The Abolition of Britain: From Winston Churchill to Princess Diana

30 years ago I lived up-country, deep in the African bush. Every evening I twiddled the dials and adjusted the antenna on my short-wave radio. I was tuning into the World Service of the BBC and its radio serial "the Archers - an everyday story of country folk". This serial was the epitome of Englishness - robust, honest and worthy farming families leading their lives steeped in the rich cultural heritage of England. It was a world immensely civilized and comforting - it reinforced my identity - a universe woven through with integrity, self reliance, generosity, self restraint and common sense. Its institutions, parishes, policemen drew their strength, legitimacy and harmony from a centuries-long process of growth and adaptation. Peter Hitchens describes how this world was subverted and finally chain-sawed into oblivion by an unholy coterie of jealous and doctrinaire do-gooders, misfits, intellectuals and an evermore influential leftwing media. We now live in a geographic entity called Britain where state schools are obliterating our extraordinary achievements with a Stalinist airbrushing of history; where policemen operate like an occupying army; where the media indoctrinate the population with trash culture and scandalously biased `news' and opinion. Now I know why I became out of sorts with the Archers. Those stolid farmers had become uncertain, self-critical, simpering, lap-dogs to masterful, bossy, manipulative and crusading wives. They were eating quiche for tea and measuring their manure in "kilos". In the novel `1984' George Orwell invoked a creepy feeling of alienness in the reader by having his hero go into an English pub and order a "litre" of beer. Well, pints are still in English pubs - just, but the new Archers' Britain invoked exactly the same feeling of alienness in me. And Peter Hitchens has explained why. That Archers' England has been captured by scriptwriters, politicians and activists who have a clear agenda - to mock, denigrate and finally wipe out all that they could find of beauty and strength and worth - and replace it with a gender neutral, guilt-ridden, multicultural nightmare. Meanwhile the general population is sedated into apathy by consumer prosperity and brain rotting, social conditioning TV. It is an England that "would have lost at Trafalgar and Waterloo, and given up on the attempt to colonize America, because of the absence of safety nets, sexual equality and proper child care." This same coterie hypocritically sends their children to élite schools to avoid them being turned into "mannerless, uncultured ignoramuses" by the state cooperative. Peter Hitchens' work challenges head-on the new taboos and shibboleths erected by this coterie. Of course they spit and fume in frustration when he mercilessly dissects the cancerous, illogical and spiteful nature of their doctrines. Some of them have written sulphurous reviews on this page. Pay no attention to them - they are the Little Folk. Low self-esteem, the worm

In his book, "The Abolition of Britain", journalist Peter Hitchens states profoundly what many millions of Britons currently think - that the cultural revolution that swept the nation in the aftermath of Sir Winston Churchill's death has made many feel like foreigners in their own land. Particularly poignant is his contrast between the years 1965 and 1997, and the funerals of the Greatest Briton, Sir Winston Churchill, and Diana, Princess of Wales. In 1965, Britain was a restrained, conservative and patriotic society. A nation mourned at the death of a great man, but it did so in a solemn and dignified manner. Cranes were lowered in respect along the Thames and people filed quietly along to catch a glimpse of Churchill's coffin. Hitchens also makes marked contrasts between the general perceptions of the populations of both years. In 1965, Britons looked towards the Empire as an achievement to be proud of, and they looked back with pride over the 1000 years plus of British history. How different it is today. Hitchens' most potent revelation is his description of the marked contrast with the funeral of Lady Diana, when an outpouring of emotion swept over the nation in torrents. The funeral processions were most unlike those of Sir Winston. Hitchens correctly highlights Churchill's death as the point when the Britain of old, the Britain whose values it's gallant soldiers defended against the menaces of Hitler and the Kaiser, began to be seriously undermined by the politically-correct leftists. Hitchens' book is a profound indictment of Blairism and the fuzzy "Third Way" political system which it has created. This is a book that needs to read by ALL Britons, for it explains where the entire concept of Britain and the British became undermined. Excellent.

An Anglophile American reading this articulate, comprehensive, chilling, manifesto is bound to have two reactions. The first will be, 'I didn't realize it was as bad as this.' The second, dawning more slowly, will be 'How long before it gets this bad *here* too?'Peter Hitchens argues that during the last decades, broadly speaking the era between Sir Winston Churchill's funeral in 1965 and Diana, Princess of Wales's in 1997, Britain was abolished. Not the land mass itself, obviously, but instead everything -- everything -- that once defined what it meant to be British. In chapter after relentless chapter, Hitchens shows the march of 'modern' PC orthodoxy through the Anglican Church, the marriage and divorce laws, the television and radio, the education system. History, the political system, the language, ancient ideas of loyalty and patriotism, virtue and service, even the very shape of the land itself ... all have within living memory been reshaped into something new, different -- and completely divorced from the past.Many people have noted these changes. Hitchens' contribution lies in showing that the changes were not coincidental, but instead were deliberate, orchestrated even, and that many of the same activists were behind the various facets of the assaults.Again and again, Hitchens produces evidence showing the arrogance and self-righteousness of the self-anointed 'reformers.' Again and again, they say, 'We recognize that the British people love the old ways, and that there is no popular clamour for change. Nevertheless, change we must.' Hitchens argues that what the 'reformers' have never been able adequately to answer is, 'Why?' And more to the point, 'Why was it necessary to destroy the old way, and make the new way mandatory?'Why, indeed? Why, for example, is Britain now jailing farmers and shopkeepers for using Imperial measurements instead of metric ones? Why is the government trying to abolish trial by jury and the right to self-defense? Sad to say, this book, while insightful and spirited, is almost unrelievedly depressing. It is literally only in the last few paragraphs of the final chapter that Hitchens offers any sort of hopeful outlook ... and even then, it is only to suggest ways to keep the future from becoming yet bleaker. What has been destroyed has been destroyed forever.Indeed, it's sad to note that in the year or so since this book came out, things in Britain have in fact gotten worse. Tony Blair has taken yet more steps toward a presidential style of government, shoving aside still further both the monarchy and the House of Commons. I'm sure Hitchens finds no joy in being a prophet, but he seems to be, unfortunately, on the right track.For anyone who loves Britain -- and especially for Americans whose idea of Britain is shaped by 'Masterpiece Theatre' and other PBS offerings -- this sad, wonderful book serves as the gravestone of an idealized vision, and a warning to our own country.

I think, with the lack of reviews from actual British people resident in Britain under customer comments upon this book, it behoves me to put across the viewpoint that other reviewers seem to have been asking for.The cover of Peter Hitchens' book shows the Union Jack, the flag of Great Britain, flown at half-mast. The image comes from the days after Princess Diana died and part of a nation mourned. Notably, however, another part of it clearly did not. Hitchens takes this fact and runs with it, and he is not wrong to do so. He points out that, as part of Britain poured out its emotion in a tremendous fashion, another part looked on aghast at the nakedness of sentiment being displayed. I am a mere 20 years of age, but as a passionate Brit I do not find it hard to sympathise with the point he is making here.Most of the time we in Britain look around and things seem okay. Occasionally we wonder whether things aren't just a little bit wrong. In the aftermath of Princess Diana's death, some of us felt like strangers in our own land. The author is right to state that people are asking now and may continue to ask in ever greater numbers: exactly what happened to the country they thought they grew up in? The point is as true for all the other English-speaking nations in the world as it is for Britain.Certainly, as some reviewers have pointed out, it would have to be conceded that Hitchens on occasion puts on rose-tinted spectacles when examining a British past often characterised by impoverishment and occasionally meaningless sacrifice. But he is no fool, and if he sometimes lapses into sentiment then we ought to forgive him if only for the many other highly relevant and prescient points he makes in this work. Further to that, he may look at Britain and see only England, but to all Americans who might not be aware of this fact (including, apparently, some reviewers here), England is absolutely the dominant constituent part of the United Kingdom and in fact houses 85% of the inhabitants - this much has not changed drastically for a century, so if England is all he sees, he isn't missing too much.Foremost in Hitchens' firing line is what essentially boils down to the new liberal orthodoxy. To any Americans who have read or might read this book, unless you are a passionate Democrat you might well recognise the point Hitchens is making here. In all its forms, be it in its control of state-run schools, its management of state healthcare, its changes to the justice system, and many others, the politicians who have sought to change things for the better have actually changed things for the worse. In Britain, state education has noticeably collapsed in the quality of its output since the left-wing destruction of selective schools in favour of comprehensives. The National Health Service in Britain has been a monument to folly almost since it started but has become so much the religion of Britain that not even right-wingers would think of challenging its inherent a

I couldn't help but think of Nietzsche's fabled mad man who thought all the churches had become tombs because modern man had rendered God dead. What was therein prophecied has come to pass--and more. If Mr. Hitchens is not engaging in hyperbole, then Nietzsche's mad man is sane in comparison to us; a whole culture has been rendered dead.Mr. Hitchens is clearly a traditionalist conservative. He also decries the wanton destruction of venerable British institutions such as schools, the church, and even parliament and the monarchy. This passionate expose of the left does allow some room for equivocation. In a rather picturesque account of a modern Briton going back to Churchill's funeral in 1965 he shows changes that we can all mourn as a loss: the disappearance of courtesy and the huge rise in crime. There have also clearly been changes for the better: the great decrease in the number of people smoking and the terrible pollution problems.More than anything else, this book makes the American reader think of how similar issues and problems are shared, and where the United States may be heading in the very near future. These questions include those about education: Why have schools who once applied the dictum of moderation in all things to just things like math, science, English, and history? Why did the mainstream church (which is nothing but a set of beliefs) abandon those beliefs, thereby essentially self-destructing?This book confuses many people as he does not spare Margaret Thatcher or the Tories in his indictments. He disapproves of what he feels is indifference, or animus, exhibited by Tories to cultural matters. Their only concerns have been economic, what Peter Gress calls the bourgeois pathology in his book From Plato to Nato. Mr. Hitchens is correct on this account. American conservatives suffer from the same malady.This book really does not offer much in the way of prescriptions beyond resisting full integration into the EU. He does offer many observations with parallels in this country. Unless we Americans wish to follow suit, we'd best answer why a people who have gone from the administrators of the world's greatest empire have in a short hundred years diminished themselves to the point where their government does not trust the populace with sharp objects (they have knife as well as gun control now). Read this book and be disturbed.