A small French town has laid to rest a murdered child. The funeral was sombre, dignified, and utterly predictable. What follows now is the ceremonial flogging of the local gendarmerie for their failure to prevent the crime. And yet, the real scandal is not French. It is British.
I refer, of course, to the creeping degradation of our own policing standards. While the French weep for a child, we in Britain must confront a quieter but no less lethal failure: the slow death of public trust in the constabulary. Every week brings a new report of an officer who should have acted but did not. Every month a new scandal involving sexual abuse, racism, or incompetence. The rot is not French. It is ours.
Let us be precise. The French have their own problems: a centralised police force that is bureaucratic and often aloof. But they still possess something we have lost: the instinct for order. When a child is murdered, the French do not immediately blame 'systemic failures' or 'toxic masculinity'. They ask: where was the patrol? Why was the door unlocked? They demand accountability from individuals, not from abstractions.
We, by contrast, have developed a fetish for explanation. Every crime is a symptom. Every failure is a structure. We do not punish the constable who scrolled through his phone while a woman was being raped in the next street. No, we convene a commission to examine 'institutional misogyny'. The result is a mountain of reports and a valley of impunity. The French child is dead. The British system is dying.
Consider the facts. In the last decade, British police have been revealed to have spied on journalists, to have covered up child abuse rings in Rotherham, to have destroyed evidence in the Hillsborough disaster. The Metropolitan Police is currently the subject of an inquiry into itself. That is the definition of a closed loop: a system that inspects its own entrails and pronounces itself healthy.
Meanwhile, the French, for all their Gallic chaos, still believe in the simple proposition that a police officer is there to protect the innocent and hunt the guilty. They do not believe that every suspect is a victim of society. They do not believe that the state should apologise first and arrest later. They have not yet reached our state of decadent relativism, where the criminal is merely an accident of bad policy.
And so we watch the French bury a child, and we tut at their incompetence. But we should instead look in the mirror. Our policing is not merely flawed. It is spiritually bankrupt. We have traded the hard duties of justice for the soft comforts of therapy. We have replaced the truncheon with the sensitivity training manual. The result is a country where criminals walk free and the public feels betrayed.
The French child is a tragedy. The British decline is a disgrace. One will be remembered. The other will be ignored until it is too late.
