this current scandal, I had been drawn to the model seen in examples from historic accounts. The pattern seemed to be the publication of a relatively serious academic book followed by a more populist account followed by either TV or film drama and/or a novel. You saw this in ‘The Other Boleyn Girl’ and in a more extreme form with Dan Brown’s ‘Da Vinci Code’.

My lottery winning fantasy was to fund a serious academic account of our current understanding of ME and also a more populist account that addressed such as the PACE scandal. Also I unsuccessfully tried to influence a friend who was a successful screen writer to take an interest in the scandals around ME in the UK. Sadly he unexpectedly passed two years ago.

I think the Sub postmasters story, loosely follows this pattern, in that the equivalent of the serious academic work was the legal work in the courts, the more populist accounts appeared in such as the Private Eye coverage and then the ITV drama provided the breakthrough to wider public consciousness.

My feeling is that we currently lack the good academic synthesis of the huge amounts of information that would enable more populist writers to either write an accessible book or the compelling drama.
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I think it needs a few different angles, and suspect the less documentary ones are the breakthrough points. We are slightly different to the post office on the basis that getting ME/CFS understood through a bit of drip-feeding of better characters through shows that aren't centred on it would be very helpful. And for example a charity getting someone like Catherine Tate (and her grandma character) onboard to get across the PEM issue, and how many who think they are 'the kind ones' have been given misinformation under the classic switch and bait of 'used to be called yuppie flu now we are really kind in some blurb about the mind'.

I just think that some of it is education directly. Some of it is calling out, for those who choose the easy alternative to 'believe' but deep down if it did start to have a few good one-liners, when someone is being the ME-version of 'backhanded compliment'.

On the more serious side, One of my favourite TV series before I got more ill was Follow the Money (subtitles required). The more that time goes on and the more I look into it the more I think the format would fit ME/CFS well (it has different series that start at slightly different points or cover different situations, but I think they 'link' under a bigger main issue).

- so for example if it was all ME/CFS it could be eg LP, or different countries, or different 'issues'/opportunities that popped up predominantly under certain generations or points in time. Or it could be that ME/CFS is a starter and woven through but is only one part of/vehcile used for the 'bigger problem' eg psychsomatic, and whatever is the various interests behind that (including individuals, and I wonder how much really was/is individuals creating opportunities for bigger entities rather than the other way around)

Follow the Money (TV series) - Wikipedia

if you look at the writers Anders August - Wikipedia one also did the Legacy (The Legacy (TV series) - Wikipedia also subtitles but less complex so more accessible perhaps, but as I watched a few times before really ill and this makes a massive difference to me it's hard to judge) which is very character-focused as it is about a will and testament situation within a complex family situation, so can really unbundle and bring alive those nuances of how interactions etc work. I think what I mean is would do an amazing job at bringing alive the nuance of ME/CFS as a condition people experience differently depending on their situation and severity but also how stigma and incitement in different interactions operates.

Another writer worked on Borgen, so might be well-placed to spot the political serendipities then perhaps even we are?
 
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