Various French politicians are acknowledging the EU’s failure – “No one, with a minimum of clear-sightedness, could go down the corridors of Brussels without having the sincerity to recognize that it doesn’t work,” said former French minister for European affairs Laurent Wauquiez – but their own solutions seem unworkable:

For Montebourg, the European Union “is like a bankrupt company. If it is not restructured, it will die.” He suggests a return to real national borders, the reduction of the number of European bureaucrats by 97 percent, the ending of the tendency to regulate the cocoa content of chocolate or the market for goat’s cheese, the return of money-issuing powers to the various countries’ central banks (while keeping the Euro), and an alliance of the grasshoppers (France, Spain, and Italy) against the great wicked ant, Germany. What a wonderful way to promote peace and harmony between France and its neighbor across the Rhine!

Why do the most nationalist parties of small European nations want to remain in the EU? In City Journal, an explanation for this contradiction…

The Scots, once the canniest and most provident of people, now believe that improvidence is the greatest of political virtues, and that it is their inalienable right to run huge budgetary deficits for the sake of “social justice”—that is, for services paid for by someone else. Their detestation of George Osborne, the Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer, is quite out of proportion to his unsuccessful efforts to balance the budget; the Scots think that if they leave the United Kingdom and join Europe, they will be allowed to run any deficits they like.

Dalrymple unexpectedly enjoys a visit to Southsea:

We had a few hours to kill in Portsmouth and went to Southsea, where Conan Doyle was once a general practitioner. A former haven of petty bourgeois respectability, it is now seedy, its Victorian and Edwardian terraces divided into flats and bed-sits for students, recipients of social security and transients with jobs. I loved it.

For one thing there were scores of little shops, with no chain shops in sight; and you could park for free for two whole hours! There was a splendidly must second-hand bookshop specialising in pre-war crime novels, presided over a pre-internet owner who did not spend his time poring over a computer comparing prices. Southsea seemed delightfully unregulated; it as like going back several decades.

Mass riots accompanied England’s first match of the 2016 European Championships, held in the already crime-ridden city of Marseilles. Surely the rioters were only expressing existential displeasure at their poverty-stricken lives?

…no doubt in twenty or thirty years’ time a public inquiry, lasting several months if not years, could be mounted at public expense to the immense profit of lawyers, to prove that the fat and ugly sunburnt drunken English fans, suffering from terrible poverty and lacking in self-esteem, were provoked by the French police and were entirely free of any wrong-doing. Did not the French police have ample warning of what the English are like when they get drunk in a hot climate before a football match? Why were they not prepared for it so that instead they had to resort to untensils such as truncheons, tear gas and Alsatian dogs to quell the disturbances rather than prevented them by the mass deployment of counsellors, social workers, reiki therapists and the like?

Attending a Haydn concert, Dalrymple comes to the horrifying realization that he has brought his cell phone with him, and…insert ominous chords…he has left it on.

What to do about the infernal apparatus in my pocket? I did not want to take it out while the music was still playing, thereby drawing attention to myself as a member of the younger generation who could not concentrate without distracting himself for longer than a few minutes. (No one else in the audience, I felt sure, had even brought a phone with him.) The shame would have been terrible.

Libertarians and free marketers are relatively relentless in their criticisms of labor regulations as actually hurting the middle and lower classes, so it seems almost fitting that the owner of the Porsche burned by defenders of such regulations in Nantes, France turns out to have been a humble electrician.

“On Twitter I saw that it was called a boss’s car, though I am only a worker,” Pascal told Le Figaro. The article noted that support for him quickly sprung up on social media under the rubric, “I am Porsche.” What Pascal and his defenders said is interesting though not entirely reassuring.

His comments implied that if indeed he had been a boss, which is to say a plutocrat, then the burning of his car would or at any rate might have been justified. This, in turn, implies that there is no such thing as justified or justifiable wealth: only if we had all the same incomes would the ownership of such a fine car be morally acceptable. Moreover, what applies to the ownership of fine cars would presumably apply to the ownership of everything else.

A recent article in the Guardian on the Pacific island nation of Nauru causes Dalrymple to recall his visit there in the 1980s:

When I visited it all those years ago it had become immensely rich because of the phosphate rock that covered its surface…Not more than twenty years before, the inhabitants had lived by subsistence on fish and coconuts, but now they had one of the highest per-capita incomes in the world.

This sudden accession to wealth was not altogether a good thing for the local population (4,000 when I visited, 10,000 now). There was little for them to do, either in the way of work or entertainment. Practically everything—rent, telephone, electricity, water—was supplied to everyone free of charge. One of the major occupations of the population was eating, which it did on a vast scale. Many Nauruans became enormously fat…

This is all explained in greater (and very entertaining) detail in his second book, Fool or Physician: The Memoirs of a Sceptical Doctor.

Many of us like the idea of Harriet Tubman replacing Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill. But will it actually lead to any reduction in the rancor of our national disagreements over race?

This has been hailed as progress in the equalisation of American society, and is typical of the gestural politics of our time. Strangely enough, though, the gestures never seem to assuage resentment, but seem rather to accentuate and aggravate it. They are never enough and more are demanded. It is a bit like the Cultural Revolution, during which no confession was ever grovelling enough for the Red Guards and no admission ever of sufficient crimes.

Why bureaucracies and large charities are, almost by definition, unsentimental:

The welfare state in fact dissolves the very notion of desert, because there is no requirement that a beneficiary prove he deserves what he is legally entitled to. And where what is given is given as of right, not only will a recipient feel no gratitude for it, but it must be given without compassion—that is, without regard to any individual’s actual situation. In the welfare state, the notion of a specially deserving case is prohibited, for it implies a distinction between the deserving and the undeserving. In my career, I was many times startled by the unfeelingness of welfare bureaucrats in the face of the most appalling, and non-self-inflicted, suffering.