Post Office vs DEFRA (Part 1)

Mr Bates vs The Post Office has been an extraordinary successful vehicle to humanise the victims of a small number of unaccountable, out of control self-serving corporate monsters hiding within every power structure.

Monsters who made the conscious decision to ensure that regular people lost their livelihoods, handed over their savings, lost their homes, lived in cars and were put in prison for crimes that were never committed.

I’d be willing to bet that there will be no sympathy for disreputable outfits like DEFRA.

Our sector could present hundreds of customers and supporters of boarding establishments who were closed without warning who would be willing to testify that the disastrous conduct of local authority licensing officers was unjustified.**

Just as I'm willing to bet that after 700+ post masters had their lives destroyed, there will be just as much interest in how a dysfunctional and scurrilous and badly run department like DEFRA wrote our regulations.
DEFRA wrote our regulations without any contact with our sector, without exercising any due diligence and then tried to get away with having twiddled their thumbs for four years while knowing that their regulations were being abused by local authorities to decimate an essential sector in the supply chain supporting UK tourism.

The majority of people aren’t interested in politics and the public provide anyone in charge the power to do virtually anything as long as they make life better for a majority of individuals.
But today it hardly matters if you’re on the right or left because in the face of climate change, immigration, global economic collapse, Ukraine and Covid, none of the political hierarchies have any answers to anything.
The public recently scored a win after the prime-time dramatisation of Mr Bates vs The Post Office exposed the lies, concealment and corruption that have become a central defence for all corporate structures and the media decided that pressure was required to get anything done.

But there are dozens of injustices waiting in the wings:

We have the Windrush scandal where citizens of this country were wrongfully accused of being illegal immigrants and some were imprisoned. We have the contaminated blood scandal where screening failed and people were infected with AIDS and we have the Grenfel Tower fire scandal where bureaucrats signed off on cheap inmflammable cladding that caused families to suffocate - so there’s no shortage of possible follow-ups to illustrate the failure of government to act wisely, correctly or act in the public interest.

This discussion of the Post Office fiasco and the DEFRA debacle is covered in ten short articles:
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10