The exoneration of subpostmasters will strengthen not weaken our constitution, argues Rosie Brocklehurst

I’ve come to the conclusion that the Post Office is clearly corrupt from top to bottom.  I say this from watching the Post Office Inquiry and reading many documents. It is corrupt despite employing several in-house legal counsel over time, who ostensibly did little to disclose injustice but instead covered tracks – like the legal counsel in Succession, only worse – believing their role was to oversee getting away with daylight robbery, not preventing it.

UK society’s elites meet with each other in boardrooms, over lunches, through commissioning, via recommendation. They scratch each other’s backs, thinking they are the trustees of prosperity and order, when they are failing miserably. Diverse ‘little’ people in village shops across the country, as Lord Arbuthnot, a seasoned Post Office campaigner says, are the trusted ones: “They are the brand, not the management or the cost of their stamps.”  

But these people are powerless. The degraded state of politics in this country has led us to believe for years that politics is corrupt, but it is ultimately all we have. Of course, people see governments getting away with it – from cash for questions in brown envelopes, political nepotism related to Murdoch and hacking scandals, Covid contracts (Mone), Greensill (Cameron), failure to pay tax (Zahawi), proroguing Parliament (Johnson/Rees-Mogg) and much else.  

But for society not to collapse into anarchy, the government has to take control and be seen to do so. That is partly why Parliament must exonerate all the subpostmasters with convictions. Otherwise, these traumatised people will have to relive their ordeal in court, often without documentation, and be forced to prove their innocence. They will also need to wait even longer before they can even apply for compensation – according to some, up to ten years without a strengthening of the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC).

This Post Office story includes really rotten lawyers and really stand-out brave and brilliant legal minds. Knowledge of the existential threat posed to the Post Office by the failures of Horizon and the way the Post Office and Fujitsu handled it, reaches into government. There is much more to come out and it is likely it will reach into the role of previous governments and officials in the civil service at the Department for Business and Trade (formerly BEIS).

We know only that Lord Neuberger, former President of the Supreme Court, was brought in to advise Post Office and swiftly after, there was an attempt by Lord Grabiner to recuse Justice Fraser at the Group Litigation Order in 2019, but at the behest of whom we are not certain yet. As to the appalling non-disclosure of documents at trials, and other potential malfeasance, already the Solicitors Regulation Authority is seemingly shirking responsibility to investigate solicitors involved, seemingly more concerned about impacts of wrongdoing on the earning power of solicitor ‘brands’, than an abject failure which saw subpostmasters jailed due to lack of evidence which could have proven their innocence.

So, regulators also need a shake-up. Who else can do that but Parliament? Judges and the justice system failed subpostmasters. Who else can sort them out, but Parliament? Lord Justice Holroyde said at the Appeal in 2021 of three test subpostmaster criminal appeal cases on Limb 2, which are rarely won, including Seema Misra’s story (explored on Labour Hub here) and Janet Skinner’s, with multiple threads common to hundreds of subpostmaster convictions, that they were “an affront to the public conscience.” This is the worst judgement the law can make in such cases.

The public is now conscious of what happened. Any failure to rapidly overturn all convictions and bring financial restitution before anyone else dies makes this an exceptional imperative.

I listened to the kind and deeply intelligent Patrick Green KC who worked (pro bono for a time) for Alan Bates and the 555 Subpostmasters at the GLO in front of Sir Peter Fraser, give the excellent reasons why mass exoneration must happen by Parliament, against the protectionist instincts of former DPP Ken Macdonald and new head of the judiciary Dame Sue Carr.

But more than that, if the judiciary insists it keep its control within the separation of powers over this, more subpostmasters will die – which could heighten the febrile state of the nation already riven with anxiety, dissatisfaction and despair.

To those who fear that a blanket exoneration could see the odd rogue go unpunished,  the great 18^th century jurist William Blackstone had a ready answer: “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent man  suffer.”

Rosie Brocklehurst is a journalist and press officer (retired) who worked for the Labour Party, LWT, the BBC and several charities.

Image: Source: Post Box in Snow. Author: CGP Grey, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. Image of Gizmo – c/o Mark. Image of Teju – c/o Teju.