When we were in the UK in December we managed to catch the excellent tv series, Mr Bates vs The Post Office, made in relation to the Post Office scandal. It made for grimly compulsive viewing. In a very limited sense there was a 'feel good' aspect to the dramatisation in terms of the courage and resilience of Alan Bates and the other falsely accused subpostmasters featured. But it left this viewer facing a genuinely puzzling conundrum: How could those at the highest levels of the organisation have behaved for so long in so thoroughly despicable a manner? What happened to their simple sense of decency?
And then today I stumbled across what I think is the answer, courtesy of a clip from the official inquiry on YouTube featuring the closing remarks of Edward Henry QC. He argues that the board wanted control of their employees and sought this through the Horizon software later shown to be full of glitches. At the point when they could have responded appropriately to the complaints about the failing computer system they did not want to accept the truth about how faulty the software was as this would deny them the control they believed it had afforded them.
This explanation works for me. The great danger for those who are successful is how easy it is to make the terrible assumption that they are genuinely superior to 'ordinary' folk, and fall into the trap of thinking how, somehow, those folk don't matter quite as much as their superiors.
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