Quite apart from its human and political aspects, now well known after the ITV drama-documentary series Mr Bates versus the Post Office – which incidentally I can’t get up here in Sweden (any ideas, anyone?), but fully expect SVT to broadcast eventually – the Great UK Post Office Scandal must have the effect of disillusioning people about computer systems in general; one of which is the real original villain of this piece. Writing personally, I’m now wondering whether HMRC’s repeated demands on me for £1000+ in unpaid taxes – when I can’t understand and am not being told how on earth I can possibly owe this amount (my income from pensions being very small, and nearly all of it PAYE) – might not also be due to a computer glitch at their end. I won’t bore you with details (there’s nothing more tedious than other people’s tax affairs); except to say that several long letters to the tax authorities, detailing my situation, have been met with not a single response of any kind, not even ‘Computer says no’; adding to my belief that HMRC is now entirely staffed by machines, without a single human being among them. Are they supplied by Fujitsu too?
And of course this kind of distrust will probably be taken to justify right-wing Americans’ suspicions of their famous ‘Dominion’ voting machine, on which US elections now seem increasingly to rely.
Human society relies on ‘trust’. Donald and Boris have done a lot to erode that. Now the machines are joining in. It’s almost Science Fiction.
Porter’s Pensées 
I believe Britbox is available over the internet in Sweden. I don’t know if “Mr. Bates” will be there yet, but apparently it showcases BBC and ITV output.
I think lots of people share your frustration with the remote, impersonal corporate systems that are now ubiquitous. I wonder how much that resentment feeds into today’s populist politics.
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A (former) computer programmer writes: don’t blame the computer, which will infallibly do whatever the programmer tells it to do! There are always people behind system failures – and in this case a lot of programmers clearly screwed up. More blame rests with the people who insisted on the Post Office using the Horizon system (originally developed for a different purpose, as I understand it) in the first place, and then insisted on the system being implemented on time, ready or not; this group, from what I’ve read, includes Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair.
Still, faults in computer systems are a fact of life, and they can usually be quickly and relatively painlessly rectified. Another large helping of blame goes to everyone at Fujitsu who insisted that the system was fine when faults were reported to them, and maintained – entirely falsely – that each fault report was the first one they’d heard. Then there’s the Post Office hierarchy, who similarly maintained that the system was infallible in the face of mounting evidence, and demanded that hundreds of basically fictional losses had to be made good whatever the cost. If these two groups of people hadn’t stuck to their (indefensible) positions for years on end, Mr Bates Versus the Post Office would have been the much less dramatic Mr Bates Reports A Problem.
(Apologies if this is a duplicate comment – WordPress is being weird.)
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I take all these points. The trouble lies with those who forget that humans lie behind all this, and treat computers as though they were free from human error.
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