The response to the appalling Post Office scandal shows that the ideas of honour and virtue are not dead. In country towns the local sub-postmaster was held in honour as a key member of the community. This explains the widespread anger that these honourable people have been dishonoured by an abuse of the power of the state. The Post Office ruthlessly persecuted – there is no other word for it – hundreds of its postmasters. The concept of honour is inseparable from the concept of virtue. The idea that “honours” such as a CBE or a knighthood should be handed out by politicians in return for political favours – or worse, for money – is obnoxious and dishonourable. The cultivation of virtue must be recognised as being at the heart of any religiously-based ethics. Both the public and private sectors need to honour virtue – once described as “doing good without reward when no-one’s looking” – if they are to regain public trust. The Post Office scandal has shown what the absence of honour and virtue looks like. It is an ugly picture.
Journalists, often a venal and arrogant lot, seem to have come up with the goods this time. The ITV series which we’ve all been transfixed by dramatised a story journalists had exposed. They often deserve the opprobrium that is hurled at them, but the story confirms that a free – well, a free-ish – media is one of the essential cogs in the wheels of a functioning democracy. It was heart-breaking to see in the ITV series so many of the postmasters accused of wrongdoing sharing the collective national sense that the justice system can be trusted to get at the truth, and gradually becoming more and more frustrated and angry as they learned that, No, money and power can get you off the hook. Or perhaps the story shows that, creaking though it is, we live in a flawed democracy underpinned by the rule of law, which because of the odd maverick MP, some intrepid journalists, a superb scriptwriter and a batch of wonderful actors somehow, just, eventually (let’s see) allowed innocent “little people” to swim through all the treacle in the end.
There are currently several other public inquiries taking place, including one into the infected blood given to haemophiliacs, which can be traced to events in the 1970s, and into the Grenfell Tower fire, which happened almost seven years ago. It would be good to think the uproar over the Post Office scandal gave them a nudge to get on with it.
Top picture: How the mighty have fallen and standards have dropped. The Post Office in College Street, Dumbarton, which has now been replaced by a counter at Morrisons in the High Street.