The news arrives with the grim familiarity of a Victorian penny dreadful: a British toddler, a cold case in Australia, and a family’s cry of condemnation aimed at the police. It is a story that, on its surface, might seem a parochial tragedy, a local matter of botched investigation and familial grief. But to view it through such a narrow lens is to miss the deeper currents. For this is not merely a tale of investigative failure; it is a parable of the intellectual and moral decadence that has crept into the very marrow of our once-great institutions.
Let us note the details. The family of the deceased child has publicly excoriated the police, accusing them of incompetence and, more troublingly, of a lack of urgency because the victim was, in their words, “just a British tourist.” The insinuation is clear: that the authorities in the former colony, perhaps still nursing a post-imperial chip on their shoulders, devalued a life from the mother country. Whether this charge holds water is beside the point. What matters is the perception, the raw nerve it touches, of a Commonwealth fraying at the edges.
But let us be honest. The rot goes deeper than any single police force. We live in an age of intellectual decadence, where the very concept of truth has been relativised, where “narratives” compete with facts, and where institutions once trusted to be impartial are now seen as agents of power. It is an age of epistemological collapse, eerily reminiscent of the late Roman Empire, when rhetoric triumphed over reason and the barbarians were not at the gates but within. The family’s condemnation may be justified or not, but it is symptomatic of a broader loss of faith: in the police, in the state, and in the very idea of justice.
Consider the historical parallels. When the Roman Empire declined, its vaunted legal system became a playground for the wealthy and connected. Justice was for sale. The plebs, cut adrift, turned to superstition and conspiracy. Sound familiar? Today, we have our own superstitions: the cult of the victim, the fetishisation of feeling over fact. A family grieves, and their grief becomes a weapon. The police, for their part, no longer command automatic respect; they must earn it, and failingly so. The result is a toxic dance of accusation and defence, with the truth left bleeding on the floor.
And what of national identity? The British tourist angle is a revealing one. It speaks to a lingering sense of imperial nostalgia, a belief that British blood should command a premium on the global stage. It is a dangerous delusion, one that ignores the reality of a post-imperial world where the old hierarchies have been levelled, often with good reason. But let us not be fooled: the decline of British prestige is not just in the eyes of others. It is self-inflicted. We have become a nation that celebrates weakness, that apologises for its history, that has lost the very grit that built the empire. And in doing so, we have lost something essential about ourselves.
The cold case inquiry is a welcome step, but it will not restore faith. That requires a deeper reckoning. We must rediscover the virtues of dispassionate inquiry, of institutional rigour, of a justice system that is blind not just to privilege but to sentiment. We must, in short, become Romans again before it is too late. But I fear we have already passed the Rubicon. The barbarians are not coming; they are already here, and they look remarkably like us.
