Post Office scandal: what the lack of action tells you about Britain's polarised politics

It’s hard to hear anything about the Post Office scandal without being outraged at the way innocent people have been treated by a system stacked against them. The bosses of a powerful institution simply didn’t believe and didn’t listen to its people.

More than 700 sub-postmasters and postmistresses were wrongly convicted of theft, false accounting and fraud. Democracies are meant to protect ordinary people from this kind of ordeal, so it’s reasonable to ask why Britain’s political leaders have been so slow to speak up, let alone act.

The answer goes to the heart of the weakness of modern party politics in Britain, and the consequences of the polarisation that drives it.

If this is “one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in history”, as prime minister Rishi Sunak claims, there is an intriguing question as to exactly why mainstream politics only seems outraged about it now. After all, the story was broken by Computer Weekly 14 years ago. It has been the subject of an in-depth BBC podcast helmed by Nick Wallis, and has received regular attention in the magazine Private Eye. It has been raised multiple times in parliament, and there is even an official inquiry slowly working its way through what happened.

The Post Office scandal has been largely denied the attention it deserves. Until, that is, ITV broadcast a drama based on the story which was watched by 9 million people during a slow news week in early January. But why did it take a television mini-series to spur political leaders (and journalists) into action?

Tragic but not ‘useful’

There are two observations about the behaviour of politicians in recent days that perhaps tell us something about the nature of modern party political democracy. The first is that something being wrong or unjust, even on an epic scale, is an insufficient precondition for political action.

The victims of the Post Office scandal have lacked a constituency. Their cause didn’t identify with a party or movement, and the systemic failure of the institution did not provide convenient evidence for any side of any number of contemporary political cleavages identifiable in Britain. Taking on the cause would do nothing to further any existing national arguments about, say, immigration or taxation, by giving ammunition for one side to damage the other. Consequently, it remained present but largely suppressed below the surface of popular attention.

The second observation is that now it has so dramatically broken through to the top of the agenda, the story is feeding “politics as usual” in a way that it failed to do so for all these years. It has become a cheap weapon of party warfare. Political leaders and partisan hacks are scrambling to use the scandal for their own advantage.

None was more opportunist than Conservative deputy chairman, Lee Anderson, who used prime minister’s questions to call for the Liberal Democrat leader, Ed Davey, to “clear his desk” for his part in what happened.

Aside from anything else, Anderson will have had at least half his mind on the electoral threat the Lib Dems currently pose to vulnerable Conservative MPs. Davey has been rather self-critical of his time as Post Office minister during the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government. He has acknowledged that he should have done more, or been more sceptical of what he was being told by officials and the Post Office which, he says, was “lying on an industrial scale”.

But Kevin Hollinrake, the current Post Office minister, has held the office since October 2022 – and he has no more substantive information today than he did a fortnight ago. Yet he has only acted decisively now, a few days after the television drama aired – at a moment when the only option left was to interfere in the independent decisions of the courts.

This is not the only example of petty party politics. There has been other daft populist comment including from Nigel Farage, who is demanding to know why Labour leader Keir Starmer did nothing about this scandal when he was director of public prosecutions. The answer, as Farage and others know well, is simple: these were private prosecutions brought by the Post Office.

The wheels of justice have now finally begun turning and the power of the state deployed. But it is only because an ITV drama has made this injustice relevant to everyday party politics, after more than a decade. For the victims whose lives have been wrecked by this terrible scandal, it is welcome news, of course. But it illustrates a frightening blind spot in the functioning of today’s divisive democracy.

Stephen Barber does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.