Dalrymple has some thoughts on British children after witnessing some typically bad behavior from a British teenager:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that children in Britain have more miserable or wretched childhoods than any others in Europe. This is in large part because of the population’s growing incompetence in the art of living, but it is also almost traditional that the British do not like their children very much. By the time they have finished bringing them up so badly, they are proved retrospectively right not to have liked them very much, because they grow into pretty awful young adults…

Read it here

At The Critic, Dalrymple writes on the minor controversy over a review of a book of poetry and finds mistakes all around:

This suggestion of plagiarism upset the publisher, Canongate, which said, “Canongate refutes completely this baseless allegation.”

It did nothing of the kind. Only in a world of “my truth” are denial and refutation synonymous. One would have hoped for better from a respectable publisher.

At Taki Mag, Dalrymple reflects on the cultural obsession with youth and the way modern society equates staying “young forever” with adolescent behavior.

There has been a vogue for running after a youthful clientele ever since the Second Vatican Council, when the Catholic Church more or less abandoned the Latin Mass, among other things. The leaders of the church had the rather dim idea of trying to attract young people to the religion by “modernizing” its liturgy, which was far more beautiful in Latin than in any modern language

In his quarterly essay for City Journal, Dalrymple argues that under Keir Starmer’s government the United Kingdom is swiftly moving toward a state that prosecutes citizens not for traditional crimes but for what they say, while displaying little interest in serious criminal disorder:

The combination of frightening and bullying the population, while ignoring actual disorder, has become the hallmark of British public administration. Notices are posted at stations, airports, hospitals, post offices, and on trains and buses warning of what will not be tolerated, especially so-called hate crimes. At the same time, public-address systems endlessly urge people to call the police “if you see something that doesn’t look right,” without specifying what that might be, implying that the population is constantly under threat requiring police protection—which they know from experience to be almost notional, with the vast majority of crimes neither investigated nor even recorded, let alone prosecuted. We live increasingly in a state whose actions veer between the ineffectual and the malign.

Read it here

In this piece, Dalrymple argues that our gaze is magnetized by distant crises while the sufferings nearest to us, those we might actually relieve, are neglected. We moralize about far-off spectacles and policy grand narratives, yet overlook the concrete duties right under our noses.

By sloganeering one has discharged oneself, so to speak, of the onerous duty to be good.

Read the full essay here.

In this essay at TakiMag, Dalrymple reflects on the paradox of modern travel—how the freedom of flight is matched by enforced waiting—and uses a chance encounter in an airport to probe deeper questions about compassion and the value of life:

How easy it is to conclude that the lives of others are not worth living—intrinsically not worth living!

In his monthly essay at New English Review, Dalrymple examines the modern surge in tattooing among young people and interprets it as a symptom of a deeper search for identity, recognition and freedom, ironically revealing a loss of individuality rather than its affirmation:

I find this, at heart, all very sad. It is a desperate search both for public recognition and individuality. Public notice is hardly something that ought to be desired for its own sake, while individuality is conferred existentially, as an essential condition, whether desired or not, of being human.

In this essay at Law and Liberty, Dalrymple argues that the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill in Britain will create a vast new bureaucracy rather than meaningfully relieve suffering, and that the rituals of paperwork may outlast the very persons the Bill claims to help:

This bill is perfectly drafted to create more employment than it will relieve suffering. Although the ostensible purpose of the bill is to assist terminally ill people who wish to end their own lives, it will, in reality, be either dangerous, because its provisions and safeguards are so cumbersome that they will be ignored, or ineffectual, because the same measures are so lengthy to comply with that few people will benefit from the passage of the law. Most people will die before the forms can be properly filled in.

The case of Claire Mackie-Brown in Scotland, who is being investigated for making a statement that is supposedly a hate crime, reveals a cultural shift:

The fact that someone should think that the innocuous locution, “born and bred here”, should be a manifestation of hatred is revelatory of the debased and pathological universalism of much of what counts for thought in the modern Western world.

Read the piece at Quadrant