Post Office scandal: should Alan Bates turn down 'tainted' knighthood?

A former subpostmaster who spent decades fighting for justice for colleagues devastated by the Post Office scandal is being urged to refuse a knighthood.

Alan Bates led a 20-year campaign on behalf of Post Office workers, after more than 700 subpostmasters and mistresses were prosecuted and convicted of theft or fraud based on information from faulty Horizon software.

His story has recently become well known following the release earlier this month of ITV drama "Mr Bates vs. The Post Office".

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Honour for Bates 'common sense'

Bates initially refused to accept an OBE while former Post Office boss Paula Vennells held a CBE given to her in 2019. He argued that accepting the honour would be a "slap in the face" to the victims, many of whom were not only prosecuted but faced financial ruin, lost their homes, or were shunned by their local communities.

But after Vennells relinquished her honour last week amid huge public pressure, Bates told The Times: "I would wait until I was offered, if anyone chooses to offer me one, then come back and ask me."

And the offer could come "sooner than expected", according to the paper. After a mass quashing of convictions was announced last week by the government, Downing Street said it would be "common sense" to honour Bates. 

More than 125,000 people have signed a petition, led by the Daily Mirror, demanding that he be honoured with a CBE or even a knighthood for his role in exposing the Horizon scandal. 

Labour has also backed the calls, with a spokesperson for Keir Starmer telling the paper that Bates has "clearly emerged as a hero" for his role leading the campaign.

"Obviously, honours have their own independent process, but I'm sure that is something the public would regard as entirely appropriate and we would support," the spokesperson said.

'British heroes receiving crumbs from a tainted table'

"Please don't accept it, Mr Bates," pleaded Matthew Syed in The Sunday Times. "Just say no." 

If members of the honours committee "come knocking" with a CBE or even a knighthood, Syed continued, tell them to "shove it". After all, "it is the honours system, and the wider cancer of patronage and privilege, that provides the essential backdrop to this very British scandal".

What "shines through" in the ITV drama is that this scandal is "what happens when you have one set of rules for insiders – the ministers, the quangocracy, the executives of giant corporations – and a different set of rules for those who are euphemistically called 'ordinary people'".

Bates represents the "antithesis of the complacency" of the so-called establishment,  argued Syed. He is "a counterpoint to the spider's web of access and impunity that distorts so much of our society", which is "why a knighthood would jar with those of us who see this scandal not merely as spotlighting a grievous injustice but as a chance to cut out this cancer once and for all".

Many defenders of the UK system of honours argue that it is valuable "because of the hundreds of unsung heroes and heroines who receive recognition", said Sky News's Adam Boulton. But the truth is that these unsung heroes "tend to get the lower honours" while the top awards, such as CBEs and peerages, "go to the already powerful". Britain's heroes are therefore "receiving crumbs from a tainted table".

Bates "deserves all the respect and praise we can give him", not least for his "decency and his honourable determination to clear the name of so many and obtain compensation for them". But "my advice to the people's hero, however, is do not 'Arise Sir Alan'".