Power-worship: the last principle of party politics
Peter Hitchens loathes New Labour and wants to abolish the Conservative Party, discovers Ed West
31 July 2009

Peter Hitchens argues that Tony Blair and New Labour were dangerous cultural radicals (PA Photos)

The Broken Compass
By Peter Hitchens
Continuum, £14.99

By strange coincidence I happened to be reading Peter Hitchens's new book on the night of the European elections results - a poll which saw the Labour Party slip to Edwardian-era support levels.

Hitchens was once a member of the Labour Party and, before that, a Trotskyite, but in the late Seventies he had one of the more dramatic conversions in Fleet Street, becoming the leading social conservative in British journalism, a critic of liberal Tories such as David Cameron and "car-obsessed, pinstriped, market-worshipping" Thatcherites.

The Broken Compass, which has received less attention in the conservative press than it deserves, mixes Hitchens's analysis of modern British politics - and the lack of any small-c conservative party - with his own memoirs as an industrial and foreign correspondent (which gave him a chance to view socialism in both its western and eastern European forms).

Hitchens recounts how he watched the Berlin Wall fall and, soon after, the Soviet Union, only to see the same anti-family radicalism take off in the West, a form of cultural Marxism that has infected both parties and so made the political compass and its ideas of "Left and Right" meaningless. Today the Labour and Conservative parties are neither socialist or conservative, but power-worshipping social and cultural radicals.

However, although Hitchens is the leading popular conservative thinker in Britain - some say a prophet - the most interesting chapters chart his own journey, both political and geographical, which began when he travelled to Poland to cover the Solidarity strike in 1980.

The Polish shipyard workers were then in conflict with the Polish United Workers' Party, and Hitchens assumed, as he attended the British Trades Union Congress conference that autumn, that the British workers would support them.

"Here were workers, Trade Unionists, in a foreign country, peacefully facing an almighty employer with nothing but fraternity and the strike weapon. Surely the TUC would support these brothers? Had they been workers in Chile, or South Africa, that support would indeed have come about. But they were striking against a socialist government, and so they were the wrong kind of brothers. Worse, from the TUC platform's point of view, they appeared to be at least partly motivated by patriotism and religion."

Hitchens was disgusted and shocked by the hypocrisy of British socialists, who revered the men of Tolpuddle and Jarrow "when they were safely in the past", but "loathed such courage when they really met it in the present day".

He asked the Daily Express to send him to Poland, where he met Lech Walesa, who despised the British unions as cowards and toadies and said so in detail in every imaginable way.

Hitchens remained behind the Iron Curtain as Soviet Communism ebbed away. He witnessed Soviet brutality in Lithuania and dryly recalls the fear he felt as the bullets flew over his head: "I have no idea if I could die for my country if called upon to do so, but I am absolutely sure that I do not wish to die for any newspaper, commemorated by a blurred picture and an inaccurate brief obituary."

Returning home after the USSR fell, and now a conservative, he says he found that "far from being defeated in the Cold War, social and cultural radicalism and the worship of power had escaped through the holes in the Berlin Wall, and begun to establish themselves in a morally and politically disarmed Britain".

Soon enough his worst fears were confirmed with the rise of New Labour, the ultimate triumph of liberal Marxism, a philosophy that was culturally radical but also "easy about people getting filthy rich", to paraphrase Peter Mandelson. He wrote: "It was not specifically difficult for 'New Labour' to accept the Thatcher changes, which left Britain with a public sector as powerful and as important as it had had at any time since 1945, and with an enormous welfare state."

She did not reverse any of the radical Labour reforms of the previous years, the welfare state and NHS of 1945-51, nor the more severe reforms of 1964-70, "which began and consolidated the cultural and moral revolution, turned the schools into egalitarian engines, and transformed the welfare state from a safety net into a powerful disincentive to unskilled work".

New Labour set about introducing a third great revolutionary period, "which greatly extended the cultural and moral revolution, removed most conservative elements from the constitution, politicised the civil service, further expanded the public sector through the NHS and local government and broke up the United Kingdom".

By the early Seventies Britain's state school system was so effective that 70 per cent of Oxford places went to state school children. The private school system was on its knees.

Forty years later and that figure is 55 per cent, and that's despite huge political pressure to favour state school pupils who can no longer compete with their privately educated peers. Our state system is now among the worst in the First World - all thanks to Labour's Tony Crossland, who replaced the grammar system with abysmal comprehensives, leaving millions unable to spell or add up.

The Tories themselves betrayed conservatism, Hitchens says, by destroying the railway system through cuts to services and privatisation, leaving our towns ruined by road-widening schemes and our society fractured by the selfish motor car. Hitchens's solution to these social problems is the same as that he argues for in his Mail on Sunday column: the destruction of the Conservative Party, which he says is the only way to save Britain.

"Only one thing could have prevented the completion of this project - the collapse of the Tories and their replacement by a genuinely conservative political party uninterested in any such treaty with the Left, and willing to pack votes from Labour on a large scale through raising issues such as immigration and disorder, where working-class voters mistrusted their 'natural' party." We shall have to see.