Post Haste (not)

The Great British Post Office Scandal has taken the media by storm following an ITV drama about how Postmasters/Mistresses were in their hundreds convicted of fraud, when in fact a flawed new computer system called Horizon was introduced to (mis)manage their local accounts. All of a sudden Post Office branch accounts went into the red, and the prosecutions started. Now every MP in the land is jumping up and down demanding answers, compensation and blanket reversals of convictions. Which is all very well, but since the scandal was well known for many years how did it take so long to get to this point? It’s been 15 or so years in the making—right back to the time when I was an MP before 2010. Did I get any local correspondence about this? I really can’t remember, and I had developed friendly relationships with local Sub-Postmasters in various campaigns, not least to save their businesses threatened by ‘modernisation’ and ‘rationalisation.’ Anyway, there’s now a big blame game going on, and on the obverse a self credit game of MPs’ trying to exculpate themselves by ordering their caseworkers to see if they ever wrote on behalf of a constituent to a minister on the subject.
 
Who was the first MP to take up the Sub Postmasters/Mistresses cause in the House of Commons? It takes a lot of digging to find out, and it turns out to be someone whom the establishment of all political persuasions would have preferred to have disappeared without trace (that’s s hint). Here’s what the MP said:
 
‘in view of the fact that over 20,000 sub-postmasters in shops receive as remuneration only £20 to £40 a year for working a day of twelve hours, without a meal hour, and that many of them are compelled out of this sum to pay for assistance if they desire to absent themselves for a single evening, whether he [the Postmaster General] will take steps, without at present reopening the general question of postal employees’ grievances, to make some improvement in the cases cited.’
 
Yes, not today’s case, but a parliamentary question dating from February, 1908 asked by one Victor Grayson, the Socialist member for Colne Valley. Perhaps he should be made the parliamentary patron saint of Sub Postmasters/Mistresses. (Quotation in Victor Grayson: In Search of Britain’s Lost Revolutionary, Harry Taylor, Pluto Press, 2021 p. 107)
 
Well Grayson did disappear without trace, although he left behind quite a story (which I’m still reading). I think we could do with a few Graysons now.