UK Post Office scandal shows computers were more trusted than people
Whatever the eventual outcome, though, the affair of the UK Post Office and the Dodgy Computer System is a salutary, heartrending and profoundly unsettling tale
The most mind-boggling miscarriage of justice in modern British history is about to be set right, at last. Whether it will be definitively ended, and whether justice will be done in full to all of its nearly 1,000 victims, remains to be seen. Whatever the eventual outcome, though, the affair of the UK Post Office and the Dodgy Computer System is a salutary, heart-rending and profoundly unsettling tale.
Starting on New Year’s Day, ITV broadcast Mr Bates v the Post Office, a four-part drama based on the real-life story of how hundreds of people who ran post offices around the UK were wrongly accused of theft and false accounting, beginning in 1999 and continuing to 2015. Money did indeed seem to be missing at some post offices during that time. But it was not stolen. It was “disappeared” by a new computer system that couldn’t do basic sums.
