At the Telegraph, TD argues that Labour’s definition of poverty—household income below 60 percent of the median—confuses inequality with genuine deprivation. By this relative metric, even a millionaire among billionaires would be deemed “poor,” while a society where everyone is equally cold and starving would count as poverty-free. He says that such thinking leads to bad policy, fosters resentment, and even encourages a perverse preference for general decline, since recessions reduce inequality.

The difference between relative and absolute measurements is important in medicine as well as economics. Let me give a purely hypothetical example. Suppose the infant mortality rate in the richest tenth of the population were 3 per thousand, and in the poorest tenth 6. Let us then suppose that both could be lowered respectively to 2 and 5 thousand. Everyone would be better off, but inequality would have increased: the difference in mortality rates between the two deciles would have increased from 200 to 250 per cent. The benefit, though the same per thousand for both deciles, would have lowered the infant mortality rate by 33 per cent in the richest tenth, but by only 20 per cent in the poorest.

Would anyone reject such a lowering of mortality rates on the grounds that it increased inequality? (I rather fear that some might, because envy and hatred are by far the strongest political emotions.)

Read it here (subscription required)

At Taki’s Mag, Dalrymple reflects wryly on why pedants take such delight in spotting tiny errors and why the rest of us are sometimes tempted to do the same. What begins as fault-finding, he suggests, often masks a deeper desire for order in a world that resists it.

I think that pedantry is often, if not always, an effort to keep at bay the fear of disorder in the world, and of the meaninglessness and fleetingness of human existence. A man who scours a text after its publication for error (I am not speaking here of copy editors, who scour it beforehand) thinks that he is engaged in important work, saving the world from misconception; but in reality, he is defending himself against insignificance.

Read it here

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.