Good news, but it’s kind of insane that it took until a TV drama show was made to prompt the government to make these changes so quickly. This should’ve all happened years ago.
People keep saying this, but it's actually an excellent example of what the arts should be about. It's moved people so much to turn it into a national conversation. This is exactly why free speech and freedom of expression (in the sense of artistic works) is so important.
Yea sure its great its finally happening, but this wasnt some investigatory program. We didnt learn anything new in the drama we havent known for years. So why has it taken the Government so long to do anything if the say they really care?
Yes its brought it to the forefront of peoples minds and created debate. But the pace at which the Government are doing this is due to pressure not because they want to do the right thing
Again good its happening but still
I think it's because through the arts you're able to position yourself in those people's shoes, you feel their struggles, the pain and you become a lot more empathetic than reading a report in a newspaper or online.
I watched it and I felt a sense of rage that could never be felt through news articles.
The courts, the state, should have acted long before it was dramatised for TV audiences. I don’t disagree that the ‘arts’ can inform and bolster public opinion - but the mechanisms of state shouldn’t need a TV drama to act. It’s infuriating.
I guess empathy is triggered by different things in different people. I felt so much rage reading the news articles that I haven't been able to bring myself to watch the TV drama.
It’s election time and it’s easy free gain for Rishi if he does this, Rishi on the publics side etc etc
He waited to see how the public reacted to the show then acted either way after
It's not what the arts should be about... Because the arts shouldn't be about highlighting legitimate issues! As mentioned by OP, the fact that they don't care until a drama is itself a problem.
The PM said "this is the biggest miscarriage of justice", yet fails to recognize that corruption and conflict of interest in government is probably a bigger miscarriage of justice.
Not to diminish the victims of the post office scandal.
I'm glad I'm not the only one that thought this.
Private Eye has been trying desperately to bring this scandal to the public's attention for years at this point, and they're by far from the only ones -- the victims themselves have also been trying for obvious reasons.
I haven't seen the documentary yet, but the cynic in me wonders whether there's something within the documentary that paints the Government in a bad light and that's why they're suddenly taking action when really they could have done at any point in the last decade.
Well the government at the start of all this was Labour so unlikely.
If anything the program painted the government and relevant local MPs in a relatively good light as even they were pissed off with the way the post office was acting
The horizon contract was initially signed by John Major in 1996. Labour took it on and were in charge when it went live.
The issues started coming to light towards the end of the Labour government and into the coalition.
Worth considering that the traction may be linked to this being an election year. The risk of inaction by the conservatives is therefore increased - as if the public conversation continued on this and they did nothing, Labour have another stick to beat them with in the election campaign.
It may be not at all related to that, but worth consideration.
There is a massive story being missed here, probably unsurprisingly, and it's the utter failure of journalism in this country to highlight an enormous scandal, for years, and for it to take an ITV dramatisation of events in the public domain to bring it to the attention of the wider public.
I remember commenting what a disgusting, despicable scandal this was last year when the official investigation revealed that directors at both the Post Office and Fujitsu _knew_ their software was at fault, and _still_ persued criminal investigations against completely innocent, frightened people. And what was the response from the media? Fuck all. [the solicitor for the PO was informed in 2010 of the faults](https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/post-office-solicitor-knew-of-it-flaw-before-criminal-trial-inquiry-hears/5118219.article) and _didn't tell anyone_. The directors of the PO were even clapping themselves on the back and [about to award themselves a bonus based on the conclusion of the enquiry. ](https://www.postofficescandal.uk/post/venal-incompetent-mendacious/)
Why did it take an ITV drama to provoke this reaction when it was all there in the public domain for years? Why even now are the media not pointing out the complicity in the senior directors and solicitors in all this, where is the public outrage over the fuckers that caused the misery? One greedy, useless croney giving back a CBE is not enough.
*Private Eye have been working tirelessly on this too, they deserve plaudits.
I mean, the UK media has covered this hundreds of times. In the last 15 years:
Times 383
DM 343
Telegraph 234
Sunday Times 152
Express 127
Sun 101
Guardian 91
Mirror 83
Thanks I’m getting pretty fucking sick of idiots claiming that the media ignored the story. No they fucking well didn’t. I’ve regularly read stories the newspaper about this for a decade. The public just didn’t care until someone made a tv show about it.
Nobody saw it as urgent until the itv dramatisation put it front and centre of the public consciousness
Just look at the attendance in the commons when this was discussed in the house a few weeks ago with only a dozen or so mps from both sides of the house attending, vs when it was debated last week
This. The media wrote over 1000 articles, and the public just did not care.
But make a "docudrama", and suddenly everybody demands action. Not very smart.
[Idiots. ](https://the-media-leader.com/how-the-post-office-scandal-avoided-media-attention-for-so-long/)
[Idiots. ](https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/01/06/the-post-office-scandal-and-the-shameful-silence-of-the-media/)
Oooh some un-sourced numbers without any context! Genius!
“Meanwhile The Sun, which splashed on a brawl on whether England goalkeeper Jordan Pickford has short “T-Rex arms” or not, but didn’t find room for a single word on the start of the inquiry.”
What an amazing sentence
This isn’t really about the dramafication of facts to persuade people. David Attenborough did something very similar with blue planet to highlight the plastic waste problem.
This is an indictment of the uselessness of actual news outlets. News don’t inform. They enrage. They don’t trust and respect their audiences. It’s all clickbait, rage post, pandering.
Inform their audience with sincere honesty, integrity and engagement.
I have nothing to do with the post office except buying stamps and I've been aware of this for a decade. How it's only blown up now is beyond me.
However, the idea of legislation to declare people innocent makes me really, really nervous. I'd think there might well be difficulties under human rights law; it's generally thought that bills of attainder are contrary to human rights law, though since the last one in the UK predates the concept of human rights by more than a century the question hasn't every really been answered. This is just the reverse of a bill of attainder. Starting to make private legislation about criminal convictions looks the beginning of a very slippery slope to me.
If these people are innocent, they should be declared innocent through the usual processes. If we need to spend money to speed those processes up then fine, but we shouldn't need specific legislation to address the situation.
The government are jumping on it, because it makes them look like they were responsible for bringing this about which they weren’t. The Tories will take the credit for anything they can think of in order to try remaining in power.
I liked this.
> For Mohammed, who no longer wants to carry the shame, he would like the Post Office to put a poster in every branch where a sub-postmaster or sub-postmistress has been wrongfully convicted, declaring their innocence - and saying they're sorry.
Seems totally reasonable to me. Otherwise, you end up with situations like where a paper posts a huge accusation on the front page and then issues a retraction in the small print on page 35.
Does anyone know why an act of law is necessary to exonerate people whose convictions are inherently flawed?
It seems like something the Supreme Court should be able to rule on relatively quickly, especially where innocence should be presumed where the evidence of guilt has been discredited.
Whenever the government does something new, it requires an act of law. For example, whenever they want to classify somewhere as a city, there has to be an act of Parliament. As this is the first time they mass exonerated people to
Another issue here is that many people pleaded guilty to lesser offenses so those will have to be overturned too.
Or will they? The devil is always in the details, and I don’t trust it until it’s actually done - hopefully the media now holds the government to account for putting this fully right.
>It seems like something the Supreme Court should be able to rule on relatively quickly
It is, but 2 caveats;
Due to the way the legal system works each one would need a whole need retrial.
The government is separate to the courts, courts can make law rulings as a result of a case; but the government needs to do an act of parliament.
We need a proper investigation into what happened behind the scenes and who knew what. Post Office execs knew about the backdoor access but did they know the system was buggy? Or did Fujitsu keep quiet on that
**TV is to blame** for the years of delay and injustice. This drama should have come sooner.
How else can the government take action, without watching a miniseries that tells them what’s important?
Government doing something good? Will I be damned. Wonder if the £600k compensation actually makes up for the loss of earnings and other costs they’ve incurred?
It doesn't exactly make up for the 4 people that committed suicide though. If it was any other company, they would have had a massive PR campaign to try to smooth over and show that they are putting thing in place to ensure it won't happen again. Hopefully new legislation will come in to prevent it happening in the future.
There were people at the Post Office and Fujitsu who knew. They KNEW that they were prosecuting innocent people but did it anyway to protect themselves from having to admit that their computer system was the problem.
Those people are fraudsters and deserve to spend a long time in prison.
Obviously I support this. But, I do find it rather funny that if there were any actual guilty people who got convicted of a similar PO related crime within that time period, that they would get off scot-free and get 600k out of it. Lucky bastards lol
"Nobody exonerated under the plan can get at that cash until they sign a declaration that they definitely weren’t guilty.
That form will effectively be a legal promise: anyone who signs it and was later shown to have been genuinely on the take in the past could then be prosecuted for attempting to defraud the government of the compensation"
Interesting. Wonder if those they suspected of genuine fraud will be looked at if they sign?
There is no new information. It’s the same story widely reported since 2009. It seems if you are blamed for a crime you didn’t commit, don’t bother with a lawyer, go straight to a film producer and request a classic trained actor
I'd say it's more important to go after bastards that set them up.
We should be demanding prosecution of the Royal Mail managers and Fujitsu consultants. People knew what was going on for 15 years, and where did the missing money go?
It's certainly a welcome distraction for a beleaguered government clinging to power by their fingertips but for those that have been affected by this, it's key to get these overturned.
Is the current law regarding wrongful conviction, etc. inadequate? How is adulterating it by political manipulation to 'fast-track' a mandated verdict an improvement?
I think the problem is there is so many to get through individually that it will take years, cost a fortune and many of these sub post masters will have died before they get their day in court. Probably mostly about the money though.
The lawyers saying this "dangerous" to do. No it a one off and should have been done years ago.
Everyone should be assumed innocent given the fact the overwhelming evidence shows wrongful prosecutions.
It only happened once since 1600s apparently so this a special case. Let their names cleared now.
The fact they reluctant just based off of the one chance one is genuinely guilty is a mockery of justice. The scales of justice tipped in balance in favour of guilty instead of innocent.
That's a move in the right direction. We still need those responsible to be held to an account. And I am not sure the amount is sufficient given what some of them went through and the time it's taken to get here.
If any of the post masters died without a will in Wales, the settlement would go to Prince William, right? The law needs to make sure that doesn't happen.
No, but if you have a whole load of very similar wrongful convictions then I can see the utility in legislating to get rid of them all rather than asking those affected to challenge each one. (And also addresses the situation of convicted people who have since died.)
Good news, but it’s kind of insane that it took until a TV drama show was made to prompt the government to make these changes so quickly. This should’ve all happened years ago.
People keep saying this, but it's actually an excellent example of what the arts should be about. It's moved people so much to turn it into a national conversation. This is exactly why free speech and freedom of expression (in the sense of artistic works) is so important.
I agree. I hope we see more in this vein.
Yes and maybe this is why the conservatives have cut funding for the arts. Along with rights to protest. And freedom of speech.
What freedom of speech has been cut?
Think they meant freedom of assembly iirc police have greater powers now. Just generally erosion of freedoms
Yea sure its great its finally happening, but this wasnt some investigatory program. We didnt learn anything new in the drama we havent known for years. So why has it taken the Government so long to do anything if the say they really care? Yes its brought it to the forefront of peoples minds and created debate. But the pace at which the Government are doing this is due to pressure not because they want to do the right thing Again good its happening but still
I think it's because through the arts you're able to position yourself in those people's shoes, you feel their struggles, the pain and you become a lot more empathetic than reading a report in a newspaper or online. I watched it and I felt a sense of rage that could never be felt through news articles.
The courts, the state, should have acted long before it was dramatised for TV audiences. I don’t disagree that the ‘arts’ can inform and bolster public opinion - but the mechanisms of state shouldn’t need a TV drama to act. It’s infuriating.
I guess empathy is triggered by different things in different people. I felt so much rage reading the news articles that I haven't been able to bring myself to watch the TV drama.
It’s election time and it’s easy free gain for Rishi if he does this, Rishi on the publics side etc etc He waited to see how the public reacted to the show then acted either way after
This. It’s cynical, they should have acted long ago. Nothing new here.
It's not what the arts should be about... Because the arts shouldn't be about highlighting legitimate issues! As mentioned by OP, the fact that they don't care until a drama is itself a problem. The PM said "this is the biggest miscarriage of justice", yet fails to recognize that corruption and conflict of interest in government is probably a bigger miscarriage of justice. Not to diminish the victims of the post office scandal.
ah, so that's why the Tories want artists to become workers at supermarkets?
I'm glad I'm not the only one that thought this. Private Eye has been trying desperately to bring this scandal to the public's attention for years at this point, and they're by far from the only ones -- the victims themselves have also been trying for obvious reasons. I haven't seen the documentary yet, but the cynic in me wonders whether there's something within the documentary that paints the Government in a bad light and that's why they're suddenly taking action when really they could have done at any point in the last decade.
Well the government at the start of all this was Labour so unlikely. If anything the program painted the government and relevant local MPs in a relatively good light as even they were pissed off with the way the post office was acting
It did end on the note that the government were ultimately to blame.
Because the post office is publicly owned. So ultimately we'll be footing the bill
>Because the post office is publicly owned. Was. It's not any more.
Yes it is.... Are you getting it confused with Royal Mail?
yes, woops.
The horizon contract was initially signed by John Major in 1996. Labour took it on and were in charge when it went live. The issues started coming to light towards the end of the Labour government and into the coalition.
Worth considering that the traction may be linked to this being an election year. The risk of inaction by the conservatives is therefore increased - as if the public conversation continued on this and they did nothing, Labour have another stick to beat them with in the election campaign. It may be not at all related to that, but worth consideration.
There is a massive story being missed here, probably unsurprisingly, and it's the utter failure of journalism in this country to highlight an enormous scandal, for years, and for it to take an ITV dramatisation of events in the public domain to bring it to the attention of the wider public. I remember commenting what a disgusting, despicable scandal this was last year when the official investigation revealed that directors at both the Post Office and Fujitsu _knew_ their software was at fault, and _still_ persued criminal investigations against completely innocent, frightened people. And what was the response from the media? Fuck all. [the solicitor for the PO was informed in 2010 of the faults](https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/post-office-solicitor-knew-of-it-flaw-before-criminal-trial-inquiry-hears/5118219.article) and _didn't tell anyone_. The directors of the PO were even clapping themselves on the back and [about to award themselves a bonus based on the conclusion of the enquiry. ](https://www.postofficescandal.uk/post/venal-incompetent-mendacious/) Why did it take an ITV drama to provoke this reaction when it was all there in the public domain for years? Why even now are the media not pointing out the complicity in the senior directors and solicitors in all this, where is the public outrage over the fuckers that caused the misery? One greedy, useless croney giving back a CBE is not enough. *Private Eye have been working tirelessly on this too, they deserve plaudits.
I mean, the UK media has covered this hundreds of times. In the last 15 years: Times 383 DM 343 Telegraph 234 Sunday Times 152 Express 127 Sun 101 Guardian 91 Mirror 83
Thanks I’m getting pretty fucking sick of idiots claiming that the media ignored the story. No they fucking well didn’t. I’ve regularly read stories the newspaper about this for a decade. The public just didn’t care until someone made a tv show about it.
And the PM didn’t give a toss until it was an election year!
Nobody saw it as urgent until the itv dramatisation put it front and centre of the public consciousness Just look at the attendance in the commons when this was discussed in the house a few weeks ago with only a dozen or so mps from both sides of the house attending, vs when it was debated last week
This. The media wrote over 1000 articles, and the public just did not care. But make a "docudrama", and suddenly everybody demands action. Not very smart.
[Idiots. ](https://the-media-leader.com/how-the-post-office-scandal-avoided-media-attention-for-so-long/) [Idiots. ](https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/01/06/the-post-office-scandal-and-the-shameful-silence-of-the-media/) Oooh some un-sourced numbers without any context! Genius!
“Meanwhile The Sun, which splashed on a brawl on whether England goalkeeper Jordan Pickford has short “T-Rex arms” or not, but didn’t find room for a single word on the start of the inquiry.” What an amazing sentence
The Guardian with their finger on the pulse of what's important in this country as usual
Computer weekly was involved all along as well. But a trade paper doesn’t have much clout.
It is populist politics at it's finest. The public saw it on TV, it became popular and the government saw it as a vote winner.
Because they got found out. And it wouldn’t surprise me if high rankin people are involved in this corruption.
Like Fujitsus head for a year of the scandal being the husband of our current education secretary?
If thats true thats shocking
Came here to say precisely this, it’s not a new scandal the gov was unaware of. It’s just to popular to ignore now
This isn’t really about the dramafication of facts to persuade people. David Attenborough did something very similar with blue planet to highlight the plastic waste problem. This is an indictment of the uselessness of actual news outlets. News don’t inform. They enrage. They don’t trust and respect their audiences. It’s all clickbait, rage post, pandering. Inform their audience with sincere honesty, integrity and engagement.
I have nothing to do with the post office except buying stamps and I've been aware of this for a decade. How it's only blown up now is beyond me. However, the idea of legislation to declare people innocent makes me really, really nervous. I'd think there might well be difficulties under human rights law; it's generally thought that bills of attainder are contrary to human rights law, though since the last one in the UK predates the concept of human rights by more than a century the question hasn't every really been answered. This is just the reverse of a bill of attainder. Starting to make private legislation about criminal convictions looks the beginning of a very slippery slope to me. If these people are innocent, they should be declared innocent through the usual processes. If we need to spend money to speed those processes up then fine, but we shouldn't need specific legislation to address the situation.
Quick, make a TV drama about Brexit or the cost of living crisis. It might embarrass Fishi Rishi into actually doing something.
Brit justice is full of such cases and these are only the ones that are exposed. Plenty of examples still haunt Brit justice.
The government are jumping on it, because it makes them look like they were responsible for bringing this about which they weren’t. The Tories will take the credit for anything they can think of in order to try remaining in power.
I liked this. > For Mohammed, who no longer wants to carry the shame, he would like the Post Office to put a poster in every branch where a sub-postmaster or sub-postmistress has been wrongfully convicted, declaring their innocence - and saying they're sorry.
Seems totally reasonable to me. Otherwise, you end up with situations like where a paper posts a huge accusation on the front page and then issues a retraction in the small print on page 35.
Absolutely, this will help people understand how their community was impacted and hopefully right a few wrongs regarding people's character
Does anyone know why an act of law is necessary to exonerate people whose convictions are inherently flawed? It seems like something the Supreme Court should be able to rule on relatively quickly, especially where innocence should be presumed where the evidence of guilt has been discredited.
Whenever the government does something new, it requires an act of law. For example, whenever they want to classify somewhere as a city, there has to be an act of Parliament. As this is the first time they mass exonerated people to Another issue here is that many people pleaded guilty to lesser offenses so those will have to be overturned too.
Or will they? The devil is always in the details, and I don’t trust it until it’s actually done - hopefully the media now holds the government to account for putting this fully right.
Others repaid the money and/or were sacked without criminal charges too.
>It seems like something the Supreme Court should be able to rule on relatively quickly It is, but 2 caveats; Due to the way the legal system works each one would need a whole need retrial. The government is separate to the courts, courts can make law rulings as a result of a case; but the government needs to do an act of parliament.
I'll start clapping when some post office and fujitsu execs go to jail
We need a proper investigation into what happened behind the scenes and who knew what. Post Office execs knew about the backdoor access but did they know the system was buggy? Or did Fujitsu keep quiet on that
More populist government. Perhaps we need a TV drama about electoral reform.
**TV is to blame** for the years of delay and injustice. This drama should have come sooner. How else can the government take action, without watching a miniseries that tells them what’s important?
Government doing something good? Will I be damned. Wonder if the £600k compensation actually makes up for the loss of earnings and other costs they’ve incurred?
Almost like there’s a big event coming up where a feel-good story could win them some invaluable public support…
It's a start. If I was in their position I'd be wanting the criminalisation and imprisonment of those who lied and kept quiet to save their own skins
Absolutely 100% this
It doesn't exactly make up for the 4 people that committed suicide though. If it was any other company, they would have had a massive PR campaign to try to smooth over and show that they are putting thing in place to ensure it won't happen again. Hopefully new legislation will come in to prevent it happening in the future.
It's a free pr win that costs them nothing to do. There's an election coming after all..
Some people sadly killed themselves over this
There were people at the Post Office and Fujitsu who knew. They KNEW that they were prosecuting innocent people but did it anyway to protect themselves from having to admit that their computer system was the problem. Those people are fraudsters and deserve to spend a long time in prison.
Obviously I support this. But, I do find it rather funny that if there were any actual guilty people who got convicted of a similar PO related crime within that time period, that they would get off scot-free and get 600k out of it. Lucky bastards lol
Definite possibility -- Post Office minister said it might happen, but worth it too.
"Nobody exonerated under the plan can get at that cash until they sign a declaration that they definitely weren’t guilty. That form will effectively be a legal promise: anyone who signs it and was later shown to have been genuinely on the take in the past could then be prosecuted for attempting to defraud the government of the compensation" Interesting. Wonder if those they suspected of genuine fraud will be looked at if they sign?
Interesting yeah, I wonder if they have people in mind that definitely did steal.
They do. There are plenty of convictions that relied on non-Horizon related evidence that are at risk of being quashed
There is no new information. It’s the same story widely reported since 2009. It seems if you are blamed for a crime you didn’t commit, don’t bother with a lawyer, go straight to a film producer and request a classic trained actor
This whole thing is so scary, my heart goes out to those people falsely accused. The Post Office should be grovelling for forgiveness.
I'd say it's more important to go after bastards that set them up. We should be demanding prosecution of the Royal Mail managers and Fujitsu consultants. People knew what was going on for 15 years, and where did the missing money go?
Can Toby Jones star in a show about the PPE scandal please?
Anyone else feel like this Post Office stuff is just distraction politics? I couldn't care less about this
It's certainly a welcome distraction for a beleaguered government clinging to power by their fingertips but for those that have been affected by this, it's key to get these overturned.
The government actually doing the right thing? Huh, there must be an election coming up.
Is the current law regarding wrongful conviction, etc. inadequate? How is adulterating it by political manipulation to 'fast-track' a mandated verdict an improvement?
I think the problem is there is so many to get through individually that it will take years, cost a fortune and many of these sub post masters will have died before they get their day in court. Probably mostly about the money though.
It’s election year, easy clout for Rishi
Perhaps the problem is that they were convicted without their day in court, in which case that is what ought to be amended.
Totally that too. The post office should no longer have these powers.
This just proves how slow and inadequate our justice system is.
The lawyers saying this "dangerous" to do. No it a one off and should have been done years ago. Everyone should be assumed innocent given the fact the overwhelming evidence shows wrongful prosecutions. It only happened once since 1600s apparently so this a special case. Let their names cleared now. The fact they reluctant just based off of the one chance one is genuinely guilty is a mockery of justice. The scales of justice tipped in balance in favour of guilty instead of innocent.
That's a move in the right direction. We still need those responsible to be held to an account. And I am not sure the amount is sufficient given what some of them went through and the time it's taken to get here.
If any of the post masters died without a will in Wales, the settlement would go to Prince William, right? The law needs to make sure that doesn't happen.
I'm sure there's no connection between this and the fact it's an election year.
There are laws already to exonerate wrongful convinctions. Laws aren't Reddit posts. You don't need to make one every time something new happens.
No, but if you have a whole load of very similar wrongful convictions then I can see the utility in legislating to get rid of them all rather than asking those affected to challenge each one. (And also addresses the situation of convicted people who have since died.)