The Abolition of Britain

The Abolition of Britain

Cover of The Abolition of Britain, revised UK edition
Author	Peter Hitchens
Country	United Kingdom
Subject	Politics of the United Kingdom
Genre	Non-fiction
Publisher	Quartet Books
Publication date	1 August 1999
Pages	362
ISBN

The Abolition of Britain: From Lady Chatterley to Tony Blair (US subtitle: From Winston Churchill to Princess Diana) is the first book by British conservative journalist Peter Hitchens, published in 1999. It examines a period of perceived moral and cultural reform between the 1960s and New Labour's 1997 general election win. Hitchens asserts that the reforms facilitated vast and radical constitutional change under Tony Blair's new government that amounted to a "slow motion coup d'état". The book was cited by Gillian Bowditch in The Times as being a major modern work to dissect "the decline in British morals and manners over the past 50 years", and identified by Andrew Marr in The Observer as "the most sustained, internally logical and powerful attack on Tony Blair and all his works".

Hitchens's later book The Broken Compass explored the same themes, applied to socio-political events and culture in the 2000s decade.

The Abolition of Britain is a conservative polemic against the changes in the United Kingdom since the mid-1960s. It contrasts the funerals of Winston Churchill (1965) and Diana, Princess of Wales (1997), using these two related but dissimilar events, three decades apart, to illustrate the enormous cultural changes that took place in the intervening period. His argument is that Britain underwent a "cultural revolution", comparable to that of China in the 1960s. He describes and criticises the growing strength of such forces as multiculturalism, which still had a liberal consensus behind it at the time the book was written. He argues that English schools had largely ceased to teach the history of the country or the literature of Britain's past, criticising the preference for methodology in history teaching.