Christopher and Peter Hitchens on The Abolition of Britain (1999)

October 14, 1999 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1893554392?ie=UTF8&tag=doc06-20&link... More Hitchens: http://thefilmarchived.blogspot.com/search/label/Christopher%20Hitchens

The Abolition of Britain is the first book by conservative journalist Peter Hitchens. Originally published in 1999, it charts and examines a period of moral and cultural reform between the 1960s and the New Labour general election win in 1997. Hitchens asserts that the reforms facilitated vast and radical constitutional change under Tony Blair's new government that amounted to a "slow motion coup d'état." The book was described by Francis Wheen in Literary Review as "a plangent lament for the Old Britain," cited by Gillian Bowditch in The Times as being a major modern work to dissect "the decline in British morals and manners over the past 50 years," and identified by Andrew Marr in The Observer as "the most sustained, internally logical and powerful attack on Tony Blair and all his works."

The Abolition of Britain is a conservative polemic against the changes in the United Kingdom since the mid-1960s. It contrasts the funerals of Winston Churchill (1965) and Diana, Princess of Wales (1997), using these two related but dissimilar events, three decades apart, to illustrate the enormous cultural changes that took place in the intervening period. His argument is that Britain underwent a "cultural revolution", comparable to that of China in the 1960s. He describes and criticises the growing strength of such forces as multiculturalism, which still had a liberal consensus behind it at the time the book was written. He argues that English schools had largely ceased to teach the history of the country, criticising the preference for methodology, or the literature of Britain's past.

Other changes gain Hitchens' attention, from the passivity and conformism resulting from the watching of television to the Church of England's rejection of its traditional liturgy and scripture. Sex education, he argues, is a form of propaganda against Christian sexual morality. The sexual revolution brought about by the first contraceptive pills was the result not of accidental discovery, but of research deliberately pursued by moral revolutionaries. He describes the efforts made to provide respectability for unmarried motherhood, not least the campaign to replace the expression "unmarried mother" with "single parent", thus lumping together those who had children out of wedlock with widowers, widows or deserted wives and husbands, and so deflecting disapproval. Hitchens sees the British establishment as being morally weak in their failure to resist the emerging drug culture, when they could easily have done so in the mid-60s. He cites as one example the prosecution of Mick Jagger and the subsequent intervention of The Times in Jagger's defence in 1967 ("Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?") after his (temporary) conviction.

One chapter analyses the use of TV and radio soap operas to spread liberal cultural and moral propaganda, and refers to several instances where this intention has been openly expressed by the editors and authors of such programmes. In another, he attacks the development of "anti-establishment" comedy since the staging of Beyond the Fringe at the Edinburgh Festival in 1960. For Hitchens, the development of television, citing with approval a critical letter by T. S. Eliot to The Times in 1950, was something which should have led to a greater public debate than it did. In particular, Hitchens criticises the easy capture of the Conservative Party by lobbyists for commercial TV, which removed the BBC's monopoly power to defend cultural standards. He argues that the introduction of colour television, which made even the bad programmes look good, greatly increased the influence of TV over the public mind.

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 that it would distract attention from the book's main message. It was reinstated in the paperback and American editions, with an explanatory preface. Hitchens elaborated that the morality of homosexuality itself was tangent to his main argument, which was about British society's unwillingness to criticize sexual promiscuity among gay, bisexual, and straight men alike despite what he sees as the ill after-effects.

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[LeBigMacDaddy]

I think Peter got the best of that one. Don't usually take to conservative types but I like his honesty

[terrybahoon]

... and Rushdie too. They've all turned up to see their pal.

[Riiye]

@324wilson Glad I'm not the only one to notice. Got any other examples? The direct insult to Northern Ireland was by far the worst and I have never seen a man conduct himself in such a conceited, snobbish manner as I did when he gave that portion of the speech.

[324wilson]

I must say that Hitch didn't do well on this debate.

[324wilson]

@Riiye Absolutely! That's where I disagree with Christopher. There can be little or no doubt that Christopher had a "Little Englander" attitude! It would have been quite interesting to see his views on the coming Scottish referendum.

[benehan]

"fuck off!" :D

[Riiye]

Not nit picking, but at 24:50 Christopher says "you haven't made me proud to be British, I've been proud to be English all along". I have noticed this trend with Hitch, through his outright insult to Northern Ireland while apparently supporting their plight for a united Ireland, to his admission that he hates Yorkshire and others. He seems, bizarrely, to have quite a little Englanders attitude towards the other nations in the UK. Anyone else notice this?

[Clivepom]

'I don't understand it, you vote for the destruction of the things you love.' ...if I could say one thing to Britain....

[Clivepom]

Billy Bragg should have been removed. Pathetically incoherent.

[Bastiat90]

Hitchens became an American citizen, so you cannot ascribe such motivations to him.

[tomthefunky]

@Bastiat90 Chris wanted a European Union like every other European Lefty because that was the way (they thought) they could compete with America. Admit it, Bastiat90.

[Bastiat90]

He wasn't a besotted supporter... as he explains in his magnificent book Hitch 22, he identified as a citizen of the European Union because it fitted with his self description as an internationalist.