A LEGITIMATE CONTRARIAN

Lock up our tourists on arrival (Theodore Dalrymple, 03/08/2003, Daily Telegraph)

The British abroad, at least where they congregate in large numbers, are loud, arrogant, coarse, drunken, vulgar, intimidating and stupid. They are, not to put too fine a point upon it, the scum of the earth. Endowed by nature with more than their fair share of ugliness, and completely lacking in dignity or self-respect, let alone respect for others, they contrive to arouse a Swiftian disgust in any impartial observer. Alas, this preternatural unattractiveness is not confined to those who have crawled from the lower depths of society: middle-class youth now believes it is politically virtuous as well as psychologically healthy to behave in a totally uninhibited fashion. Compared with the British abroad, the Germans are gentlemen.

Can anything be done about it? Clearly not in Britain, for the British have lost completely the ability to govern themselves. They are incapable of recognising, let alone of solving, the most obvious of the problems that beset them. They cannot see themselves as other people see them: if they could, they wouldn't be as they are. The cause is lost in Britain.

It is therefore the foreigners who must save us from ourselves. It is the only viable solution. I therefore suggest that the Spanish, Greeks and Turks form a pact to arrest and place in preventive detention a half of British tourists immediately on arrival. The fact of being a British tourist at a resort popular with British tourists should be sufficient warrant. If more formal charges are needed, conspiracy to vomit in public or to use threatening behaviour towards waiters and others should suffice. After all, if they weren't planning to behave badly, they would [not] have come in the first place: for no young Briton could enjoy himself without making himself obnoxious to others. Nuisance is nine-tenths of their pleasure.

They need to adopt our Time Zone Rule and our State Border Rule. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 3, 2003 7:58 PM