Allow Me The Indulgence Of A Little Heresy…

…but maybe we’ve got it all wrong. Maybe it’s not the EU that’s at fault.

Maybe it’s really our own elected officials and public servants? Maybe, as Patently points out, natural selection is simply at work?

Take the case of the fortuitously-departed Toulouse murderer’s wretched father (a convicted drug dealer):

Mohamed Benalel Merah has said he wants to bury his son, who reportedly had joint French and Algerian citizenship, in Algeria.

His accusation that the French authorities deliberately chose to kill his son rather than capture him has caused indignation in Paris.

Now, in the UK, this would result in a ‘no comment’ or an expression of sympathy from politicians.

Not so in France:

"If I were the father of such a monster, I would shut my mouth in shame," said French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe.

Encore, encore!

Meanwhile, as Teresa ‘Kitten Heels’ May wrestles with the tricky problem of Abu Qatada and the ECHR refusal to let us deport him, Italy just shrugs and boots out their guy anyway:

… Italy was yesterday hit with nothing more than a relatively small financial penalty after it defied a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights and deported an Islamic fundamentalist to Tunisia.

The court, which had said the man could not be removed until his case had been heard in full, only awarded damages and made no order for Rome to retrieve the man and take him back.

Viva!

It seems that it’s not just ministers at fault now, though. Even when they want to resolve issues, they are stymied by the civil servants nominally under their control:

The Government's own experts have said David Cameron's plans to toughen punishments for Britain's most prolific offenders could force crime up, not down.

In a fresh embarrassment for the Prime Minister his officials are unconvinced by his proposals to give more electronic tags and longer curfews to the thousands of career criminals currently being let off with a slap on the wrist.

Their job isn’t to be convinced; it’s simply to carry out his wishes! We elected him, not them!

'Given a limit on the overall level of resources available for probation services, and the need for sentences to remain proportionate to the seriousness of the offending, delivering top end community orders may cause a number of primarily rehabilitative requirements to be substituted for primarily punitive ones,' it says.

Get with the programme – no-one gives a damn for ‘rehabilitation’. We’ve had years of it, and it hasn’t worked.

Time to try punishment again. And time to elect people who don’t simply shrug and say ‘Nothing I can do – EU rules, y’see…’.