To draw your attention to Mr Bates vs The Post Office

[5foot5]

There is already a thread about this on the Telly Addicts forum here

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/telly_addicts/4970440-mr-bates-vs-the-post-office-mon-to-thur-itv-9pm-tv-pace-no-spoilers

However this seems like such an important subject that I thought I would draw attention to it on AIBU.

The first episode aired tonight but the whole series is available on itvx.

Most of you will no doubt have heard about the Horizon scandal, but whether you have or you haven't this program is compelling. It will probably make you furious but it deserves as wide an audience as possible.,

But reputation can in some circumstances be something you can never get back. No smoke etc. what they did to those people was beyond despicable. What your personal morals are don't come into it unfortunately. These people have been hung out to dry, in front of society as a whole (not all of whom will have your values unfortunately). The whole situation is almost beyond belief tbh.

It really isn't. It happens over and over and over again with a quick and meaningless 'lessons will be learned'. They aren't and these abominations of people are put in roles they really shouldn't be.

Vennells being a christian minister of some sort is the icing on the cake. Aren't religions supposed to do their best for people?

The Inquiry continues today, Alan Bates to give evidence

Thanks, Duncin, watching now.

My god. I'm minutes in and it's already damning evidence.

Alan Bates was clearly the Post Office's worst nightmare, even back in 2002.

He's confident with the technology, and meticulous in his detailing of what was happening.

And he's putting it all down in writing and sending it to the Post Office. So they can't claim they don't know. In 2002.

I am dipping in and out, they made 507 calls to the Horizon helpline

Alan Bates is a god of paper-trail laying.

On a lighter note, this were the youtube subtitles when Bates was sworn in

The voice-recognition captions have certainly been creative throughout. But that's a winner.

BTW, did anyone else notice near the end of the TV programme, when everyone else had been calling him Alan, Mrs Patmore says (something like), "Goodbye, Mr Bates."

Of course not Mrs Patmore really, just the same actor. But I got the feeling she enjoyed slipping that in.

And the Post Office are still very slow on providing informantion - they haven't learned yet!

I bloody love Alan Bates. This morning was going through his experience by using the correspondence he'd had with Post Office and, at the end of the morning, with Ed Davey (being a weasel).

It was amazing to see in letter after letter Bates making prophetic statements of what might happen and how it wasn't just that Post Office was destroying lives but it was travelling down the road to its own destruction.

One interesting fact that I'd been unaware of is that after Bates was sacked in 2003 for raising difficult questions and continuing to pursue them, he has not been employed since. More that 20 years of his life devoted to campaigning, and it's quite possible he's not been earning anything over that time.

It's a personal thing but I find this dry account in terms of what actually happened to be more compelling than a dramatised account where facts are omitted and fictions inserted to produce a narrative that's more appealing to the audience.

Au contraire, the PO learned years ago that failing to provide information is an extremely effective method of stonewalling and evading consequences. And almost never brings them any penalty.

It works very well for them. Of course they're still doing it.

Dude is amazing. No waffle.

At the end of Bates' evidence, the Chair thanked him and then told those attending that he could see they were about to applaud but he wanted them not to because he didn't want to deal with other forms of reaction from them in relation to other witnesses that they might react very differently to.

In other words, if they can applaud Bates they might want to boo others, and that wouldn't be right.

100% this! There can’t be many people as tenacious as him.

Giving evidence in today's morning session is Lord Arbuthnot. He was James Arbuthnot MP, and his background was as a barrister in Chancery. His part in uncovering the scandal is less well-know, but it was vital. He basically led the resistance to the Post Office in Parliament and provided considerable support to subpostmasters victimised by the Post Office.

What's striking about this evidence is the number of times that statements made in very significant situations, for example in response to MPs, by people at the top of the Post Office were simply untrue. Paula Vennells in particular seemed to be willing to say just about anything if it served to bat away the question put in front of her.

Yep. Obfuscate, misdirect, evade dealing with the content of allegations by yapping about process.

It's all very much "The answer is No; I'll come up with Reasons later."

A draft report uncovered by the BBC shows the Post Office spent £100m fighting sub-postmasters in court despite knowing its defence was untrue

I don't think this was actually new - it was clear from Nick Wallis's book that the Post Office lied lied and lied again.

Giving evidence in today's morning session is Lord Arbuthnot. He was James Arbuthnot MP, and his background was as a barrister in Chancery. His part in uncovering the scandal is less well-know, but it was vital

Indeed. There were a disproportionate number of postmasters in his constituency who were affected, and also the Chinook crash which was initially blamed on human error before being ascribed to a computer error in the end made him question the post office narrative as well (his constituency included RAF Odiham where the Chinooks are/were based).

And as a former barrister he is very precise, very observant, and not easily bullied or distracted off course.

He comes across as being the right man, in the right place, at the right time.

Lord Arbuthnot's evidence was definitely the highlight of the day. The scandal is so huge it's difficult to try to understand it all, which is what makes his evidence so compelling, it enables you to follow one thread of what was going on along one particular timeline. Broadly it seems that they Post Office got themselves into a terrible mess through being incredibly amateurish but what happened next was the worst thing. As their realisation grew of the terrible mess, and what revealing it would cost them, the urge to cover it up grew and grew, and it is this that led them to corrupt themselves and to corrupt the whole organisation, and also to corrupt anyone else on their side. In defending the Post Office brand they transformed what was behind it into a dark and malicious thing.