An archaic dialect

Dalrymple begins to wonder whether

I still speak modern English, or whether, approaching middle age, the language of my youth and education has become an archaic and somewhat quaint dialect.

Dalrymple’s quaint and archaic dialect

Compared to the prose of NHS managers, that of the British Medical Journal is as Edward Gibbon

From Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage, ed. Jeremy Butterfield, 2015

The English were constipated: now they’re incontinent

Dalrymple explains that his account of Britain as a declining, broken society is

ironic in the sense that I don’t think there was a golden age in which society was whole.

But

we have to look at the problems we have. Every age looks at the problems it has, and what I’ve found in England is a refusal to face the problems: they’re just too uncomfortable.

Dalrymple says it is, to a degree, a

puzzle

as to why Britain has become more degraded than all other comparable countries. But he points to

a gestalt switch: what was regarded as good is regarded as bad, and vice-versa. Emotional constipation, once a characteristic of the British, has become emotional incontinence. People regard it as a good thing to express themselves, irrespective of whether they’ve anything to express.

For reasons of hormonal disaffection, young people are disposed to throw themselves into ideological causes. They are susceptible to ideological rot, as they are to criminality,

which is a young man’s game.

With regard to English anti-social life, Dalrymple says:

If you go to entertainment areas, there is always an element of threat in Britain.

He recounts an experience he had in Manchester, where he was staying at an hotel.

There was laughing and screaming outside at 1.30 in the morning. When I went out the next morning, I found that someone had been nearly murdered — he was in hospital, in a coma. You can’t tell the difference in England between people enjoying themselves and someone being murdered.

The English then and now

Once, writes Dalrymple, the qualities of the English population included

• cool and ironic detachment from its own experience, that permitted it to face adversity with great good humour and modesty rather than by resort to histrionics
• a polite restraint that was a precondition of depth of character. This restraint seemed to me heroic in an undemonstrative way; it was also the guarantor of an implicit subtlety

Today the chief characteristics of the English, Dalrymple points out, are

• militant vulgarity
• lack of restraint
• arrogant loudness
• ferocious and determined drunkenness
• antisocial egotism
• aggression and quick resort to violence
• grossness of appetites
• prideful ugliness of appearance
• lack of finesse in any department of human existence

Moral delicacy on Facebook

All we want is attention

The internet and Facebook, Dalrymple notes,

are certainly bringing into prominence the intrinsic decency and sense of fair play of the English,

as well as their

refined use of language.

He cites the Facebook contributions that greeted the reduction of the sentence given to Lee Kilburn. Mr Kilburn, Dalrymple explains,

is a 42-year-old man of previously good character who was driven to distraction by children who constantly knocked on his door and ran away. His wife had just been diagnosed with a brain tumour. Mr Kilburn chased one of the children who had knocked on his door, and there are two versions of what happened: he says he ran after her, grabbed her and she fell, he fell on top of her and she broke her nose on the ground; she says he punched her and broke his nose.

Mr Kilburn admitted that he had lost his temper and was in the wrong, but denied that he had intended to injure the girl. The judges agreed that there were mitigating circumstances, freed him from jail and suspended his sentence. One response on Facebook to the judicial decision read as follows:

I’d go inside [i.e. be admitted to prison] just to wrap a quilt round his neck and stab the **** in his skull until his head is drained, no remorse, no mercy, dead! His cell would be covered in red.

Dalrymple comments:

The moral delicacy of the man who wrote this is evident from his refusal to spell out the four-letter word he wanted to use to describe Mr Kilburn. The line has to be drawn somewhere.

He asks:

Did people have sentiments such as the above before Facebook enabled them to be expressed anonymously in public, or did the possibility of expressing them in public anonymously call them forth?

Rottrollen (detail), 1917. John Bauer. Pen and wash

 

Dirtiest people in Europe

Let the State clear up after me

Why, asks Dalrymple, are Britain’s councils and its highways agency

so negligent?

Local public administration

is incapable of organising street-cleaning properly, and does not see it as an important part of its duty. After all, it has chief executives to pay.

Why do the British

turn practically every road into a ribbon development of the rubbish dump of a Latin American town?

England’s streets are

by far the dirtiest in Western Europe. A Briton’s street is his dining room and litter bin.

The English seem to think that

what a beauty spot really needs is an empty, glaring-orange Lucozade bottle.

Circumambient slovenliness

The explanation lies, Dalrymple points out, in the deep selfishness of the British.

In order not to litter when it might be convenient to you to do so, you have to appreciate that you are not the only person in the world, that the world is not made just for your convenience.

If you look at the British,

you would think they were like shrews, that they have to eat twice their own body weight every few hours to survive. It is hardly surprising that people who exert no control over when and where they eat exert no control over where they leave the remains.

It is no coincidence that the British,

being the dirtiest people in Europe, are also the fattest.

 

A society in decomposition

England has neither leaders nor followers but is composed only of egotists

The

intellectual torpor, moral cowardice, incompetence and careerist opportunism of the British political and intellectual class

A careerist, intellectually torpid, incompetent coward

is now very evident, writes Dalrymple. Despite everything that has happened in recent years, the corrupt mandarins continue to contrive

not to notice what has long been apparent to anyone who has taken a short walk with his eyes open down any frequented British street: that a considerable proportion of the country’s young population (a proportion that is declining) is ugly, aggressive, vicious, badly educated, uncouth and criminally inclined.

Lavish self-esteem

While British youth is utterly lacking in self-respect,

it is full of self-esteem: that is to say, it believes itself entitled to a high standard of living, and other things, without any effort on its own part.

Although youth unemployment in Britain is very high, that is to say about 20 per cent of those aged under 25,

the country has had to import young foreign labour for a long time, even for unskilled work in the service sector.

The British, idlest workers in Europe

No rational employer in a service industry would choose a young Briton

if he could have a young Pole; the young Pole is not only likely to have a good work ethic and refined manners, he is likely to be able to add up and — most humiliating of all — to speak better English than the Briton, at least if by that we mean the standard variety of the language. He may not be more fluent but his English will be more correct and his accent easier to understand.

Travesty of an educational system

After compulsory education,

or perhaps I should say intermittent attendance at school, up to the age of 16 costing $80,000 a head, about one-quarter of British children cannot read with facility or do simple arithmetic. It makes you proud to be a British taxpayer.

State-subsidised criminality

British youth

leads the Western world in almost all aspects of social pathology, from teenage pregnancy to drug taking, from drunkenness to violent criminality. There is no form of bad behaviour that our version of the welfare state has not sought out and subsidised.

British children

are radically unsocialised and deeply egotistical, viewing relations with other human beings in the same way as Lenin: Who whom, who does what to whom. By the time they grow up, they are destined not only for unemployment but unemployability.

Long bath in vomitus

All the necessary electronic equipment is available for the prosecution of the main business of life, viz

entertainment by popular culture. And what a culture British popular culture is! Perhaps Amy Winehouse was its finest flower and its truest representative in her militant and ideological vulgarity, her stupid taste, her vile personal conduct and preposterous self-pity.

Sordor

Winehouse’s sordid life

was a long bath in vomitus, literal and metaphorical, for which the exercise of her very minor talent was no excuse or explanation. Yet not a peep of dissent from our intellectual class was heard after her near canonisation after her death, that class having long had the backbone of a mollusc.

Thugs in uniform

What of the police? They are

simultaneously bullying but ineffectual and incompetent, increasingly dressed in paraphernalia that makes them look more like the occupiers of Afghanistan than the force imagined by Robert Peel. The people who most fear our police are the innocent.

(2011)

The harridan-and-harpy wing of British politics

An article reflecting the views of such people is read, or endured, by Dalrymple. It is about ‘gender inequality’ in politics and society, and is both

dull, as all such articles are bound to be,

and impoverishing of the English language. However, the virtue of the article, to be found in the London newspaper the Observer, is that it lavishly furnishes Dalrymple with opportunities to indulge what he describes as

one of the most delightful of emotions,

viz., righteous indignation.

The article irritates our man intensely, finally reducing the doctor-writer to

impotent rage.

The promised land

Why do Sudanese, Eritreans, Yemenis and all the other migrants make a bee-line for Britain?

It is not, says Dalrymple, because of more generous social provisions.

Our schools and hospitals are not better than elsewhere: I think rather the reverse. Nor are we more generous with monetary subventions.

He thinks there are two chief factors.

• The English language. ‘Many of the refugees will have some knowledge of it already; those who don’t speak it will be more eager to learn it than a less global language. Mastery of English opens vistas beyond the capacity of all other languages.’
• Relatively liberal labour laws. ‘This makes it easier to find work. There will be no work in the rest of Europe for them, thanks to protective labour laws.’

But their eagerness to work

does not mean that they will be an asset to the country, especially if they can subsequently claim the right to family reunification. The latter has had disastrous effects everywhere it has been granted.

How Britons lard their speech with the word ‘fuck’ at least twice a sentence

This is something, writes Dalrymple, that any foreigner in contact with the British

has noticed, even if his command of [the English] language is otherwise limited.