What Mr Bates vs The Post Office shows is how little state bullies care about ordinary people
SUNLIGHT, they say, is the best disinfectant. And so is the harsh spotlight of a major television drama.
Consequently, the Post Office scandal is finally attracting the national disgust it deserves after ruining the livelihoods and mental health of more than 700 innocent sub-postmasters when its own dodgy computer system was the true culprit.
If those in charge had listened to the likes of the main protagonist (played by the superb Toby Jones in Mr Bates vs The Post Office) when he first flagged the issue in 2000, then the fault could have been swiftly identified before any real damage was done.
But, as ever when the dead hand of state-funded bureaucracy is involved, no one bothered to listen and what followed was blind arrog- ance, a whole lot of a**e-covering and one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British history.
Heads must surely roll. But don’t hold your breath.
What usually happens is that those culpable shuffle off to another high- profile role and are possibly even given an honour for their “services” to God knows what.
Certainly not the ordinary folk whose interests they purport to represent.
At least ex-Post Office boss Paula Vennells has given back her CBE.
In the ITV drama, former sub-postmaster Alan Bates, who lost his own post office franchise in Llandudno, north west Wales, after rightly refusing to put his signature to computer accounting errors, tells his lawyer: “We are fighting a war against an enemy owned by the British government, which means they have mighty forces and bottomless pockets funded by the taxpayer . . . while we’re just skint little people.”
Later, the barrister representing the victims blithely informs him: “In fights like this, the side with more money usually wins.”
What sort of “justice” is that?
Once all of those whose livelihoods and mental wellbeing were ruined (four people took their own lives) have been wholly exonerated and compensated, the next step must surely be that MPs work tirelessly for a law that ensures a level playing field judicially when individuals are fighting a vast institution.
Otherwise, the side with limitless funds will always have the upper hand.
During Shelagh Fogarty’s LBC radio show on Monday, “Tracy from Newcastle” called in to say her father-in-law was a sub-postmaster who didn’t go to prison but, despicably, had been “pursued relentlessly” for the £30k deficit that the PO admitted he hadn’t actually stolen.
Like everyone else caught up in the scandal, they were told “you’re the only people this is happening to” and she says they have had to “fight and fight and fight” ever since.
“Where is that money that we all had to pay back?” she asks.
“And who was the one that said, ‘Tell them you’re the only one this has happened to’?”
Indeed. PM Rishi Sunak has tried to distance himself from the scandal and says he is aiming to fast-track compensation for the victims.
‘It rips you to pieces’
But Tracy says “he definitely knew” about it because he was Chancellor at the time the group headed by Alan Bates was fighting to get back its legal costs and faced a delay she “absolutely” believes was caused by the Treasury.
Aside from Tory MP Paul Scully, “the only Post Office minister who listened . . . and fought for us”, she says of the rest: “They’ve known about it for years and they’ve just continued to let us go through this absolute hell.”
Lee Castleton, played by Will Mellor in the TV drama, called in too.
He and his wife bought a PO in Bridlington, East Yorks, in July 2003 and six months later suffered the first “glitch” — a deficit of “£1,103.18” which they repaid, as the PO contract insisted.
Overall, they eventually lost £25,000.
The Post Office took him to the High Court and was awarded extortionate legal fees on top. It bankrupted him.
“The honesty is that there was no honesty,” he told LBC.
“I’m blessed in knowing so many members of the group who have been pillars of society where they live, but were then hanged, drawn and quartered in society over the years for something they didn’t do.”
Lee’s daughter was spat at on the school bus because “her father was a thief who stole old ladies’ pension money”, his wife’s epilepsy and anxiety attacks were “horrific” and his daughter’s anxiety led to an eating disorder.
“I can’t put it into words, really. It just rips you to pieces,” he said.
How sad that it’s taken a television dramatisation to finally make everyone sit up, take notice and demand answers on how a state body could act in this despicable and unchallenged way for so long.
Perhaps someone could make a drama about HMRC — aka the taxman — and its behaviour towards the thousands caught up in various legislative messes such as the loan charge scandal and the ridiculously muddy off-payroll working rules — aka IR35 — which dictate how freelancers like me, who provide their services through a limited company, are assessed for tax purposes.
HMRC has shifted the goalposts of a system it was perfectly happy with for years and is now trying to impose vast, arbitrary and backdated tax bills when no one seems to know exactly what the IR35 rules are.
Not the accountants countrywide who recommended that self-employed clients should set up personal services companies years ago, not the many judges who, when test cases reach tribunal, come up with wildly varying conclusions and, it seems, not even HMRC staff themselves.
Leading the charge through the courts is my friend Kaye Adams, a freelance broadcaster who has been fighting HMRC for ten years now.
Patrick Hosking of The Times recently named her as one of his “business heroes” for “standing up to immutable power”.
She won the first two tribunals, but HMRC is the zombie (with deep pockets) that won’t die and it took her to the Court of Appeal where, astonishingly, even though it was a point of law being thrashed out, she had to fund her own legal fees as well as HMRC’s.
She has just won her third tribunal and is waiting to hear if HMRC will appeal again.
If it does, it begs the question: How many times does a court have to rule in someone’s favour before it accepts the decision and stops hounding them?
And how can it justify spending circa £250k of taxpayers’ money pursuing a robustly disputed £70k tax bill?
Just like the Post Office’s mantra of ‘You are the only one’, the HMRC mantra when questioned about the IR35 mess is, ‘It is our duty to ensure everyone pays the right tax under the law, regardless of wealth or status’, as though self-employed individuals like Kaye are Google or Amazon.
What gaslighting nonsense.
HMRC has been investigating my IR35 status for the past six years and, despite answering hundreds of detailed questions about my long and varied work portfolio as a journalist, broadcaster and author, being passed around multiple caseworkers and being told in 2018 that they had conducted a “comprehensive review”, they still won’t “s**t or get off the pot” as my old grandma used to say, but continue to send me annual “computer says pay” demands for arbitrary, eye-watering sums.
I have no issue with scrutiny, but why is it taking so long to come to a decision?
Perhaps HMRC hopes that the mental and financial strain of its shambolic and protracted prodding will force people to pay a settlement to be left alone?
Well it worked for the Mafia.
And in many cases, it has worked for HMRC too.
I know of long-established freelancers who have wearily paid “go away” money to HMRC despite its stance against them never being tested in court.
Zero accountability
For the record, I’m not pretending it even comes close to the living nightmare endured by the sub-postmasters, but it’s relentlessly stressful and the parallels in terms of unchallenged behaviours by a state-funded institution operating under weak ministerial oversight are hard to ignore.
It’s easy to think “who cares” when it doesn’t affect you, but we should care about the unchallenged tactics of institutions given unfettered power with zero accountability.
Meanwhile, since 2021, the onus of IR35 status has shifted to companies rather than individuals, and many are so frightened of repercussions from HMRC that they are insisting people become “employed for tax purposes”, otherwise known as zero-rights employees.
This tactic has been used to force countless self-employed lorry drivers, agency nurses, beauticians and IT workers on to the payroll and has contributed a sizeable chunk to Rishi Sunak’s boast last year that there were “400,000 new people on the payroll” while failing to mention they have little or no employment benefits.
So, if there is any good to come from the Post Office scandal, then it’s perhaps that we are now more likely to give a sympathetic ear to “the little people” or whistleblowers, and less likely to place our faith in big institutions to do the right thing.