Peter Hitchens

Peter Hitchens
Peter Hitchens
Occupation	Author, Journalist, Polemicist
Nationality	United Kingdom
Notable works	The Abolition of Britain
Relatives	Christopher Hitchens (brother)
Website
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk

Peter Jonathan Hitchens (born 28 October 1951) is a British columnist and author, noted for his traditionalist conservative stance. The author of four books, including The Abolition of Britain and more recently The Broken Compass: How British Politics Lost its Way, Hitchens writes for Britain's 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 author and polemicist Christopher Hitchens.

Early life

Peter Hitchens was born in 1951 in Malta, where his father was stationed with the Royal Navy. He was educated at The Leys School, the Oxford College of Further Education and the University of York. He married Eve Ross, daughter of leftwing journalist David Ross in 1983.

Career in journalism

Hitchens worked for the Daily Express between 1977 and late 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.

After an interval as a roving foreign reporter, during which he reported from South Africa during the last days of Apartheid, and from Somalia at the time of the U.S.-led military intervention in the country, he became the Daily Express Washington correspondent. Returning to London in 1995, he became a commentator and, eventually, a regular columnist. He 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 2001, Hitchens announced his departure from the 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 proprietorship of numerous adult magazines. He joined the Mail on Sunday where—in addition to a weekly column and weblog in which he debates directly with readers—he produces occasional reportage both at home and abroad, including studies of the new Muslim communities in England's Pennine towns, several reports from Russia and the US, Western and Eastern Europe, many of the former Soviet Republics, the Middle East (including Israel, Iraq and Iran), Africa, Cuba, Venezuela, China, Japan, North Korea and Burma.

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 again in 2009, Hitchens was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize in Political Journalism; the latter occasion provoking public criticism towards Hitchens from fellow journalist Nick Cohen.

Appearances in the British broadcast media

Hitchens speaks frequently on British radio and televsion, often debating (typically left-wing) opponents on a variety of social and political topics. He is a regular panellist on Question Time and Any Questions? and has been a frequent guest on This Week with Andrew Neil and The Daily Politics.

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 recalls that he suggested the adversarial format. He 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.

Personal political history

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.

He joined the Conservative Party in 1997, but concluded that the party had no idea what it was facing and would never be able to challenge New Labour, and subsequently left in 2003. Hitchens challenged Michael Portillo for the Conservative Party nomination in the Kensington and Chelsea seat in 1999. His critics often point to his "failure" to gain nomination as a reason for his hostility to the modern Conservative Party. In fact he stood for nomination to publicise a book and to expose Portillo's lack of conservatism. He knew he could not gain nomination and had no intention of standing for parliament.

He is now politically independent, and believes that no party he could support will be created until the Conservative Party disintegrates. He has dismissed the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) as "A Dad's Army Party" with "a blazer-and-cravat feel to it which limits its appeal to the same sort of areas where the Tory Party still stumbles about in its prolonged death throes, the Southern English middle classes."

Public image

The Guardian describes Hitchens as "the Mail on Sunday's fulminator-in-chief" and his columns as "molten Old Testament fury shot through with visceral wit". He 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."

Core beliefs

Politically, Hitchens could be classified as a Moral and Social Conservative. His stance resembles the paleoconservative tradition in the United States. Apart from the occasional condemnation of the UK's tax burden, and the scope and reach of its Welfare State, he rarely comments on fiscal matters. Hitchens is critical of neoconservatism, arguing that a unwavering allegiance to the unfettered free market is no substitute for Christian morality, and that the free market, pursued dogmatically, can often damage institutions which conservatives should value. Correspondingly, he has frequently criticised Thatcherism for ignoring the value of institutions and traditions, and has said the left are not entirely wrong when they accuse the Thatcher government of having damaged British society.

In propounding his socially conservative views, Hitchens frequently criticises political correctness, which he considers to be a manifestation of Cultural Marxism. He says it is important to acknowledge that the Left has been correct in its long opposition to racism. He maintains that opponents of political correctness will fail unless they accept that it has some positive elements, and that it is attractive to so many because of its promotion of simple good manners. However he argues (in opposition to the Left) that genuine good manners, tolerance and decency are impossible, in the long term, without the foundation of traditional morality and religious faith.

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".

Morality and religion

Hitchens, who is a confirmed and communicant member of the Church of England, is an advocate of moral virtues 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 the institution of 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 re-examined, and posits that homosexual relationships should not be granted legal parity with heterosexual marriage. Hitchens maintains that he bears no ill-will towards homosexual individuals, and rejects the term "homophobia" in this context as an epithet which, he argues, is increasingly used to stifle legitimate debate on social policy. In February 2009, Hitchens stated that people are being "forced to say that we think homosexuality is a good thing, that homosexual couples are equal in all ways to heterosexual married couples". In his view, Britons are now "the subjects of some insane, sex-obsessed Stalinist state, compelled to wave our little rainbow flags as the 'Gay Pride' parade passes by".

Hitchens believes that abortion should be illegal at any stage of pregnancy.

Hitchens is an Anglican, and he defends the use of the Church of England's 1662 Book of Common Prayer and the Authorised (or King James) version of the Bible not only because he believes they are beautiful and memorable, but also because he feels that they are the indispensable foundations of Anglicanism's "powerful combination of scripture, tradition and reason". However he opposes the current liberal positions of the current Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, whom he dubs the "Ayatollah of Canterbury" in relation to the Archbishop's views on Islam.

Liberty, security and crime

Hitchens advocates a society governed by conscience and the rule of law, 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. In his newspaper columns, Hitchens referred to David Blunkett, British Home Secretary between 2001 and 2004, as "Minister of the Interior", on the grounds that the title, reminiscent of police states, better reflected Blunkett's policies than the traditional British title of "Home Secretary".

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.

Foreign policy

Hitchens opposed the Kosovo and 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 futile, foredoomed 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 poiticians of any of the three main 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 itself into regions.

Non-intervention in World War II

For most of his career, Hitchens took the view that World War 2, unlike World War 1, was "the war that had to be fought". In 2008, in an article in the Daily Mail, he publicly reversed this view, referring in particular to the declaration of war made against Nazi Germany (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".

Northern Ireland

Hitchens condemned the 1998 Belfast Agreement as a surrender to the Provisional IRA and a violation of the rule of law. 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 was mistaken because it impeded just that. 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.

Education

Hitchens condemns comprehensive education, 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. Hitchens argues, basing his case on the work of John Marks ('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 that comprehensive education has brought about a general dilution of education and of examination standards. Hitchens believes egalitarian schooling has done grave 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 of literacy, threaten to leave Britain lagging behind emerging economic powers such as China and India.

As a means of improving standards in the UK, 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.

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 diseases—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 upon stable monogamous marriage.

New Labour

Hitchens is critical of New Labour for what he describes as "attacks on the constitution", and has described Prime Minister Tony Blair's constitutional reforms as a "slow-motion coup d'état". He has also likenend the New Labour policy on immigration as a "slow motion putsch". The huge expansion of the role of "special advisers" in government, who Hitchens describes as "political commissars" in the civil service, was based, in his view, on similar but smaller-scale appointments by the Conservatives.

Hitchens contends that the most profound changes brought about by the Labour Party have been 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. 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, and the process 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 has also often caricatured Blair as "Princess Tony". This is a reference to Blair's use of the expression "The People's Princess" to euologise Diana, Princess of Wales after her death. Hitchens is also heavily critical of Blair's successor Gordon Brown, describing him as a "boring, dismal Marxoid", though he has criticised what he sees as a "prejudiced, shallow" attempt to destroy Brown by the media since he became Prime Minister.

Conservative Party

Hitchens is dismissive of the modern British Conservative Party, frequently deriding the party's leadership as the "useless Tories". He has often been at odds with fellow conservatives, and argues 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 (though Hitchens prefers the German system of selection to the Eleven Plus examination).

He is also critical of what he considers to be a continuing idolatry of Margaret Thatcher among many Conservative Party supporters. Thatcher, in his view, weakened Britain's institutions and singularly failed to address moral or cultural questions.

Hitchens has expressed contempt for David Cameron, the current party leader, regarding him as a member of the "liberal elite" with little conception of the challenges facing modern Britain. He argues that the Conservatives have indiscriminately adopted the policies of their opponents over the last century out of an unprincipled desire for office at all costs, a process, he maintains, that has accelerated under Cameron's leadership.

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.

British National Party

Hitchens has in his writing continually repudiated the BNP. After BNP party leader Nick Griffin's appearance on Question Time in October 2009, Hitchens stated that the BNP are an embarrassment to "proper, patriotic conservatives like me who are not racially bigoted or prejudiced and do not care about the colour of people's skin".

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 treatment—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".

Transport

Hitchens has criticised the Privatisation of British Rail in the 1990s, and mocks Conservatives for their belief that road transport, heavily state subsidised, is in some way more conservative than railways. He has also bemoaned the large-scale reductions made to Britain's rail infrastructure in the 1960s, and subsequent increased focus on the motor car as the central plank of transport policy.

Evolution

Hitchens sees evolution as a speculative and unfalsifiable theory which cannot be observed in progress. He reasons that if it took place in the past it did so before there were any human witnesses, and that if it is taking place now it is operating so slowly that our civilisation is likely to perish long before it has been able to record it in action.

He maintains that supporters of Darwinism often mistake adaptation of existing species for a far more ambitious process required for evolution. He therefore contends that the theory of evolution is wholly unlike other scientific theories with which it is often compared. He regularly likens belief in evolution to religious faith, on the basis that religious claims also cannot be tested and similarly have their origins not in certain knowledge, but rather in the preferences of the believer. In support of his scepticism he cites Karl Popper's remarks on the scientific status of evolution, in which Popper confesses to being disturbed by the apparent tautology of the theory of natural selection.

Hitchens argues that neither he nor anyone else knows how life began or how the realm of nature assumed its present form. He says he is willing to accept the possibility that evolutionists may be right, and asks that they extend the same courtesy to theists. He agrees with evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins that a belief in the truth of evolutionary theory, properly understood, is incompatible with a theist position. He maintains that the question remains a matter of choice, and that intelligent people should be free to decide for themselves which explanation they prefer. He does not criticise evolutionary theory, believing it to be an ingenious possible explanation for the origins of species, but one which he himself prefers not to embrace.

Like many other sceptics on this subject, Hitchens does not subscribe to a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis. In a review of his brother's work God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, he stated that, "many decades have passed since I fancied the story of Adam and Eve was literal truth, if I ever did."

Global warming

Hitchens is sceptical of the real extent of man made global warming, has described the fuss surrounding it as "alarmist" and the facts presented as false or misleading or using data selectively.

Relationship with elder brother Christopher

Hitchens's elder brother is the prominent American based writer and polemicist Christopher Hitchens. Christopher, whose views on most issues are to the left of Peter's, has said that the main difference between the two is a belief in 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 Christopher's book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything 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 an event with his brother.

Publications

Hitchens is the author of The Abolition of Britain (1999, ISBN 0-7043-8140-0) and A Brief History of Crime (2003, ISBN 1-84354-148-3), 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 1-84354-148-3), re-titled The Abolition of Liberty: The Decline of Order and Justice in England (ISBN 1-84354-149-1) and featuring a new chapter on identity cards, was published in April 2004. The Broken Compass: How British Politics Lost its Way (Continuum ISBN 1-84706-405-1), was published in May 2009, and The Rage Against God: Why Faith is the Foundation of Civilisation (Continuum ISBN 1-44110-572-7), is due for publication in March 2010.

See also

• Conservatism
• Paleoconservatism
• Pro-life
• Social conservatism

Bibliography

• "Brothers at war over Britain" Article on a debate about Britain's future with brother Christopher Hitchens, 15 October 1999. Includes some short, selected audio clips from the event.
• "Cool Britannia" - 4 November 2002. Geoff Metcalf interviews Peter Hitchens on The Abolition of Britain.
• "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.
• How the Left censored the blindingly obvious truth about rape - August 2008. Peter Hitchens writes about rape.

External links

Regular features

• Weekly column in the Mail on Sunday newspaper
• Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday blog

Book Reviews

• Reviews of A Brief History of Crime in the: The Daily Telegraph, and The Observer

TV Reviews

Reviews of Toff at the Top in:

• The Daily Telegraph,
• The Independent and
• The Times.
• Description of Toff at the Top on the Channel 4 website
• Description of Stealing Freedom on the Channel 4 website

Video

• Interview about the The Abolition of Britain for the Booknotes series Pop-up window with embedded RealPlayer plugin

Debates

• Christopher Hitchens debates Peter Hitchens

Sermon

• Peter Hitchens's address to City New Year Service, The Parish Church of St. Michael's Cornhill, London, January 2005

Other

• Who Comments? - Peter Hitchens