Let us, for a moment, cast our minds back to the dying embers of the Roman Republic, where the mob ruled the streets and justice was a plaything of popular sentiment. The recent decision to drop charges against Budapest’s mayor for his involvement in a Pride march feels eerily familiar. The UK, in its infinite wisdom, has rushed to defend the ‘right to protest’. How noble. How predictable.
Here we have a European city, a venerable old capital with a history stretching back to the Celts and Romans, and its mayor is accused of flouting laws designed to protect public order. But no, the charges are dropped. Why? Because the zeitgeist demands it. Because the modern intellectual’s greatest fear is to be seen as insufficiently sympathetic to a cause. We are witnessing the legalisation of emotional blackmail.
The UK’s defence of the mayor is not about principle. It is about signalling. The right to protest, once a cornerstone of liberal democracy, has been twisted into a weapon against the very rule of law. When did we decide that the ability to disrupt, to offend, to dominate public spaces with one’s own moral vanity became a sacred entitlement? The Victorians, for all their faults, understood that liberty required restraint. They knew that the mob, once unleashed, would tear down the pillars of civil society. And here we are, applauding their demolition.
Let me be clear: I have no particular quarrel with Pride marches. People should be free to express themselves. But the dropping of charges here is not about freedom. It is about the cowardice of prosecutors who fear the social media mob more than they respect the law. It is about a political class that has abandoned the concept of equal justice in favour of popular applause.
The UK’s intervention, with its high-minded rhetoric about ‘defending democratic values’, is precisely the sort of intellectual decadence that precedes the fall of empires. We saw it in Rome, where the law became subordinate to the whims of the Praetorian Guard. We saw it in late Tsarist Russia, where the intelligentsia romanticised revolution while ignoring the reality of lawlessness. And now we see it in our own time: a hollow, self-congratulatory defence of ‘rights’ that are actually privileges for the fashionable.
What next? Will we drop charges against anyone whose cause is deemed sufficiently righteous? Will we allow the mob to define which laws matter and which do not? This is not progress. This is the end of the Enlightenment project. This is the triumph of emotion over reason, of sentiment over statute.
I am reminded of Edmund Burke’s warning: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” But here, the good men are doing something. They are doing nothing. They are collapsing under the weight of their own moral pretensions. The charges were dropped because the authorities lacked the spine to uphold the law. And the UK, that once-great defender of legal traditions, has given its blessing.
We should be angry. Angry at the spectacle of a legal system that bends to the wind. Angry at a political culture that mistakes emotional exhibition for virtue. And angry at ourselves for tolerating this slow erosion of the very foundations of order. The fall of Rome did not happen in a day. It happened one dropped charge at a time.
