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

In this piece, Dalrymple reflects on how human beings, including himself, are prone to envy, especially when confronted with the wealth of the chief executives of large corporations:

All judgment, said Doctor Johnson, is comparative, which is no doubt true; but the natural habit of comparing one’s situation with that of other people is also to a degree controllable by taking thought. If I grow envious over the superior wealth of others, which I think unmerited by comparison with my own merits, can I not stop to think in absolute rather than in comparative terms?

At TakiMag, Dalrymple examines the absurdity of modern politics, in France specifically but elsewhere too, and he argues the culprit is us:

We are sheep who complain of their shepherd: We don’t like his guidance or his bullying, we abominate his sheepdog, but we want him to take better care of us. The shepherd says that he will do so, provided only that we accept that he decides everything for us. We want him not only to protect us from the wolves, but to provide the grass as well.

In this piece at City Journal, Dalrymple critiques the Church of England’s decision to host a graffiti-style installation inside Canterbury Cathedral, arguing that it embodies an institutional self-undermining: rather than preserving its sacred heritage, the Church is actively eroding it.

If any institution in the world provides evidence of Freud’s concept of the death instinct, it is the Church of England. With unfailing aim, it does whatever will hasten its demise, already quite advanced…