This absolutely was a fraud. The (unfair) contract required postmasters to make good any shortfalls. The hundreds who were prosecuted either refused or ran out of their own money to make up the shortfalls. Many were sacked because they refused to sign the accounts, losing their livelihoods, pensions, life savings, homes and good names as a result. Thousands more were just quietly putting their own money in, sometimes unfairly suspecting an employee of theft, due to errors the Post Office knew about but refused to admit.
And a primary driver of the scandal was the imperative to make the Post Office profitable so that it could be privatised, with investigators paid partly based on how much money they recovered. New Labour and the Coalition both have much of this blood on their hands.
Gut-wrenchingly awful. The senior people responsible need to lose their livelihoods, pensions, life savings, homes and good names. I’m not a fan of carceral solutions and Noel Thomas, imprisoned for nine months before his conviction was overturned, says he would not wish it on anyone. He is right. But destitution is something these people visited on hundreds of people for their own financial gain and those gains need to come back to the people they harmed.
I covered that. Regardless, a spell in jail won’t deprive them of their pensions or their homes (Jeffrey Epstein went to jail and came out just as rich and powerful as when he went in).
I want them to pay a real price. The same price they extracted from thousands of subpostmasters. And I want every other senior executive and politician to know that it is a price that can be extracted from them too.
Jail does not help. These are not the cases I would choose to test anti-carceral arguments on - and in the current carceral context, jail would be eminently reasonable. As long as they don’t come out to their massive pensions and massive houses and all the trappings of luxury they bought off the backs of the people who were powerless to stop them.
To be clear, Noel Thomas was only sentenced to 9 months and served it in full. He wasn’t exonerated until much later. Many convicted sub-postmasters died before their convictions could be overturned, and most of them are still waiting to get back the thousands they paid to pad the post office’s profits.
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