On: ‘We fear lessons will not be learned’: Chloe Moffat’s parents on their fight to...

“Lessons will be learned.” I have read the phrase so often it has worn smooth as a river pebble, and I confess I no longer know what it means. A lesson wants a learner - some mind that receives the blow and is changed by it. But what learns here? The Treasury is a body without nerves. Cut it and it does not bleed; it issues a memorandum. Punish it and it does not flinch; it revises a procedure. Whatever shame it owns lives in the mouths of its servants, and servants turn over like tenants.

Consider the particular case, since the particular is all we truly have. A young woman, employed, capable, caught inside a disciplinary process - a machine built to judge her - and the coroner finds that this machine materially contributed to her death. Materially: as if grief were cargo to be weighed at a customs house. And her parents, who ought now to be left alone with the oldest sorrow there is, have spent a year instead becoming detectives, hunting through papers for the shape of what killed their daughter. I know something of turning a death over and over - I lost the dearest friend I had, and I interrogated that loss for years - but they must conduct their interrogation in public, before lawyers. It strikes me as a second cruelty laid upon the first.

Here is my contradiction, unresolved: I have sat in judgment myself, wore the chain, heard the petitions, and believed then, as I believe now, that process shields the weak from the strong. Yet here the process was the wolf.

So they sue for wrongful death. But can a treasury die? It cannot even blush - and blushing, I suspect, is the only punishment that ever taught anybody anything.