Then on January 1st 2024, British TV channel ITV ran a 4-part mini series Mr Bates vs The Post Office, bringing the scandal to the attention of 9.2 million viewers. Unlike in 2020, where the scandal apparently was underreported due to Brexit and Covid hogging the headlines, this time the injustice of hundreds of people landing in jail for something they hadn't done caused a big outcry. By January 10th the British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced new legislation to exonerate and compensate wrongly convicted Post Office branch managers.

Mass miscarriages of justice are extremely difficult to resolve. The "legal" way is to retry every single case, while the people who avoided prosecution by paying up for imaginary shortfalls would have to sue the Post Office for compensation. It isn't really surprising that this way takes forever, and still hadn't repaired much of the damage 5 years later. Bringing in a new law, as promised, with a blanket exoneration and compensation has the potential to be much faster, but is legally dubious. It goes against the separation of powers, parliaments shouldn't overturn court cases in general. And nobody knows how many subpostmaster really *did* have their hands in the till and were actually guilty. So why did the UK government do this?

The answer is simply that the measure is rather popular. Public scandal, outcry, government reacts immediately with strong measures, that is how many people imagine things should be. The Conservative Party has been in government in the UK since 2010, and saying that their time in office was rocky would be an understatement. They have to hold a general election within the next year, and their prospects are extremely bleak. It is too late to persuade the electorate with good long-term government. So flashy and populist measures are all that is left for the Tories to try to avoid a complete wipeout in the next elections.

I have a hard time thinking of any other TV show that had this much political impact. The sequence of a public scandal being half-forgotten until a TV show brings it to the top of a government's priority list is pretty extraordinary. But at least for some of the victims, many of which had to live with the economic and private consequences of a felony conviction for decades, this is probably a good outcome. Many of them were lacking both the energy and the trust in the legal system of Mr. Bates to try and get justice for themselves. And as cynical one might be about the populist reaction of the UK government, it shows that populism isn't all bad. We would like our governments to do the right thing, without media having to push them, but that is probably wishful thinking.