At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says

I went on a deep dive on this scandal about a year or so ago. One thing that struck me is the class element.

Basically, the Post Office leadership could not understand why someone would buy a PO franchise. It's a substantial amount of money up front, and people aren't allowed to buy multiple franchises, so every PO was an owner/operator position. Essentially people were "buying a job".

The people in leadership couldn't understand why someone would buy the opportunity to work long hours at a retail position and end up hopefully clearing a middle class salary at the end of the year. They assumed that there must be a real reason why people were signing up and the real reason was to put their hands in the till.

So they ended up assuming the postmasters were stealing, and the purpose of the accounting software was to detect the fraud so it could be prosecuted. When the accounting software started finding vast amounts of missing funds, they ignored questions about the software because it was working as intended. I bet if the opposite had happened, and it found very little fraud, they would have become suspicious of the software because their priors were that the postmasters were a bunch of thieves.

This is a salient observation that I don’t think has been presented bluntly enough by the media or popular culture (such as Mr Bates Vs The Post Office).

The UK is class-obsessed, which is not as immediately clear to the rest of the world (especially US). Lends a lot of credence to your theory.

In the UK class is about your education, how you speak and who your parents are and, to a lesser extent, money.

In the US I get the impression that it is much more about money. And therefore less static.