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Dalrymple spends some of his space musing on the origin of this evil, and discussing obvious candidates such as the intellectual elite’s attack on the family and the moral hazards of government welfare. This is fine as far as it goes. It is brave today to call evil by its proper name but having identified it as such, why not use and refer to the literature in religion that is standing waiting to be deployed?
I have only a minor disagreement with the Dalrymple argument. The Doctor has now moved to France. Over there last month, I was sunning myself and swimming off a jetty in a tiny port. Every day hired boats would arrive and tie up for a night or two. There were English people who made a noise and threw waste into the water, Germans who shouted and guffawed into the night and Dutch people who spread their tables and chairs across the jetty, blocking it. Dalrymple admits that cultural collapse has now reached Paris but his thesis is that sections of the youngish British ‘masses’ are the worst infected. I think it is a general Western condition. More- over the people whose behaviour I noticed were mostly elderly and middle-class. They increasingly share in the promiscuity, the family collapse, the careless indebtedness, the HIV and chlamydia, the rudeness and public drunkenness. It is nothing like so acute but, then, they started later. Spectator readers can no longer rely on Dr Dalrymple to enjoy barbarism vicariously. If they sniff hard, however, they should already be able to detect a definite whiff of sewage — at home.
Digby Anderson’s All Oiks Now: The Unnoticed Surrender of Middle England is published by the Social Affairs Unit.
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