Britain’s Post-Office Scandal Echoes Earlier Debacles
Doubling down on mistakes rather than admitting errors is an all-too-familiar story.
Britain’s Post Office scandal has echoes of previous debacles.
Photographer: Pietro Recchia/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
A famous West End production of J.B Priestley’s morality play An Inspector Calls ends with the walls of a home falling down around a rich family, the Birlings, who have been proven to share responsibility for the suicide of a young working-class woman. For the Birlings, read Britain’s rotten, hierarchical society.
The Post Office scandal gripping the UK has many of the same elements as Priestley’s play. A large cast of well-paid corporate executives, civil servants, senior politicians and lawyers not only failed to protect a group of ordinary, unprivileged people — postmasters wrongly accused and prosecuted for theft and fraudulent accounting after a computer program malfunctioned — but actively connived in their destruction.