Peter Hitchens
Encyclopedia
Peter Jonathan Hitchens (born 28 October 1951) is an award-winning British columnist
and author, noted for his traditionalist conservative
stance. He has published five books, including The Abolition of Britain
, A Brief History of Crime
, The Broken Compass
and most recently The Rage Against God
. Hitchens writes for Britain's The Mail on Sunday
newspaper. A former resident correspondent in Moscow and Washington, Hitchens continues to work as an occasional foreign reporter, and appears frequently in the British broadcast media. He is the younger brother of the writer Christopher Hitchens
.
. He was educated at The Leys School
, which he left at 15, completing his secondary education at the Oxford College of Further Education before entering the University of York
, where he attained a BA in Politics, and is said to have replied 'I was too busy starting a revolution' when asked why he was late for a lecture. He married Eve Ross, the daughter of left-wing journalist David Ross, in 1983.
between 1977 and December 2000, initially as a reporter specialising in education and industrial and labour affairs, then as a political reporter, and subsequently as Deputy Political Editor
. While working for the newspaper in 1992 he broke the story concerning Jennifer's Ear
.
Leaving parliamentary journalism to cover defence and diplomatic affairs, he reported on the decline and ultimate collapse of the communist regimes in several Warsaw Pact
countries, an assignment which culminated in a stint as Moscow Correspondent, where he witnessed and reported on the final months of the Soviet Union
in 1990/91. He became the Daily Express Washington correspondent soon afterwards. Returning to London in 1995, he became a commentator and, eventually, a regular columnist. Hitchens continued to espouse a conservative viewpoint despite the publication's general move towards the political centre
in the mid-nineties, and its decision to support the Labour Party
under Tony Blair
in the months approaching the 1997 general election
. In December 2000, Hitchens announced his departure from the Daily Express in response to the title's acquisition by Richard Desmond
; Hitchens felt that his own moral and religious conservatism was incompatible with Desmond's publishing a string of sex magazines. He joined The Mail on Sunday, where he has a weekly column and weblog
in which he debates directly with readers and produces occasional reportage from the UK.
Hitchens has also written for The Spectator
, a conservative British magazine, and sporadically for more left-leaning publications such as The Guardian
, Prospect
, and the New Statesman
. He is also an occasional contributor to The American Conservative
magazine.
In 2007 and 2009 Hitchens was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize
in Political Journalism. He won the prize in 2010 for his foreign reporting.
in The Economist
as "a forceful, tenacious, eloquent and brave journalist. Readers with long memories may remember his extraordinary coverage of the revolution in Romania in 1989, or more recently his intrepid travels to places such as North Korea. He lambasts woolly thinking and crooked behaviour at home and abroad".
Hitchens first became a roving foreign reporter in the early 1990s while working for the Daily Express, when he reported from South Africa during the last days of apartheid, and from Somalia at the time of the US-led military intervention in the country. He continued his foreign reporting after joining The Mail on Sunday, for which he has written several foreign reports, including from Russia (including Moscow) and the US, Western
and Eastern Europe, many of the former Soviet Republics
(including a 2008 visit to Minsk
in Belarus, and a 2010 report from Sevastopol
in Ukraine described by Edward Lucas
in The Economist
as a "dismaying lapse"), Astana
in Kazakhstan, the Middle East (including Israel, Gaza
, a 2003 visit to Iraq in the wake of the 2003 invasion
, and an undercover report from Iran, which was described by Iain Dale
as "a quite brilliant account"), Africa (including a trip to the Congo in 2008, during which he narrowly avoided being lynched
), Cuba, Venezuela, China, Japan, North Korea, Burma and Istanbul. In 2009, Hitchens was shortlisted
for Foreign Reporter of the Year
in the British Press Awards
.
In 2010, Hitchens was awarded the Orwell Prize in recognition of his foreign reporting.
and Any Questions?
and has been a frequent guest on This Week
with Andrew Neil
, The Daily Politics
and The Big Questions
. In 2011, Hitchens wrote of his relationship with the broadcast media that "People like me – though still allowed to speak – are allowed on to mainstream national broadcasting only under strict conditions: that we are 'balanced' by at least three other people who disagree with us so that our views, actually held by millions, are made to look like an eccentric minority opinion".
Hitchens has authored and presented several documentaries on Channel 4
and BBC Four
, in which he examined Britain's entry into the Common Market
, discussed the erosion of civil liberties
in the UK, and critically examined the political achievements of Nelson Mandela
, and later the career of David Cameron
(see On the Conservative Party). In the late 1990s, he co-presented a programme on Talk Radio UK with Labour Party stalwarts Derek Draper
and Austin Mitchell
. Hitchens was offered the chance to present a programme on his own by the station's then boss, Kelvin MacKenzie
, but preferred and suggested an adversarial format with a left-wing co-presenter, believing this to be the best way of achieving broadcast fairness and balance.
put to Hitchens that the paper he worked for was "a bigoted, sexist, homophobic comic strip". Shortly after his appearance, Hitchens wrote "Is there any point in public debate in a society where hardly anyone has been taught how to think, while millions have been taught what to think? Sometimes I wonder".
Hitchens studied politics at the University of York
from 1970 to 1973. He was a Trotskyist
member of the International Socialists from 1969 to 1975, and joined the British Labour Party
in 1977, campaigning for Ken Livingstone's
unsuccessful candidature for Hampstead in the 1979 general election
. Hitchens left the Labour Party in 1983 when he became a political reporter at the Daily Express, thinking it wrong to carry a party card when directly reporting politics. The period also coincided with a culmination of growing personal disillusionment with the Labour movement. In 2010, Hitchens dismissed the "cruel revolutionary rubbish" he promoted as a Trotskyist as "poison".
He joined the Conservative Party
in 1997, but left in 2003. Hitchens challenged Michael Portillo
for the Conservative Party nomination in the Kensington and Chelsea
seat in 1999.
Hitchens believes that no party he could support will be created until the Conservative Party disintegrates, an event he first began calling for in 2006. From 2008, he began frequently advocating in his writing that what would facilitate such a collapse would be for the Conservative Party to lose the 2010 general election: "If they fail to win an election against this awful government, then it is my belief and hope that they will collapse. Many of their MPs and supporters will leave politics altogether, others will go to the Liberal Democrats or Labour, where they belong. Some will be interested in an entirely new party, which will not be the Conservatives and so will be able to appeal to the many patriotic, law-abiding people abandoned by Labour".
, James Silver describes Hitchens as "the Mail on Sunday's fulminator-in-chief" and his columns as "molten Old Testament
fury shot through with visceral wit". Hitchens has said of his reputation: "I know a lot of people consider me to be disreputable or foaming at the mouth, but you have to learn not to care, or at least not to mind. I don't like being called 'bonkers' and I think to some extent it demeans people who use phrases like that. But I take comfort from the fact that most totalitarian regimes
tend to classify their opponents as mentally disordered."
and an advocate of moral virtue
s founded on religious (particularly Christian) faith. He argues that these have been undermined and eroded by social liberals
, and by those he calls cultural Marxists
, since the 1960s—a theory he explores in his book The Abolition of Britain
.
In support of this thesis, Hitchens cites, among other things, what he describes as serial attacks on marriage by the State. He identifies these attacks as the introduction of no-fault divorce
, the removal or redistribution of what were formerly the exclusive privileges of marriage (and the resultant decline in status of the matrimonial state), the abolition of the Christian Sunday, and the growing economic and cultural pressure on wives and mothers to go out to work. He believes that without faith
and without strong families, the development of conscience
is stunted, private life
is diminished and the power of the state increased.
He believes that many of the measures which created the "permissive society
" were mistaken or excessive and need to be reexamined, and posits that homosexual
relationships should not be granted legal parity
with heterosexual marriage.
Hitchens believes that abortion
should be illegal at any stage of pregnancy.
Hitchens defends the use of the Church of England
's 1662 Book of Common Prayer
and the Authorised (or King James
) version of the Bible. Of the latter, he has written "it is not simply a translation, but a poetic translation, written to be read out loud to country people in large buildings without loudspeakers, to be remembered, to lodge in the mind and to disturb the temporal with the haunting sound of the eternal". Hitchens feels that both books are indispensable foundations of Anglicanism's "powerful combination of scripture, tradition and reason", and that they have been undermined as a result of "senior figures [within the Church of England] wishing to dump what they regard as the baggage of a penitential and gloomy past".
Michael Gove
, writing in The Times
, has asserted that, for Hitchens, what is more important than the split between the Left and the Right is "the deeper gulf between the restless progressive and the Christian pessimist", and in 2010 Hitchens himself wrote "in all my experience in life, I have seldom seen a more powerful argument for the fallen nature of man, and his inability to achieve perfection, than those countries in which man sets himself up to replace God with the State".
; the latter Hitchens has written critically of at considerable length, and has likened his short book The Labour Case (1959) to "a revolutionary manifesto".
Hitchens was critical of New Labour for what he called "attacks on the constitution", and described its Prime Minister
Tony Blair
's constitutional reforms
as a "slow-motion coup d'état". He has also asserted that the New Labour policy on immigration
was a "slow motion putsch". Hitchens believes that the most profound changes brought about by New Labour were designed to concentrate power in the hands of the executive
, to debauch civil service neutrality, and to turn Parliament into a mere tool of Downing Street
, with Blair himself as Chief Executive
. In Hitchens's view, the most significant single action in this programme was the passing of Orders in Council allowing Alastair Campbell
and Jonathan Powell
, both political appointees, to give orders to civil servants. This signalled, in his view, a general attempt to politicise Whitehall, which has continued ever since. Hitchens claims to have detected a parallel effort to appropriate some of the trappings of monarchy and to diminish the Crown's significance and standing, which he sees as embryonic presidentialism
.
Hitchens also often caricatured Blair as "Princess Tony". This was a reference to Blair's use of the expression "The People's Princess" to eulogise Princess Diana
after her death
. Hitchens has also been very critical of Blair's activity subsequent to his stepping down as Prime Minister. Hitchens described Blair's successor, Gordon Brown
, as a "boring, dismal Marxoid
", whose public performances were "horribly like Humphrey Bogart
's portrayal of the tormented Captain Queeg
in The Caine Mutiny
". However, Hitchens criticised what he saw as a "prejudiced, shallow" attempt to destroy Brown by the media after the latter became Prime Minister in 2007.
, frequently deriding the party's leadership as the "useless Tories". He has often been at odds with fellow conservatives, and has argued that the Conservative Party has a consistent record of ill-considered parliamentary acts and policies that cannot be dismissed as accidents or mistakes. He cites as examples: the reorganisation of local government in 1974
, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act of 1984
, the introduction of the GCSE
exam, the Criminal Justice Act
of 1991, the negotiation and signing of the Single European Act
and the signing of the Maastricht Treaty, the severe reduction in defence spending at the end of the Cold War, the privatisation
of the UK's railways
, the Iraq War and the final abandonment of all attempts to re-introduce grammar schools.
In March 2007 Hitchens wrote and presented a television programme for Channel 4
, Toff at the Top, in which he argued this view. Hitchens views Cameron's social, educational, and foreign policies as being indistinguishable from those of New Labour. Cameron, having declined previous interview requests from Hitchens, also declined to participate in the broadcast. Subsequent to the programme's airing the Conservative leader described Hitchens as "a maniac" at a public meeting in Oxfordshire
.
Hitchens has called for the establishment of a new political party in the UK, representing the traditionalist conservative strand of opinion that he espouses, and which would, in his own words, be "neither bigoted nor politically correct". He believes that such a movement cannot come into being until the Conservative Party collapses, arguing that many millions of Britons habitually vote for this and other political parties out of tribal loyalty, from which they cannot be detached by reasoned argument.
—as truly poor people across the world undoubtedly still do." He argues that the claim that absolute poverty continues to exist in Britain is "a lie the Left uses to destroy the middle class".
, which he sees as the best guarantee of liberty
. He believes that capital punishment is a key element of a strong justice system
.
He warns that the decline of conscience and morality
will inevitably lead to a strong state. He is especially critical of the use of "security
" as a pretext for diluting and eroding individual liberty. He argues that increased "security" destroys freedom without necessarily increasing safety, and says that there is no contradiction between maintaining liberty and protecting the realm
.
Hitchens is critical of moves towards authoritarian government and the erosion of civil liberties
, whether they come from the Right or the Left of the political spectrum. Accordingly, he has been highly critical of the British government's desire for identity cards
, its attempts to abolish jury trial
, to centralise the police, and its creation of a national law enforcement body in the form of the Serious Organised Crime Agency
(SOCA). He describes these developments as facets of governmental desire for permanent, irreversible constitutional revolution, and an attack on English liberty
in general.
Hitchens is opposed to the relaxation of laws
against the possession of illegal recreational drugs
. He argues that the law's active disapproval of drug taking is an essential counterweight to the "pro-drug propaganda" of popular culture
. He has said that attempts to combat drug use by restricting supply and persecuting drug dealers are invariably futile, unless possession and use
are punished as well. He counters claims that the "War on Drugs
" has failed by suggesting that the state has made no serious efforts to reduce or eliminate illegal drug consumption for many years. Hitchens has said that the prevailing approach, known as "Harm reduction
", is defeatist
and counter-productive. He was among the earliest commentators to argue that cannabis
presents a major mental health
risk to users.
and 2003 Iraq Wars on the grounds that neither was in the interests of either Britain or the United States. He has not, however, associated himself with the Left-dominated anti-war
campaigns, not least as he remains a strong supporter of the State of Israel. He also opposes the British military presence in Afghanistan
, arguing that it is destined to fail and has no achievable aim. Hitchens made a live appearance on BBC News in November 2009 during which he stated, in a response to Gordon Brown's announcement that more troops would be sent to Afghanistan, that a ridiculous position had been reached in which none of the front bench politicians of any of the three main British parties were prepared to say that the British mission to the country had failed.
On Europe, Hitchens argues that the United Kingdom should negotiate an amicable departure from the European Union, whose laws and traditions he regards as incompatible with the laws and liberties of England, and with the national independence
of the United Kingdom as a whole. He also believes that the interests of the European Union are often different from—and in many cases hostile to—those of the UK. Devolution
of governmental powers to Scotland
and Wales in 1998
was, for Hitchens, not a step towards true independence for those countries, but rather part of an EU-inspired strategy to dissolve the UK into statelets and regions, as a preliminary step to its complete absorption into a European superstate. For the same reason, he has opposed attempts to divide England into regions.
(after the invasion of Poland
) which had, in his opinion, disastrous consequences for Britain. A subsequent analysis that Hitchens made of this issue in one of his columns was described by Michael White
of The Guardian
as being "as melancholy a cry of pain about the modern world as I have recently encountered".
Hitchens has also written critically about the Allied policy of strategic bombing
of German cities during the Second World War, citing in particular the A.C. Grayling book Among the Dead Cities, which in Hitchens's view makes "the case against the bombing of German civilians unanswerable".
as a surrender
to the Provisional IRA
and a "collapse and a surrender to lawlessness". He believes that the best approach to solving Northern Ireland
's problems would have been the full integration of Northern Ireland into the United Kingdom, arguing that creating a Northern Irish Parliament at Stormont
impeded this. He believes that the achievements of direct rule
over Northern Ireland, not least in removing discrimination
against Roman Catholics, have been greatly underestimated. He maintains that Northern Ireland is now only a provisional part of the UK since, under the terms of the agreement, it can be transferred to Irish sovereignty
by a single, irreversible referendum.
, the Plowden
reforms of primary schooling and modern child-centred teaching methods
, seeing them as egalitarian
political projects with no educational justification and many educational disadvantages. He bases his case on John Marks's The Betrayed Generation, (Centre for Policy Studies
2001), the Engineering Council
's survey of changing undergraduate maths skills in 2000, and Durham University
's unvarying annual general ability test, and has also cited a 2004 article by Jenni Russell
in The Guardian which draws attention to this issue. Hitchens has also contended that comprehensive education has brought about a general dilution of education and of examination standards, and explores in detail the history and consequences of this development in Chapter Eleven of The Broken Compass—'The Fall of the Meritocracy'. He believes a further consequence of egalitarian schooling is serious damage to the national culture, and fears that lowered standards in technical, scientific and mathematical education, combined with poor teaching of English and the resulting decline in literacy, threaten to leave Britain lagging behind emerging economic powers
such as China and India.
As a means of improving standards in the UK, as well as increasing social mobility
, Hitchens supports a return to the academically selective grammar school
system which has been gradually dismantled by successive British governments since the issuing of Circular 10/65
by Anthony Crosland
in 1965 (though Hitchens prefers the German system of selection to the Eleven Plus examination).
As a supporter of orthodox
Christian morality, Hitchens opposes sex education
in schools. He argues that the general introduction of sex education in schools has incontrovertibly been accompanied by an increase in sexual activity among the young, with a resultant rise in pregnancies, abortions and instances of sexually transmitted disease
s—the very things that sex education is ostensibly intended to prevent. He argues that its real purpose is the undermining of Christian sexual morality, based on stable monogamous
marriage.
polemicist Christopher Hitchens
. Christopher has said that the main difference between the two is their attitudes towards belief in the existence of God. Peter himself has said, "We inhabit separate worlds," and "We're not close. We're different people, we have different lives, we have entirely different pleasures, we live in different continents. If we weren't brothers we wouldn't know each other."
The brothers had a protracted falling out after Peter wrote an article in 2001 in The Spectator
alleging that his brother had said he "didn't care if the Red Army
watered its horses at Hendon
"—a claim denied by Christopher. After the birth of Peter's third child, the two brothers reconciled, although Christopher said "There is no longer any official froideur, but there's no official—what's the word?—chaleur, either."
Peter's review of God Is Not Great led to public argument between the brothers but not to any renewed estrangement. In the review, Peter wrote that his brother’s book was misguided, "mostly in the way that it blames faith for so many bad things and gives it no credit for any of the good it may have done. I think it misunderstands religious people and their aims and desires. And I think it asserts a number of things as true and obvious that are nothing of the sort".
In June 2007, the brothers appeared as panellists on BBC
TV's Question Time
, where they clashed over a number of issues, most notably the intervention in Afghanistan.
In April 2008, on US soil, they debated the invasion of Iraq
and the existence of God
, respectively. Peter Hitchens indicated that the occasion would mark the last time he would participate in such events with his brother, "because of the danger that they might turn into gladiatorial combat in which nothing would be resolved and enmity could be created."
However, in October 2010 at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, the brothers again had a debate—described as a conversation with the press—over the nature of God in civilisation. The two clashed over the main issues, with Peter lamenting the decline in civility to levels "not far from the Stone Age." However, when the subject of Christopher's illness in concert with religion was brought up, Peter defended his brother's choice of beliefs, stating that he thought "it would be quite grotesque to imagine someone would have to get cancer to see the merits of religion."
(1999, ISBN 978-0-7043-8140-7) and A Brief History of Crime
(2003, ISBN 978-1-84354-148-6), both critical of changes in British society since the 1960s. A compendium of his Daily Express columns was published under the title Monday Morning Blues
in 2000.
An updated edition of A Brief History of Crime (2003 ISBN 978-1-84354-148-6), re-titled The Abolition of Liberty: The Decline of Order and Justice in England (ISBN 978-1-84354-149-3) and featuring a new chapter on identity cards
, was published in April 2004. The Broken Compass: How British Politics Lost its Way
(Continuum ISBN 978-1-84706-405-9), was published in May 2009, and The Rage Against God
(Continuum ISBN 978-1-4411-0572-1), was published in Britain in March 2010, and was due to be published in the US (Zondervan ISBN 978-0-310-32031-9) in May 2010.
In January 2011 Hitchens announced he was working on a new book entitled The War We Never Fought, about what he sees as the non-existent war on drugs
.
Book Reviews
TV Reviews
Reviews of Toff at the Top in:
Video
Debates
Sermon
Columnist
A columnist is a journalist who writes for publication in a series, creating an article that usually offers commentary and opinions. Columns appear in newspapers, magazines and other publications, including blogs....
and author, noted for his traditionalist conservative
Traditionalist Conservatism
Traditionalist conservatism, also known as "traditional conservatism," "traditionalism," "Burkean conservatism", "classical conservatism" and , "Toryism", describes a political philosophy emphasizing the need for the principles of natural law and transcendent moral order, tradition, hierarchy and...
stance. He has published five books, including The Abolition of Britain
The Abolition of Britain
A chapter in The Abolition of Britain on the contrast between the public health policies on lung cancer and the public health policies on AIDS was left out of the first edition of the book, after Hitchens was advised that airing thoughts critical of homosexual acts would bring such criticism on it...
, A Brief History of Crime
A Brief History of Crime
A Brief History of Crime is the third book by conservative author and journalist Peter Hitchens published in 2003 and in 2004 under the title The Abolition of Liberty for the paperback edition.-Themes:...
, The Broken Compass
The Broken Compass: How British Politics Lost its Way
The Broken Compass: How British Politics Lost its Way is the fourth book from English traditionalist conservative writer Peter Hitchens...
and most recently The Rage Against God
The Rage Against God
The Rage Against God is the fifth book by the traditionalist conservative writer Peter Hitchens, originally published in 2010...
. Hitchens writes for Britain's The Mail on Sunday
The Mail on Sunday
The Mail on Sunday is a British conservative newspaper, currently published in a tabloid format. First published in 1982 by Lord Rothermere, it became Britain's biggest-selling Sunday newspaper following the closing of The News of the World in July 2011...
newspaper. A former resident correspondent in Moscow and Washington, Hitchens continues to work as an occasional foreign reporter, and appears frequently in the British broadcast media. He is the younger brother of the writer Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Eric Hitchens is an Anglo-American author and journalist whose books, essays, and journalistic career span more than four decades. He has been a columnist and literary critic at The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Slate, World Affairs, The Nation, Free Inquiry, and became a media fellow at the...
.
Early life
Peter Hitchens was born in 1951 in Malta, where his father was stationed with the Royal NavyRoyal Navy
The Royal Navy is the naval warfare service branch of the British Armed Forces. Founded in the 16th century, it is the oldest service branch and is known as the Senior Service...
. He was educated at The Leys School
The Leys School
The Leys School is a co-educational Independent school, located in Cambridge, England, and is a day and boarding school for about 550 pupils aged between 11 and 18 years...
, which he left at 15, completing his secondary education at the Oxford College of Further Education before entering the University of York
University of York
The University of York , is an academic institution located in the city of York, England. Established in 1963, the campus university has expanded to more than thirty departments and centres, covering a wide range of subjects...
, where he attained a BA in Politics, and is said to have replied 'I was too busy starting a revolution' when asked why he was late for a lecture. He married Eve Ross, the daughter of left-wing journalist David Ross, in 1983.
Career in journalism
Hitchens worked for the Daily ExpressDaily Express
The Daily Express switched from broadsheet to tabloid in 1977 and was bought by the construction company Trafalgar House in the same year. Its publishing company, Beaverbrook Newspapers, was renamed Express Newspapers...
between 1977 and December 2000, initially as a reporter specialising in education and industrial and labour affairs, then as a political reporter, and subsequently as Deputy Political Editor
Political Editor
The political editor of a newspaper or broadcast media is the senior political reporter who covers politics and related matters for the newspaper or station...
. While working for the newspaper in 1992 he broke the story concerning Jennifer's Ear
War of Jennifer's Ear
The War of Jennifer's Ear is the name given to a 1992 controversy in United Kingdom politics, between the opposition Labour Party and the governing Conservative Party...
.
Leaving parliamentary journalism to cover defence and diplomatic affairs, he reported on the decline and ultimate collapse of the communist regimes in several Warsaw Pact
Warsaw Pact
The Warsaw Treaty Organization of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance , or more commonly referred to as the Warsaw Pact, was a mutual defense treaty subscribed to by eight communist states in Eastern Europe...
countries, an assignment which culminated in a stint as Moscow Correspondent, where he witnessed and reported on the final months of the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
in 1990/91. He became the Daily Express Washington correspondent soon afterwards. Returning to London in 1995, he became a commentator and, eventually, a regular columnist. Hitchens continued to espouse a conservative viewpoint despite the publication's general move towards the political centre
Centrism
In politics, centrism is the ideal or the practice of promoting policies that lie different from the standard political left and political right. Most commonly, this is visualized as part of the one-dimensional political spectrum of left-right politics, with centrism landing in the middle between...
in the mid-nineties, and its decision to support the Labour Party
Labour Party (UK)
The Labour Party is a centre-left democratic socialist party in the United Kingdom. It surpassed the Liberal Party in general elections during the early 1920s, forming minority governments under Ramsay MacDonald in 1924 and 1929-1931. The party was in a wartime coalition from 1940 to 1945, after...
under Tony Blair
Tony Blair
Anthony Charles Lynton Blair is a former British Labour Party politician who served as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2 May 1997 to 27 June 2007. He was the Member of Parliament for Sedgefield from 1983 to 2007 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1994 to 2007...
in the months approaching the 1997 general election
United Kingdom general election, 1997
The United Kingdom general election, 1997 was held on 1 May 1997, more than five years after the previous election on 9 April 1992, to elect 659 members to the British House of Commons. The Labour Party ended its 18 years in opposition under the leadership of Tony Blair, and won the general...
. In December 2000, Hitchens announced his departure from the Daily Express in response to the title's acquisition by Richard Desmond
Richard Desmond
Richard Clive Desmond is an English publisher and businessman. He is the owner of Express Newspapers and founder in 1974 of Northern & Shell, which publishes various celebrity magazines, such as OK! and New!, and British national newspapers Daily Star and Daily Express...
; Hitchens felt that his own moral and religious conservatism was incompatible with Desmond's publishing a string of sex magazines. He joined The Mail on Sunday, where he has a weekly column and weblog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
in which he debates directly with readers and produces occasional reportage from the UK.
Hitchens has also written for The Spectator
The Spectator
The Spectator is a weekly British magazine first published on 6 July 1828. It is currently owned by David and Frederick Barclay, who also owns The Daily Telegraph. Its principal subject areas are politics and culture...
, a conservative British magazine, and sporadically for more left-leaning publications such as The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
, Prospect
Prospect (magazine)
Prospect is a monthly British general interest magazine, specialising in politics and current affairs. Frequent topics include British, European, and US politics, social issues, art, literature, cinema, science, the media, history, philosophy, and psychology...
, and the New Statesman
New Statesman
New Statesman is a British centre-left political and cultural magazine published weekly in London. Founded in 1913, and connected with leading members of the Fabian Society, the magazine reached a circulation peak in the late 1960s....
. He is also an occasional contributor to The American Conservative
The American Conservative
The American Conservative is a monthly U.S. opinion magazine published by Ron Unz. Its first editor was Scott McConnell, his successors being Kara Hopkins and the present incumbent, Daniel McCarthy....
magazine.
In 2007 and 2009 Hitchens was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize
Orwell Prize
The Orwell Prize used to be regarded as the pre-eminent British prize for political writing.Three prizes are awarded each year: one for a book, one for journalism and another for blogging...
in Political Journalism. He won the prize in 2010 for his foreign reporting.
Foreign reporting
In 2010 Hitchens was described by Edward LucasEdward Lucas (journalist)
Edward Lucas is a British journalist.Lucas is International Editor of The Economist, the London-based global newsweekly and also oversees the paper’s political coverage of Central and Eastern Europe. He has been covering eastern Europe since 1986, and was the Moscow bureau chief from 1998-2002,...
in The Economist
The Economist
The Economist is an English-language weekly news and international affairs publication owned by The Economist Newspaper Ltd. and edited in offices in the City of Westminster, London, England. Continuous publication began under founder James Wilson in September 1843...
as "a forceful, tenacious, eloquent and brave journalist. Readers with long memories may remember his extraordinary coverage of the revolution in Romania in 1989, or more recently his intrepid travels to places such as North Korea. He lambasts woolly thinking and crooked behaviour at home and abroad".
Hitchens first became a roving foreign reporter in the early 1990s while working for the Daily Express, when he reported from South Africa during the last days of apartheid, and from Somalia at the time of the US-led military intervention in the country. He continued his foreign reporting after joining The Mail on Sunday, for which he has written several foreign reports, including from Russia (including Moscow) and the US, Western
Western Europe
Western Europe is a loose term for the collection of countries in the western most region of the European continents, though this definition is context-dependent and carries cultural and political connotations. One definition describes Western Europe as a geographic entity—the region lying in the...
and Eastern Europe, many of the former Soviet Republics
Republics of the Soviet Union
The Republics of the Soviet Union or the Union Republics of the Soviet Union were ethnically-based administrative units that were subordinated directly to the Government of the Soviet Union...
(including a 2008 visit to Minsk
Minsk
- Ecological situation :The ecological situation is monitored by Republican Center of Radioactive and Environmental Control .During 2003–2008 the overall weight of contaminants increased from 186,000 to 247,400 tons. The change of gas as industrial fuel to mazut for financial reasons has worsened...
in Belarus, and a 2010 report from Sevastopol
Sevastopol
Sevastopol is a city on rights of administrative division of Ukraine, located on the Black Sea coast of the Crimea peninsula. It has a population of 342,451 . Sevastopol is the second largest port in Ukraine, after the Port of Odessa....
in Ukraine described by Edward Lucas
Edward Lucas (journalist)
Edward Lucas is a British journalist.Lucas is International Editor of The Economist, the London-based global newsweekly and also oversees the paper’s political coverage of Central and Eastern Europe. He has been covering eastern Europe since 1986, and was the Moscow bureau chief from 1998-2002,...
in The Economist
The Economist
The Economist is an English-language weekly news and international affairs publication owned by The Economist Newspaper Ltd. and edited in offices in the City of Westminster, London, England. Continuous publication began under founder James Wilson in September 1843...
as a "dismaying lapse"), Astana
Astana
Astana , formerly known as Akmola , Tselinograd and Akmolinsk , is the capital and second largest city of Kazakhstan, with an officially estimated population of 708,794 as of 1 August 2010...
in Kazakhstan, the Middle East (including Israel, Gaza
Gaza
Gaza , also referred to as Gaza City, is a Palestinian city in the Gaza Strip, with a population of about 450,000, making it the largest city in the Palestinian territories.Inhabited since at least the 15th century BC,...
, a 2003 visit to Iraq in the wake of the 2003 invasion
2003 invasion of Iraq
The 2003 invasion of Iraq , was the start of the conflict known as the Iraq War, or Operation Iraqi Freedom, in which a combined force of troops from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Poland invaded Iraq and toppled the regime of Saddam Hussein in 21 days of major combat operations...
, and an undercover report from Iran, which was described by Iain Dale
Iain Dale
Iain Campbell Dale is best known for his conservative-minded British political blog Iain Dale's Diary and for his frequent appearances on UK news channels as a political commentator. He is also a publisher, broadcaster and former Conservative Party politician...
as "a quite brilliant account"), Africa (including a trip to the Congo in 2008, during which he narrowly avoided being lynched
Lynching
Lynching is an extrajudicial execution carried out by a mob, often by hanging, but also by burning at the stake or shooting, in order to punish an alleged transgressor, or to intimidate, control, or otherwise manipulate a population of people. It is related to other means of social control that...
), Cuba, Venezuela, China, Japan, North Korea, Burma and Istanbul. In 2009, Hitchens was shortlisted
Short list
A short list or shortlist is a list of candidates for a job, prize, award, political position, etc., that has been reduced from a longer list of candidates . The length of short lists varies according to the context.-U.S...
for Foreign Reporter of the Year
British International Journalist of the Year award
The International Journalist of the Year award is one of the honours given annually by the British Press Awards. The journalist to have won the award most often is Robert Fisk....
in the British Press Awards
British Press Awards
The British Press Awards is an annual ceremony that celebrates the best of British journalism. Established in the 1970s, honours are voted on by a panel of journalists and newspaper executives...
.
In 2010, Hitchens was awarded the Orwell Prize in recognition of his foreign reporting.
Appearances in the British broadcast media
Hitchens speaks frequently on British radio and television, often debating (typically left-wing) opponents on a variety of social and political topics. He is a regular panellist on Question TimeQuestion Time (TV series)
Question Time is a topical debate BBC television programme in the United Kingdom, based on Any Questions?. The show typically features politicians from at least the three major political parties as well as other public figures who answer questions put to them by the audience...
and Any Questions?
Any Questions?
Any Questions? is a topical debate radio programme in the United Kingdom.-Format:It is broadcast by BBC Radio 4 on Friday evenings and repeated on Saturday afternoons, when it is followed by a phone-in response programme, Any Answers?, previously a postal response slot...
and has been a frequent guest on This Week
This Week (BBC One TV series)
This Week is a current affairs and politics TV programme in the United Kingdom on the BBC, screened on Thursday evenings, hosted by former Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil alongside former Conservative Member of Parliament and Minister Michael Portillo, and a left leaning guest panellist on...
with Andrew Neil
Andrew Neil
Andrew Ferguson Neil is a Scottish journalist and broadcaster.He currently works for the BBC, presenting the live political programmes The Daily Politics and This Week...
, The Daily Politics
The Daily Politics
The Daily Politics is a British television show launched by the BBC in 2003. Presented by Andrew Neil and Jo Coburn, the programme takes an in-depth and sometimes irreverent look at the daily goings on in Westminster and other areas across Britain and the world, and includes interviews with leading...
and The Big Questions
The Big Questions
The Big Questions is a faith and ethics television programme usually presented by Nicky Campbell. It is currently broadcast live on BBC One between 10:00am and 11:00am on Sunday, replacing Heaven & Earth as the BBC's religious discussion programme....
. In 2011, Hitchens wrote of his relationship with the broadcast media that "People like me – though still allowed to speak – are allowed on to mainstream national broadcasting only under strict conditions: that we are 'balanced' by at least three other people who disagree with us so that our views, actually held by millions, are made to look like an eccentric minority opinion".
Hitchens has authored and presented several documentaries on Channel 4
Channel 4
Channel 4 is a British public-service television broadcaster which began working on 2 November 1982. Although largely commercially self-funded, it is ultimately publicly owned; originally a subsidiary of the Independent Broadcasting Authority , the station is now owned and operated by the Channel...
and BBC Four
BBC Four
BBC Four is a British television network operated by the British Broadcasting Corporation and available to digital television viewers on Freeview, IPTV, satellite and cable....
, in which he examined Britain's entry into the Common Market
European Economic Community
The European Economic Community The European Economic Community (EEC) The European Economic Community (EEC) (also known as the Common Market in the English-speaking world, renamed the European Community (EC) in 1993The information in this article primarily covers the EEC's time as an independent...
, discussed the erosion of civil liberties
Civil liberties
Civil liberties are rights and freedoms that provide an individual specific rights such as the freedom from slavery and forced labour, freedom from torture and death, the right to liberty and security, right to a fair trial, the right to defend one's self, the right to own and bear arms, the right...
in the UK, and critically examined the political achievements of Nelson Mandela
Nelson Mandela
Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela served as President of South Africa from 1994 to 1999, and was the first South African president to be elected in a fully representative democratic election. Before his presidency, Mandela was an anti-apartheid activist, and the leader of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing...
, and later the career of David Cameron
David Cameron
David William Donald Cameron is the current Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, First Lord of the Treasury, Minister for the Civil Service and Leader of the Conservative Party. Cameron represents Witney as its Member of Parliament ....
(see On the Conservative Party). In the late 1990s, he co-presented a programme on Talk Radio UK with Labour Party stalwarts Derek Draper
Derek Draper
Derek William Draper is a former lobbyist, former editor of the LabourList website, and psychotherapist. As a political advisor during the 1990s he became widely known for his role in two political scandals, "Lobbygate" and "Smeargate".-Biography:Draper was educated at Southlands High School in...
and Austin Mitchell
Austin Mitchell
Austin Vernon Mitchell is a British Labour Party politician who has been the Member of Parliament for Great Grimsby since a 1977 by-election.-Education and early life:...
. Hitchens was offered the chance to present a programme on his own by the station's then boss, Kelvin MacKenzie
Kelvin MacKenzie
Kelvin Calder MacKenzie is an English media executive and former newspaper editor. He is best known for being editor of The Sun newspaper between 1981 and 1994, an era in which the paper was established as Britain's best selling newspaper.- Biography :MacKenzie was educated at Alleyn's School...
, but preferred and suggested an adversarial format with a left-wing co-presenter, believing this to be the best way of achieving broadcast fairness and balance.
June 2011 Question Time appearance
In June 2011, Hitchens was booed and heckled at length by a Question Time audience for expressing a socially conservative position on the sexualisation of children, and was the only panel member to adopt this position. During the same programme, chairman and presenter David DimblebyDavid Dimbleby
David Dimbleby is a British BBC TV commentator and a presenter of current affairs and political programmes, most notably the BBC's flagship political show Question Time, and more recently, art, architectural history and history series...
put to Hitchens that the paper he worked for was "a bigoted, sexist, homophobic comic strip". Shortly after his appearance, Hitchens wrote "Is there any point in public debate in a society where hardly anyone has been taught how to think, while millions have been taught what to think? Sometimes I wonder".
Personal political history
| "Against the Labour Party, which I knew to be penetrated by all manner of Marxists, and soaked in the ideas of the revolutionaries, it was increasingly necessary to support the Tories. This was partly because of the strikers' lies, but much more because of Poland and Czechoslovakia. On the Cold War, I knew she [Thatcher] was right and the Left were wrong. I found my teenage belief in nuclear disarmament the most embarrassing of all, and made it my personal business to confront the silly revived Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament is an anti-nuclear organisation that advocates unilateral nuclear disarmament by the United Kingdom, international nuclear disarmament and tighter international arms regulation through agreements such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty... (CND), attending their showings of Peter Watkins's propaganda film The War Game and pointing out that the horrors portrayed in it were the result of Soviet nuclear bombs – a fact that did not seem to have crossed their minds". |
| — Hitchens recounting in his book The Broken Compass The Broken Compass: How British Politics Lost its Way The Broken Compass: How British Politics Lost its Way is the fourth book from English traditionalist conservative writer Peter Hitchens... a stage he reached in the early 1980s in his own political philosophy. |
Hitchens studied politics at the University of York
University of York
The University of York , is an academic institution located in the city of York, England. Established in 1963, the campus university has expanded to more than thirty departments and centres, covering a wide range of subjects...
from 1970 to 1973. He was a Trotskyist
Trotskyism
Trotskyism is the theory of Marxism as advocated by Leon Trotsky. Trotsky considered himself an orthodox Marxist and Bolshevik-Leninist, arguing for the establishment of a vanguard party of the working-class...
member of the International Socialists from 1969 to 1975, and joined the British Labour Party
Labour Party (UK)
The Labour Party is a centre-left democratic socialist party in the United Kingdom. It surpassed the Liberal Party in general elections during the early 1920s, forming minority governments under Ramsay MacDonald in 1924 and 1929-1931. The party was in a wartime coalition from 1940 to 1945, after...
in 1977, campaigning for Ken Livingstone's
Ken Livingstone
Kenneth Robert "Ken" Livingstone is an English politician who is currently a member of the centrist to centre-left Labour Party...
unsuccessful candidature for Hampstead in the 1979 general election
United Kingdom general election, 1979
The United Kingdom general election of 1979 was held on 3 May 1979 to elect 635 members to the British House of Commons. The Conservative Party, led by Margaret Thatcher ousted the incumbent Labour government of James Callaghan with a parliamentary majority of 43 seats...
. Hitchens left the Labour Party in 1983 when he became a political reporter at the Daily Express, thinking it wrong to carry a party card when directly reporting politics. The period also coincided with a culmination of growing personal disillusionment with the Labour movement. In 2010, Hitchens dismissed the "cruel revolutionary rubbish" he promoted as a Trotskyist as "poison".
He joined the Conservative Party
Conservative Party (UK)
The Conservative Party, formally the Conservative and Unionist Party, is a centre-right political party in the United Kingdom that adheres to the philosophies of conservatism and British unionism. It is the largest political party in the UK, and is currently the largest single party in the House...
in 1997, but left in 2003. Hitchens challenged Michael Portillo
Michael Portillo
Michael Denzil Xavier Portillo is a British journalist, broadcaster, and former Conservative Party politician and Cabinet Minister...
for the Conservative Party nomination in the Kensington and Chelsea
Kensington and Chelsea (UK Parliament constituency)
Kensington and Chelsea was a constituency represented in the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It was one of the safest Conservative seats in the United Kingdom, and since its creation in 1997 became a prestigious seat, with MP Alan Clark, the former Defence Secretary...
seat in 1999.
Hitchens believes that no party he could support will be created until the Conservative Party disintegrates, an event he first began calling for in 2006. From 2008, he began frequently advocating in his writing that what would facilitate such a collapse would be for the Conservative Party to lose the 2010 general election: "If they fail to win an election against this awful government, then it is my belief and hope that they will collapse. Many of their MPs and supporters will leave politics altogether, others will go to the Liberal Democrats or Labour, where they belong. Some will be interested in an entirely new party, which will not be the Conservatives and so will be able to appeal to the many patriotic, law-abiding people abandoned by Labour".
Public image
In The GuardianThe Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
, James Silver describes Hitchens as "the Mail on Sunday's fulminator-in-chief" and his columns as "molten Old Testament
Old Testament
The Old Testament, of which Christians hold different views, is a Christian term for the religious writings of ancient Israel held sacred and inspired by Christians which overlaps with the 24-book canon of the Masoretic Text of Judaism...
fury shot through with visceral wit". Hitchens has said of his reputation: "I know a lot of people consider me to be disreputable or foaming at the mouth, but you have to learn not to care, or at least not to mind. I don't like being called 'bonkers' and I think to some extent it demeans people who use phrases like that. But I take comfort from the fact that most totalitarian regimes
Totalitarianism
Totalitarianism is a political system where the state recognizes no limits to its authority and strives to regulate every aspect of public and private life wherever feasible...
tend to classify their opponents as mentally disordered."
Morality and religion
Hitchens, a former atheist, is a confirmed and communicant member of the Church of EnglandChurch of England
The Church of England is the officially established Christian church in England and the Mother Church of the worldwide Anglican Communion. The church considers itself within the tradition of Western Christianity and dates its formal establishment principally to the mission to England by St...
and an advocate of moral virtue
Virtue
Virtue is moral excellence. A virtue is a positive trait or quality subjectively deemed to be morally excellent and thus is valued as a foundation of principle and good moral being....
s founded on religious (particularly Christian) faith. He argues that these have been undermined and eroded by social liberals
Social liberalism
Social liberalism is the belief that liberalism should include social justice. It differs from classical liberalism in that it believes the legitimate role of the state includes addressing economic and social issues such as unemployment, health care, and education while simultaneously expanding...
, and by those he calls cultural Marxists
Cultural Marxism
Cultural Marxism is a term referring to a group of Marxists who have sought to apply critical theory to matters of family composition, gender, race, and cultural identity within Western society.-Explanation of the "Cultural Marxism" theory:...
, since the 1960s—a theory he explores in his book The Abolition of Britain
The Abolition of Britain
A chapter in The Abolition of Britain on the contrast between the public health policies on lung cancer and the public health policies on AIDS was left out of the first edition of the book, after Hitchens was advised that airing thoughts critical of homosexual acts would bring such criticism on it...
.
In support of this thesis, Hitchens cites, among other things, what he describes as serial attacks on marriage by the State. He identifies these attacks as the introduction of no-fault divorce
No-fault divorce
No-fault divorce is a divorce in which the dissolution of a marriage requires neither a showing of wrong-doing of either party nor any evidentiary proceedings at all...
, the removal or redistribution of what were formerly the exclusive privileges of marriage (and the resultant decline in status of the matrimonial state), the abolition of the Christian Sunday, and the growing economic and cultural pressure on wives and mothers to go out to work. He believes that without faith
Faith in Christianity
Faith, in Christianity, has been most commonly defined by the biblical formulation in the Letter to the Hebrews as "'the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen". Most of the definitions in the history of Christian theology have followed this biblical formulation...
and without strong families, the development of conscience
Conscience
Conscience is an aptitude, faculty, intuition or judgment of the intellect that distinguishes right from wrong. Moral judgement may derive from values or norms...
is stunted, private life
Private sphere
The private sphere is the complement or opposite to the public sphere. The private sphere is a certain sector of societal life in which an individual enjoys a degree of authority, unhampered by interventions from governmental or other institutions. Examples of the private sphere are family and home...
is diminished and the power of the state increased.
He believes that many of the measures which created the "permissive society
Permissive society
The permissive society is a society where social norms are becoming increasingly liberal. This usually accompanies a change in what is considered deviant. While typically preserving the rule "do not harm others", a permissive society would have few other moral codes...
" were mistaken or excessive and need to be reexamined, and posits that homosexual
Homosexuality
Homosexuality is romantic or sexual attraction or behavior between members of the same sex or gender. As a sexual orientation, homosexuality refers to "an enduring pattern of or disposition to experience sexual, affectional, or romantic attractions" primarily or exclusively to people of the same...
relationships should not be granted legal parity
Same-sex marriage
Same-sex marriage is marriage between two persons of the same biological sex or social gender. Supporters of legal recognition for same-sex marriage typically refer to such recognition as marriage equality....
with heterosexual marriage.
Hitchens believes that abortion
Abortion
Abortion is defined as the termination of pregnancy by the removal or expulsion from the uterus of a fetus or embryo prior to viability. An abortion can occur spontaneously, in which case it is usually called a miscarriage, or it can be purposely induced...
should be illegal at any stage of pregnancy.
| "As it sought to be relevant and forward-looking, the Church of England found its Bible, its Prayer Book and its buildings something of an embarrassment. All spoke a wholly different language, not just in vocabulary, grammar, and cadence – but in thought and in the goals and rules they regarded as important. The language of both Prayer Book and Bible had been deliberately archaic when they were first written. Like most religions, the sixteenth-century Anglicans recognised that the ordinary spoken tongue of street, shop and kitchen were not suited to dealing with the eternal. Apart from anything else, much of it designed to be sung rather than said, and it was allied from the start with some of the most beautiful music written in Britain". |
| — From Chapter Four of The Abolition of Britain The Abolition of Britain A chapter in The Abolition of Britain on the contrast between the public health policies on lung cancer and the public health policies on AIDS was left out of the first edition of the book, after Hitchens was advised that airing thoughts critical of homosexual acts would bring such criticism on it... , 'Hell Freezes Over' . |
Church of England
The Church of England is the officially established Christian church in England and the Mother Church of the worldwide Anglican Communion. The church considers itself within the tradition of Western Christianity and dates its formal establishment principally to the mission to England by St...
's 1662 Book of Common Prayer
Book of Common Prayer
The Book of Common Prayer is the short title of a number of related prayer books used in the Anglican Communion, as well as by the Continuing Anglican, "Anglican realignment" and other Anglican churches. The original book, published in 1549 , in the reign of Edward VI, was a product of the English...
and the Authorised (or King James
King James Version of the Bible
The Authorized Version, commonly known as the King James Version, King James Bible or KJV, is an English translation of the Christian Bible by the Church of England begun in 1604 and completed in 1611...
) version of the Bible. Of the latter, he has written "it is not simply a translation, but a poetic translation, written to be read out loud to country people in large buildings without loudspeakers, to be remembered, to lodge in the mind and to disturb the temporal with the haunting sound of the eternal". Hitchens feels that both books are indispensable foundations of Anglicanism's "powerful combination of scripture, tradition and reason", and that they have been undermined as a result of "senior figures [within the Church of England] wishing to dump what they regard as the baggage of a penitential and gloomy past".
Michael Gove
Michael Gove
Michael Andrew Gove, MP is a British politician, who currently serves as the Secretary of State for Education and as the Conservative Party Member of Parliament for the Surrey Heath constituency. He is also a published author and former journalist.Born in Edinburgh, Gove was raised in Aberdeen...
, writing in The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
, has asserted that, for Hitchens, what is more important than the split between the Left and the Right is "the deeper gulf between the restless progressive and the Christian pessimist", and in 2010 Hitchens himself wrote "in all my experience in life, I have seldom seen a more powerful argument for the fallen nature of man, and his inability to achieve perfection, than those countries in which man sets himself up to replace God with the State".
Labour party
Hitchens contends that the modern version of the Labour party was "formed mainly by struggles in the 1980s" and in a programme of "social liberalism, egalitarian education and the sexual revolution" envisaged at the end of the 1950s by figures such as Anthony Crosland and Roy JenkinsRoy Jenkins
Roy Harris Jenkins, Baron Jenkins of Hillhead OM, PC was a British politician.The son of a Welsh coal miner who later became a union official and Labour MP, Roy Jenkins served with distinction in World War II. Elected to Parliament as a Labour member in 1948, he served in several major posts in...
; the latter Hitchens has written critically of at considerable length, and has likened his short book The Labour Case (1959) to "a revolutionary manifesto".
Hitchens was critical of New Labour for what he called "attacks on the constitution", and described its Prime Minister
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is the Head of Her Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom. The Prime Minister and Cabinet are collectively accountable for their policies and actions to the Sovereign, to Parliament, to their political party and...
Tony Blair
Tony Blair
Anthony Charles Lynton Blair is a former British Labour Party politician who served as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2 May 1997 to 27 June 2007. He was the Member of Parliament for Sedgefield from 1983 to 2007 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1994 to 2007...
's constitutional reforms
Constitutional amendment
A constitutional amendment is a formal change to the text of the written constitution of a nation or state.Most constitutions require that amendments cannot be enacted unless they have passed a special procedure that is more stringent than that required of ordinary legislation...
as a "slow-motion coup d'état". He has also asserted that the New Labour policy on immigration
Immigration policy
An immigration policy is any policy of a state that deals with the transit of persons across its borders into the country, but especially those that intend to work and to remain in the country. Immigration policies can range from allowing no migration at all to allowing most types of migration,...
was a "slow motion putsch". Hitchens believes that the most profound changes brought about by New Labour were designed to concentrate power in the hands of the executive
Executive (government)
Executive branch of Government is the part of government that has sole authority and responsibility for the daily administration of the state bureaucracy. The division of power into separate branches of government is central to the idea of the separation of powers.In many countries, the term...
, to debauch civil service neutrality, and to turn Parliament into a mere tool of Downing Street
Downing Street
Downing Street in London, England has for over two hundred years housed the official residences of two of the most senior British cabinet ministers: the First Lord of the Treasury, an office now synonymous with that of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and the Second Lord of the Treasury, an...
, with Blair himself as Chief Executive
Head of State
A head of state is the individual that serves as the chief public representative of a monarchy, republic, federation, commonwealth or other kind of state. His or her role generally includes legitimizing the state and exercising the political powers, functions, and duties granted to the head of...
. In Hitchens's view, the most significant single action in this programme was the passing of Orders in Council allowing Alastair Campbell
Alastair Campbell
Alastair John Campbell is a British journalist, broadcaster, political aide and author, best known for his work as Director of Communications and Strategy for Prime Minister Tony Blair between 1997 and 2003, having first started working for Blair in 1994...
and Jonathan Powell
Jonathan Powell (chief of staff to Tony Blair)
Jonathan Nicholas Powell is a British diplomat who served as the first Downing Street Chief of Staff, under British Prime Minister Tony Blair throughout his premiership, from his election in 1997 until his resignation in 2007...
, both political appointees, to give orders to civil servants. This signalled, in his view, a general attempt to politicise Whitehall, which has continued ever since. Hitchens claims to have detected a parallel effort to appropriate some of the trappings of monarchy and to diminish the Crown's significance and standing, which he sees as embryonic presidentialism
Presidential system
A presidential system is a system of government where an executive branch exists and presides separately from the legislature, to which it is not responsible and which cannot, in normal circumstances, dismiss it....
.
Hitchens also often caricatured Blair as "Princess Tony". This was a reference to Blair's use of the expression "The People's Princess" to eulogise Princess Diana
Diana, Princess of Wales
Diana, Princess of Wales was the first wife of Charles, Prince of Wales, whom she married on 29 July 1981, and an international charity and fundraising figure, as well as a preeminent celebrity of the late 20th century...
after her death
Death of Diana, Princess of Wales
On 31 August 1997, Diana, Princess of Wales, died as a result of injuries sustained in a car accident in the Pont de l'Alma road tunnel in Paris, France. Her companion, Dodi Fayed, and the driver of the Mercedes-Benz W140, Henri Paul, were pronounced dead at the scene of the accident. Fayed's...
. Hitchens has also been very critical of Blair's activity subsequent to his stepping down as Prime Minister. Hitchens described Blair's successor, Gordon Brown
Gordon Brown
James Gordon Brown is a British Labour Party politician who was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Labour Party from 2007 until 2010. He previously served as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Labour Government from 1997 to 2007...
, as a "boring, dismal Marxoid
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
", whose public performances were "horribly like Humphrey Bogart
Humphrey Bogart
Humphrey DeForest Bogart was an American actor. He is widely regarded as a cultural icon.The American Film Institute ranked Bogart as the greatest male star in the history of American cinema....
's portrayal of the tormented Captain Queeg
Captain Queeg
Lieutenant Commander Philip Francis Queeg, USN, is a fictional character in Herman Wouk's 1951 novel The Caine Mutiny. He is also a character in the identically titled 1954 film adaptation of the novel and in The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, the Broadway theatre adaptation of the novel that opened...
in The Caine Mutiny
The Caine Mutiny
The Caine Mutiny is a 1952 Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Herman Wouk. The novel grew out of Wouk's personal experiences aboard a destroyer-minesweeper in the Pacific in World War II and deals with, among other things, the moral and ethical decisions made at sea by the captains of ships...
". However, Hitchens criticised what he saw as a "prejudiced, shallow" attempt to destroy Brown by the media after the latter became Prime Minister in 2007.
Conservative Party
Hitchens is dismissive of the modern British Conservative PartyConservative Party (UK)
The Conservative Party, formally the Conservative and Unionist Party, is a centre-right political party in the United Kingdom that adheres to the philosophies of conservatism and British unionism. It is the largest political party in the UK, and is currently the largest single party in the House...
, frequently deriding the party's leadership as the "useless Tories". He has often been at odds with fellow conservatives, and has argued that the Conservative Party has a consistent record of ill-considered parliamentary acts and policies that cannot be dismissed as accidents or mistakes. He cites as examples: the reorganisation of local government in 1974
Local Government Act 1972
The Local Government Act 1972 is an Act of Parliament in the United Kingdom that reformed local government in England and Wales on 1 April 1974....
, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act of 1984
Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984
The Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 is an Act of Parliament which instituted a legislative framework for the powers of police officers in England and Wales to combat crime, as well as providing codes of practice for the exercise of those powers. Part VI of PACE required the Home Secretary...
, the introduction of the GCSE
General Certificate of Secondary Education
The General Certificate of Secondary Education is an academic qualification awarded in a specified subject, generally taken in a number of subjects by students aged 14–16 in secondary education in England, Wales and Northern Ireland and is equivalent to a Level 2 and Level 1 in Key Skills...
exam, the Criminal Justice Act
Criminal Justice Act
Criminal Justice Act is a stock short title used for legislation in the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland and Canada relating to the criminal law...
of 1991, the negotiation and signing of the Single European Act
Single European Act
The Single European Act was the first major revision of the 1957 Treaty of Rome. The Act set the European Community an objective of establishing a Single Market by 31 December 1992, and codified European Political Cooperation, the forerunner of the European Union's Common Foreign and Security Policy...
and the signing of the Maastricht Treaty, the severe reduction in defence spending at the end of the Cold War, the privatisation
Privatisation of British Rail
The privatisation of British Rail was set in motion when the Conservative government enacted, on 19 January 1993, the British Coal and British Rail Act 1993 . This enabled the relevant Secretary of State to issue directions to the relevant Board...
of the UK's railways
Rail transport in the United Kingdom
The United Kingdom consists of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and previously consisted of Great Britain and the whole of Ireland. Rail transport systems developed independently on the two islands of Great Britain and Ireland, and most of the railway construction in the Republic of Ireland was...
, the Iraq War and the final abandonment of all attempts to re-introduce grammar schools.
In March 2007 Hitchens wrote and presented a television programme for Channel 4
Channel 4
Channel 4 is a British public-service television broadcaster which began working on 2 November 1982. Although largely commercially self-funded, it is ultimately publicly owned; originally a subsidiary of the Independent Broadcasting Authority , the station is now owned and operated by the Channel...
, Toff at the Top, in which he argued this view. Hitchens views Cameron's social, educational, and foreign policies as being indistinguishable from those of New Labour. Cameron, having declined previous interview requests from Hitchens, also declined to participate in the broadcast. Subsequent to the programme's airing the Conservative leader described Hitchens as "a maniac" at a public meeting in Oxfordshire
Oxfordshire
Oxfordshire is a county in the South East region of England, bordering on Warwickshire and Northamptonshire , Buckinghamshire , Berkshire , Wiltshire and Gloucestershire ....
.
Hitchens has called for the establishment of a new political party in the UK, representing the traditionalist conservative strand of opinion that he espouses, and which would, in his own words, be "neither bigoted nor politically correct". He believes that such a movement cannot come into being until the Conservative Party collapses, arguing that many millions of Britons habitually vote for this and other political parties out of tribal loyalty, from which they cannot be detached by reasoned argument.
Poverty and wealth distribution
Hitchens believes there to be a correlation between adherence to strong ethical standards, including conscientious labour, deferred gratification, self-denial and thrift, and middle class status (and the material well-being it generally brings). He has stated that "The middle classes are not good because they are better off. They are better off because they are good." He rejects the belief that any poverty which exists in Britain is anything other than relative. "The British 'poor' of today do not starve, do not freeze, do not go without medical treatmentHealth care
Health care is the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease, illness, injury, and other physical and mental impairments in humans. Health care is delivered by practitioners in medicine, chiropractic, dentistry, nursing, pharmacy, allied health, and other care providers...
—as truly poor people across the world undoubtedly still do." He argues that the claim that absolute poverty continues to exist in Britain is "a lie the Left uses to destroy the middle class".
Liberty, security and crime
Hitchens advocates a society governed by conscience and the rule of lawRule of law
The rule of law, sometimes called supremacy of law, is a legal maxim that says that governmental decisions should be made by applying known principles or laws with minimal discretion in their application...
, which he sees as the best guarantee of liberty
Liberty
Liberty is a moral and political principle, or Right, that identifies the condition in which human beings are able to govern themselves, to behave according to their own free will, and take responsibility for their actions...
. He believes that capital punishment is a key element of a strong justice system
Legal systems of the world
The legal systems of the world today are generally based on one of three basic systems: civil law, common law, and religious law – or combinations of these...
.
He warns that the decline of conscience and morality
Morality
Morality is the differentiation among intentions, decisions, and actions between those that are good and bad . A moral code is a system of morality and a moral is any one practice or teaching within a moral code...
will inevitably lead to a strong state. He is especially critical of the use of "security
Security
Security is the degree of protection against danger, damage, loss, and crime. Security as a form of protection are structures and processes that provide or improve security as a condition. The Institute for Security and Open Methodologies in the OSSTMM 3 defines security as "a form of protection...
" as a pretext for diluting and eroding individual liberty. He argues that increased "security" destroys freedom without necessarily increasing safety, and says that there is no contradiction between maintaining liberty and protecting the realm
Realm
A realm is a dominion of a monarch or other sovereign ruler.The Old French word reaume, modern French royaume, was the word first adopted in English; the fixed modern spelling does not appear until the beginning of the 17th century...
.
Hitchens is critical of moves towards authoritarian government and the erosion of civil liberties
Civil liberties
Civil liberties are rights and freedoms that provide an individual specific rights such as the freedom from slavery and forced labour, freedom from torture and death, the right to liberty and security, right to a fair trial, the right to defend one's self, the right to own and bear arms, the right...
, whether they come from the Right or the Left of the political spectrum. Accordingly, he has been highly critical of the British government's desire for identity cards
British national identity card
The Identity Cards Act 2006 was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It provided for National Identity Cards, a personal identification document and European Union travel document, linked to a database known as the National Identity Register .The introduction of the scheme was much...
, its attempts to abolish jury trial
Jury trial
A jury trial is a legal proceeding in which a jury either makes a decision or makes findings of fact which are then applied by a judge...
, to centralise the police, and its creation of a national law enforcement body in the form of the Serious Organised Crime Agency
Serious Organised Crime Agency
The Serious Organised Crime Agency is a non-departmental public body of the Government of the United Kingdom under Home Office sponsorship...
(SOCA). He describes these developments as facets of governmental desire for permanent, irreversible constitutional revolution, and an attack on English liberty
On Liberty
On Liberty is a philosophical work by British philosopher John Stuart Mill. It was a radical work to the Victorian readers of the time because it supported individuals' moral and economic freedom from the state....
in general.
Hitchens is opposed to the relaxation of laws
Liberalization
In general, liberalization refers to a relaxation of previous government restrictions, usually in areas of social or economic policy. In some contexts this process or concept is often, but not always, referred to as deregulation...
against the possession of illegal recreational drugs
Recreational drug use
Recreational drug use is the use of a drug, usually psychoactive, with the intention of creating or enhancing recreational experience. Such use is controversial, however, often being considered to be also drug abuse, and it is often illegal...
. He argues that the law's active disapproval of drug taking is an essential counterweight to the "pro-drug propaganda" of popular culture
Popular culture
Popular culture is the totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture, especially Western culture of the early to mid 20th century and the emerging global mainstream of the...
. He has said that attempts to combat drug use by restricting supply and persecuting drug dealers are invariably futile, unless possession and use
Recreational drug use
Recreational drug use is the use of a drug, usually psychoactive, with the intention of creating or enhancing recreational experience. Such use is controversial, however, often being considered to be also drug abuse, and it is often illegal...
are punished as well. He counters claims that the "War on Drugs
War on Drugs
The War on Drugs is a campaign of prohibition and foreign military aid and military intervention being undertaken by the United States government, with the assistance of participating countries, intended to both define and reduce the illegal drug trade...
" has failed by suggesting that the state has made no serious efforts to reduce or eliminate illegal drug consumption for many years. Hitchens has said that the prevailing approach, known as "Harm reduction
Responsible drug use
Responsible drug use is a harm reduction strategy based on a belief that illegal recreational drug use can be responsible in terms of reduced or eliminated risk of negative impact on the lives of both the user and others....
", is defeatist
Defeatism
Defeatism is acceptance of defeat without struggle. In everyday use, defeatism has negative connotation and is often linked to treason and pessimism, or even a hopeless situation such as a Catch-22...
and counter-productive. He was among the earliest commentators to argue that cannabis
Cannabis
Cannabis is a genus of flowering plants that includes three putative species, Cannabis sativa, Cannabis indica, and Cannabis ruderalis. These three taxa are indigenous to Central Asia, and South Asia. Cannabis has long been used for fibre , for seed and seed oils, for medicinal purposes, and as a...
presents a major mental health
Mental health
Mental health describes either a level of cognitive or emotional well-being or an absence of a mental disorder. From perspectives of the discipline of positive psychology or holism mental health may include an individual's ability to enjoy life and procure a balance between life activities and...
risk to users.
Foreign policy
Hitchens opposed the Kosovo1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia
The NATO bombing of Yugoslavia was NATO's military operation against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War. The strikes lasted from March 24, 1999 to June 10, 1999...
and 2003 Iraq Wars on the grounds that neither was in the interests of either Britain or the United States. He has not, however, associated himself with the Left-dominated anti-war
Anti-war
An anti-war movement is a social movement, usually in opposition to a particular nation's decision to start or carry on an armed conflict, unconditional of a maybe-existing just cause. The term can also refer to pacifism, which is the opposition to all use of military force during conflicts. Many...
campaigns, not least as he remains a strong supporter of the State of Israel. He also opposes the British military presence in Afghanistan
War in Afghanistan (2001–present)
The War in Afghanistan began on October 7, 2001, as the armed forces of the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Australia, and the Afghan United Front launched Operation Enduring Freedom...
, arguing that it is destined to fail and has no achievable aim. Hitchens made a live appearance on BBC News in November 2009 during which he stated, in a response to Gordon Brown's announcement that more troops would be sent to Afghanistan, that a ridiculous position had been reached in which none of the front bench politicians of any of the three main British parties were prepared to say that the British mission to the country had failed.
On Europe, Hitchens argues that the United Kingdom should negotiate an amicable departure from the European Union, whose laws and traditions he regards as incompatible with the laws and liberties of England, and with the national independence
Self-determination
Self-determination is the principle in international law that nations have the right to freely choose their sovereignty and international political status with no external compulsion or external interference...
of the United Kingdom as a whole. He also believes that the interests of the European Union are often different from—and in many cases hostile to—those of the UK. Devolution
Devolution
Devolution is the statutory granting of powers from the central government of a sovereign state to government at a subnational level, such as a regional, local, or state level. Devolution can be mainly financial, e.g. giving areas a budget which was formerly administered by central government...
of governmental powers to Scotland
Scotland Act 1998
The Scotland Act 1998 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It is the Act which established the devolved Scottish Parliament.The Act will be amended by the Scotland Bill 2011, if and when it receives royal assent.-History:...
and Wales in 1998
Government of Wales Act 1998
This is about the Act that set up the Welsh Assembly. For the newer Government of Wales Act 2006, see that article.The Government of Wales Act 1998 This is about the Act that set up the Welsh Assembly. For the newer Government of Wales Act 2006, see that article.The Government of Wales Act 1998...
was, for Hitchens, not a step towards true independence for those countries, but rather part of an EU-inspired strategy to dissolve the UK into statelets and regions, as a preliminary step to its complete absorption into a European superstate. For the same reason, he has opposed attempts to divide England into regions.
World War II
For most of his career, Hitchens took the view that World War II was "the part of British history which provides the ultimate justification and vindication of this country's existence, its heroic and solitary battle against Nazi tyranny". However, in 2008 he publicly reversed this view, referring in particular to the declaration of war made against Nazi GermanyNazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
(after the invasion of Poland
Invasion of Poland (1939)
The Invasion of Poland, also known as the September Campaign or 1939 Defensive War in Poland and the Poland Campaign in Germany, was an invasion of Poland by Germany, the Soviet Union, and a small Slovak contingent that marked the start of World War II in Europe...
) which had, in his opinion, disastrous consequences for Britain. A subsequent analysis that Hitchens made of this issue in one of his columns was described by Michael White
Michael White (journalist)
Michael White is an associate editor and former political editor of The Guardian.-Early life:White was raised in Wadebridge, Cornwall...
of The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
as being "as melancholy a cry of pain about the modern world as I have recently encountered".
Hitchens has also written critically about the Allied policy of strategic bombing
Strategic bombing
Strategic bombing is a military strategy used in a total war with the goal of defeating an enemy nation-state by destroying its economic ability and public will to wage war rather than destroying its land or naval forces...
of German cities during the Second World War, citing in particular the A.C. Grayling book Among the Dead Cities, which in Hitchens's view makes "the case against the bombing of German civilians unanswerable".
Northern Ireland
Hitchens condemned the 1998 Belfast AgreementBelfast Agreement
The Good Friday Agreement or Belfast Agreement , sometimes called the Stormont Agreement, was a major political development in the Northern Ireland peace process...
as a surrender
Surrender (military)
Surrender is when soldiers, nations or other combatants stop fighting and eventually become prisoners of war, either as individuals or when ordered to by their officers. A white flag is a common symbol of surrender, as is the gesture of raising one's hands empty and open above one's head.When the...
to the Provisional IRA
Provisional Irish Republican Army
The Provisional Irish Republican Army is an Irish republican paramilitary organisation whose aim was to remove Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom and bring about a socialist republic within a united Ireland by force of arms and political persuasion...
and a "collapse and a surrender to lawlessness". He believes that the best approach to solving Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland is one of the four countries of the United Kingdom. Situated in the north-east of the island of Ireland, it shares a border with the Republic of Ireland to the south and west...
's problems would have been the full integration of Northern Ireland into the United Kingdom, arguing that creating a Northern Irish Parliament at Stormont
Parliament of Northern Ireland
The Parliament of Northern Ireland was the home rule legislature of Northern Ireland, created under the Government of Ireland Act 1920, which sat from 7 June 1921 to 30 March 1972, when it was suspended...
impeded this. He believes that the achievements of direct rule
Direct Rule
Direct rule was the term given, during the late 20th and early 21st centuries, to the administration of Northern Ireland directly from Westminster, seat of United Kingdom government...
over Northern Ireland, not least in removing discrimination
Discrimination
Discrimination is the prejudicial treatment of an individual based on their membership in a certain group or category. It involves the actual behaviors towards groups such as excluding or restricting members of one group from opportunities that are available to another group. The term began to be...
against Roman Catholics, have been greatly underestimated. He maintains that Northern Ireland is now only a provisional part of the UK since, under the terms of the agreement, it can be transferred to Irish sovereignty
United Ireland
A united Ireland is the term used to refer to the idea of a sovereign state which covers all of the thirty-two traditional counties of Ireland. The island of Ireland includes the territory of two independent sovereign states: the Republic of Ireland, which covers 26 counties of the island, and the...
by a single, irreversible referendum.
Education
Hitchens condemns comprehensive educationComprehensive school
A comprehensive school is a state school that does not select its intake on the basis of academic achievement or aptitude. This is in contrast to the selective school system, where admission is restricted on the basis of a selection criteria. The term is commonly used in relation to the United...
, the Plowden
Plowden Report
The Plowden Report is the unofficial name for the 1967 report of the Central Advisory Council For Education into Primary education in England. The report, entitled Children and their Primary Schools reviewed Primary education in a wholesale fashion. The collation of the report took around 3 years...
reforms of primary schooling and modern child-centred teaching methods
Student-centred learning
Student-centred learning is an approach to education focusing on the needs of the students, rather than those of others involved in the educational process, such as teachers and administrators...
, seeing them as egalitarian
Egalitarianism
Egalitarianism is a trend of thought that favors equality of some sort among moral agents, whether persons or animals. Emphasis is placed upon the fact that equality contains the idea of equity of quality...
political projects with no educational justification and many educational disadvantages. He bases his case on John Marks's The Betrayed Generation, (Centre for Policy Studies
Centre for Policy Studies
The Centre for Policy Studies is a British right wing policy think tank whose goal is to promote coherent and practical public policy, to roll back the state, reform public services, support communities, and challenge threats to Britain’s independence...
2001), the Engineering Council
Engineering Council UK
The Engineering Council is Britain's regulatory authority for registration of Chartered and Incorporated engineers and technicians, holding a register of these and providing advice to students, engineers, employers and academic institutions on the standards for registration and procedures for...
's survey of changing undergraduate maths skills in 2000, and Durham University
Durham University
The University of Durham, commonly known as Durham University, is a university in Durham, England. It was founded by Act of Parliament in 1832 and granted a Royal Charter in 1837...
's unvarying annual general ability test, and has also cited a 2004 article by Jenni Russell
Jenni Russell
Jenni Russell is a British columnist and broadcaster. She writes the Monday political column for The Evening Standard and also writes regularly for The Sunday Times and The Guardian. She worked for many years at the BBC and ITN, most recently as editor of The World Tonight on BBC Radio 4...
in The Guardian which draws attention to this issue. Hitchens has also contended that comprehensive education has brought about a general dilution of education and of examination standards, and explores in detail the history and consequences of this development in Chapter Eleven of The Broken Compass—'The Fall of the Meritocracy'. He believes a further consequence of egalitarian schooling is serious damage to the national culture, and fears that lowered standards in technical, scientific and mathematical education, combined with poor teaching of English and the resulting decline in literacy, threaten to leave Britain lagging behind emerging economic powers
Emerging Powers
The term emerging powers is a recognition of the rising, primarily economic, influence of a group of nations who have recently increased their presence in global affairs...
such as China and India.
As a means of improving standards in the UK, as well as increasing social mobility
Social mobility
Social mobility refers to the movement of people in a population from one social class or economic level to another. It typically refers to vertical mobility -- movement of individuals or groups up from one socio-economic level to another, often by changing jobs or marrying; but can also refer to...
, Hitchens supports a return to the academically selective grammar school
Grammar school
A grammar school is one of several different types of school in the history of education in the United Kingdom and some other English-speaking countries, originally a school teaching classical languages but more recently an academically-oriented secondary school.The original purpose of mediaeval...
system which has been gradually dismantled by successive British governments since the issuing of Circular 10/65
Circular 10/65
Circular 10/65 is a Government circular issued in 1965 by the Department of Education and Science requesting Local Education Authorities in England and Wales to begin converting their secondary schools to the Comprehensive System. For most of England and Wales, it marked the abolition of the old...
by Anthony Crosland
Anthony Crosland
Charles Anthony Raven Crosland , otherwise Tony Crosland or C.A.R. Crosland, was a British Labour Party politician and author. He served as Member of Parliament for South Gloucestershire and later for Great Grimsby...
in 1965 (though Hitchens prefers the German system of selection to the Eleven Plus examination).
As a supporter of orthodox
Orthodoxy
The word orthodox, from Greek orthos + doxa , is generally used to mean the adherence to accepted norms, more specifically to creeds, especially in religion...
Christian morality, Hitchens opposes sex education
Sex education
Sex education refers to formal programs of instruction on a wide range of issues relating to human sexuality, including human sexual anatomy, sexual reproduction, sexual intercourse, reproductive health, emotional relations, reproductive rights and responsibilities, abstinence, contraception, and...
in schools. He argues that the general introduction of sex education in schools has incontrovertibly been accompanied by an increase in sexual activity among the young, with a resultant rise in pregnancies, abortions and instances of sexually transmitted disease
Sexually transmitted disease
Sexually transmitted disease , also known as a sexually transmitted infection or venereal disease , is an illness that has a significant probability of transmission between humans by means of human sexual behavior, including vaginal intercourse, oral sex, and anal sex...
s—the very things that sex education is ostensibly intended to prevent. He argues that its real purpose is the undermining of Christian sexual morality, based on stable monogamous
Monogamy
Monogamy /Gr. μονός+γάμος - one+marriage/ a form of marriage in which an individual has only one spouse at any one time. In current usage monogamy often refers to having one sexual partner irrespective of marriage or reproduction...
marriage.
Relationship with elder brother Christopher
Hitchens's elder brother is the prominent U.S.-based writer and antitheisticAntitheism
Antitheism is active opposition to theism. The etymological roots of the word are the Greek 'anti-' and 'theismos'...
polemicist Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Eric Hitchens is an Anglo-American author and journalist whose books, essays, and journalistic career span more than four decades. He has been a columnist and literary critic at The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Slate, World Affairs, The Nation, Free Inquiry, and became a media fellow at the...
. Christopher has said that the main difference between the two is their attitudes towards belief in the existence of God. Peter himself has said, "We inhabit separate worlds," and "We're not close. We're different people, we have different lives, we have entirely different pleasures, we live in different continents. If we weren't brothers we wouldn't know each other."
The brothers had a protracted falling out after Peter wrote an article in 2001 in The Spectator
The Spectator
The Spectator is a weekly British magazine first published on 6 July 1828. It is currently owned by David and Frederick Barclay, who also owns The Daily Telegraph. Its principal subject areas are politics and culture...
alleging that his brother had said he "didn't care if the Red Army
Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army started out as the Soviet Union's revolutionary communist combat groups during the Russian Civil War of 1918-1922. It grew into the national army of the Soviet Union. By the 1930s the Red Army was among the largest armies in history.The "Red Army" name refers to...
watered its horses at Hendon
Hendon
Hendon is a London suburb situated northwest of Charing Cross.-History:Hendon was historically a civil parish in the county of Middlesex. The manor is described in Domesday , but the name, 'Hendun' meaning 'at the highest hill', is earlier...
"—a claim denied by Christopher. After the birth of Peter's third child, the two brothers reconciled, although Christopher said "There is no longer any official froideur, but there's no official—what's the word?—chaleur, either."
Peter's review of God Is Not Great led to public argument between the brothers but not to any renewed estrangement. In the review, Peter wrote that his brother’s book was misguided, "mostly in the way that it blames faith for so many bad things and gives it no credit for any of the good it may have done. I think it misunderstands religious people and their aims and desires. And I think it asserts a number of things as true and obvious that are nothing of the sort".
In June 2007, the brothers appeared as panellists on BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
TV's Question Time
Question Time (TV series)
Question Time is a topical debate BBC television programme in the United Kingdom, based on Any Questions?. The show typically features politicians from at least the three major political parties as well as other public figures who answer questions put to them by the audience...
, where they clashed over a number of issues, most notably the intervention in Afghanistan.
In April 2008, on US soil, they debated the invasion of Iraq
2003 invasion of Iraq
The 2003 invasion of Iraq , was the start of the conflict known as the Iraq War, or Operation Iraqi Freedom, in which a combined force of troops from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Poland invaded Iraq and toppled the regime of Saddam Hussein in 21 days of major combat operations...
and the existence of God
Existence of God
Arguments for and against the existence of God have been proposed by philosophers, theologians, scientists, and others. In philosophical terms, arguments for and against the existence of God involve primarily the sub-disciplines of epistemology and ontology , but also of the theory of value, since...
, respectively. Peter Hitchens indicated that the occasion would mark the last time he would participate in such events with his brother, "because of the danger that they might turn into gladiatorial combat in which nothing would be resolved and enmity could be created."
However, in October 2010 at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, the brothers again had a debate—described as a conversation with the press—over the nature of God in civilisation. The two clashed over the main issues, with Peter lamenting the decline in civility to levels "not far from the Stone Age." However, when the subject of Christopher's illness in concert with religion was brought up, Peter defended his brother's choice of beliefs, stating that he thought "it would be quite grotesque to imagine someone would have to get cancer to see the merits of religion."
Publications
Hitchens is the author of The Abolition of BritainThe Abolition of Britain
A chapter in The Abolition of Britain on the contrast between the public health policies on lung cancer and the public health policies on AIDS was left out of the first edition of the book, after Hitchens was advised that airing thoughts critical of homosexual acts would bring such criticism on it...
(1999, ISBN 978-0-7043-8140-7) and A Brief History of Crime
A Brief History of Crime
A Brief History of Crime is the third book by conservative author and journalist Peter Hitchens published in 2003 and in 2004 under the title The Abolition of Liberty for the paperback edition.-Themes:...
(2003, ISBN 978-1-84354-148-6), both critical of changes in British society since the 1960s. A compendium of his Daily Express columns was published under the title Monday Morning Blues
Monday Morning Blues
Monday Morning Blues by the conservative journalist Peter Hitchens is a collection of articles reprinted from the Daily Express, which were originally published during the mid to late 1990s. Topics range from arguments for the death penalty and laments for the decline of the BBC among other...
in 2000.
An updated edition of A Brief History of Crime (2003 ISBN 978-1-84354-148-6), re-titled The Abolition of Liberty: The Decline of Order and Justice in England (ISBN 978-1-84354-149-3) and featuring a new chapter on identity cards
British national identity card
The Identity Cards Act 2006 was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It provided for National Identity Cards, a personal identification document and European Union travel document, linked to a database known as the National Identity Register .The introduction of the scheme was much...
, was published in April 2004. The Broken Compass: How British Politics Lost its Way
The Broken Compass: How British Politics Lost its Way
The Broken Compass: How British Politics Lost its Way is the fourth book from English traditionalist conservative writer Peter Hitchens...
(Continuum ISBN 978-1-84706-405-9), was published in May 2009, and The Rage Against God
The Rage Against God
The Rage Against God is the fifth book by the traditionalist conservative writer Peter Hitchens, originally published in 2010...
(Continuum ISBN 978-1-4411-0572-1), was published in Britain in March 2010, and was due to be published in the US (Zondervan ISBN 978-0-310-32031-9) in May 2010.
In January 2011 Hitchens announced he was working on a new book entitled The War We Never Fought, about what he sees as the non-existent war on drugs
War on Drugs
The War on Drugs is a campaign of prohibition and foreign military aid and military intervention being undertaken by the United States government, with the assistance of participating countries, intended to both define and reduce the illegal drug trade...
.
See also
- ConservatismConservatismConservatism is a political and social philosophy that promotes the maintenance of traditional institutions and supports, at the most, minimal and gradual change in society. Some conservatives seek to preserve things as they are, emphasizing stability and continuity, while others oppose modernism...
- List of newspaper columnists
- PaleoconservatismPaleoconservatismPaleoconservatism is a term for a conservative political philosophy found primarily in the United States stressing tradition, limited government, civil society, anti-colonialism, anti-corporatism and anti-federalism, along with religious, regional, national and Western identity. Chilton...
- Pro-lifePro-lifeOpposition to the legalization of abortion is centered around the pro-life, or anti-abortion, movement, a social and political movement opposing elective abortion on moral grounds and supporting its legal prohibition or restriction...
- Social conservatismSocial conservatismSocial Conservatism is primarily a political, and usually morally influenced, ideology that focuses on the preservation of what are seen as traditional values. Social conservatism is a form of authoritarianism often associated with the position that the federal government should have a greater role...
Further reading
- "Brothers at war over Britain" Article on a debate about Britain's future with brother Christopher HitchensChristopher HitchensChristopher Eric Hitchens is an Anglo-American author and journalist whose books, essays, and journalistic career span more than four decades. He has been a columnist and literary critic at The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Slate, World Affairs, The Nation, Free Inquiry, and became a media fellow at the...
, 15 October 1999. Includes some short, selected audio clips from the event. - "Peter Hitchens on the European Union" – December 2002. Karl Zinsmeister interviews Peter Hitchens at his home in Oxford.
- "Raging Bulldog" – Guardian interview, 20 September 1999.
External links
Regular featuresBook Reviews
- Reviews of A Brief History of Crime in: The Daily Telegraph, and The Observer
TV Reviews
Reviews of Toff at the Top in:
Video
- Interview about The Abolition of Britain for the Booknotes series Pop-up window with embedded RealPlayerRealPlayerRealPlayer is a cross-platform media player by RealNetworks that plays a number of multimedia formats including MP3, MPEG-4, QuickTime, Windows Media, and multiple versions of proprietary RealAudio and RealVideo formats.-History:...
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Debates
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