The work of Theodore Dalrymple isn't political, it has no ulterior agenda - it's just pure, refreshing common sense. Turn to any page in this fine collection and you'll be reminded of Orwell's essays, in particular the desire to strip away political homilies and platitudes and record things exactly as they are.

And how bad can they be? One example which shows the establishment's reluctance to punish any behaviour, no matter how bad, is the case of Victoria "Anna" Climbie, a 8-year-old girl from the Ivory Coast brought to the UK by her great-aunt, used as a means to get benefits, then tortured in a horrific manner until her death. Social worker and police officers involved with Victoria's family were aware of the little girl's malnutrition, poor health and traumatized responses, yet at no point was she removed from the family to prevent further harm coming to her. Why not? As Dalrymple suggests, the failure to act may well be due to the race of Victoria's abuser (she was black):

"...the social worker and the policewoman believed Marie Therese Kouao because they wanted to avoid having to take action against a black woman, for fear of appearing too "white" in the eyes of other blacks. Thus, they resorted to the preposterous rationalizations that the Ivory Coast is an island in the West Indies and that West Indian children stand at attention when their mothers visit them in the hospital.

The white doctor who was taken in by Kouao's ridiculous story of scabies (a diagnosis contradicted both by a dermatologist at the time and at post-mortem) was afraid to appear too harsh in her assessment of Kouao, to avoid the accusation, so easily made in these times of easy outrage, of being a racist. Had she not affected to believe Kouao, she would have had to take action to protect Anna, at the risk of Kouao's accusing her of being racially motivated. And since (to quote another memo from my hospital) "racial harassment is that action which is perceived by the victim to be such," it seemed safer to leave Kouao to her coat hangers, hammers, boiling water, and so forth... In this situation, black and white are united by their own kind of folie à deux, the blacks fearing that all whites are racist, the whites fearing that all blacks will accuse them of racism.

And while we are locked in this folly, innocents like Anna Climbie die."

This is where Dalrymple shows his fearlessness, by pointing out the unspoken but very real problems still lurking in modern British society. How can child abuse be confronted if social workers are frightened of appearing "intolerant" of a different culture? How can crime be fought if the police refuse to tackle cases of theft on the grounds that they're harder to solve and make the figures look bad, or cases of violence which can be safely classified as "domestic"? Most importantly, how can a young man or woman from the working-class hope to aspire if they're constantly given the message that they're entitled to use initial material poverty as an excuse for every anti-social act they choose to commit in the future?

Dalrymple's voice of experience is sorely needed. He's the one who's worked in the NHS hospital and in the prison of a large city. It's not a pretty picture, but it's the truth. Listen. ( )