India has done it. They have slapped a ban on Telegram, the encrypted messaging app, all because some malefactors used it to leak exam papers. This is the sort of reflexive, authoritarian gesture we expect from a nation that still has a caste system but which the British liberal establishment will now sheepishly admire as ‘decisive action’.
Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, our own wise men and women in Westminster are pondering ‘tougher digital regulation laws’. Oh, the pattern is clear. Every age has its own guillotine: in 1793 it was the blade, in 2025 it is the kill switch.
The exam scandal is merely the pretext. The real crime of Telegram is that it allows people to speak without a licence. That is a sin against the bureaucratic state, which desperately wants to assign you a digital ID number and watch you type.
We are repeating the Fall of Rome, only with better Wi-Fi. The Vestal Virgins are now content moderators, and the barbarians are at the gates wearing hoodies and carrying laptops. India’s ban will not stop cheating.
It will stop only the free exchange of ideas. And the UK, in its fatuous pursuit of ‘online safety’, will follow suit. The Victorians knew that a man’s home is his castle.
But today, his smartphone is a rented flat with the landlord’s spy camera in the bedroom. I am Arthur Penhaligon, and I have seen this script before. The ending is not happy.
