Dalrymple has said before that all policies in Britain today “have the opposite effect of what is intended”. At the Library of Law and Liberty, he writes of one such example: the destruction of the traditional British educational system that once served to elevate bright but poor students into the middle class. Because talent is not distributed evenly throughout a population, such a meritocratic system inevitably resulted in inequality, the fighting of which was deemed more important than maximizing the absolute level of achievement by all. But in dumbing down the system, it only destroyed opportunity for the poor:

The result: a class society came to look more like a caste society. If the teaching of grammar, for example, were abandoned on the theory that no form of language was superior to any other, an enormous additional advantage was now handed, almost ex officio, to middle class children for whom Standard English was their native tongue. In addition, the middle classes were able to avoid or evade prevailing low standards.