A WEEK on, the Post Office scandal has now entered a defensive phrase of mutual recrimination and blame. In an election year, political parties are chasing credit and trying to dodge responsibility.
Because this scandal drags on from the Blair government, through Cameron’s coalition years and into single-party Conservative government after 2015 – as well as SNP rule in Scotland since 2007 – there’s plenty for everyone to work with.
Journalists and columnists who have never written a clause about the scandal before are chasing after MPs and MSPs about why they never raised it in Parliament.
Tabloids are heating up tar and plucking feathers for successive Post Office ministers – including LibDems Ed Davey and Jo Swinson – for their paper trail of indifference to the people we now know were affected by the Post Office’s lies.
Ed Davey
Politicians across parties are inventing heroic backstories for themselves where they – like James Arbuthnot – really championed affected postmasters.
It is hard to say whether they are kidding themselves on or whether their intention is to kid on you.
Investigators are digging back into the origin story of the scandal which implicates New Labour procurement policies in putting in place the outsourced IT framework which helped make this moral catastrophe possible.
Partisan barristers are hoping to use Keir Starmer’s role as a public prosecutor against him – wrongly claiming he stood over the prosecution of men and women across England.
As we move on to consider redress and compensation, the mean and dilatory reparation schemes run under the UK Government’s superintendence are also under the microscope.
Most are unprepared to say the quiet part out loud: that like much of the rest of the community, they didn’t know much about the Post Office scandal, hadn’t looked into it, hadn’t thought much about it, didn’t care about it until recently, and did sod all to address it until now.
Easy blame is taking the place of collective reflection.
Prosecutions
I’ll never forget May 2022. Sir Wyn Williams’s inquiry into the scandal is now nearing the end of its fourth phase of hearings. He is due to spend a week in late January on Scottish prosecutions, focusing on the prosecution of William Quarm on North Uist. Quarm pled guilty to embezzlement in 2010 and died in 2012.
His conviction has now been quashed by the High Court of Justiciary.
The Welsh judge only won permission to look at what happened in Scotland and Northern Ireland in March 2022.
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