Bath Publishing

I've surprised myself by not actually getting Blobercised about the shameful gaslighting and ruination of local Post Office managers across the water. Not until January-too-late did I find a hook in the coincidence of ICL on the periphery of my own life. I guess the itch of my indignation was eased by posts across on Metafilter 2023 - 2020. Sometimes Metafilter comments are from people who actually know what they are talking about.  That something is rotten in the state of POmark has been known since at least 2009 when Private Eye started flagging it [7 page 9,000 word PDF] on the regular.  But corporate and politcal and main-stream journalistic inertia allowed each egregious case to get washed away without any song-and-dance.

One of the White Hats in this sorry tale is Nick Wallis, who (in 2010!) was a local radio talk-show host who started to talk to Sub-Postmanagers about the ruination of their lives and blog about it. He published a book about his, and their journey, for the Christmas market in . . . 2021. The title couldn't be more explicit: The Great Post Office Scandal: The fight to expose a multimillion pound IT disaster which put innocent people in jail. If you want a 1 hour exec summary Wallis was interviewed by James "LBC" O'Brien [whom bloboprev] on the latter's Full Disclosure channel. Hislop at Private Eye and Wallis are extremely magnanimous about someone else (ITV docudrama on the telly over Christmas 2023) removing the final chip from the dams of inertia and obfuscation and release a national tsunami of outrage.

For my money, the worst actors, the Blackest Hats are worn by any and all the high profile pols and journos who are talking large now having been too busy to care about injustice for . . . get this . . . 25 years: since the first prosecutions of PO employees started happening through perjury, gaslighting and the perverse incentives of corporate bonuses.

Anyway, I was googling around Nick Wallis after hearing his book getting a glowing rec from Rory Stewart on his TRIP podcast. And came across The people who published The Great Post Office Scandal who are Bath Publishing. They were a micro WFH company with a niche market in legal text-books: "Employment Tribunal Remedies Handbook" - "Contamination, Pollution & the Planning Process: A Practitioner's Guide" that sort of thing. Wallis was hawking his book about and had it rejected 9 times by risk-averse publishers. But Bath Publishing took an Entrepreneurial plunge on it. I hope they, and Wallis, make a lorra money. I also found a card, an envelope and a stamp and sent them a This is Just to Say [whc bloboprev] tribute:

You have published   for which          we wish you
the plum             you were probably  champagne delicious
going bad in         risking            not too sweet
the postbox          a court case       and so cold