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Global warning

Theodore Dalrymple

Wednesday, 24th October 2007

For a British patriot, it is a great relief to go to Marseilles.

At last somewhere in Europe as filthy and littered as almost the whole of Britain! If we can’t make ourselves better — and of course we won’t, so long as the final purpose of our public service is to employ the people employed by the public service — we can at least rejoice in the degradation of others.

Indeed, in one respect Marseilles was worse than anywhere I have seen in Britain: for I have never seen so much graffiti anywhere in the world. Every concrete surface — and, to adapt the words of a well-known song slightly, there is an awful lot of concrete in Marseilles — was covered in the handiwork of — well, of whom exactly?

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Eric Hester

October 25th, 2007 1:27pm

The great Theodore Dalrymple is right again - this time about modern architecture's promoting graffiti. Such architecture also leads to more crime, a fact known for some time but concealed.