Our enemies are right to mock us

11 April 2007

Sentimentalists are moral universalists: they pretend that what happens anywhere in the world is as much their responsibility as what happens within their legal jurisdiction. Not a sparrow falls, but Mr Blair is responsible for its resuscitation. We cannot sleep easy in our beds until there is no tyranny anywhere: until then, unfortunately, there must be eternal war, even if we have not the means to wage it and we have just halved the size of the navy in order to keep millions financially dependent on the government. As for the poor children of Africa, it is our duty to save them at taxpayers’ expense, even if our sale of most of the gold reserves of the country at the lowest possible price does not altogether suggest that we are economically competent. But a vote of 25 per cent of the adult population of this country gives us not only the right, but the duty, to put the world to rights.

Unfortunately, the rest of the world is not altogether of our opinion, and proves refractory to our design, as in Iran, as in Iraq. But it requires less courage in the short term to bomb selected defenceless parts of the world than to clear our streets of litter, teach all our children to read, deal with crime and so forth; that would involve hard decisions and taking on some real opposition.

Mr Blair has been exposed as the frog in Aesop’s fable that puffs and puffs himself up in an attempt to prove himself as big as the cow, until he explodes. But we cannot blame him entirely. He is, after all, one of us, the new Britons. I think the least we can do is put some teddy bears by the railings outside Downing Street to help him come to terms with his humiliation.

Theodore Dalrymple begins a new column on the humbug and banality of the modern world in our issue of 28 April.