Society

Amidst the endless controversy that surrounds Harry and Meghan, there was at least one topic that seemed to be innocuous enough: the Christian name that they chose to give their now 2-year old daughter. She was named Lilibet, a reference to the childhood nickname Elizabeth II was given by her father George VI. The choice of name was widely seen as a rather self-conscious form of homage by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex to the one member of the Royal Family that both claimed to venerate. It was disliked by some courtiers who regarded its use as ‘bewildering’ and ‘rather presumptuous’. But according to Gyles Brandreth’s 2022 biography of

One of the fascinating aspects of the Horizon Post Office scandal is the way that the sub-post masters and mistresses who were victims of the bungling or maybe malevolent Post Office management, are represented as a class. They seem to sum up the qualities that used to be thought of as quintessentially English: honest, respectable, truthful, yet quiet and reluctant to make a fuss – even when they suffered a monstrous mass injustice. Their suffering in near silence is one reason why it has taken so long for the scandal to break through into public consciousness. Perhaps from a misplaced sense of shame, many of the unjustly accused sub-post masters and

While everyone is rightly calling for the Post Office Horizon postmasters’ convictions to be overturned and for them to be given proper compensation, there is arguably a deeper issue at stake: how much society trusts technology.   We now know that the Horizon accounting software was not reliable. But during the sub-postmasters’ original trials, prosecutors for the Post Office argued that it was dependable and the courts took this for granted.   Why did the courts rely on the evidence of such a faulty IT system? The answer is a society-wide problem – with people falling into the trap of thinking computers are infallible. You might think they are no more likely to lie