IT is seldom that the ruling class emerges into view as a class, rather than as disparate wealthy and powerful individuals.
Part of maintaining class rule is convincing people that the part of the jigsaw they are upset about is the whole picture.
In Britain, this has been raised to an elevated art. When class power actually appears it is draped in medieval pomp, as at the state opening of Parliament. That is class rule as costume drama.
That is why the Post Office scandal is such a teachable moment. So much of the interlocking network of bourgeois power stands exposed, all together and at the same time.
The government is right to bow to public outrage and fast-track legislation exonerating the persecuted postmasters and speeding up the payment of compensation.
Lawyers may complain that it sets a bad precedent for Parliament to overturn court convictions by fiat.
But the legal system needs to look at its own role in this epic miscarriage of justice.
Why did so many judges, facing cases against decent men and women which should have strained the credulity of anyone, side with the employer bringing a private prosecution?
And what of the very highly paid lawyers who prepared the cases, and agreed cynical plea deals which still left the innocent criminalised?
They are integral to a rotten system. But they are only a part of it.
There are the bosses of the Post Office. They ran an organisation fixated on bonuses at all levels — bonuses for hounding postmasters and then bonuses for co-operating with the inquiry into their own malfeasance.
The Post Office being publicly owned changes nothing in itself. It is run according to the prevailing neoliberal precepts of seeking maximum profit with the greatest possible self-enrichment at the top.
The other corporation enmeshed in the scandal is Fujitsu, purveyor of dodgy IT. It uses its monopoly position to extract the most lucrative possible contracts from the taxpayer.
Piling outrage upon scandal, it has secured billions of pounds worth of such contracts after it was publicly exposed in 2019 over Horizon.
Ministers claim they could do nothing else because of “procurement rules,” as if these were acts of God.
They are the products of Treasury civil servants, themselves enmeshed in the apparatus of private profit and looking forward to their turn on the gravy train once the revolving door between Whitehall and business lands them in a boardroom.
Did politicians stand up for the interests of justice? They did not. Among those with questions to answer are Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey, who brushed aside appeals to hear the postmasters’ case in person, and Labour campaign co-ordinator, hardcore Blairite Pat McFadden.
It would seem that for more than a decade ministers instinctively sided with whatever the Post Office bosses told them and ignored evidence of a scandal so palpable it took wilful blindness to ignore.
They too nowadays usually see government office as just a way station to private riches, bestowed by the companies they once regulated with the lightest of touches.
Fat cats, judges, civil servants, politicians — all in it up to their neck. One can imagine them gathering in their Pall Mall clubs of an evening to scoff at the postmasters they were incarcerating or impoverishing.
Justice does not stop at one emergency Bill, still less at an exchange of honours between Paula Vennells and postmaster hero Alan Bates.
Nor does it stop at this one scandal. Grenfell. Infected blood. Pandemic procurement. The same power set up each time.
Real justice means breaking the system of class rule now embodied in the word Horizon.
