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Peter Hitchens (born 28 October 1951 in Sliema, Malta GC) is a British journalist, author and broadcaster.

He was a reporter on the Daily Express, where he was 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 resultant conflict of interest as his reason for leaving.

Political career

Hitchens is a former Marxist who was for some years a member of the International Socialists and then a member of the British Labour Party . 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 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. But he has always made it clear that he had no serious expectation of being chosen and put himself forward only to criticise Mr Portillo and his plan to 'modernise' the Party. He was never even interviewed by the local Tory association. He now defends conservative and Christian positions.

Hitchens' political beliefs

He 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 argues that social democratic government, often unintentionally, undermines and erodes freedom of thought and speech, and is institutionally hostile to the married family and to private life. He is also specially concerned about the use of 'security' as a pretext for diluting and eroding the liberties of the individual. He argues that increased 'security' destroys freedom without necessarily increasing the safety of nation and people, and argues that there is no contradiction between maintaining liberty and protecting the realm. On the contrary, he says, liberty is one of the things any good government should set out to defend. He believes that the social democratic approach to crime - 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. This is the basis for his belief in punitive imprisonment and his reasoned calls for the restoration of capital punishment. He stresses that the death penalty is only tolerable in a society with strong independent juries and an unrestricted press, and opposes it in all other circumstances.

Hitchens argues that the United Kingdom should negotiate an amicable departure from the European Union. He has described Prime Minister Tony Blair's constitutional reforms as a 'slow-motion coup d'etat'.

He condemned the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, as a surrender to the Provisional IRA and a violation of the rule of law. He regrets the decline of religious faith and family life.

He opposes modern teaching methods and the dilution of examinations. He believes young children should not be exposed to television, especially unsupervised, mainly because of the damage this does to both imagination and individuality. He believes that many of the measures which created the 'permissive society' were mistaken or excessive and that tolerance should not be confused with licence. He was one of the earliest critics of multiculturalism.

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 has often been at odds with fellow conservatives, opposing the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the privatisation of the UK's railways.

He is frequently dismissive of the modern British Conservative Party, calls for its dissolution, and has spoken of his desire for a new conservative movement to take its place. An Anglican, 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 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) and A Brief History of Crime (2003), 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 and featuring a new chapter on identity cards, was published in April 2004.

See also

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

• peterhitchens.com
• BBC News, 9 December 2000, Veteran columnist quits Express
• The Guardian, 31 May 2005, "When Christopher met Peter" after the brothers had not spoken for four years

• 1951 births
• British journalists