1. AFRGA1 A053
AFR 16-17 April 2016
www.afr.com | The Australian Financial Review
53
Weekend FinLunch with The AFR
DOWN THE
DRAIN WITH
DALRYMPLEThe prison psychiatrist-turned-columnist says
Britain’s post-war rebellious streak has morphed
into unstoppable vulgarity, writes Kevin Chinnery.
Theodore Dalrymple, aka Anthony Daniels, is a warrior against downward aspiration. PHOTOS: LOUISE KENNERLEY
We used to be known for our
emotional constipation. Now
it’s emotional incontinence.
THE WILMOT
RESTAURANT
PrimusHotel
339PittStreet,
Sydney
2businesslunch
courses,$110
2hiramasakingfish
sashimi
1potatognocchi
1Tasmanian
salmonfillet
1Berlokasparkling
water,$10
1greentea,$6
1Englishbreakfast
tea,$6
Total,withtipand
surcharges:$140.30● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
H
e’s the psychiatrist
who broke a taboo.
In 1990, Theodore
Dalrymple, prison
shrink, slum area
hospital doctor and
freshly appointed
magazine columnist
started telling the awful truth about Bri-
tain’s poor.
Long before motormouth welfare queen
Vicky Pollard became the butt of a national
joke on the television show Little Britain,
Dalrymple was warning of a native under-
class utterly impoverished not in money,
but in language, ideas and ambition.
His books, essays and columns for The
Spectator,TheTimesandtheNewStatesman
have been compared to Orwell in their
observations of Britain. But the plight of
Orwell’s working class, stricken by the
Depression and the collapse of employ-
ment, is moving and dignified in a way that
Dalrymple’s post-welfare state underclass is
definitely not.
He shows a new Gin Lane, a Hogarthian
horror show of self-destructive behaviour:
drink- and drug-addled deadbeat parents,
feral children, random violence and chosen
idleness. Chaos and ignorance, encouraged
by the welfare and education systems, and
treated as both normal and unavoidable.
‘‘I didn’t start out to write that. I was just
describing what I saw. I probably made it
less terrible,’’ he recalls as we sit down to
lunch atthe lessfashionable endof Sydney’s
Pitt Street. ‘‘But I saw almost straight away
that raw want was not the explanation. It
just hit me in the face.’’
Blameisreserved fortheintellectualclass
that made all this happen. Not through
the indifference of the 1930s, but over-
indulgence. Trendy 1960s social theories
have run amok and caused endless harm to
the people they are supposed to be helping,
he says.
Academics, writers, artists and journal-
ists tore down old values such as personal
responsibility and civility, replaced by ideas
that ‘‘society is to blame’’ and a moral
relativism that says that nothing is wrong.
‘‘It has disastrous effects on those worst
off,’’ he says, ‘‘those least able to withstand
the practical results’’ of that moral anarchy.
Zero self-control, and zero connection
between effort and reward did not make
people happy, but left them trapped in
‘‘cheerless self-pitying hedonism and the
brutality of the dependency culture’’, he
wrote in his book, Life at the Bottom.
Dalrymple hazards a precise starting date
for this: when John Osborne replaced
TerenceRattiganastheleadingBritishplay-
wright, he says, and angry young men
replaced the stoicism of The Browning Ver-
sion. It was people who ‘‘showed off their
cleverness and their virtue’’ by attacking the
status quo. The damage didn’t matter, so
much as their pet theories.
It’s the radical vanity I well remember at
uni in the 1970s, I say, with intellect equated
with contempt for conventional life. It’s the
same in art, Dalrymple adds, where you
have to be transgressive just for the sake of
it.
He is in Australia as the Centre of Inde-
pendent Studies 2016 scholar-in-residence,
and will also be lecturing on ‘‘Is Society
Broken?’’ at the Sydney Opera House on
April 18, and in Melbourne on April 21.
Where Britain leads, he warns, others are
only a few decades behind.
His prose uses adjectives as percussion to
beat in the message. Militant philistinism,
aggressive incivility. Some newspaper
columnists are their writing made flesh.
Dalrymple is not. In person he has an imp-
ish smile, and an animated laugh at his
more outrageous suggestions. His voice is
reassuringly doctorly. If you were a terrified
newcomer in the prison system, you would
be glad to see him.
We order. Sashimi to start, then gnocchi
for him and salmon for me. No wine.
So how did a population that is now
wealthier than ever become the world
champions ... ‘‘of such decay’’, he says, fin-
ishing my question. Did Britain’s old
respectable working class, such keen self-
improvers, just improve themselves out of
existence and leave only a lumpenprolet-
ariat behind?
‘‘Except now they are all the lumpenpro-
letariat,’’ he says with a straight face. He
does not actually like the idea of some
isolated underclass, when their vulgarity
has become the ideology of the nation.
Havingtrickleddown fromthetop,moral
licence has now percolated up again from
the bottom. Its tidemark, for Dalrymple, is
tattoos. The middle classes began tattooing
themselves out of empathy, he once
thought, with marginal people such as
criminals or bikers.
‘‘But unfortunately, when you imitate
something, the role becomes the reality.’’
Mass drunkenness and mass vulgarity is
now routine across British society. In the
1960s, stung by criticism it was too middle
class, the BBC hired Jimmy Savile, he says.
Decades before Savile’s sexual predation
was revealed, ‘‘he was the start of an evan-
gelical vulgarisation that has proved
unstoppable’’.
It’s the biggest case of downward aspira-
tion ever known, he jokes. Why? He’s not
sure. ‘‘Loss of confidence among the middle
class – which is quite easy to enter, unlike
Francewhichisfarmoresnobbish.Andloss
of British power and influence in the world.
It’s catastrophic when that happens.’’
Leaders now follow the led. In France,
politicians ‘‘pretend to be more cultured
than they are’’, he says. In Britain, ‘‘it’s
exactly the opposite’’.
Aren’t you just exaggerating something
terrible? I ask. Britain is supposed to be a
world leader in soft power: influence
through culture and image. Or do they have
so much vulgarity they can export it? ‘‘Well,
thatiswhatishappening.Whyanyonefinds
British culture attractive I can’t imagine.’’
Brutish behaviour happens in a brutish
aesthetic. He bemoans the destruction of
graceful cityscapes by careless civic plan-
ners. Weare lunchingat thePrimus Hotel,a
newly restored art deco gem with huge red
marble columns that a Venetian doge
would be happy sitting among. It was once
Sydney’s water and sewage department: a
palace of civic efficiency and pride – pre-
cisely the thing that has gone down the
drain in Britain, he says.
British urban dwellers, he wrote in his
book Our Culture, What’s Left of It, are like
barbarians camped out in the ruins of an
older, superior civilisation they don’t under-
stand. You can study them through their lit-
ter; there is so much of it, and local councils
feel no shame in being unable to control it.
That is a deeper corruption of their pur-
pose than in Italy, he thinks, where at least
you can pay under the desk and things hap-
pen. Litter is dropped everywhere, by every-
one, he says: there is no underclass in the
Lake District.
‘‘You don’t have to wait 3000 years for lit-
ter to become archaeology before it tells you
something,’’ he says. ‘‘You can track diet,
habits, their attitudes, and how they see the
world.
‘‘It’s a complete loss of interest in the pub-
lic space,’’ he thinks. Graffiti artists have
takenitoverbutasexpression,hesays,graf-
fiti is just individualism without any indi-
viduality – another modern condition.
‘‘People have great difficulty marking them-
selves out as individuals. I didn’t, but then
I’m odd.’’
How odd?
‘‘Well, from an early age, I was contrary.
Not in any aggressive or egotistical way. But
I was always quite happy that I knew best.
It’s not true of course, but I never let it des-
troy the illusion.’’
What if in a parallel universe Dalrymple
also found himself at the bottom of the
social heap. What would he have done? ‘‘I
have often thought the worst fate is to be an
intelligent and sensitive person born into
the British underclass. The social pressure
onyoutofailisenormous.Irememberagirl
who wanted to study French but, ‘they said I
was stupid because I was clever’. Can you
imagine growing up in that environment?’’
He looks sad as he says it.
What’s the answer? The real problem is
‘‘the modern miracle of British education,
in which people come out of school know-
ing even less than when they went in’’.
When he talked to patients at the hospital
where he worked, ‘‘you were plumbing
the shallows. I couldn’t find anything that
they knew’’.
The theme at the bottom of much of Dal-
rymple’s writing is lack of self-restraint,
from serial litterers to serial killers. He says
that he once signed up as the vulgarity cor-
respondent of the Daily Mail – he smirks at
that one – sent on assignment to an England
soccer friendly in Italy.
A hundred middle-class Englishmen he
travelled with hurled abuse at any passing
Italian. ‘‘I asked one of them, a computer
programmer, why he did it. He said, ‘you
have to let your hair down’. I said, ‘well, no,
youdon’t.Youshouldkeepitup’.Weusedto
be known for our emotional constipation.
Now it’s emotional incontinence.
‘‘If you let your hair down often enough, it
becomes your character.’’
He says there is nowadays an odd fear
of bottling up emotions. Dalrymple once
talked to a man who had just murdered his
girlfriend. ‘‘He said to me: ‘Well, I had to kill
her, doctor, or I don’t know what I would
have done.’’’ We can only laugh at the unin-
tended irony.
Theodore Dalrymple is the pen name of
the real Anthony Daniels, who was still
working in the health system when he
beganwriting.Whydidhebecomeapsychi-
atrist? ‘‘The gossip,’’ Daniels replies. And he
liked the idea of working not just with peo-
ple’s physiology, but their lives as well.
Is Anthony as angry as Theodore? Both
are just disappointed that things are not as
good as they could be, he says. ‘‘But disap-
pointment is the permanent condition of
mankind. Life would be intolerable without
it. We would all be so smug.’’
Isn’t it just part of a liberal democracy to
tolerate difference and to make allowances
for some, even if you find them obnoxious?
‘‘Well, a society that tolerates everything is
rather bad. Shouting, screaming and intim-
idation? We are prepared to tolerate public
vomiting, but if you use the term ‘actress’,
you are a sexist.
‘‘A very well-educated lady told me public
vomiting is all right: ‘They can clear it up.’
This is how the elite now thinks. They are so
anxious not to seem narrow-minded or big-
oted, or of being ‘judgmental’. How did that
word become a term of abuse?’’ W