MR BATES versus THE POST OFFICE
You may have seen the recent TV drama and subsequent furore, how could you miss it? a true story about the appalling behaviour of the Post Office towards its sub-postmasters and mistresses? It particularly resonates with me because it mirrors my own experience of being persecuted by a large organisation, in my case Electricity North West. The stress of dealing with them led to the death of Carol, my wife and soulmate and gave me diabetes. The tactics were similar in both cases although the sub-postmasters and mistresses being employees were locked out of their post offices and denied access to documents that could have proved their innocence. Each of the 800 of them was told that they were the only ones affected, in my case I really was the only one, it was MR MARROW versus ELECTRICITY NORTH WEST initially in the High Court.
The vast majority of people will fortunately never have to face this sort of thing, it caught me by surprise, but you never know, so I am going to offer some advice based on my personal experience. Their tactics will involve using the Courts and legal system to threaten you with huge costs it is NOT an idle threat but a very real one and they have almost unlimited resources you will be playing with your own money. In my case they started a claim in the High Court that my new build was encroaching on their land. It was a pure invention and I had three items of very good evidence they had nothing. They didn’t need to have a good case because they knew they would be able to bludgeon me into settling out of court so it would never get to a judgement.
The Court initially asked if I wanted to defend the claim. Without even thinking I said yes bearing in mind my solid evidence and their lack of evidence. However, in a very short space of time ENW informed me that they had already run up legal costs of £50,000 which I would have been liable to pay by default if I had abandoned my defence. Bearing in mind that in all cases where the amount involved is less than £100,000 it should be decided by the Small Claims Procedure where the maximum costs allowed are £1500. In this case the value they put on the strip of land they claimed I was encroaching on was £1, the amount I eventually paid to buy the land, even though it was my own land, in the settlement along with a seventeen-pages of bollox settlement deed. I pointed this out to the judge in a pre-trial telephone hearing and was completely ignored. There is also something called the Overriding Objective which is supposed to put both sides on a more equal footing and the costs should be commensurate with the value of the claim. So, the courts are corrupt and biased against the individual in favour of the large company or institution, they don’t even follow the legal guidelines. I have also found that institutions that should protect the public don’t, they are also corrupt and or incompetent. In this case it includes the courts, the police, the planning department, OFGEM, the local press and the press complaints authority.
If the matter had gone on to a court hearing ENW’s projected costs, filed with the Court, were £130,000 and I had no confidence that I would even have had a fair hearing. One old hippie anarchist against a battalion of solicitors, barristers, surveyors etc. and a biased judge. So much for British justice, I always used to naively think that there was such a thing. ENW’s solicitors tried very hard to pressure me into getting my own solicitor; I didn’t and please don’t even think about it unless you are very rich; legal costs mount up at an alarming rate especially when the lawyers start firing letters at each other. I wrote my own letters, several hundred of them and derived considerable schadenfreude from knowing that each one would probably have cost them at least £250 to be read by their own solicitors. If I had had my own legal team, it would have eventually cost me £tens of thousands rather than a £1.
Fortunately, most senior managers of big companies and institutions are incompetent, and I include judges in this. They are also unethical, unprofessional, vindictive and completely ruthless in their persecution of people who they know have done nothing wrong, but merely tried to stand up to them.
You will see that I am writing this in general terms; the seventeen-page settlement document included a gagging clause, sorry disclosure agreement. This is a contradiction in terms, it can hardly be called an “agreement” when it has been imposed on one. It is a cover up of behaviour that someone knows to be wrong, I won’t say they are ashamed, these people don’t even understand the concept, but they realise it will reflect badly on them and or their organisation. It shouldn’t be allowed it is just another cover up of the truth. However, I am not allowed to publish any derogatory statements about ENW’s management past or present, neither am I allowed to say that they have devalued my property, so I won’t; I will just leave it to you to come to your own conclusions about that.
I have been fighting injustice all my life, before this and against all the odds I nearly always won and was even in the fortunate position of being able to cost the MOD £millions when they privatised my job and many others, except senior management of course. The full story is in my book, details at the end of this post. However, I had never been involved in the Courts other than The Small Claims Procedure twice; I lost both times but I was in the wrong anyway, so I hadn’t had any previous experience of just how corrupt Is the British legal system. Once the courts and legal system are invoked you will not win unless you are very rich. Like the postmasters I had done absolutely nothing wrong and ENW’s claim against me was a complete fabrication; I just didn’t have the wherewithal to fund the costs to fight it in Court.
However, senior managers, judges and all the expensive lawyers; the old hippie anarchist was able to run rings round them all. I just had to make the pragmatic decision to buy my own land for £1. They won, with the benefit of hindsight it was inevitable, but it was a pyrrhic victory. It cost them well over £100,000 and the position on the ground remained the same except I now had a formal agreement to access the rear of the property which I didn’t have before. I think it is just possible that I made them change their long-term plans. I am not sure about that, but they did sack the Operations Director when I informed them that what they were doing, which was due to be repeated at every primary sub-station in the Northwest, was unlawful. If I am right, it would have cost them £millions if not £tens of millions. I was then dealing directly with the CEO and his lawyers; I was hoping to get the CEO sacked as well but he retired before I got the chance. Again, I am not allowed to say they were incompetent so I will have to let you come to your own conclusions about that also.
It is not my intention to hijack the wonderful victory of the postmasters and mistresses. Even though there are many of them it took 20 years and a TV drama to bring it about. I just want to point out that these miscarriages of justice must be going on all the time with individuals like me and we need to bring about sweeping changes to the legal system that allows it to happen; and the influence of big companies and the Establishment who can ride roughshod over all the laws that they use to keep the rest of us in line. They were not able to get me criminally convicted but they tried, and I had several run ins with the police, see the main post, date at the end. You can win but it will take a lot of time and effort and cost if you allow them to coerce you into getting your own lawyers; it just moves the battlefield into territory that is advantageous to them.
So far there has been no prosecution of Post Office management or Fujitsu who should pay at least some of the cost of compensation. They certainly shouldn’t be given any more government contracts!!!!!
Their tactics will not work as well if at all on people who have nothing to lose. In my case the house they claimed was encroaching was worth about £450,000 and if they had won in Court they told me they would put a. charge on it, so I couldn’t plead poverty when it came to their costs. If you have nothing you can’t be threatened. The house where I live across the lane is in a family trust I can live there for my lifetime, and it can’t be touched. Once I have sold the surplus house, there is a sale going through as we speak and salted the money away, I will be much less vulnerable.
ENW do you still watch this blog site? Probably not you probably think it’s all over. So, you will either be forewarned, or you will get a rude awakening either way you are not going to get away with it. By the time I have finished with you, you will be about as popular as the Post Office and you should remember that revenge is a dish best taken cold. This country is as corrupt as any tinpot African state, and I am going to do my best to change that. I am even starting a political party to be called The Alternative Party, what else? None of the main existing parties Conservatives, Labour and Lib Dems come out of this very well and my giant killing days are not over yet.
Full story of my struggle with ENW in my post of 23rd July 2022.
Alternative Party draft manifesto 11th. December 2019.
My book: MY GENERATION: Revelations and Revolutions: Revelry and Reverie. Only available on Kindle at the moment but you can get the Kindle app free on your phone, it is almost as good as the device. Go onto Kindle books and put my name and or the name of the book in the search box it will come up, ignore the diet book it was just a try out for publishing the main book.
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