Institutions vs the people
The post office scandal shows what happens when the justice system works for the elite, not the public.
One theme I explore in my book How Woke Won is the growing disjuncture between the values and interests of a political and cultural elite and the rest of society. Institutions - from the law courts to the National Health Service - that once worked for the people, now all too often seem to work against the people. One example of this is the Post Office scandal which, 20 years after subpostmasters started being wrongfully convicted, is now at the centre of public attention thanks to the brilliant ITV dramatisation, MrBates vs The Post Office.
Paula Vennells: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-67925304
Paula Vennells, who was Post Office chief executive between 2012 and 2019, has been rightly criticised for her role in defending what turned out to be wrongful convictions. Vennells was awarded a CBE in 2019, shortly before leaving the Post Office. She has now returned the honour but it is worth noting the reason for her recognition. The Post Office said the honour was given for her work on ‘diversity and inclusion’, and her ‘commitment to the social purpose at the heart of the business and her dedication in putting the customer first’.
Anyone who has stood in a seemingly endless Post Office queue, or waited for letters that turn up weeks late, will laugh at the idea of the customer coming first. But what’s more significant here is the way that ‘diversity and inclusion’ and ‘social purpose’ sit alongside the huge legal injustice against subpostmasters that Vennells was overseeing. Yet again we see that a commitment to woke values becomes a way for the elite to launder their reputations and boost their own salaries, all at the expense of ‘unfashionable victims’.
I wrote about why Mr Bates Vs The Post Office has captured the public attention more than most other ‘social issue’ dramas on Spiked this week:
Mr Bates vs The Post Office is different from most of today’s television dramas. For a start, it focusses on people who live in towns and suburbs, not the trendy parts of big cities. Rather than shoe-horning in a transgender character, simply to make a point, the series remains faithful to reality. Those caught up in the injustice are predominantly white or of Indian heritage. They are all middle-aged or older. Neither wealthy nor impoverished, the subpostmasters were simply hard-working people aspiring to make a better life for their families. Audiences are not manipulated into pitying those involved. There is no room for sentimentality. Instead, we see the subpostmasters coming together in solidarity, and organising and fighting for their cause collectively.
The absence of identity politics and woke hectoring, the ordinariness of the people represented and the absence of pity are, I would argue, a big part of why the drama has cut through into popular consciousness.
But these very same factors explain why the Post Office scandal didn’t garner the attention it deserved before now. Unfortunately for the subpostmasters, middle-aged people from outside the big cities are not a particularly fashionable group in the eyes of our political and cultural elites. MPs quick to be filmed being silly in support of transgender people, kneeling for Black Lives Matter or sharing their own #MeToo stories apparently find people like the subpostmasters boring, unrelatable and potentially politically dubious.
Justice was served to my local MP, Rosie Duffield, this week. Duffield had been subjected to an internal Labour Party investigation after she was accused of anti-Semitism and transphobia. She has now been exonerated of all charges but, as I wrote in The Spectator, when it comes to pernicious complaints, the process those accused are subjected to is often punishment enough:
Elected in 2017 as Canterbury’s first Labour MP in a century, Duffield vocally campaigned against anti-Semitism from the off. Back then, with Corbyn as party leader, she was criticised by local members for attending a rally and supporting then Labour MP Luciana Berger who had condemned anti-Semitism within the party. Of course, none of this matters to the vexatious transgender ideologues outraged that a woman has the temerity to defend sex-based rights. That Duffield continues to resist their intimidatory tactics and insist on speaking up for biological reality has clearly driven them mad.Â
Sadly, Duffield’s haters are unlikely to see her exoneration as a sign that they should call off their campaign against her. They know that the outcome of any investigation is largely irrelevant: it is the process that is the punishment. They have sentenced Duffield to continual scrutiny and a constant need to defend herself, as well as a never ending stream of abusive comments and slanderous accusations. When this becomes your life, day in, day out, the hardiest souls are left worn out and frustrated at the waste of time and energy.
Even the reporting of Duffield’s exoneration has been coloured by hostility to her views on gender. Initially, BBC News wrongly declared that the NEC investigation was prompted by Duffield having ‘liked a tweet supporting antisemitism and transphobia’. Yet Linehan’s pithy response to Izzard’s grandstanding was neither of those things.
Finally this week, another example of institutions becoming distant from their primary purpose is schools. Post-lockdown, pupil absenteeism remains a huge problem. It seems that after two years of being told that attendance doesn’t matter, many children have been reluctant to return to the classroom. Getting pupils back to school now requires policy makers to explain why regular attendance is important. They need to be able to say what children get from going to school that they cannot get elsewhere. Unfortunately, neither Conservative nor Labour education ministers have been able to make a convincing case for education. Instead, they promote attendance as an end in itself, or try to bribe children with free breakfasts and extra sport. Worse still is Labour’s proposal to put a mental health counsellor in every secondary school. This risks turning education into therapy. I wrote about this in The Spectator:
Free breakfasts and more sport risks sounding like a weak attempt at bribery. McDonald’s and the local leisure centre no doubt offer better. Some children will need access to counsellors or speech and language support but a weekly therapy session is unlikely to get children up to speed on their maths. More to the point, there is a real risk that schools become an odd combination of food bank, doctor’s surgery and leisure centre. Amid the welfare and service provision, education is hard to find.
Prior to 2020, closing schools was never part of any pandemic response plans. The decision to shut classrooms to all but the most vulnerable children was taken with no apparent assessment of the educational consequences. Teaching was, in the main, reduced to a few worksheets or the odd online quiz. Exams were cancelled and grades given out seemingly at random. And when pupils finally returned to the classroom, there was little concerted effort to make up for what they had missed.
Yet neither Keegan nor Phillipson admit to this failure. As Ellie Lee and Jennie Bristow point out in their new book Parenting Culture Studies, post-lockdown, ‘the problem of the suspension of education has rarely been explicitly addressed.’
In marketing terms, education is a school’s unique selling point. It is not access to breakfast clubs, counsellors or sports that make going to school necessary but access to teachers with specialist subject knowledge they are keen to impart. School is the only place where children can learn things their parents do not know, things that are deemed so important they are worth passing from one generation to the next.
Thank you for reading Cieo.