Post Office scandal sounds warning on diversity backlash

When Britain’s Post Office scrutinised a £57,000 hole in Kashmir Gill’s branch accounts, she was interrogated before investigators raided her home. “They followed me home to search the house, look in the cupboards and under the bed,” the former sub-postmaster says. “It felt like they were surprised by our lifestyle, which we had earned honestly.” 

The 66-year-old, who moved to the UK from India in 1974, had been wearing gold jewellery when she was quizzed. Many older south Asian women wear similar accessories — Gill was given hers as part of a wedding dowry — but she believes this affected how she was perceived by investigators and meant the Post Office latched on to an idea that she stole to fund her lifestyle.

Gill’s son, Balvinder, another former sub-postmaster, claims there was a cultural disconnect that contributed to his mother being wrongly convicted. She was one of more than 900 sub-postmasters — individuals who run local branches — found guilty of charges including false accounting and theft, based on data from Japanese company Fujitsu’s faulty Horizon IT system.

“The [Post Office] saw south Asians as wealth generators. Initially they saw that as a good reason to go into partnership with us but when the tables turned it was a reason to disqualify us,” he says, arguing that the family’s silver Mercedes had been treated with suspicion.

UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has described the decades-long sub-postmaster scandal as one of the “greatest miscarriages of justice” in modern British history. Financial shortfalls in local branches resulted in individuals losing their jobs, homes and livelihoods. Others were convicted and sent to prison. Throughout extensive inquiries and testimonies from convicted sub-postmasters, questions have been raised about whether race played a role in convictions and sentencing procedures.

More than two-fifths of all sub-postmasters in the UK network are from an Asian background, according to a…