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when you're friends with that one "pick me" girl 🙄
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when you're friends with that one "pick me" girl 🙄

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ALAN BATES, OUR HERO Imagine spending 20 years trying to prove you are not a thief. Now imagine winning. Now imagine the same people who called you a thief for two decades hand you a piece of paper that says take this money or get nothing at all. That is basically what just happened to Sir Alan Bates. Quick recap for anyone who missed the ITV drama or somehow avoided this story for the last ten years. The Post Office used a computer system called Horizon. It was built by Fujitsu UK. It was buggy. Really buggy. So buggy it invented money problems that did not exist. Post office workers would check their accounts and suddenly there was a shortfall of a few thousand pounds nobody could explain. Instead of checking the software, the Post Office decided the simpler explanation was that thousands of small shop owners across the country had all quietly turned into criminals at the same time. Over 700 people were prosecuted. People lost their homes. People lost their marriages. People went to prison for crimes a computer made up. Some people died before anyone in charge admitted the truth. This went on from 1999 to 2015. Sixteen years. Nobody at the top said sorry in any meaningful way. Nobody at the top lost their job over it either. Alan Bates was one of these subpostmasters. He got sacked in 2003 after Horizon claimed he had a shortfall. Instead of quietly disappearing, which is probably what the Post Office was hoping for, he went and found other victims. He built a group called the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance. For years he organised hundreds of ordinary shopkeepers who had zero legal power against a state owned company with unlimited lawyers and unlimited patience for delay. In 2019 they won. High Court ruling. Official confirmation that Horizon was broken and these people were never thieves. 555 claimants won a settlement of 57.75 million pounds. Sounds like a lot of money until you remember lawyers exist. After legal fees ate through it, the group had almost nothing left to actually live on. Justice, minus the overhead. Then the ITV drama airs. The whole country suddenly pays attention. Every politician who ignored this scandal for over a decade now wants a photo standing next to Alan Bates. He gets knighted in June 2024. Everyone claps. Case closed, surely. Not quite. This year, while thousands of other victims were still stuck waiting for their own payouts, the government gave Bates an offer for his own personal claim. Reports say it was worth less than half of what he was asking for. And it came with a lovely little catch. Take it or leave it. Not a discussion. Not a negotiation. An ultimatum, handed to the one man who spent two decades fighting exactly this kind of behaviour, delivered by the exact institution he spent two decades fighting. He eventually settled. The government says it has now paid out 1.2 billion pounds to over 9,000 victims in total. A nice round number for a press release. Nobody will confirm exactly how much Bates personally walked away with. Reports suggest somewhere in the millions. Somewhere. Vague enough to sound generous. Vague enough to dodge a real answer. So here is the full tally. Sir Alan Bates gets a knighthood, a hit TV show, standing ovations in Parliament, and years of praise for exposing one of the biggest scandals in British history. Then the same government still needed convincing to treat his own compensation fairly. Turns out being a national hero does not get you a fast pass through the bureaucracy you spent your entire life fighting against. You would think being proven right for 20 years earns you the benefit of the doubt. Apparently it earns you a knighthood and a pressure tactic normally reserved for a used car dealership. Sources: BBC News (UK) The Independent ComputerWeekly ITV and many others

Artur Nadolny

66,166 次观看 • 4 天前