Truth (and Action!) Through Storytelling
Have you been following a recent story out of the United Kingdom? One of Britain's biggest miscarriages of justice, the wrongful conviction of hundreds of post office workers due to faulty software has exploded into the public domain following a TV drama, sparking demands for justice. In an over-20-year scandal, some postal workers were sent to prison and others lost their livelihoods and homes.
An independent inquiry as well as a police investigation into the scandal are ongoing, and top business executives and former ministers are in the firing line.
Here’s what happened…
Hundreds of postal workers at the state-owned post office were wrongly prosecuted or convicted between 1999 and 2015 for alleged false accounting, theft, and fraud, because of a glitchy software system that incorrectly showed money missing from accounts. Some spent time in jail while others went bankrupt, saw their marriages destroyed, or committed suicide, while others simply died before their names were cleared.
A bit of explanation for US-based readers…
Managers at post office branches across Britain, called postmasters or postmistresses, are often at the heart of their communities, trusted individuals who handle people's savings and pensions.
The post office maintained for years that data from the defective Horizon computer accounting system, developed by Japan's Fujitsu and rolled out in 1999, was reliable, while accusing branch managers of theft.
TV drama to the rescue
Mr Bates vs the Post Office: The Real Story is a four-part miniseries chronicling sub-postmaster Alan Bates’s legal battle against the Post Office, which had falsely accused him and some 3,500 others of defrauding the UK’s postal service. As soon as it aired, the number of signatures on a long-running petition calling for an official honor to be stripped from former post office chief executive Paula Vennells rocketed to more than one million.
The series, which stars Toby Jones as former subpostmaster Alan Bates, was broadcast on New Year’s Day, and renewed interest in the injustice once more. With public campaigns mounting once again, prime minister Rishi Sunak has now confirmed that a new law will be introduced so those wrongly convicted are “swiftly exonerated and compensated.” (Don’t hold your breath for that one.)
On January 9, 2024, ITV shared that Mr Bates vs the Post Office had been watched by 9.2 million viewers, the channel’s best new drama in three years. (In the US, watch for it possibly coming to Britbox, or use a VPN to connect to ITV.)
Why did it work?
If you’ve been reading my work for any amount of time, you’ll know what I return to again and again: the ability of stories to make people feel empathy. If you can put yourself in the place of someone else (real or fictional), then you are widening your own ability to understand others.
People in Great Britain knew—perhaps only vaguely—that this was a thing, but only those affected felt any passion about the question. That all ended over the past two weeks, as viewers all over were taken into the lives of wrongly accused postmasters. They became real people to the audience, people not so different from anyone else. One caller to a radio show I listen to said the drama had underlined to her that “if they can do it to them, they can do it to me.”
The ability of corporations and institutions to minimize damage as well as publicity had news outlets making only marginal progress in reporting the situation—and that went for those who had an interest in doing so—in England, as in the US, client-journalists often write precisely what corporations want to hear.
But stories are a different thing. Stories bypass the political gatekeepers and are free to, as Toni Morrison once said, “look at something without blinking.”
I am so heartened by this situation. A friend of mine, a journalist, said to me once, “Journalists write about facts. Novelists write about truth.” And I think that’s at play here—we can go directly to the heart. Of a person. Perhaps even of a country.
And change can come.