Reader Writes March 2024
Like many others I have been enjoying, and steaming over, the ITV drama of the very real Mr Bates
vs The Post Office. It’s an astonishing tale and brilliantly put together; the small people up against
the titans of business. But it is also a vast tragedy where hundreds of subpostmasters and their
families were wrongly thrown out of their jobs, and often their homes. Over 700 were wrongly
prosecuted, some went to prison, and some took their own lives. How on earth could it have
happened?
To sum it up simply, if you were being generous, you would spin a tale of faulty software systems
designed and installed by Horizon (for Fujitsu). Add to this perhaps wishful thinking and PR
management by the Post Office, and it all gets covered up or ignored for years. But as the TV
drama makes clear, there was a criminal pursuit of innocent subpostmasters as opposed to the
guilty software designers and their managers. A “clunky” system turned out to be fraudulent. But
what drives our indignation? Essentially, we are hard-wired for a sense of justice; if we have an
active faith, or if perhaps we grew up in a home where such issues were important, it is all the
more likely that we will feel that sense of outrage on behalf of the victims in any conflict.
The World Economic Forum has just had its annual gathering of corporate masters of the universe,
chief executives, politicians and economists at the Swiss resort of Davos. That gathering of the
super wealthy and powerful, quite unapologetically is there to promote and protect its own
interests rather than ours. There will, of course, be some unctuous wringing of hands over how to
spend philanthropy budgets on a few of the world’s prominent problems; but they certainly won’t
be putting their heads together to suggest ways of paying and spending more tax. Their common
creed is low taxes, deregulation and cheap labour.
That is only a digression to say that the victims of the Post Office scandal are victims of a corporate
culture that puts shareholders first and rewards CEOs plus their brand managers very handsomely
for boosting that bottom line. It’s been said many times before in the context of different
industries that we find ourselves so far inside the belly of the market driven beast that we can’t
see that the world could be run in a more human and equitable way. Just recently in church we
celebrated Plough Sunday, and gathered outside around a splendid shining plough; we prayed for
the farmer (Philip from Old Radnor) and for the treasured land all around us; here’s another
industry where family business and stewardship of our precious soil so often collide with
corporate bottom lines. Paris is gridlocked with Farmers’ tractors shouting about the same thing.
All four gospels give an account of Jesus’s clash with the temple where he overturned the tables of
the money changers and drove out the livestock. He declared forcefully that they had turned that
place of prayer into a “den of robbers”. Essentially, a system for offering sacrifices in the temple
was being used to defraud worshippers and especially foreigners. If God has hard-wired us to
know right from wrong, we can trust him to help us stand up for justice and the victims of
injustice.
Robert MacCurrach
