This Blessed Plot - Introduction

The other day I picked up a bulldog book called The Abolition of Britain written by a new interest of mine, a British journalist named Peter Hitchens, who has a weekly column on the Daily Mail, and keeps the blog to which I linked updated during the week, mostly with essays responding to the critiques of his online readers. You can also find him on YouTube. He is the brother of the better known Christopher Hitchens, the most fiery funny and eloquent atheist evolutionary materialist around. Christopher recently wrote a bestselling book, "God is Not Great." Peter happens to hold opinions diametrically opposed to his brother on almost any significant political, religious, or social point you care to consider. His stated political goal is the destruction of the Tory Party. He believes that only when the Tory Party dies can the true conservative votes, presently tied up in a blind, customary loyalty to the Tories, be released to vote for a truly conservative party. I rather like him.

This particular book, published in 1999, is his attempt to explain how and why the social life of Britain, seen in a moral light, changed during the 20th century, using the funeral of Winston Churchill in 1965 as the symbol of the death of the old Britain, changed in many respects, but possessing fundamentally the same spirit it had possessed since the birth of the nation-state, and the funeral of Princess Diana in 1997 as the symbol of the birth of the new, anti-historical Britain. Each chapter in the book deals with a unique vector in the transformation. While I read the book, I will post on each chapter as a means of mulling over the content. Hope you enjoy.