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.

This

I'm just starting the second episode. I've got the tablet out for it as its not on itvx on my telly for some reason.

Binged it all.

I know corruption runs deep in this Country, but I cannot get over the cover-up and the fact that there are significantly responsibly PO employees that have faced ZERO repercussions with CBEs held in their name. People died, wrongly went to prison, lives destroyed forever. But Paula V is a fucking CBE and the other is now Head of Welsh football. Vile.

I know we see it time again, where institutions lie and ruin lives of the normal people. But after the last 10 years plus of a political shit show and massive cooperation success whilst all the normal people struggle to pay bills, it feels quite poignant.

*went on to be Head of Welsh football. I don't think they are anymore. But still 😡

Not just the last 10 years. This started in 2000.

So - apolitical comment - this highlights all governments since then to be absolutely rubbish.

We deserve better.

So lots of outrage on the thread but what is anyone going to do?

Well here's an idea.

Anyone working for a company using Fujitsu as a supplier should use their staff suggestion scheme they should migrate away from them.

Suggest that they advertise moving towards Fujitsu zero along with moving to Carbon zero.

Come on MNetters go for it.!!

But it wasn't Fujitsu that prosecuted people. That was the Post Office.

Yes they were the cause of the issues, but it was the Post Office that covered it up and prosecuted people leading to their ruin.

Given the sheer scale of what Fujitsu produces... I imagine a wholesale boycott being wholly impractical for anyone, anywhere. Do you know who makes all the components of your phone, TV, laptop? I don't.

The answer isn't a boycott. It's to ensure the Post Office is held to account and retribution (or as near possible) is delivered.

Paula Vennells, having helped to destroy the lives of the victims of this scandal, was awarded a CBE and became an Anglican priest. Heads should have rolled.

OMG - adding insult to injury. I saw the second episode yesterday and need to catch up on episode 1 now. I was watching in absolute disbelief that people could be treated like this and yes, heads should have rolled - and still should. I hope all those poor people do, at the very least, get compensated and their names publicly cleared. 🌹

https://amp.theguardian.com/business/2023/dec/28/post-office-horizon-inquiry-enough-evidence-for-police-investigation

Not sure if anyone has posted this link upthread? Please let someone sensible at the CPS run with this.

I’m so angry for these poor victims. The show is such a stressful watch purely because of the frustration of watching innocent people try and do the honourable thing.

At the very least, Paula Vennells should be handing back her CBE or being stripped of it.

There have been some BAFTA-winning performances on this show - Monica Dolan and Toby Jones are outstanding.

If you boycott anyone using Fujitsu, you'll be boycotting the NHS - for whom Fujitsu supply lots of health detection systems. You'll be boycotting the police. And HMRC.

Fujitsu is not a commercial company like that. They are government suppliers. They get paid regardless of what you and I think of them. They supply systems for which there is little other choice or alternative.

I suspect the best thing we can do is impress upon our MPs how important we consider it to be that the victims get their compensation quickly. And how interested we are in the findings of the inquiry and that those responsible are brought to justice. Not that I have much faith in it.

Angela van den Bogerd was briefly Head of People at the Welsh FA. This led to the CEO who appointed her losing his job. She was sacked after 4 months in the job. She does not appear to have worked since then.

I'm fuming at this. How was this story not bigger in the news? How on earth did common sense not prevail in the judicial system at the number of convictions, all saying the same thing? How does she still have a CBE???? FFS.

https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/strip-paula-vennells-of-her-cbe?source=twittershareebutton&utmmedium=socialshare&utmmsource=twitter&share=cb10bdf3-d574-49f0-b471-fcbe621f3b57

@PrincessPeaches123 it was though at the time tbf. The Times/Sunday times and The DM were all huge champions for justice for the group. The drama has really captured everyone’s imagination now, particularly those who may have been younger when the story was current. It is an absolute travesty that they have had to fight for compensation to be paid fairly so that a reasonable level of tax was paid… they were actually paid it in one lump sum attracted 45% tax rate.

I also don't understand why this has been so underreported in the press (though I know the Times has reported on it quite extensively). It's such an enormous miscarriage of justice, both in terms of how many people it affected, and the consequences of what happened. And yet, the media coverage in no way reflects that.

Would be interested to hear people's theories as to why that might be.

And, while other countries have corruption that is ostensibly worse than ours, I do wonder if there is something unique to Britain in the ways in which failure is rewarded. Does the term "fail upwards" even exist in other languages or countries? It's such a conspicuous practice in so many sectors in the UK, including my own (I can't tell you how many times I've seen people who've made massive cockups be promoted, or people who are psychopathically vicious be actively headhunted).

@GCAcademic tbf, for once we can’t blame the right-leaning press for trying to highlight this stuff. The DM did lead a large campaign at the time trying to get them justice. I think ALL eyes should now be on Adam Crozier, who was the CEO for 7 years when all of this was going on…and then moved to ITV. The breathtaking audacity to sign off on a drama based on a scandal he was overseeing beggars belief.

But if you’ve ever worked in a large corporation, the scale of incompetence in decision (or should I say, non-decision) making-roles is just staggering. And don’t get me started on the Teflon wankers who throw everyone under the bus when they get found out. Generally speaking, having been a trouble shooter in the past, I’ve looked like an absolute genius by just saying ‘why would that be the case?’ Or ‘send me a log of every email received that day so I can double check you didn’t know/see the information’

How some people sleep at night I do not know.

I knew about this years ago , mostly from an article I read online and then the Panorma programme on bbc one.
A small post office close to my mum shut down overnight around 2001 time and my mum said it was because of fraud ( but only rumours) and now I wonder if it was this.

Amazing acting from the whole cast. The actor who played Martin though was astronomical. You could sense his complete loss of hope. Was Angela Van Den Bogerd played by Katherine Kelly.

Is Van Den Bogerd Dutch, or Belgian? KK was doing a very odd accent - the way she said "environment" was . And is it Ian Hart playing the investigator?

It’s actually the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) that regulate solicitors and, in my experience, they are shockingly unfit for purpose. Read TrustPilot to see how many people have a negative experience of them. I reported a crystal clear breach of their Principles and they ignored my report, ‘investigated’ a completely different matter and then told me they didn’t uphold my complaint. It was completely bizarre. There is virtually no chance of any solicitor being struck off for this scandal. Self-regulation is not regulation and just gives members of the public a false sense of security.

Have a look at Angela Van Den Bogerd's linked in page. She had one job at the Post Office for 25 years, then a series of 6 different leadership roles in a period of nine and a half years, all lasting less than two years. Perhaps she 'failed upwards'?

Paula Vennels wiki page says the following: 'During her time as CEO, the Post Office went from losing £120 million a year to making a profit.'

I would strongly dispute that, for 3 reasons:

1. As we saw in the series, some of those 'profits' were actually the money they made postmasters/mistresses 'pay back' - so were stolen. It's not profit if you steal it.
2. It does not count the compensation due to the victoms as part of the operating losses. No, they passed that debt onto the taxpayer. If a business operates in a way that means they owe compensation to their employees then this should be accounted for in their profit calcuations.
3. If they had not blamed the masters/mistresses and instead chosen to replace Horizon instead, the millions of cost that would have entailed would also have impacted profit calcs.

The idea that Vennells was successful in turning around the financial situation of the PO is based on turning a blind eye to the source of some of the profit and an even blinder one to the fact that they are not including massive operating costs in the numbers.

chng.it/kFG5GpCYCP

This petition looks good. I have signed it.

Personally I'd like to see a movement getting rid of the honours system altogether. Too often it is used to 'reward' political support rather than actual public service.

It's a sham and I think it (now) shames us that we keep handing them out to people with deeply unpleasant morals. It also greatly diminishes the value when they are given to good people who deserve them.

Helpline saying each one was the only one , was probably a glorified customer services with scripts to read .

Hard to imagine how many years it's gone on and the misery it's caused to innocent people , losing homes , bankruptcy , prison , illness . Beggars belief .

Re the judicial system, I don't think anyone picked up the number of convictions of subpostmasters. Remember that many of them pleaded guilty of false accounting in order to avoid a possible conviction for theft. And most judges would only have seen a handful of cases spread over a number of years.

In my view, the problem for the criminal justice system is that, since the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999, the courts are required to assume that computers are working correctly unless there is evidence to the contrary. This reversed the legal position - prior to this, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 required the prosecution to prove that any computer was working properly before they could use anything produced by the computer as evidence. The change came as a result of a recommendation by the Law Commission, which seems to have thoroughly misunderstood the complexity and reliability of computer systems and, it is now clear, misrepresented the views of the experts quoted in their report.

Many judges have little understanding of computers. For example, the judge in at least one Horizon case commented that any problems with the computer would be obvious to the operator - a comment that is clearly untrue. This led to judges refusing to order disclosure of material that would have helped defendants to show that Horizon was faulty and misdirecting juries. But the primary fault here lay with Post Office and its lawyers. Even if no-one else in Post Office was aware, the lawyers knew that they were required by law to disclose to defendants any evidence that might undermine the case against them and that this duty continued even after the defendant had been convicted. They nonetheless failed to disclose evidence that clearly should have been disclosed. Indeed, it there are emails in which they discuss not disclosing information simply because it might throw doubt on previous convictions.

This refusal to disclose continued through the group litigation and continues today - disclosure to the inquiry into the scandal is often late and/or incomplete. We also saw in the group litigation that Post Office repeatedly made statements that were clearly untrue. One example of this was that, for a long time, they insisted that there was a "dispute" button on Horizon that subpostmasters could press when Horizon showed a shortfall. They eventually admitted that this was a fiction - there was no dispute button and there never had been.