Our cultural heritage is more important than foreign aid

I wept bitter tears of loss as I watched Notre Dame burn and in pain pleaded to God for his mercy.

It is early, but this morning the structure still stands, the photographs suggesting the rib-vaulted roof over the crossing had gone, and a further part of the stone vaulting over the Chancel. However, the roof over the Nave is still at great risk - the fire will have inflicted extremes of heat and streams of molten lead from the roof covering, the cold water used to extinguish the flames then likely to crack the stone. The timber roof structure dated from 1220 - 1240 and is alas now wholly gone.

Notre Dame's 13th century timber roof over the rib-vaulted Nave

When the Germans reduced the historic centre of Warsaw to rubble in the last war, the Poles swore to rebuild it exactly as it was, and even under a repressive and authoritarian Communist regime they did so. Every roof tile and window exactly as it was before the Teuton barbarians subjected it to HE. And this was exactly the right thing to do - for our European cultural heritage has a value above rubies; our nations and our peoples, our forbears and ancestors live in these stones and in this wood and in the craft and art and love with which they proclaimed for the world to see our being, our Sein.

Here's a clear message to government and to our pathetic failure of a Parliament, both antithetical to the interests of the People. Our cultural heritage is more important by a factor of magnitude than pissing away billions of our taxes to corrupt third-world tyrants in the name of modish liberalism. Notre Dame is a warning to you; you have a duty to use every effort, take every measure, spend whatever is needed, to secure our own cultural heritage from damage, neglect, negligence or malicious damage. Your failure will not be tolerated.