Post Office scandal highlights corrosive nature of groupthink
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Narrated by The Sunday Times
It has taken the vivid ITV drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office to put the Post Office miscarriage of justice where it belongs in the public consciousness — alongside the Grenfell Tower fire, the Hillsborough stadium crush and the infected blood scandal as a shameful example of human mistreatment. Tomorrow, Westminster will doubtless attempt (finally) to ride to the rescue. But it is also another shocking example of how institutional groupthink can have such devastating consequences for those cut out of the consensus.
Between 1999 and 2015, thousands of Post Office branch owner-managers were accused of theft and false accounting over cash shortfalls, and at least 700 were prosecuted, despite the fault lying with a new computer system. Hundreds of lives were ruined. At
