Deep State makes kind of sense here, because the U.K. Post Office, had there own Law Enforcement. They can act like the state in several ways. I think the correct term is "Private prosecution". And as fare as I understand it, the U.K. Post Office was able to have there own judge.
No, the Post Office doesn't have its own "law enforcement" (if you mean something like a police force) or its own judges.
Any company has the right to bring a private prosecution under UK law, and this was the basis for the prosecutions in question. It just means that the company pays for some of the costs involved.
Whether or not private prosecutions should be allowed is certainly a legitimate topic of discussion. Let's not muddy the waters with misinformation about the Post Office having some kind of parallel police and courts system. It just doesn't.
> Any company has the right to bring a private prosecution under UK law
That's a simplification. The Post Office has a more privileged position due to its history; it has both formal access (e.g. to police computers) and informal deference from CPS that regular companies do not enjoy.
That’s true, but it’s unclear the extent to which any of that was a factor. For example, how was the Post Office’s access to the PNC relevant here?
It may be that the CPS would have taken over these prosecutions and dropped them if the company in question had been, say, Tesco. But I don’t see how we can be sure of this.
> It may be that the CPS would have taken over these prosecutions and dropped them if the company in question had been, say, Tesco. But I don’t see how we can be sure of this.
I agree we can't know for sure. But I think it's a mistake to shrug it off and assume the fact it was the Post Office had nothing to do with how it played out.
> But I think it's a mistake to shrug it off and assume the fact it was the Post Office had nothing to do with how it played out.
I agree. My only aim here was to correct some of the wild misconceptions about the powers of the Post Office that pop up in these threads. It’s one thing to suggest that the Post Office was given special deference by the CPS and other parts of the legal system. It’s another thing to suggest that the Post Office has its own judges, or that the Post Office has some kind of unique legal power to bring private prosecutions. Unfortunately, serious factual errors of this kind tend to get passed over lightly in pile-on threads where everyone wants to vent their (justifiable) anger at the Post Office. People expend more energy responding to my factually accurate posts (probably because I don’t redundantly rant about how awful the Post Office is) than they do correcting blatant misinformation.
