The Broken Compass

The Broken Compass: How British Politics Lost its Way is the fourth book by British writer

Hitchens depicts the right in particular as a confused and spent political force that has supposedly been subsumed by the

In the media, The Broken Compass received mostly negative reviews from left-leaning outlets and some other newspapers, and was largely ignored by the conservative press. It was reissued as The Cameron Delusion in March 2010, two months before David Cameron became the British Prime Minister.

Background

Hitchens sets out his stall in the preface "The Lost Frontier", stating: "conventional wisdom is almost always wrong. By the time it has become conventional, it has ceased to be wisdom and become cant. Its smug cousin, received opinion, is just as bad. The aim of this book is to defy these two enemies of thought and reason", and "conventional wisdom's biggest single mistake is its thought-free, obsolete idea of Left and Right".^[2]

Synopsis

Part I: The New Permanent Government of Britain

In Chapter 1, "Guy Fawkes Gets a Blackberry", Hitchens claims that opinion polls are a device for influencing public opinion and not measuring it, and that political parties and newspapers are responsible for this manipulation, whose purpose is to "bring about the thing it claims is already happening".^[3] The author cites contemporary examples of the media attacking Gordon Brown and the expected win of the Conservative Party at the 2010 general election.^[4] Hitchens begins Chapter 2, "The Power of Lunch", by asserting, based on his time as a reporter at Westminster, that political journalists are uninterested in serious political debate; propagate received centre-left standpoints on issues; and consult with each other and politicians about media stories. Chapter 3, "Time for a Change", describes how a media reporting bias is attempting to facilitate a Tory general election win. Hitchens states one of his motivations in writing the book was to frustrate this exercise.^[5] Hitchens claims in Chapter 4, "Fear of Finding Something Worse", that Labour has reached "the most significant moment in its history – the complete acceptance of its programme by the Conservatives".^[6] The author invokes the closing image of George Orwell's Animal Farm to illustrate how close the two parties have become.^[7] Chapter 5, "The Great Landslide", discusses how a number of left-leaning writers and newspapers have allegedly begun describing the Conservatives in favourable terms, and how this no longer constituted "a form of treason".^[8]

Part II: The Left Escapes to the West

Chapter 6, "Riding the Prague Tram", describes Hitchens's experience of travelling in

Chapter 8, "Racism, Sexism and Homophobia", examines how the modern ideology of race and the term racist differ from the previous concept of "racialism", and how the sexual revolution represents "seeking the existing order's permission to pursue pleasure at all costs",^[10] which undermines Christian principles of marriage, and has its roots in events in 1968.^[11] In Chapter 9, "Sexism is Rational", Hitchens states that the Left's taking up feminist causes since the 1960s has led to the damage and exploitation of women,^[12] as well as a decline in marriage. Hitchens says this process is part of revolutionaries' seeking to "destroy and expunge the restraints placed on human selfishness by the Christian religion. The permanent married family is the greatest single obstacle to this".^[13] Hitchens concludes that in Britain there is an emerging citizenry "prepared for enslavement, ignorant of its origins, past, rights, traditions, and duties"^[14] and that "only in a wholly broken political system could there be such a need for reform, and no reformers ready to address it".^[14]

In Chapter 10, "Equality or Tolerance", Hitchens examines how the Left have since the 1960s taken up the cause of

Hitchens asserts that political mismanagement, facilitated by an abandonment of the adversarial system, has resulted in an overall decline in British society. He identifies the end of the Cold War (which "made many of the old political positions meaningless overnight"^[23]) as one cause of this, as well as the implementation of the ideas of Fabian social democracy and the ideology of the 1960s.

Reception

On publication the book was reviewed in The Guardian, The Observer and the New Statesman, was the occasion of two interviews with Hitchens with Hannah Pool in The Guardian,^[24][25] and a discussion with the author on BBC Radio 4.^[26]

The reviews in the left-leaning press were generally unfavourable; Peter Wilby's review in The Observer was dismissive towards much of the book's contents. Wilby wrote "As Hitchens sees it, 'the broken compass' is chiefly the Conservatives' fault. Even under Thatcher, they accepted too many of Labour's social democratic and liberal reforms. So we have a permanent government of the centre and one of Labour's main aims is to stop a genuinely Conservative party emerging that may attract working-class votes on such issues as "immigration and disorder" and getting Britain out of Europe. 'It was greatly in Labour's interest, once the Tory party had accepted so much of Labour's programme as unalterable, that the Tory party should be preserved against the danger of dissolution,' Hitchens writes. There is a grain of truth in all this, but on the left most would reverse the argument. The postwar consensus was destroyed in the Thatcher years and Labour failed to restore it, accepting, at least until the credit crunch, unrestrained neoliberal capitalism. New Labour's appeal to business and the city was that it closed off, perhaps forever, the possibility of a genuinely socialist alternative".^[27]

Writing in the New Statesman, Anthony Howard saw the book as "a hotchpotch of separate essays" and that, though Hitchens mounts a spirited defence of his beliefs, he nevertheless resembles "some faintly out-of-date figure searching the kitchen for any pot or pan he can hurl against the spirit of the age".^[28] In a review in The Guardian, Steven Poole described Hitchens as being "in general exhilaratingly good when attacking the hypocrisies and stupidities of specific individuals",^[29] and wrote that the "best parts" of the book describe "scenes of foreign reporting, such as an alarming visit to Vilnius in 1991, where Soviet forces massacred Lithuanian nationalists".^[29] However, Poole also added that the book resorted too much to cultural generalisation.

Conservative newspapers and magazines, which had consistently reviewed Hitchens's previous books, largely ignored The Broken Compass. An exception to this trend was the Shadow Education Secretary Michael Gove referring at length to the book in his column in The Times, where he wrote that it "has some passages of quite brilliant writing and it is at its best when Peter reflects on his own life and his disillusionment with the left-wing ideology of his youth" and that the book "makes some telling points, which are discomfiting reading for conservatives who value grace and civility in our national life".^[30]

Release details

The book was first published in the UK on 11 May 2009 by Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd., and in the US on 20 June 2009 by Continuum, with the altered subtitle How Left and Right Lost Their Meaning. In anticipation of the 2010 general election, a revised paperback edition with the new title The Cameron Delusion was released in the UK on 17 March 2010.

Index

Steven Poole in his Guardian review wrote that "Hitchens should at least be applauded for taking the trouble to provide an amusing index, a duty shirked by too many authors." The index was the subject of a full-page parody by Craig Brown in the magazine Private Eye.^[31]

References

Bibliography

• Hitchens, Peter (2009). The Broken Compass: How British Politics Lost its Way. Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd.
  ISBN 978-1-84706-405-9
  .
• Hitchens, Peter (2010). The Cameron Delusion (Updated ed.). Continuum.
  ISBN 9781441135056
  .

• The Triumph of the Political Class by Peter Oborne, a similarly polemical work analysing the 21st-century political class in Britain
• Red Tory: How Left and Right have Broken Britain and How we can Fix It by Phillip Blond, which calls for a radical new political settlement to tackle issues facing British society

External links

• West, Ed (31 July 2009). "Power-worship: the last principle of party politics".
  The Catholic Herald. Archived from the original
  on 20 May 2010.
• John Kampfner (11 May 2009). Insight with Peter Hitchens: How British politics lost its way (video). Frontline Club.