The Abolition of Britain: From Winston Churchill to Princess Diana

One English critic called The Abolition of Britain "an elegant jeremiad" in which Peter Hitchens identifies everything that has gone wrong with Britain since World War II and makes the case for "those many millions who feel that they have become foreigners in their own land and wish with each succeeding day that they could turn the clock back."

Writing with passion and flair, Hitchens targets the pernicious effects of TV culture, the "corruption and decay" of the English language, the loss of politeness, and the "syrupy confessional mood" brought on by the death of Diana, which Hitchens contrasts with the somber national response to the death of Winston Churchill.

If there is a term that summarizes everything that has gone wrong in Britain, it is "Tony Blairism," which Hitchens sees as having rewritten England's history, trivialized its journalism, subverted its educational system and cultural standards, and overthrown accepted notions of patriotism, faith, and morality. The New Britain is government by focus group in which people are told what to feel as a way of preventing them from asking how they want to be governed.

Looking at the changed face of his country, Hitchens finds a "politically correct zeal for the new" whose impact on daily life has been "as devastating in effect, if not in violence, as Mao tse Tung's Cultural Revolution in China."

About The Author

Peter Hitchens is one of Britain's most controversial conservative commentators. Prime Minister Tony Blair after a bruising press conference encounter told him to "sit down and stop being bad." Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams recently suggested it was time Hitchens was "decommissioned." Brother of Vanity Fair writer Christopher Hitchens, the author lived in the U.S. for two years, where he was Washington correspondent for the London Daily Express. He has covered British domestic politics, the end of the Cold War, the Somalia intervention, and the collapse of Communism in Prague, Bucharest and East Germany and the Soviet Union.