This Bad by Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal Spring 2006

Theodore Dalrymple writes, as always, brilliantly.

"One definition of decadence is the concentration on the gratifyingly imaginary to the disregard of the disconcertingly real. No one who knows Britain could doubt that it has very serious problems - economic, social, and cultural. Its public services - which already consume a vast proportion of the national wealth - are not only inefficient but completely beyond amelioration by the expenditure of yet more money. Its population is abysmally educated, to the extent that in a few more years Britain will not even have a well-educated elite. An often cynical and criminally minded population has been indoctrinated with shallow and gimcrack notions - for example, about social justice - that render it singularly unfit to compete in an increasingly competitive world. "

This Bad by Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal Spring 2006