Mr Bates. Who?

Remember ‘Mr Bates v. The Post Office’ (ITV, January, 2024)? The British public was inspired to express their outrage about a monstrous injustice for which the Government had a clear responsibility, and was the power in the land to remedy the outrage. The public rose in an extraordinary moment of spontaneous political activity, not to ask, but to demand Government action to ensure a swift end to the injustice. The overwhelming public outrage that produced this seismic political impact on Parliament was unexpectedly provoked by a very clever television drama (Mr Bates v. the Post Office) about a scandal in the Post Office that had sent innocent people to prison, and ruined their lives; an outrage to which the public gave irresistible and forceful political voice, and that brought the Government – in a panic – hastily to account; effusively issuing solemn promises to bring swift justice to the victims, and compensation to the ruined. Parliament and Government flapped. Cabinet Ministers promised decisive, timely action. New brooms would sweep clean. British fair play and justice would prevail. An Official Inquiry was set up, which in public decisively skewered almost everyone representing the Post Office or Government brought before it, for an endless list of failings (or more often they skewered themselves). Justice, it was believed, would prevail. A native sense of justice and fairness is, after all a conviction Britain claims with facile self-assurance, is a distinctive British virtue we may rely on.

Only it isn’t. Justice and Restitution, in the appropriate form, that is delayed is justice denied. Almost two years later, and long after the actual grievous injustices were perpetrated through the Courts, and executed relentlessly by a wholly-owned Government institution, armed with exclusive and exceptional legal powers over prosecution, the Horizon IT investigation nevertheless goes on endlessly to this day. Many of the victims still remain uncompensated, and therefore, the injustice still stands, with no decisive end in sight. The Government, its own reputation in shreds, was discarded by the electorate in the 2024 general election. The Government that replaced it, however, has proved no better or more assiduous in solving the problem; and uses the same playbook, relying on the corrosive effects on decisive action of a bureaucracy it seems neither able to control nor master.

Sky News reported on the victims’ current views of their endless predicament in an interview with a victim of the injustice, Jo Hamilton, in July 2025:

“Post Office scandal victims are calling for redress schemes to be taken away from the government completely, ahead of the public inquiry publishing its first findings.
‘Take (them) off the government completely,’ says Jo Hamilton OBE, a high-profile campaigner and former sub-postmistress, who was wrongly convicted of stealing from her branch in 2008.
‘It’s like the fox in charge of the hen house,’ she adds, ‘because they were the only shareholders of Post Office’.

Successive Governments have managed to spin this injustice out for almost two more years without final and complete resolution or justice. This is how it is done.

Forget justice or compensation. Britain did what it does best. It readily handed out trinkets to the victims: Orders of a defunct Empire, or a Knighthood. The form of Government operation that functions under soothing Ruritarian flummery turns out to be a variant of Bagehot’s binary distinction of Government in action: the ‘dignified’ (Crown) and the ‘efficient’ (Cabinet). In the 21st century, however it is better to describe the distinction as being between ‘formal’ Government and ‘real’ Government; because now the ‘formal’, but clearly not ‘real’ public government extends far beyond Crown, or indeed Parliament, to embrace both Cabinet Ministers and Cabinet (they are no longer the exclusive ‘efficient’ government). Formal Government (the one in which politicians supposedly command government), that is, both Parliament and Cabinet, operate little more than a system of Public Relations; a shadow reality. The system of functioning Government, operating somewhere in the interstices between Parliament, Government, Civil Service and the informal paraphernalia of Orders in Council, or the enigmatic mysteries of Crown Privilege that have survived and adapted to 21st century conditions, have not received the discerning scrutiny of a modern Bagehot. We are all too busy with the PR, or being foxed by it. Where effective Government is exercised is no longer clear; unless we are inclined to simplify the problem, and embrace undiluted cynicism. That is one solution.

All we, the public can understand of modern Government (which manifestly is not functioning well); is to observe it as a ‘Black Box’’, and the proof of what happens in the ‘formal’ part of Government can only be tested by looking at the inputs, the promises, the supposed ‘action’ that is claimed to happen; and comparing these inputs with the results of the ‘real’ Government action; which can be found only in outcomes. From observation, the outcomes of ‘formal’ Government, exemplified by the Post Office Scandal, are easy to judge. False expectations. Failure. Inertia. Whatever the supposed effort or supposed sincerity, the Treasure spent, the lives affected; nothing of material significance in the functioning of Government changes, and little if anything positive happens that improves the lives of many of the affected. Promises are routinely betrayed. This is the lesson of Government in the 21st century we are entitled to draw. The problem is general. The injustice also applies to the Blood Scandal and other gross failures.

Now the ITV team are revisiting their success with a new drama; ‘The Hack’. I claim no knowledge about either of the two stories behind the new series. I have no idea about the impact the Series will have with the public. I know only this. It doesn’t matter.

The outcomes are already set. It has been done so often before. It works. All the system needs is time. Success will always seem almost in reach, but never won. Slowly, the matter at issue slips from the News Agenda. The indignation subsides. Soon enough it is forgotten. Only the platitudes remain. Patient, forgetful inertia is what the Government in Britain is designed to accomplish. Do nothing, and do it very well. The world inexorably moves on. Time is on the side of Government. Mr Bates? Who?