So a Ugandan lawyer is charged with treason, and Whitehall gasps. The Foreign Office, with all the moral authority of a reformed pickpocket, issues a statement condemning ‘judicial harassment’ in a Commonwealth ally. Let us dispense with the pious fiction that this is about human rights.
This is about power. This is about the infantilisation of nations that dare to remind the old empire that sovereignty is not a gift. The charge itself, whether robust or overblown, is an internal affair of a sovereign republic.
Yet London cannot resist the urge to lecture, to wag its finger, to issue its condemnations as though Kampala were an unruly colonial district. We have seen this play before. It is the same script that accompanied the fall of Rome: the metropole, decadent and assured of its moral superiority, hectors the provinces while its own institutions rot.
The United Kingdom, a nation that cannot police its own borders or define its own national identity, now deigns to instruct Uganda on the proper administration of justice. The hypocrisy is breathtaking. And yet the chattering classes will applaud.
They will nod along to the sanctimonious editorials, oblivious to the irony that they cheer for the weakening of a fellow sovereign state in the name of a universalist creed they would never submit to themselves. Let us call this what it is: the intellectual decadence of a post-imperial nation that cannot bear to relinquish its tutoring role. The lawyer may be innocent; he may be guilty.
That is for Ugandan courts to decide. But the reflex of London to intervene, to moralise, to issue its stern warnings, is a symptom of a larger malady. It is the arrogance of the decadent.
And decadence, dear reader, does not end well.
