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.

Someone brought this up in a previous HN comment section as an example of trust in software ruining peoples lives. But your explanation is far more human and recontextualizes it a bit for me - it just happened to be that this was done with software, but the real motivation was contempt for the lower classes and could have easily have happened 100 years ago with an internal investigation task force.

Growing up half in England and US I feel British culture is more attuned to the class aspects to this kind of event. Traditionally America likes to pretend this kind of class contempt doesn't exist (think of, people on welfare angry at welfare queens, unaware they will be affected by legislation they support).

> Traditionally America likes to pretend this kind of class contempt doesn't exist

It just manifests as racism.

Most claims of racism in America are in fact classism. Very, very few people have actual dislike of others based on race. But a whole lot of people dislike people due to culture or class signals.

Since you brought it up, this political-leaning topic is fair game.

> Most claims of racism in America are in fact classism.

This is bald-faced racism denialism and makes a sweeping generalization. For example, the Trump administration is going after immigrants not for economic or class reasons but as a dogwhistle for their Floridian golf club members who don't like minorities of any sort and to appease a large section of the base of covert and overt racists generally. There is no logic in exiling and disappearing the low cost labor needed to product food, build homes, and do the terrible jobs that make civilization possible.. because it is mission of dumb people sabotaging themselves and others. The selective protection plus oppression and criminalization of undocumented people is grounded in the need to control a desperate, underpaid population to keep prices of agriculture, home construction, and restaurant prices lower than paying ordinary, livable wages to them.

> Very, very few people have actual dislike of others based on race.

You can't know this. And, it's leans towards false because of how propinquity works.

>ut as a dogwhistle for their Floridian golf club members who don't like minorities of any sort and to appease a large section of the base of covert and overt racists generally.

I mean, here's how I see it, if 100 million Polish people, a very white peoples, suddenly claimed asylum in the US, had 300 million anchor babies to exploit that loophole, used the anchor baby army to claim massive funds of welfare in aggregate, all the while claiming zero income while working under the table and undercutting the common man ... ... and also driving drunk and refusing to learn any English and demanding Americans ought to learn Polish

If the Polish people did that I'd have it in to deport them all. And it wouldn't be about race at all, it would be the overwhelming unfair advantages and systematic exploits the Polish performed in this case. The racist narrative is just another manifestation of "playing the race card" to defend indefensible, selfish, toxic behavior