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

nytimes.com

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

#461

Post by verall »

IshKebab wrote: post #420
arranf wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide sources for your claim?

If you're looking for hard numbers on how many people shouldn't be getting them then you won't find it. Only the government has access to the details of individual claims. However you can infer a lot from a) the insane rise in claims, especially mental health related: https://obr.uk/docs/box-chart-3-f.png Has the mental health of the nation got twice as bad in 2 years? Obviously not. And b) whenever the BBC does touc…

Nothing sounds wrong to me in any of the cases you mentioned?

> £400/month help with her bills because she struggles with time management? I'm sympathetic to her problems but that is a shit ton of money!

£4800/yr is a shit ton of money? Things must be pretty rough over there!

> Child benefit also goes to lots of people (myself included) who totally don't need it.

Is that a bad thing?

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

#463

Post by Kinrany »

jordanb wrote: post #191

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…

How good or bad of a decision was it in reality? E.g. what was the real salary on top of what one would earn from investing in index?

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

#464

Post by nullc »

akudha wrote: post #162
PaulRobinson wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suggest you keep an eye on what's being published in Private Eye and Computer Weekly if you have access to those where you are. They're holding feet to the fire on all these points. One thing I would say is that if somebody is convicted in the UK, it's acceptable legally and culturally to call them by the crime they committed. The problem is that in this case the Post Office had unique legal powers, and was being r…

Lets ignore everything else for a second. Isn't it common sense, common decency to ask how can thousands of postal workers become thieves overnight? We're talking about postal workers for fuck's sake, not a bunch of mafia dudes. Is there some kind of perverse incentive for the prosecutors to send as many people to jail as possible, guilty or not? run by people who did not want to "harm the brand" Oh well, now their p…

> Isn't it common sense, common decency to ask how can thousands of postal workers become thieves overnight

The whole privatized postoffice setup was a profoundly unattractive investment-- at least to those who thought of it on investment grounds (e.g. return on investment+costs)-- and so there was a presumption before the computer system went in that many must have been in it to steal.

> Is there some kind of perverse incentive for the prosecutors

One of the broken things here is that the postoffice themselves were able to criminally prosecute-- so the criminal cases lacked "have to deserve the state prosecutors time" protection.

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

#465

Post by tenacious_tuna »

stretchwithme wrote: post #454
jacksnipe wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but citation needed. Means testing might seem “obvious” from first principles, but from a policy point of view, it makes little to no sense. The macroeconomic effects of welfare programs create a society that is better for everyone to live in. Reducing the issue to a matter of personal responsibility is a reframing that allows you to completely lose sight of the big picture, and create programs that are destin…

Citation needed for the right to other people's money. Government running charity interferes with the normal feedback in society. And the need to ask politely, justify one's apparently bad decisions and change failing behavior. People become "entitled" to regular cash so a lot of the fear that ordinarily motivates the rest of us goes away. Any system that asks nothing of people is a bad system. I grew up on welfare.…

I would rather we have a system that is too generous and gets taken advantage of than one that is too parsimonious where people die for want of food and shelter that we could provide for them.

We exist in a world where people can be unable to work or even advocate for themselves through no fault of their own. As we raise the bar for how people have to prove that they "need" help, there will be people who die because they don't have the capacity to prove that. In theory we have social workers (as a societal role) but in reality they're underfunded/don't have capacity for the same reasons.

This feels like the same moral argument behind the presumption of innocence in the American legal system: far better to let criminals walk free than to falsely imprison an innocent person. Why do we not apply the same logic to welfare?

I mean, I know why: we're worried the system would get taken advantage of and not serve the people it's "meant" to help.... but then, who does it help? How much effort is it worth making people spend to prove they need help when that effort comes with a blood cost?

I agree with GP that welfare systems make for better societies--see also, public healthcare. I have several friends who are alive because of welfare systems. I grew up with people whose family squandered the welfare they got, but I don't view that as sufficient reason to withhold welfare from anyone else; I just accept that's the cost of a system that helps people.

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

#466

Post by nullc »

watwut wrote: post #105
mike_hearn wrote: post #8

To the NY Times: please don't say they died by suicide. The passive voice makes it sound like some act of God, something regrettable but unavoidable that just somehow happened. It's important not to sugarcoat what happened: the postmasters killed themselves because the British state was imprisoning them for crimes they didn't commit, based on evidence from a buggy financial accounting system. Don't blur the details o…

> please don't say they died by suicide. The passive voice makes it sound like some act of God, something regrettable but unavoidable that just somehow happened. I mean, common. Everyone knows what suicide is or means. No, it does not make it sound like an act of God for anyone who is above A1 level of English.

Most people who commit suicide were not hounded to the end of their rope, these people were murdered by torture via the legal system. The proximal cause of their death was their own hand, sure, but their deaths should properly be seen as some form of murder or at least manslaughter.

These deaths had an unambiguous causal actor other than/in addition to themselves.

It's an exceptional condition particularly since if you are harassed by any ordinary person you have a multitude of recourse-- up to fleeing or going into hiding and so we should be very very hesitant to attribute suicide to the actions of a third party in general. But in the case of harassment perpetrated by or via state power the victims are far closer to an inescapable situation and because of the vastly greater power the state must carry vastly greater responsibility for the total consequences of their malicious and improper actions.

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

#467

Post by jordanb »

Anthony-G wrote: post #424
whycome wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fucking nuts because it's worse than that too. Fujitsu falsely claimed that they couldn't remotely modify data. They used technical info to obfuscate things for the accused and the judges.

I haven’t followed this issue closely but would lying in court about their ability to remotely modify data not be perjury?

Many people committed perjury. Many barristers advised their clients to perjure themselves. Many executives within the post office and at Fujitsu conspired to deceive the courts. Many prosecutors submitted evidence to the courts they knew to be fraudulent.

The only people who received criminal charges were the sub postmasters.

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

#468

Post by Henchman21 »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #430
klik99 wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Traditionally America likes to pretend this kind of class contempt doesn't exist It just manifests as racism.

There’s class contempt too, no one wants to be one of the poors.

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

#469

Post by hermitcrab »

This is a disgraceful story from start to finish. Many of the postmasters have still not been compensated and no-one in the post office or Fujitsu has been properly held to account yet, all these years later. In fact most of them have retired on big pensions. Paula Vennels was nearly parachuted in as a Bishop. The UK tax payer is footing the compensation bill. And Fujitsu continue to get fat contracts from the British Government. Kudos to Alan Bates, Private Eye, Computer Weekly and a few others who fought many years to get this far. But justice has still not been done.

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

#470

Post by Spooky23 »

sarreph wrote: post #407
klik99 wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a cultural mutt between US and UK, I think UK is "class-aware" and US is more obsessed with the idea that if we all wear jeans then class isn't a thing. I see the same class contempt in US as the UK, and not recognizing it for what it is keeps people divided.

I agree that contempt arises in both cultures. My point about the UK was more around the phenomenon that the class "obsession" stems from the notion that somebody's class in the UK is ostensibly immutable from birth. (It is my impression that class in the US is much more about money; your status and class can be correlated / increased by your level of wealth). In the UK it doesn't really matter if you become a millio…

The British are open about it, Americans go to great length to pretend that it doesn’t exist.

Americans use stuff like occupation, home area, and education as the manifestation of class, with a sprinkle of racism.

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