More scandals will follow the Post Office - it’s the logical consequence of how the Tories rule

After being in power for 14 years, the eagerness for this government to blame anyone but itself is quite staggering.

Thanks to a drama on ITV, the government has suddenly discovered that the Post Office has been mired in a scandal that is perhaps the largest miscarriage of justice in British legal history. But fortunately, it has also discovered that this was all the fault of Keir Starmer and Ed Davey.

Thank heavens for that! There were we all, thinking that successive Tory ministers might have allowed perfectly innocent people to rot in jail and have their lives ruined by a criminally inept organisation which they were responsible for.

Luckily, it turns out that the real villains of the piece were Starmer – of the 4 million cases handled by the Crown Prosecution Service while he was in charge, 11 were prosecutions of postmasters – and Davey, who was postal affair minister in the coalition government for two years, during which he claims he questioned what was happening but was “reassured time and again that the Horizon system was working” and “ told there weren’t that many postmasters affected”.

Of course, this is nonsense. Not even this government is stupid enough to really think the Post Office scandal was Starmer and Davey’s fault. But if they can shift the blame then they won’t have to reform the system. The system the Conservatives have been busy creating.

What did they expect to happen when they charge for access to the PM and ministers, when they arrange for companies to dodge tax, or let them break the law and get away with it?

What did they think would happen when regulators and civil servants work for and even run companies they used to be in charge of regulating?

Business leaders are not stupid, they soon learn there are no bad consequences for them, ever. Just ever larger pay packets; no matter what they do.

It all flows from the Tory philosophy that business can be trusted, is run by decent people, is law abiding and patriotic, when experience tells us it very rarely is any of those things. But that philosophy lets you deregulate and lets companies do what they want, it allows regulatory capture, then you abolish the Audit Commission, weaken workers’ rights and Union power until they are virtually worthless, ignore warnings, blame workers and always take the side of the bosses, because they know best.

As a result, you get the Post Office scandal, filthy water, useless PPE, dodgy land deals, tax avoidance and yes; cronyism and corruption.

Private Eye is doubtless already uncovering the next major scandal, which will again come as a major shock to the government when it finally gets made into an ITV drama. They will hold an investigation and find out that whoever leads the opposition parties was really to blame.

But the truth is that the system they have built will create dozens of these scandals. The checks and balances that underpinned our system have been deliberately watered down, weakened, undermined, and eventually corrupted. Scandal is inevitable, it is just a matter of how long it can be hidden.

Over 14 years the Conservatives have created a system to reward failure, corruption, greed, incompetence, mendacity and crime.

The Tory government can bleat and smear all they like; but just like the Post Office they own this one.

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