Common people

Bill Corden

An excellent article, a friend was just vacationing in Cuba from Vancouver, Canada . All was serene until the plane disgorged herds and packs from the Charter flight from England and then, as he said, the fighting , the shouting and the drinking and the vulgarity started. People from other parts of the world couldn't believe the rudeness, the overindulgence and the arrogance. Male and female yobbos with their little yobettes in tow spoiled the party for everyone.
We have our own little pockets of human ruminants here in Vancouver , but thank the Lord it isn't the prevalent culture.

mike craig

Do you get the impression he doesn't like the English?
"This vulgarity is insolent, militant and triumphant; grossly fat and hideously apparelled;Their facial expressions, their gait, their speech, their laughter, their very gestures are crude; mothers ..... lacking in tenderness ......shrewish irritability .... shrill, penetrating ... their children, who will very soon sound like them; vulgar, cheap and kitschy;aesthetic sense seems no more refined than that of magpies; pea-brained prurient vulgarians; bovine and lupine; sullen malevolence"

We really do seem to have annoyed him don't we?

reddogg

Yes I think he is annoyed and appalled. Rightly so. I travel to England regularly and the descent is striking. Riding the tube is a freak show. Everywhere the stench of decline is in the air. Have you seen what is happening to the Royal Navy lately? Soon to be only Flag Corps and marching bands. All to keep those on the dole happy. England decends into the abyss.

Maria

I wonder if this is an appropriate place to comment on the vulgarisation of political discourse, in particular by Harriet Harman. I thought her PMQ “joke” - we all know what it is like to meet a dodgy bloke at freshers’ week and do things you later regret - was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Is she trying to cultivate some sort of corblimey image to fit in with the times?

John Baily

I agree that there are many things wrong with this country today.One of the most galling is the vile snobbish misanthropic attitude of DR.Dalyrymple himself.
I am willing to bet cash money that this rage-filled sneering bore is child-less-his immaturity and sixth-form intolerance screams out of every sentence.
Didnt he use to write a shorter version of this article every week FOR YEARS?We do not want to have to read it again

Yorkshire Pit Village

John Baily @ 3:06

Please speak only for yourself.

Yam Yam

It would indeed be tempting to dismiss Theodore as a snob.

Sadly though, he is right. Whatever may have become of Britain's once-formidable financial, industrial and military capital pales besides the appalling decline in its human capital.

Once it was the red Routemaster bus that was the icon of England. Today, it is the lager can.

Bill

It is this kind of puritanical, arrogant and unremittingly snobbish attitude that would make me despise the English if I were spiteful enough to do so.

Vince Meegan

Mr. Dalrymple, What has happened can truly be laid at the door of Rupert Murdoch. (I can see you grimacing now.) In my opinion no one has done more to debase our national morals than his stable of filth peddling 'newspapers', or his television channels with their 24 hour output of mind numbing pap. Mr. Dalyrymple need look no further than Sky TV schedules or the pages of Britain's biggest selling papers to identify the source of the decay.
For the last forty or so years there has been an unrelenting output of football star porn, pop star porn, movie star porn and other vicarious trivia has reduced the nation to morons. These are the role models presented to our kids.

Sadly the BBC and the independent channels have joined him in this race to the bottom. It is hard to say which is winning, but I'd say the porn baron's Channel Five has it by a short neck.

Frederic in Paris

Sirs:
As a Frenchman living in France I shall refrain from making comments on my English neighbors. But I wish to thank the writer for his kinds words regarding my country and my fellow countrymen.

Steven Siew

I came to the UK as a teenager from Asia in the late fifties and spent the next twelve years there - my best years. What I learned in those years changed my life and I often recall the England of those days, especially its people. Sadly most of this article is true. Very sad indeed.

Ken Bishop

What this article, and many of the reactions to it, reveal about England above all is this: the educated middle class loathe and despise their own people..

merlinthepig

Right again, I think, Mr Dalrymple.

Mr Bishop. Speaking only for myself and as an educuated middle class person, I have the misfortune of only having to step outside the front door of my place of work to see the sort of people precisely as Mr D describes. I don't loath them, but I am genuinely mystified at and pity the sheer lack of self-respect and self-awareness their behaviour demonstrates.

michael

Once again the good doctor has hit the nail uncomfortably right on the V[vulgar] spot.

David Watkins

"where a spotty youth addressed me as ‘mate’, in a way that would never happen in France. I, who was three times his age, asked him not to address me thus, and he returned me a look of sullen malevolence".

First of all, what have the young man's pimples to do with anything? I take it you exhibit a godlike beauty, and certainly show none of the usual signs of advancing years - wrinkles, liver spots, baldness, sagging jowls etc. Well, you are very, very lucky, and should show compassion to those of us not equally blessed.

Secondly, what did you expect? You met his casual friendliness with frosty contempt - of course you got a hostile response. Unless you are very stupid indeed, this must have been the response that you wanted. It clearly made you happy, or as happy as you are capable of being.

alan charles

An Australian friend who lives in Pattaya, Thailand forwarded me this article. I myself live in Pattaya 8 months of each year, and the English yobs in abundance there, usually with the inevitable lager can in hand, make me wish I were French.

rielouise

That was not an article. That was a temper tantrum. Remember which country vomited forth Le Corbusier.

Miklós Cseszneky de Milvány

Vulgarity is gaining ground almost everywhere, but indeed somehow it is more noticable and maybe more acceptable in the UK. Perhaps it has something to do with the traditional English tolerance. However, England is not all about thugs, it is also the country where I have met the most genuinely polite and well-mannered persons.

shane

i was sympathising with the views in this article until it came to the part in the supermarket when the 'spotty youth' and his casual friendliness were rebuked.it reminded me of my time as a young working-class shop assistant when i too would refer to customers as mate and some usually middle-class pompous prig would reply 'dont call me mate-im not your mate!' idiots....

Robert in Arabia

In ten years on the Arabian Peninsula, I have met one single British university teacher who was not boastful about his or her alcohol consumption.

Mark

I fink you'll find, mate, that ingerland is the only place rich enuff for all us porpas to fly off to your fancy places and thus, get in the face like, of you and your posh nob mates wile you is at ayreports and such.

In other countries they often persecute, terrorise and wilfully steal from the poor and working classes - in the UK it seems they give them passports and let them travel!

Go to a housing estate in Paris or Barcelona or Rome or Hong Kong or Sydney or anywhere and you will see the uniform of the working class (then it was sackcloth, now it is sports apparel), the drink and the manners that are uniform nonetheless, and that while they don't befit a middle class opinion of what us cap doffers should wear and do and say, are perfunctory and have been the same for years.

I am the last to defend every aspect of the "lower classes" - there are many things wrong and you are gifted and able to pin point many with accuracy, wit and skill what they are - and to your credit, how to solve many of them too - your last book on sentimentality had me burning my roadside shrines.

This article reeks of NIMBY-ism in its worst form - that your holiday was spoilt by having to use public transport and see such horrors.

Sorry sir, next time I will avert me eyes from yer gaze sir and make sure me and the kids is reading proper books sir.

James Stevens

My sympathy goes out to the lowly shop assistant forced to deal with this pompous ass Athony Daniels.

James Stevens

And I swear I've seen this same "vulgar English" Dalrymple article a hundred times before in The Spectator.

spook

What are you oiks doing defiling this page? You sure as hell exemplify Dalrymple's utterances. Get thee to the Sun where you belong and stay there. Fleabags.

Richard Nalty

Dalrymple will always be dismissed by liberally-minded crowd pleasers and the "no one's better than anyone else" school of thought. But where there are no manners, there is no self-respect. Where there is no self-respect there is egomania - for there is absolutely nothing to apologise for. Therefore any challenge to one's conduct is seen as some kind of ad hominem attack, instead of a small-scale defence of civilisation. Decent, honourable Englishmen are becoming an endangered species. The weaker ones amongst us are folding to peer pressure. I will not yield if I live for a thousand years.

PSM

Such a narrow minded view of the English people, these type of people who have such shallow views see only the bad, for every person on the tube you may find distasteful there are 40 other regular English people making their way to their job, which on average they work harder at than most other countries and for more hours, but there is no mention of these people in the article. English people raise more money for charities and foreign aid than many other counties including France, and its often the working class most willing to give up their free time and cash to do so, you should try looking a little further than the end of your nose, if you can point it away from the sky for just a second.

Sarah Pope

A person of genuine politeness, of 'breeding' as the author might term it, would never have corrected the young person in the shop so rudely. They would have smiled and said thank you. They would have lead by example. Instead, the author showed the same sense of 'vulgar' self-entitlement as a child who puts their feet on the seat. How does that better anyone?