Interview with Peter Hitchens in the Warwick Boar

Here (link via his blog).

But clearly something has changed. Hitchens is hardly practising class war these days, and the Mail has never exactly been hospitable to the practitioners of revolution. He explains: “During my life, the establishment that I imagined I was fighting in the late 1960s and early 1970s was already dying - in fact it was really already a living corpse.”

For Hitchens, the 20th century has been the story of the death of the old British establishment - indeed, of Britain itself - and its replacement by a new, more liberal elite. His writing is shot through with the theme of moral decline. His new book, though it concerns mostly drugs, includes a chapter sternly entitled ‘The Demoralisation of Britain’ and from the earliest pages he thunders that the worship of a new hedonistic creed, the lamentable trilogy of sex, drugs and rock n’ roll, is responsible for many contemporary social ills.

“What all this is really about is the collapse of Protestant Christianity as the dominant system of thought and belief in modern England over the course of a century”, he elaborates, dating the start of the rot at the beginning of the First World War. “In many cases people have found the constraints and what they would call the repressions of Protestant Christianity irksome, and taken the opportunity to throw them off in many parts of life.”