The Abolition of Britain

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The Britain the world once knew has been abolished only to be replaced by New Labour’s‘Cool Britannia’, an internationalist welfare state brimming with ignorance and contempt for the glories of British civilization. Hitchens compares the funeral of Winston Churchill in 1965 to that of Princess Diana in 1997 to show that a cultural revolution has taken place in Britain — a revolution that went largely unnoticed (since it unfolded in slow motion), but which was more destructive of the national way of life than anything that happened in Mao’s China. In a chapter full of telling and unusual insights, he imagines what a young woman from 1997 might experience if she were suddenly transported back to Churchill’s funeral. She’d find a poorer, dirtier place, Hitchens admits, but one with a social cohesion and proud common culture that the intervening thirty years have almost completely obliterated.

Nothing that has happened in that fateful thirty-year span escapes Hitchens’notice. In an elegant and scathing tone, he discusses the Left’s triumph over British culture and details how even the simplest acts of patriotism have been held up as objects of ridicule for so long that now virtually everyone assumes that they are in fact ridiculous. Naming names and calling a spade a spade, he explains how self-denigration and self-doubt have completely supplanted national pride, and how homosexualists and feminists overturned venerable societal arrangements before most conservatives even realized what was happening.

A fascinating look at what happened to British manners, dress sense, morality, spirituality and Politics between 1950and the new Millennium. A bracing stimulating read from a great thinker and writer.

Reviews:

"This is a cri de coeur from an honest, intelligent and patriotic Englishman, desperately worried about the corruption of his country and the likely effects of its lurch into the embrace of a European superstate." - The Spectator, London.

"Peter Hitchens has put his finger on a deep unease unnoticed by most pundits." - Wall Street Journal

342 pages, paperback.