MR BATES VS THE POST OFFICE - mon to thur ITV 9pm - tv pace no spoilers

[Blondeshavemorefun]

Mon to thur

Mr Bates vs The Post Office is an ITV drama based on a true story of injustice starring Toby Jones, Julie Hesmondhalgh, WIll Mellor and Monica Dolan.
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Mr Bates vs The Post Office is a hard-hitting ITV1 drama starring Toby Jones, Monica Dolan and Julie Hesmondhalgh among others.

The series details one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British legal history, where thousands of Post Office sub postmasters and postmistresses were wrongly accused of theft, fraud and false accounting due to a defective IT system.

Mr Bates vs The Post Office follows Alan Bates (Toby Jones), a sub postmaster who decided to fight back against a scandalous miscarriage of justice.

He was one of thousands of sub postmasters and postmistresses who between 2000 and 2013 were falsely accused of theft due to financial discrepancies thrown up by the flawed Horizon computerised accounting system.

More than 700 were prosecuted and several went to prison while others lost their homes and life savings trying to pay back the money the Post Office claimed was missing.

Many were unfairly ostracised from their communities, who believed they were criminals.

In 2009 Alan Bates decided to form the Justice For Subpostmasters Alliance (https://www.jfsa.org.uk/), uniting thousands of his colleagues to
fight to clear their names.

Further to the discussion upthread about defence lawyers, I thought it worth posting the following, from @Hurrydash's link above:

"Although I can’t be sure of this, the fact that I have no memory of the matter proceeding to trial, suggests that the defendant in my case entered a plea of guilty.
Again, I’m surmising, but this will have been on advice from their own lawyers that the evidence was overwhelming and that a guilty plea would save them from a custodial sentence.
This is advice I have given to many defendants over the years – and, like every other barrister, it is always delivered with the caveat that an innocent person should never plead guilty if they haven’t done anything wrong, and that I will respect their plea whatever it is.
[my bolding]

I haven’t watched yet but a friend said she had and it really impacted her. It sounds very sad. Will rtft when we watch

We talked about it (the programme and what's happened / happening generally) in our team meeting this week. It's captured the nation, which is great as it puts pressure on all parties involved to resolve it, and fast.

Everyone I know who hasn't watched it has been urged by others to do so. I read this week that ITV is rearranging its schedule to repeat them on TV.

HAs lie about tenants in a similar way to the PO lying about the postmasters

https://shaction.org/2021/10/12/studies-in-stigma-no-access-must-mean-no-access/

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-67954810?xtor=AL-72-%5Bpartner%5D-%5Bbbc.news.twitter%5D-%5Bheadline%5D-%5Bnews%5D-%5Bbizdev%5D-%5Bisapi%5D&at_bbc_team=editorial&at_ptr_name=twitter&at_link_origin=BBCPolitics&at_medium=social&at_format=link&at_campaign_type=owned&at_link_type=web_link&at_link_id=6A4DE90E-B1E5-11EE-B32E-6D66D0B4AF07&at_campaign=Social_Flow

Really good piece in the Telegraph today about Alan and Suzanne.

A claim in the Sunday Times. Shocking, and yet not.

That Stephen Bradshaw -we see another Fraud Investigator with zero training in fraud, the law, or investigative procedures. Another character that started as a counter clerk and ended up in postions of such authority, a significant role, that was a key part of prosecuting and destroying the lives of others. Gleefully taking his bonus and high fiving the rest of his sordid little team,

Julian Blake (lead counsel) keeps giving him a shovel, and instead of smacking himself in the face for a wake up call, he just digs a bigger hole. If he had the slightest whiff of investigative training (or a modicum of common sense) he would see the bear traps being laid, one after the other. He was taking zero responsibility for his actions despite the mountain of evidence thrown at him showing his culpability.

His latest witness statement, the one for the enquiry. "There were no concerns." and "I have no other reflections about this matter." and my favourite. "I do not wish to bring any other matters to the attention of the Chair." Well I think Mr Julian Blake decided otherwise.

"The investigation was conducted in a professional manner at all times." But he tells us that his previous statements produced at court back in 2012 were not really his, he was given them and told to to sign them. Very professional Mr Bradshaw, very professional indeed.

I have yet to see evidence showing me that the Investigation teams at POL were not staffed by unqualified clowns.

I watched the panorama documentary. I was surprised Alan Bates didn't feature given that based on the itv drama he was an integral part of the fight?

Alan Bates has never been keen on giving interviews to the media. Prior to the first judgement in the group litigation in March 2019 he had only given one broadcast interview, which was to a Welsh-language investigative documentary programme in 2009. Broadcast interviews with him are still rare.

@prh47bridge ahh so likely he declined then? He's done a few interviews recently since the tv show.

I have no inside information but, given his reticence, that is likely.

I am on my second watch of this now and appreciating even more how it’s just so well written and well acted. I’m ashamed to say it’s taken watching this to really make me realise the true scale of how totally awful this scandal is and many times it has brought me to tears. I knew about the scandal of course before the dramatisation and thought how awful. But never did it get to me the way it has done since watching this. Just shows the power of drama, we need more important issues to be highlighted in this way.

Something that occurred to me yesterday and made me feel a little uncomfortable. DO you think this has struck home, with the media at least because it involves largely white people with a relateable occupation rather than the Grenfell or Windrush victims, who were all a bit brown. Or football supporters in the case of Hillsborough..
Or maybe this case was a bit of a last straw. Not that the others have really been properly resolved either.

@beguilingeyes The attitudes to social housing tenants have actually got even worse since Grenfell. Many of the postmasters were people of colour But the public would have seen them as successful. As they were running a business. I think we are looking at class here not race.

@beguilingeyes It's taken time for this to be picked up on any large scale; it was largely ignored for 20 years, save for Computer Weekly and Private Eye.

Hillsborough seemed to be more flurries of activity followed by periods of silence.

Also note the evidence from one of the Fujitsu Helpdesk workers, a man of Asian origin, of the Helpdesk workers (unchallenged by management) shouting to one another 'Another Patel on the fiddle' whenever they got a call from someone with an Asian name.

Showing my age here but this has happened once before when lots of repeats wasnt a thing. In 1985 the BBC broadcast a crime/political thriller called Edge of Darkness. Originally broadcast in the autumn of 1985 on BBC2 it was then repeated that Christmas on BBC1 (not really done back then) which was when i watched it as a 12 year old with my dad and where i learnt about radiation poisoning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_of_Darkness

First broadcast on BBC2, Edge of Darkness was met with such widespread critical acclaim that within days it had earned a repeat on BBC1. Winner of several prestigious awards, it remains highly regarded, often cited as one of the best and most influential pieces of British television drama

@TheLogicalSong Yes but HAs often treat their tenants the same way

I actually meant by the wider community The wider community often respected their post masters.

Read any thread on here on social housing and you will see what the wider community think of tenants.

Alan is apparently currently engaged in a fight to retain whatever system it was that paid for the group litigation. On the pages of the Financial Times.

Interesting, that never even crossed my mind and it wasn’t only white people affected by this so I’m not convinced race has anything to do with the effect this dramatisation has had on the general population. Have brilliantly made and acted dramas been made about Grenfell? Windrush? Hillsborough? If not, they really should. Great meme on the have I got news for you Instagram today basically saying can Toby Jones make more dramas about important issues.

This Hillsborough one is good:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hillsborough-DVD-Christopher-Eccleston/dp/B002GDM2VE

I think we should be uncomfortable about the fact that Windrush and Grenfell victims still haven’t had redress and accountability for the culprits and absolutely that is about race, the reluctance to address Hillsborough was about class .
But that doesn’t mean there aren’t very specific reasons why this cut through.
I think as well as the post office being at the heart of the community so people of all classes will have used a post office and spoken to the postmaster, there’s the fact that many people can relate to some of the experiences involved: having to deal with a computer system at work or in doing life admin that doesn’t work as it’s meant to and officialdom couldn’t care less, having your organisation reshaped to become supposedly more profitable and efficient but actually being fucked up in some way and the high paying managers won’t acknowledge the problems. It means we all identify at a very deep level with the victims, there’s a ‘there but for the grace of God go I’ feeling about it.
Plus the Post Office is a national institution, it’s supposed to belong to all of us. If this was just one business of many, even if there was one in every town, it wouldn’t feel as personal.

I would love to see a drama about Windrush. I don’t think I fully understand the human cost, even though it’s obvious it’s unjust, and drama would be a good vehicle.
Tv drama about Grenfell would be a hard watch and theatre about it has already caused distress to locals so I don’t know how that could be done without causing harm at present.

There are definitely parallels between Horizon and the British situation with unfit tower blocks. If you go back to the 60s, it was a world of ego-driven councillors taking back-handers from the large building suppliers, with no thought as to the suitability or quality of the product.

The tower blocks were then thrown up as quickly and cheaply as possible, using cheap labour. The labourers would find that concrete panels were defective - damaged, or with misaligned bolts - they tried to reject them only to be told 'It's passed quality control' so they had no option but to use them, sawing off bolts that were crucial to the buildings' construction. Corners were cut because all the councils cared about was the speed at which they could get them up and start receiving the government incentives for 'building high'.

In this case, the labourers who had protested unheeded moved on, and the victims were the tenants of the buildings - there are countless tales of suffering due to unfit buildings riddled with mould and vermin that are still going on to this day - the Ronan Point disaster was attributable to this, with its forensic demolition revealing the many corners that had been cut - and of course, the cladding that was an attempt to solve damp problems led to further disaster.

A drama about Grenfell would be too soon for the victims, but one going back to the 60s when it all began to go wrong would be a great idea in my opinion.