Barbarians at the gates
MICHAEL HENDERSON
1 t certainly cannot be said that Theodore Dalrymple in his brilliant commentary last week left anybody in any doubt about what modern Britain means to him. One hopes that a copy of his article was pinned up in every government department, every common room and every newsroom, but the chances are that many of the people who work in those places would mark him down as a 'reactionary'. There can be no higher praise. When you see what is happening in this kingdom we should all be reactionaries.
Of the many horrible things that threaten our national health the most dangerous is surely the self-loathing that masquerades as liberalism. You find it most frequently in the Guardian, so it was no surprise to see a piece in that paper the other day by a man called Jeffries, who wrote that England has always been a second-rate country. Oh, I don't know. This land has given as much to the glory we call European civilisation as any other, and on at least three occasions has saved Europe from those who would turn it into a bloodbath. Even at the Guardian they must know that.
We do have the Guardian to thank, though, for bringing us news of an academic at the University of Liverpool who has predicted that any trouble involving England supporters at the European Football Championships, to be staged in Portugal later this year, will be the fault of. . . the Portuguese police! John Rawling's weekly column quoted this egghead (who will remain anonymous, out of decency) at length, and his muddled thinking is shared by many other people of a wet persuasion, who would rather rub shoulders with these noble savages than the sort of chaps who followed England's rugby team to Australia. As for Wimbledon, with all those socially divisive strawberries, they would only go there to set fire to the place.
Better by far to stick with Dalrymple, who has written about his experience of following the footballers to Rome four years ago, noting that up to 10,000 'fans' 'shouted obscenities in unison for hours on end, while making gestures of implicit violence'. He went on, 'There were two surprising things about this deeply unattractive crowd: the first was that many among them were well educated, and the second was that, when the carabinieri charged, they immediately began to feel self-pity and injured outrage. It was as if their inalienable right to behave like scum had been unfairly challenged.'
It gets better. 'The vile behaviour of the English football fans abroad is in fact a symptom of a deep and rapidly advancing cultural phenomenon: the proletarianisation of British life. . . . They are people who have consciously and deliberately turned their back on certain bourgeois virtues: restraint, politeness, consideration for others, and so forth. They think of their savagery as a kind of democratic virtue, a proof that they do not hold themselves above the common man. The worse their language, the purer their heart. Hence their surprise, outrage and disbelief when they are treated by foreigners as the most degraded specimens of humanity they have ever encountered.'
We have only to look around to see that he's right. There will be trouble in Portugal, England fans will be responsible for it, and wets everywhere will blame everybody but the yobs. Whether or not he is living in his French cottage by then, I hope to see Dalrymple return to this subject. No person alive knows more about it.
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