Chris Green MP: ​Feeling of elite looking after their own in Post Office scandal

​Many were imprisoned, others were sectioned and four committed suicide.

For the postmasters, it must have felt like being a character in a grim dystopian novel.

You know you are innocent of any wrong doing yet the bureaucratic system blames you and is unrelenting in its injustice.

The Post Office bought a new computer system that had major failings but the people at the top of the organisation blamed those at the bottom for accounting errors and it went on year after year after year.

It seems incredible that, when there is a consistent pattern of errors in the accounts of so many post offices around Britain, the Post Office leadership could not see where the problems lay.

Either hundreds of postmasters independently start to defraud the Post Office in the same way, they have worked together to share ideas on how to defraud the Post Office or there may be something wrong with the new Post Office computer system?

It seems obvious that the computer system was at fault just as it is now clear that the character of the leadership was also at fault.

We all know that computer systems, well any system for that matter, will have glitches.

We just have to look to the massive £13bn computer system that the NHS tried to bring in which was found to be an almost complete failure.

Often, I hear arguments that ‘if only the system was nationalised’ everything would work better.

Well, the Post Office is a State-owned organisation so it would seem that the question is not whether the public or private sector is better – they both have their advantages and disadvantages.

It would seem, more than anything else, the self-serving bureaucratic elite looking after their own interests ahead of anything or anyone else.

Paula Vennells was paid a fortune by the Post Office, had a series of well-paid directorships and was even supported by the Archbishop of Canterbury to be the Bishop of London – the Church of England’s third most senior cleric after the two archbishops.

Most Members of Parliament, including me, have an individual or family in their constituency or someone who was unjustly accused by the Post Office and have dealt with it as part of their casework.

This is why it seemed a little odd for the Horizon scandal to cause such a shock when MPs have been working on it on behalf of their constituents; Private Eye and other publications have extensively covered it; the High Court case was won in 2019 and the inquiry began in 2021.

It cut through in part because of people’s sense of justice but principally because there is a wider feeling of the Establishment elite only ever looking after their own and no one, no matter how deserving, ends up in prison for the real crimes.