Peter Hitchens lived in Moscow from June 1990 to October 1992. He is a columnist for the Mail on Sunday.
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Peter Hitchens will be speaking at the next Spectator Event on 9 July, debating the motion ‘Too much immigration, too little integration?’ along with Ken Livingstone, David Goodhart, Trevor Phillips and others. Click here to book tickets. I used to go on left-wing demonstrations against Enoch Powell in the Sixties, and I’m still glad I
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‘Atheism is to theism,’ Anthony Grayling declares, ‘as not collecting stamps is to stamp-collecting’. At this point, we are supposed to enjoy a little sneer, in which the religious are bracketed with bald, lonely men in thick glasses, picking over their collections of ancient stamps in attics, while unbelievers are funky people with busy social
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How thrilling it is when someone finally stages a demonstration against you. All right, it was a very small protest (one person), and it was in Southampton on a wet Sunday morning. But it was all mine. Stretched by the roadside was a dank bedsheet bearing the words ‘Peter Hitchens is a hypocritical racist alcoholic.
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The shambling remnants of Britain’s social and moral conservative movement are marching to Stalingrad, singing as they go. They will not be coming back, but they don’t realise that yet. David Cameron has cleverly provoked them into this suicide mission, by claiming to be a keen supporter of homosexual marriage. And so, with all the
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The proposal to change Britain’s clocks has returned, this time with tacit government support. It makes no sense — except perhaps in Brussels Since the day I flew backwards across the International Date Line I have known that you should not mess around with time. On that occasion I left Siberia on Monday morning and
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How my heart sinks at the sight of those little features on ‘summer reading’. Follow these recommendations and you will strain your shoulder and your purse, buying and carrying books that will stay unread at least until the cool blast of the autumnal equinox, and probably forever afterwards. Ignore the log-rolling, the favours to friends
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The BBC is like a goldfish. Just as we have no way of communicating to the poor creature that it is confined by a bowl, experts of the utmost skill and renown have sought in vain for years to explain to the corporation that its ethos is slanted towards the left. It knows no other
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What a pity it is that all the hate and slime now directed against the Pope’s visit is not aimed instead at the Church of England. Why do God-haters and militant secularists have to turn on a pensionable German theology professor and head of a Rome-based religious multinational organisation, when they want to condemn the
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If the Conservative party were your refrigerator, all your food would go bad. If it were your car or bicycle, you would be stranded by the side of the road. If it were your accountant, you would be bankrupt. If it were your lawyer, you would be in prison. No commercial organisation or product so
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The Chinese word for an empire of prison camps is just as easy to remember and to pronounce as its Russian equivalent. But while most educated people in Britain know what the Gulag was, few have ever heard of the Laogai. I sometimes wonder if we will never pay any attention to such things, anywhere
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The last thing we need now is a Tory recovery. Proper conservatives should dread such a thing as much as Labour’s serious faction dreaded victory in the March 1983 Darlington by-election. They longed for the most crushing defeat possible, because it would have provided the pretext for a well-planned putsch against the doomed romantic party
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There has seldom been a time when responsible, intelligent people were less interested in serious politics. The main opposition, gripped by some Freudian delusion because reality is too hard to bear, behaves as if it were still the government and so cannot oppose or even think about doing so. The discourse of the mainstream parties
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Identity cards threaten law-abiding citizens more than they threaten terrorists, says Peter Hitchens. Their introduction would signal the end of privacy — and of England The arguments in favour of identity cards are empty and false. The Prime Minister says there are no civil liberty issues involved in their introduction, when he means that nobody
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No power on earth can sustain an idea whose time has gone. Can we all please stop pretending that the Conservative party is worth saving or keeping, or that it can ever win another election? This delusion is an obstacle to the creation of a proper pro-British movement, neither bigoted nor politically correct, which is
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Why do I now find that I, one of the BBC’s most persistent critics, feel the need to defend the organisation that I have attacked so many times in the past? Because for all its faults I would rather that Britain had a public-service broadcaster than that the airwaves were sold to the fattest cheque
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If the Archbishop of Canterbury does not crown our next monarch, then who will? The president of Europe? A multi-faith collective? Nobody at all? In which case, what sort of country will we then be and where will ultimate authority and legitimacy come from? Perhaps the prior question is why there should now be serious