Well, let's have a trial first shall we?

From that ever popular series, newspaper headline questions we can answer:

Should those who sent the sub-postmasters to prison now face court themselves?

Yes.

Of course, this is a violation of Betteridge’s Law but then it is those exceptions that make such observations interesting.

We would in fact go further. There needs to be the sight of a significant number of - and senior too - people staring out from between prison bars. We are willing to go with the trial first approach but that’s only on the good days. For this statement is correct:

The mother of two was one of more than 700 people wrongly prosecuted in the biggest miscarriage of justice in British legal history.

Strip away all of the he said, she said, stuff and the base mistake is incredibly simple. The new accounting system connecting the subpost offices with HQ contained an appalling - we’d say criminal ourselves but that trial thing - error. A design error, one that should never have been allowed to pass muster at all. If a transaction was dropped, was incomplete and then repeated - something that does happen over internet connections - then the incomplete was counted as a valid transaction. Instead of what should happen which is that the incomplete is disregarded and only complete transactions are added to the balance sheet.

That’s it. Everything else is organisations stoutly denying that they could ever have done something so stupid. But they did. The cover up perhaps being the difficulty in law but that initial mistake really was that simple.

We want to see jobs lost, pensions confiscated, gongs rescinded and jail time served. We are willing to wait until after the trial, even as we think that government should already be scything through those organizations like Atilla the Hun having a bad day.

We’re even willing to agree to it being a fair trial - for we think the result would be as we wish even with that process.