As the Post Office debacle has amply demonstrated, putting blind faith into a new form of technology can be perilous
It doesn’t take much imagination to describe what happens when a large corporation, over 16 long years, is allowed vindictively to prosecute 900 subpostmasters for theft, false accounting and fraud, when shortfalls at their branches were in fact due to bugs in the accounting software imposed on them by that corporation, as “one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in our nation’s history”.
But then Rishi Sunak is not the most imaginative of men. The US Marines, on the other hand, have an economical term that fits the Horizon fiasco like a glove: it was a “clusterfuck” – primly defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as “a very rude word for a complete failure or very serious problem in which many mistakes or problems happen at the same time”.
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