This week former postmaster Alan Bates was giving evidence against the state-owned Post Office during the official Horizon enquiry.
He has (finally) been given the chance to explain in public how the government-appointed Post Office bosses spent: 23 years lying, covering up and defending the indefensible; claiming that their bug-ridden Fujitsu Horizon accounting system was right and over 900 postmasters were wrong.
And what's more, these senior bosses did this with total impunity. It all happened under full ministerial protection, and carried on, even after the issues had been raised in court and in parliament by one or two MPs.
But like so many of the exposures of the British judicial system's innumerable "miscarriages of justice" this exposure has come too late. By now, 250 of the over 900 sacked and falsely-prosecuted postmasters, have already died. Most will never manage to rebuild their broken_lives; 42 have had to come to terms with having been sent to jail for something they never did. All had their life savings literally stolen (plus the money given by friends and relatives who stepped in to help). The Post Office executives drove 4 postmasters to suicide: in fact these bosses are guilty of murder.
There is, of course, one uplifting feature of this whole appalling debacle - and that is that Alan Bates never gave up and that he went on to lead the collective fight of his fellow postmasters to victory.
They were able to prove that even when the odds against seem overwhelming, it's possible to beat the system. Late in the day, yes, after the damage is done, but yes, they did win...
And they have also done the rest of us a huge service, because they have reminded us of the reality of this rotten, corrupt system whose leaders' habitual lying is covered up in niceties - even, precisely, these nice "legal enquiries into injustices". The British establishment and all those who have a stake in it, hope, that with enough of these empty admissions of guilt - made when the milk (or blood) is already spilt - that the working class will continue to tolerate its existence... But they had better not bank on it!
“When they justify murder as legal”
Justifications for the unjustifiable have been coming thick and fast from the politicians who inhabit the British Commons in the last few months of course.
In fact the attempt to paint black as white and vice versa, is almost unprecedented - ever since that "firm British ally", the Zionist Israeli state, decided to launch its ruthless revenge for the 7 October Hamas massacre, against the whole of the Gazan population and slaughter, men, women, children, aid workers; journalists and even stop basic food from entering the Strip.
In this case too, the cover which politicians have used is the sham of judicial systems - whether they are international laws which govern wars, i.e.,when it is "legal" to kill and when it isn't; what defines "self-defence" and what doesn't, etc., etc...
But in fact all of these distasteful arguments are just more covers for the prevailing world order: that of the strong against the weak, i.e., the US imperialist order, which has long been using the Israeli state as its proxy in the Middle East, even if, today, it entails supporting the ultra-right Zionist-Settler-dominated Netanyahu cabinet - which is nothing but a mirror-image of Hamas.
“Closing the stable door...”
So, for 6 months and while the death toll reached 33,000, Netanyahu's actions were officially excused by the British and US governments.
Only after the killing of 3 British aid workers, on 1 April, were a few arms thrown up in horror. A letter signed by 3 former supreme court justices, 600 lawyers, academics and retired senior judges, warned that the government is breaching international law by continuing to arm Israel, citing a provisional order of the International Court of Justice which concluded that there was "a plausible risk of genocide in Gaza".
An immediate and unsurprising answer, signed by even more "UK Lawyers for Israel" answered that this was a misreading of the ICJ's judgement which said that it was the "right to protection from genocide of Palestinians which was plausible" and "not the act of genocide which was plausible"..!
But so what? The unbiased public and the working class do not need laws, lawyers and courts to be able to judge what is happening in Palestine-Gaza; nor, by the way, who is guilty and who is innocent when it comes to the Post Office - or any other of the many government-instigated scandals...
And we certainly know that when it comes to the social system we all live under, that like Alan Bates and the postmasters, the only way to get real justice is to fight for it relentlessly - "stubbornly" - to use his word, despite and, if need be, against the law!