After watching the ITV series (Mr Bates) it seems to me that two things are true;

If anyone can get an honour for a hop, skip and jump or for simply doing their job then this bloke deserves a big medal.

Two; member of the then post office management team belong in jail.

More likely to go to jail for saying something that someone else deems offensive these days.
Have to agree though, the treatment of the sub post masters was an absolute disgrace and some of those at the very top should be prosecuted for harassment, theft, fraud, at the very least but also potentially manslaughter of those poor souls who took their own lives.

Just noticed that he turned down an OBE as in his words 'the job isn't yet finished"

Very trivial amounts of money compared to the fraud during Covid by friends of politicians, I bet none of them go to jail.

I'm amazed no one twigged that with over 700 so called fraudsters something may be wrong with the system. A handful of thieves perhaps but when it gets to the level it got to surely somebody questioned the numbers the system was throwing up.
The biggest surprise is that it happened under a labour government and, as we know, everything was squeaky clean.

Took homes and life savings from people who owed nothing, forced people to plead guilty and get a criminal record when there was absolutely no evidence against them. Absolute abuse of their power and of the British Justice system. Easy prey the "little man" compared to the likes of Mone who has the money to defend herself from the get go.
Had to laugh at Edd Davey demanding transparency in the ongoing public inquiry, he was the government minister responsible for the Postal Service at the time? No shame at all.
The Post Office CEO should have the CBE removed immediately, yet another reason to just scrap the honours system and the House of Lords.

What is the point of the House of Lords.
It’s elected by no one.
It can block any Party’s legislation, yet has no mandate.
I don’t believe in having second chambers as the elected chamber is all that is required to carry out the will of the electorate, the Lord’s input is superfluous.

agree totally with both about honours and the lords. like so much in this country its all about tradition and things have always been like that approach. somehow i cannot see either being abolished any time soon as even those sons and daughters of immegrant families quickly become part of the establishment like the rest do.

One of the main reasons for not having Kier Starmer in no10. When he was the main man at CPS with the likes of this and the debacle of Jimmy Saville not being prosecuted during his time how can this man be named as PM and run the country!!

Not Starmers fault, no one would speak out against Saville, he threatened them if they did, there were only suspicions, you can’t arrest and prosecute some one on here say.

having loads of dosh like saville had helped a bit though. money and influence wins hands down here.

I see both Sunak & Starmer have not supported the removal of the CBE from the head of the Post Office at that time, Paula Vennells. She was also an Anglican Priest but had no sympathy with these Postmasters.

An appearance in front of a Judge should be in order for her with the passing of a custodial sentence appropriate.

Do you really believe that….?

The scandal about Saville never came out till after he died, no accusations were levelled at him whilst he was still alive, Saville was never arrested or questioned, no charges were brought so Starmer was never involved because of this.

if you want to believe that, you carry on.

Every one who was arrested and currently convicted had people accusing them, no one came forward and made a complaint against Saville. If there was I am sure the media would have been falling over them selves to interview the accuser, I can’t imagine editors of newspapers being gagged.

Why are you so bothered about Starmer’s behaviour……? He was in charge at the CPS at the time, questions will be asked in election year, no surprise there, so best get used to it.

Why you so bothered Snowy, what questions can be asked about Saville and Starmer, you are as bad as Sunak bringing the subject up in Parliament when it was irrelevant. I repeat once again, no one made any complaints or charges could have been made against Saville so the CPS couldn’t bring a case. Once again I repeat the Police couldn't question Saville, they can’t question/arrest people on rumours, they need accusers who never came forward till he died.The red top right wing media would have had a field if anyone had come forward and paid them a substantial amount of money for the story.
Snowy just admit it you don’t like Starmer, I am not so keen on the fella either by the way.
I assume you won’t be voting Labour because of this your choice, but who is left to vote for who will have any clout in Parliament, Reform U.K., (Tice is standing in Hartlepool at the next election)The Green Party, Lib Dems etc, Conservative after 14 years of mismanaging the country ?
Me, why not let the Conservatives carry on to sort their mess out they created then they can’t blame Labour when they get in power.

The mess we're in will never be sorted out as long as Governments are controlled by Big Business, and while MPs stand for their party rather than the people they're meant to represent.
People in powerful positions and with wealth have absolutely no respect for the little man anymore, all they want is more power and more wealth and f*ck the consequences. Corruption is worse in the 1st World now than it ever was in the 3rd World but the corrupt are far more sophisticated about the way they go about their business.
Good on the sub post masters and their quest for justice, equally important to them now it seems is ensuring those responsible are held to account and punished accordingly. Strange how the TV program seems to have galvanised the police - unless they're too busy making sure Georgia's are not getting in buses or trains, or making sure nobodies sent a dubious email to someone who's taken offence and demanding the full weight of the law be brought down on the culprit.

Unlike you, I vote for who offers me the best deal. I’m a floating voter, a mercenary I have no loyalties to any Party so I get to decide who gets elected, because the confirmed Labour, Tory or Lib Dem voters vote’s are all accounted for because the brainwashed always vote for who they alwys vote for…it avoids that pesky thinking nonsense.

I’ll give you my opinion of all of them…

Starmer, apart from his poverty of personality and overwhelming dullness, he’s the consumate embodiment of double think.

Sunak,The pilot who takes off then realises he only did the taking off part of the flying lesson ……..he stands for nothing but re-election, committing slow political suicide in the hope of staying at the top.

Ed Davies, completely unspoiled by failure,the election campaign will be a delicious cringefest by the smooth ‘spokesperson’ for a woke totalitarian future.

Tice, he has an overweening confidence that courts disaster, but there is nothing more dangerous (to the Tory vote) than a man who has nothing to lose, but in reality is merely a sawdust Caesar.

That’s what I think
They’ve all got a chocolate eclair back bones……all just one dimensional chameleons.

Who is offering the best deal currently Snowy, you actually believe everything politicians say in their manifesto ?

Too early yet, but anyone who reverts back to the original net zero for starters can kiss my vote goodbye….so I can safely kick the Lib Dem’s into the long glass, but you really wouldn’t let them out of their woke play pen and allow them to wander on to the world stage in their naive Jim jams.

For once I agree with you Snowy, the tree huggers will say if Great Britain goes down the road of the net zero route irrespective of the cost they will say other countries will follow our lead. Like hell they will, no way India or China and if Trump gets re elected will they follow the net zero route like many other countries won’t either.Industries will just relocate to countries who couldn’t give a toss about net zero.

That was my beef with Blair, who I voted for first time around. He wanted to turn us into a nation of high tech keyboard bashers and made metal bashing industries a dirty word….we’d have ended up with everyone having worthless degrees and producing nothing to actually sell.
Also the migrant crisis, where all party’s show their gormless naivety.
The latest daft idea is to process people in France and allow in those who qualify to stop the boats ….but no one has said the majority refused will then go on the boats, that’s how dumb they are.
Worse still, ALL Party’s say we’re gonna process applications quicker, but it’s not how quick you process them but how many you actually approve, as they’re alleged to be on the 90% region being approved….do we need that many brain surgeons, rocket scientists and Physicists they allege they are …they take us for fools.

Yes Snowy we did turn out high tech keyboard warriors, they work in Call Centres or Phone Shops now. Sunak said they had cleared most of the back log, easily done just say yes to all them. No point in turning them down, they just appeal which can take months maybe years with lawyers coining it in costing the tax payers thousands as they will be on Legal Aid.
Sunak said he will cut taxes at the expense of Welfare Benefit, yes there are some scrounges who know how to work the system there are genuine people on benefits for one reason or another.
Abolish Inheritance Tax, I think am right in saying the government get £7 billion a year, how is that black hole going to be filled ?

Inheritance tax only applies to the very rich, so typical Tory policy of rewarding the wealthy. Talk about it enough in the media and the masses will believe its a real concern to us all.
Cracking down on benefits will probably hurt more genuine people than fraudsters but it's low hanging fruit.
Be better going after the billions that were robbed from the public purse during the covid crisis, although I suspect most would if they haven't already close the businesses or declare themselves bankrupt so thereed be nothing to get back.
Government sponsored fraud is rife in this country regardless of which party is in power.

The rich Tories will have there assets salted away where they won’t pay inheritance tax,a lot of older people have got property, not mansions which will fall into the category of inheritance tax.
I tried signing my property a modest apartment not in the inheritance tax bracket over to my daughter, if I lived in it I would have had to pay the going rate for rent.

But back on the P.O scandal, isn’t it bizarre that it’s taken a TV drama series to push this in to the main public eye.

This is great in one sense (that finally a good % of the public are rightly engaged and outraged) but sad in the way that previously this virtually sailed beneath the wind.

Nothing can ever compensate the people who spent time in jail and others who committed suicide, there was also the scandal when Hemophilians were given infected blood and they contracted HIV, so much gets swept under the carpet in the U.K. , always will be when media is controlled by the elite.

There was plenty of coverage when it erupted, but my biggest concern is how come those running the system weren’t surprised at the number postmasters in trouble, surely this must have raised a few questions.
Blaming the computer is bollocks, it’s the programmer who tells it what to do.

you mean like the rest of the population of this country who are over 30 without a university education who have not had the propaganda machine in the ears. nazi germany and the USSR would be proud of us as we have gone a step further than them in mind control.

Good point. My father was a maths teacher, a very strict one in fact, and one of his little catchphrases was “computers don’t make mistakes”

I’m going back to the seventies and eighties here and he used to say this when shop workers or insurance people or in fact anyone who tried to palm him off with that classic of “the computer has made a mistake”

No idea what you mean, I am thick as mince, I don’t have a University Degree only City and Guilds.

Nowadays the C&G guarantees you a much bigger income.

The Blair education, education thing never worked because there were no jobs at the end of it after the previous Conservative government destroyed most of the British Industries.

Most of the ones with useless Degrees like ‘meeeja’ studies and philosophy are in the call centres or flipping burgers………trying to pay off their tuition fees.
The only Degrees worthwhile are the sciences and medicine and there should be no tuition fees whatsoever, the only beneficiaries of Blair’s vision was the greedy Uni’s who popped up everywhere to milk foreign students as well as our own.

I’ve heard from someone reliable that sooner or later an English Uni will go bankrupt.

At that point it will be interesting to see what happens. It won’t be a famous one like Durham or Oxford, it will be a lesser one.

Wasnt just the Tories that destroyed British industry, Labour in its terms did nothing to support or revive manufacturing in the UK.
Its not really a surprise that the strongest economies in the world are countries that still produce and manufacture stuff.

It would have been impossible to reopen the mines as most of them flooded when they closed, Consett Steelworks was demolished more or less straight away when it closed and shipyards similar.

The current government are going to try and curb immigration which could limit the number of students who also won’t be allowed to bring their relatives.
There was a scam years ago, it was on the TV where people were falsifying university applications, as the person/persons arrived in the U.K. they disappeared never to attend any university.

Yep all of a sudden Polytechnics became universities, no idea why hospitals are called universities nowadays either ?

Most pits that were closed were required to be kept dry and were pumped for a period of 10 years I believe as the effect of allowing flooding had not been assessed nor understood. Labour was established as the party to represent the workers yet did very little to protect them since New Labour (Conservative Light) took over the party.

I see that "Doris" Vennells has returned her CBE and another interesting fact was that she had been "interviewed" for the position of Bishop of London, the 3rd highest after Canterbury & York.

The biggest closure of pits in the North East were by Harold Wilson in the late 60’s when all the inland pits were closed leaving only the coastal pits, the redundancies were much larger….not a peep from anyone.

All this money that allegedly went missing, must have turned up somewhere on the system, where did it go….?

Post Office profits apparently, how they couldn't realise that the what must have been unaccounted profit amounted to the exact sum that was allegedly stolen by the sub postmasters is beyond belief.
I also don't understand given the "affront to the British Justice system that the PO didn't have to pay their legal fees.

⬆️ Yep, that's it! In the last episode of the TV drama the money guy working for the victims was asked this very question and he answered something like...


.... The money never really existed, it only existed when the victims had to pay their money to the P.O. who then probably kept it in some holding account until it was eventually siphoned off in to the profits of our beloved Post Office.

As a brand name, surely "The Post Office" must be as dead as a Dodo now. I certainly wouldn't open any kind of account with them.

It should still have a trail regardless, why has this not been pursued. They can soon come after you if things go wrong on your part.

i mean that those over 30 without any degree are far less likely for believe or follow the net zero and climate change propaganda thrown at us. those under that age have had to live with it for years like those under 20 are bombared with race, trans and LGB stuff on a permanent basis. go back further and we had religeon and the morarchy thrown at us from the day we first walked into school.