This week Theodore Dalrymple begins a new column — on globalisation, moronic technology and modernity in general.
Whenever I read the French newspapers I come to a strange conclusion: that I hate anti-globalisation as much as I hate globalisation.
What, then, do I stand for? I don’t know, really. But it seems to me clear that, just as the globalisers are the party of the triumphant corporatists, so the anti-globalisers are the party of the French train drivers who want to retire at the age of 50 at the expense of all the people unfortunate or foolish enough not to be French train drivers. I think I must be what a consultant doing his ward round called the illness that his lymphoma patient had — neither cancer nor leukaemia, but something in between the two.
Which brings us to the question of freedom of the labour market. Like everyone else, I like a lot of different restaurants, but I’m not sure I like schools in which children have no common language. Can we have the one without the other? Honesty compels one to admit that even now there are still not many Somali or Kosovar restaurants, though a friend of mine, a Welsh-speaker, was astonished not long ago to be addressed in Welsh by a Somali waiter in a Chinese restaurant in Llansomewhereorother.
Not long ago I took my French mother-in-law to Bath, that city whose council in the 1950s, ideological followers to a man of Le Corbusier and T. Dan Smith, wanted to demolish it in favour of something a little more modern, and we stayed in an elegant small hotel with a courtyard where we took our aperitifs.
The waiter who served them was a dark-skinned Dravidian Indian.
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