Peter Hitchens
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Peter Jonathan Hitchens (born 28 October 1951 in Sliema, Malta GC) is a British journalist, author and broadcaster. He was educated at The Leys School Cambridge, Oxford College of Further Education and the University of York.
He was a reporter on the Daily Express, where he was a Moscow and then Washington correspondent. In 2000, after the Express was bought by Richard Desmond - a publisher of pornographic magazines - Hitchens left to join the Mail on Sunday, citing his strong anti-pornography views and the consequent conflict of interest as his reason for leaving. Hitchens can be said to have a traditionalist conservative perspective on most issues, and he is occasionally featured in the British broadcast media, almost invariably debating with left-wingers. He currently has no regular broadcasting slot of his own, he did once co-present a show on Talk Radio with left-wingers including Derek Draper and Austin Mitchell. He says he was offered the chance to present the programme on his own by the station's boss, Kelvin Mackenzie, but preferred, and suggested, an adversarial programme with a left-wing co-presenter, believing this was the best way to achieve broadcast fairness and balance.
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Political career
Hitchens is a former Marxist who was for some years a member of the International Socialists and later a member of the British Labour Party. He studied politics at York University. He dismisses as untrue a story that he arrived late at a lecture saying he had been "too busy starting the revolution", on the grounds that he seldom attended any lectures at all.
He joined the Conservative Party in 1997 in the belief that it was the democratic resistance to New Labour, but quickly concluded that the Party had no idea what it was facing and would never be able to oppose or defeat New Labour, and has since left. He now belongs to no party and believes that none of any value can be created until the Tories split and collapse.
He challenged Michael Portillo for the Tory nomination in the Kensington and Chelsea seat in 1999. Some critics suggest that his failure to secure the nomination explains much of his antipathy towards the Conservative Party, a claim Hitchens rejects on the basis of his having had no serious expectation of being chosen, putting himself forward only to criticise Mr. Portillo and his plan to "modernise" the Party.
Hitchens' ideological beliefs
On liberty and security
Hitchens advocates a society governed by conscience and the rule of law, which he sees as the best guarantee of liberty. He warns that the decline of conscience and morality will inevitably lead to a strong state.
He is also specially concerned about the use of 'security' as a pretext for diluting and eroding the liberties of the individual, and is opposed to the introduction of identity cards. He argues that increased 'security' destroys freedom without necessarily increasing safety, and argues that there is no contradiction between maintaining liberty and protecting the realm.
In his newspaper columns, Hitchens referred to the then Home Secretary David Blunkett as 'Minister of the Interior', on the grounds that the title, reminiscent of police states, better reflected Blunkett's illiberal policies than the traditional British title of 'Home Secretary'.
On crime, he believes that the social democratic approach - that it is a disease caused by poverty and deprivation - is both mistaken and implicitly totalitarian. A free society punishes lawbreakers harshly, but leaves the law-abiding alone as far as possible. While he calls for the restoration of capital punishment, he stresses that it is only tolerable in a society with strong independent juries and an unrestricted press, and opposes it in all other circumstances.
On foreign policy
Hitchens opposed the Iraq War on the grounds that it was not in the interests of either Britain or of the United States, but does not associate himself with the Left's campaign against the war, as he is a strong supporter of the State of Israel. He emphasises that he is not 'Anti-American', but is an admirer of the United States, and points out that many American conservatives share his opposition to the Iraq war and to what they see as an assault on liberty conducted under the banner of the 'War on Terror'.
Constitutional change
He has described Prime Minister Tony Blair's constitutional reforms as a "slow-motion coup d'état", arguing against devolution in Scotland and Wales, and the removal of hereditary peers from the House of Lords.
On Europe, he argues that the United Kingdom should negotiate an amicable departure from the European Union, which he regards as illiberal.
On Northern Ireland
He condemned the 1998 Belfast Agreement, as a surrender to the Provisional IRA and a violation of the rule of law. He believes the best approach to Northern Ireland's problems would have been the full integration of Northern Ireland into the United Kingdom, arguing that creating Stormont was "an act of huge folly". He believes the achievements of direct rule over Northern Ireland have been greatly underestimated, but reluctantly accepts that Northern Ireland is now only a provisional part of the UK, which can be transferred to Irish sovereignty by a single irreversible referendum.
On morality and culture
Hitchens deplores the decline of religious faith and the serial 'attacks' on the institution of marriage by the state and by capitalism. 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 its resultant loss of status and regard, the abolition of the Christian Sunday and the growing economic and cultural pressure on wives and mothers to go out to work, abandoning their children to day care centres. He believes that without faith and without strong families, the development of conscience is stunted, private life diminished and the power of the state increased. He also regrets the dilution of educational rigour and of school discipline, which are partly consequences of this, and partly linked to it. A supporter of orthodox Christian morality, he opposes sex education because of its active and militant endorsement of sexual relationships outside marriage, its equation of all sexual relationships with lifelong marriage and its refusal to accept the Christian belief that marriage is morally superior to other forms of sexual relationship. He states that this is an indisputable fact, known to everyone with any familiarity with sex education programmes.
He also condemns comprehensive education, the Plowden reforms of primary schooling and modern child-centred teaching methods, seeing them as egalitarian or utopian political projects with no educational justification and many educational disadvantages.
He believes that many of the measures which created the permissive society were mistaken or excessive and need to be re-examined, and he is most insistent that homosexual relationships should not be granted legal parity with heterosexual marriage. As a result, many homosexual rights supporters see Hitchens' writings on the subject as being some of the most homophobic in Britain today. Hitchens rejects this criticism, maintaining he has nothing against homosexual individuals and that the term "homophobia" is increasingly being used in this kind of context to stifle legitimate debate on social policy.
Nor, Hitchens believes, should support for Christian morality be subject to persecution and censorship, as, he contends, is increasingly the case. He was one of the earliest critics of multiculturalism. He believes that pop music has been a powerfully harmful force, promoting drug abuse, elevating talentless nonentities to unearned eminence and so undermining the crucial link between effort and reward. He strongly dislikes what he sees as the pseudo-religious and quasi-patriotic cult surrounding football, which has similarly elevated louts and cheats to a wholly unmerited status.
Hitchens has mocked evolution as the faith of "Darwinist Fundamentalists". He objects to being called a 'Creationist' because of the implied suggestion that he has dogmatic views about the origins of life, as he maintains 'Evolutionists' do. As for his own beliefs, he has stated that neither he nor anyone else has any idea how life originated, or how the realm of nature took its current shape.
On drugs
He is opposed to the relaxation of laws against the possession of certain specific recreational drugs, those which are already illegal to possess. He argues that the law's active disapproval of drugtaking is an essential counterweight to the pro-drug propaganda of much modern popular culture. He thinks attempts to combat drugtaking by restricting supply and persecuting dealers are futile if possession and use are not punished. He answers liberal claims that the 'war on drugs' has failed by pointing out that there has been no serious war on drugs for many years, especially since the Wootton Report in the 1960s first argued for relaxation of the cannabis laws. Hitchens believes that the currently modish approach known as 'harm reduction' is defeatist and counter-productive. He was among the first commentators to warn that cannabis was a major mental health danger to some users.
On the Conservative Party
He is dismissive of the modern British Conservative Party (frequently describing them as 'the useless Tories' and since David Cameron's ascension to the party leadership, "New Improved Tories, or NITS for short."), calls for their dissolution, and has spoken of his desire for a new conservative movement to take their place. He has often been at odds with fellow conservatives, opposing - for example - the Iraq War, the privatisation of the UK's railways, and what he sees as the idolatry of Margaret Thatcher (who he believes weakened Britain's institutions).
On Tony Blair
Hitchens notably always refers to Mr Blair as "Anthony Blair" because he views the Prime Minister's use of "Tony" as deliberately misleading, and the media's general acceptance of it as wrong. Shortly before Mr Blair was selected for his Sedgefield Parliamentary seat in 1983, his wife, Cherie, was picked as Labour candidate for the constituency of North Thanet. In her election address, she referred to her husband not as "Tony" but as "The barrister Anthony Blair". Also, the name "Tony Blair" is sometimes used by the BBC without any qualification, as in "Tony Blair will today tell EU leaders that he insists on reform of the Common Agricultural Policy". Hitchens believes that they would never have used "Maggie" Thatcher or "Jim" Callaghan in the same way, and would invariably have accompanied their names with the title "Prime Minister". He sees this usage - of familiar name without a title - as creeping presidentialism.
On tradition
He opposes the compulsory metrication of Britain's weights and measures, which he believes are both beautiful and practical, rooted in experience and an important part of the English language. He is an Anglican, and he defends the use of the Church of England's 1662 Book of Common Prayer (in the USA, the 1928 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 they are the indispensable foundations of Anglicanism's "powerful combination of scripture, tradition and reason".
Publications
Hitchens is the author of The Abolition of Britain (1999, ISBN 0704381400) and A Brief History of Crime (2003, ISBN 1843541483), 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, re-titled The Abolition of Liberty (ISBN 1843541491) and featuring a new chapter on identity cards, was published in April 2004. He also is regularly involved in editing this entry on Wikipedia.
Family
Peter Hitchens is married with three children. Christopher Hitchens, also a journalist, author and critic, is his older brother. Christopher's views on most issues are to the left of Peter's.
External links
- Peter Hitchens Blog
- Weekly column in Britain's Mail on Sunday newspaper (paid-registration required to read the articles listed)
Articles
- Look forward in anger Guardian Interview, 14th November 2005 (free-registration required to read this article)
- When Christopher met Peter - 31st May 2005, The Guardian newspaper organised this meeting after the brothers had not spoken for four years
- Bonkers Hitchens? - 19th April 2003. Critical review of Hitchens' book A Brief History of Crime in Scotland's Sunday Herald newspaper
- The victims of liberalism - 13th April 2003, Sympathetic review of Hitchens' book A Brief History of Crime in The Daily Telegraph
- Veteran columnist quits Express - 9th December 2000. On Hitchens' departure from The Daily Express.
- Brothers at war over Britain Article on a debate about Britain's future with brother Christopher Hitchens, 15th October 1999. Includes some short, selected audio clips from the event
Audio
- Is the Left Wing obsolete in British politics? Short debate on BBC Radio 4, 8th February 2006. (Direct link to sound-clip, 7:20 mins, requires RealPlayer to listen)
- Debate on The British Monarchy - 6th June 2002, on National Public Radio
- Debating the format of a potential Oath of Allegiance for the UK with New Statesman columnist Zia Sardar, 16th December 2001
- Debate on the British asylum system - 5th June 2000, arranged by The Observer Newspaper. (Approx. two-thirds down the page)
Video
"Stealing your Freedom"
Broadcast 27th February 2006, Peter Hitchens wrote and presented this television documentary on the erosion of civil liberties in the UK for the Dispatches series on Britain's Channel 4. RealPlayer is required to watch this video.
- Stream the Broadcast Watch without downloading. Recommended for faster internet connections only.
- Download the entire program 28.8 MB, better option for slower connections.
- Stealing your Freedom Brief description of the documentary on Channel 4's website.
Misc
- Hitchens v Secretary of State for the Home Department - a court judgment on his request to access government records of his time in the International Socialist movement