Accountability seems swift and relentless in the era of cancel culture
Accountability seems swift and relentless in the era of cancel culture, where reputations can crumble at the speed of a tweet. A single misstep, a whispered rumour, and one can be brought down in seconds. No one is too big to fail, no mistake too small to go unnoticed.
The Post Office Ltd scandal paints a starkly different picture. For nearly two decades, a faulty IT system wreaked havoc on the lives of hundreds of postmasters. Accused of financial discrepancies based on its unreliable data, real people faced wrongful prosecutions, bankruptcies, and even suicide. Despite relentless campaigns by Private Eye, the BBC, Nick Wallis, the Daily Mail and a cross-party parliamentary campaign, true progress remained agonisingly slow. It took an unlikely hero to finally catch the public’s eye: an ITV docudrama, Mr. Bates vs the Post Office.
Why, after years of real human suffering, did it take fiction to spark action? Was a TV screen more compelling than real, raw stories of devastation?
The answer, unfortunately, lies in the complex dance between power, inertia, and political prudence. Institutions like the Post Office have an inherent advantage: resources, legal might, and a tendency to close ranks under scrutiny. Victims’ voices are easily drowned out in their uphill battle. Add to that the reluctance of governments to account for errors, and the path to justice becomes one of glacial pace.
The Post Office scandal is not an anomaly. One thinks of Nikki and Paul Turner, the Cambridge couple who uncovered the £1 billion fraud at HBOS in Reading; they are among hundreds of business owners whose livelihoods were destroyed by corrupt bankers at the Reading branch of HBOS bank. Further issues are still unresolved. Then there is Kashif Shabir’s allegations of fraud at the Lloyds Recoveries unit in Bristol. Unfortunately, rather than seeking to address Mr Shabir’s complaint, Lloyds Bank has allocated resources to devising a strategy to deflect him.
The Post Office saga stands as a chilling counterpoint to our narrative of ‘instantaneous online accountability’. It exposes a world where human lives can be truly crushed beneath the weight of institutional indifference while the public eye is distracted by fleeting online storms over semantics. While cancel culture is feared for its swift and unforgiving nature, the saga prompts me to wonder whether we should be just as concerned for the menace lurking at the opposite extreme – the chilling impunity enjoyed by so many of our powerful institutions, in the face of genuinely heinous errors and actions.
