At Quadrant, Dalrymple traces what he sees as the long decline of the BBC: from a trusted global authority to an institution widely met with skepticism, a collapse of prestige driven in large part by dumbing itself down to what it perceives as the level of its audience.

Not very deeply concealed in the story is the implicit view of the BBC that most of the population was crude, and that crudity was therefore necessary to capture its attention. It also had played a part, again dialectical, in the reduction of the attention span of the population, rather condescendingly assuming that it could no longer attend to serious discussions about serious subjects, without sensational visual effects, that lasted more than a minute or two.

For a piece in the Telegraph, Dalrymple argues that the Princess of Wales’s recent claim that addiction is “not a choice or a personal failing” is both empirically false and morally damaging. By denying agency her view reduces addicts to passive objects rather than responsible subjects, stripping them of dignity and the possibility of genuine change:

At the root of the Princess’s misapprehension is the post-religious or secular view that if a person is the author of his own downfall, he is due no sympathy or compassion. It is a highly puritanical view, and since we do not want to be puritans, we make the problem a medical one instead. But since we are all sinners and the authors of our own downfall, at least in some respect or other, this also has the corollary that sympathy or compassion is due to no one when he needs it.

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.