The Abolition of Britain

''The Abolition of Britain: From Lady Chatterley to Tony Blair'' (reissued in 2018 with the subtitle ''From Winston Churchill to Theresa May''; US subtitle: ''From Winston Churchill to Princess Diana'') is the first book by British conservative journalist Peter Hitchens, published in 1999. It examines a period of perceived moral and cultural reform between the 1960s and New Labour's 1997 general election win. Hitchens asserts that the reforms facilitated vast and radical constitutional change under Tony Blair's new government that amounted to a "slow motion coup d'état". The book was cited by Gillian Bowditch in ''The Times'' as being a major modern work to dissect "the decline in British morals and manners over the past 50 years", and identified by Andrew Marr in ''The Observer'' as "the most sustained, internally logical and powerful attack on Tony Blair and all his works".

Hitchens's later book '' The Broken Compass'' explored the same themes, applied to socio-political events and culture in the 2000s decade.

Synopsis

''The Abolition of Britain'' is a conservative polemic against the changes in the United Kingdom since the mid-1960s. It contrasts the funerals of Winston Churchill (1965) and Diana, Princess of Wales (1997), using these two related but dissimilar events, three decades apart, to illustrate the enormous cultural changes that took place in the intervening period. His argument is that Britain underwent a "cultural revolution", comparable to that of China in the 1960s. He describes and criticises the growing strength of such forces as multiculturalism, which still had a liberal consensus behind it at the time the book was written. He argues that English schools had largely ceased to teach the history of the country or the literature of Britain's past, criticising the preference for methodology in history teaching.

Other changes gain Hitchens's attention, from the passivity and conformism resulting from the watching of television to the Church of England's rejection of its traditional liturgy and scripture. Sex education, he argues, is a form of propaganda against Christian sexual morality. Again, the sexual revolution brought about by the first contraceptive pills was the result "not of accidental discovery, but of research deliberately pursued by moral revolutionaries". He describes the efforts made to provide respectability for unmarried motherhood, not least the campaign to replace the expression "unmarried mother" with "single parent", thus lumping together those who had children out of wedlock with widowers, widows or deserted wives and husbands, and so deflecting disapproval. Hitchens sees the British establishment as being morally weak in their failure to resist the emerging drug culture, when they could easily have done so in the mid-1960s. He cites as one example the prosecution of Mick Jagger and the subsequent intervention of ''The Times'' in Jagger's defence in 1967 (" Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?") after his (temporary) conviction.

One chapter analyses the use of TV and radio soap operas to spread liberal cultural and moral propaganda, and refers to several instances where this intention has been openly expressed by the editors and authors of such programmes. In another, he attacks the development of "anti-establishment" comedy since the staging of '' Beyond the Fringe'' at the Edinburgh Festival in 1960. For Hitchens, the development of television, citing with approval a critical letter by T. S. Eliot to ''The Times'' in 1950, was something which should have led to a greater public debate than it did. In particular, Hitchens criticises the easy capture of the Conservative Party by lobbyists for commercial TV, which removed the BBC
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