The news from across the Channel is enough to make any right-thinking Briton seethe with a mixture of fury and despair. France, that ancient nation of philosophers and revolutionaries, has descended into a farce of its own making. A child murderer, his hands stained with the blood of innocence, has had his criminal record released, triggering an eruption of public anger. And now Britain, in a gesture of loyalty that is either admirable or idiotic depending on your view of history, has backed France in the ensuing diplomatic crisis. One must ask: what has become of the West?
Let us pause and consider the parallels. The release of such a record, in an age of obsessive transparency and digital memory, is not a bureaucratic error but a symptom of a deeper rot. It speaks to a society that has lost its sense of the sacred, where the protection of privacy for the guilty trumps the outrage of the innocent. The Victorians, for all their prudishness, understood that some things were not fit for public consumption. They knew that justice was not merely a matter of data but of moral order. We have forgotten this. We live in an age where the state, bloated and incompetent, leaks information like a sieve, and the public is left to stew in its own righteous anger.
And Britain's support for France? It is a classic case of the tail wagging the dog. We are bound by treaties and alliances that were forged in a different era, when the world was simpler and enemies clearer. Now we rush to the defence of a neighbour that has become a laughing stock, a nation where riots over a murderer's file are more common than reasoned debate. It is the Fall of Rome, writ small: the barbarians are not at the gates but inside them, and they are armed with smartphones and a sense of entitlement.
What is to be done? One hesitates to suggest a return to the stocks or the public flogging, but the desire for vengeance is a primal force that cannot be ignored. The French government, in its wisdom, should have kept the record sealed and let the man rot in obscurity. Instead, they have created a martyr of bureaucracy. And Britain, by standing with them, has made itself complicit in this farce.
This is not about left or right. It is about the survival of a civilisation that once knew how to balance justice with discretion. We are losing that knowledge. The child murderer's name may be forgotten, but the lesson should not be. The West is decadent, and its decadence is costing us our soul.
