Abuse of unaccountable power is at wicked heart of Post Office scandal

To the widely voiced reasons to admire Alan Bates, the heroically dogged leader of the campaign to achieve justice for the victims of the Post Office scandal, let me add another.

- Andrew Rawnsley

The man is the master of understatement. When the government was finally impelled to announce it will legislate to quash hundreds of wrongful convictions, he said: "It's about time." Most of us would have inserted at least a "bloody" into that response.

This swamp of malignancy has been devouring innocent people for a quarter of a century, since the Post Office started its vicious persecution of branch managers by falsely accusing more than 3,000 of crimes that included fraud and theft. The Post Office ruined reputations, livelihoods and health, and stole the liberty of the 236 who were imprisoned. The term "miscarriage of justice" is too tepid. It was a perversion of justice.

More than four years have gone by since Bates and his fellow campaigners won a significant victory in the high court when their case exploded the deception that there was nothing defective about the Horizon accounting system supplied to the Post Office by Fujitsu. The police started investigating in 2020 and a public inquiry was established the same year. More than two years have elapsed since dozens of false convictions were overturned by the court of appeal in a ruling that declared all of the Horizon-related prosecutions were "an affront to the conscience of the court". And yet it is only now - after the ITV drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office - that the conscience of Westminster has been stirred enough for the government to propose remedies.