Peter Hitchens on his intellectual journey

In response to some of his readers' comments:

Norman Garnett seems to be concerned that I sometimes change my mind. He's not specific about which such episodes worry him, but I have two responses. First, as Maynard Keynes once said when upbraided for supposed inconsistency "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?'

Second, I think I have actually been remarkably consistent for some long time. It's true that I was for several years a Marxist revolutionary, but I formally abandoned membership of the International Socialists in what I regard as the distant past. I didn't 'drift away' or 'lapse' but actually wrote a letter of resignation in 1975, which I suspect is longer ago than some readers of this blog were born. In this I am entirely open. I make no secret of it (the opposite, if anything) unlike a leading BBC presenter and several leading Labour politicians of high rank, who remain coy about having had similar experiences, and who - in one case known to me - gets quite stroppy if you mention it in his presence.

And my progress to my current position involved several years in the Labour Party trying to locate its fabled 'Right Wing' which then turned out to have atrophied and shrivelled to nothingness. It also involved some wonderfully intensive education, of a kind that money couldn't buy, as a labour correspondent dealing daily with union officials and as a political reporter spending my days and nights in the company of politicians, followed by periods in Moscow and Washington, seeing in action the two rival systems of thought which compete for supremacy in most advanced societies. I was also able to witness political violence, and some of the effects of warfare and famine, at first hand but without being in any severe danger myself, though I have to say that Somalia didn't feel terribly safe when I was there, and I was most definitely afraid at the time. These experiences, taken together, made me reconsider my teenage rejection of religious belief, and many of the categories I had previously thought were settled.

Since then, I think I can point to my having been against idealistic wars, for the liberty of the subject, for the rule of law, unconvinced by the claims of either the free market or the socialist state to provide a complete answer to the ills of society, and in favour of private life and the family. This has placed me outside the major political parties, which have generally accepted the case for liberal interventionism, are careless of liberty, equivocal on the family and increasingly irked by the rule of law. As for the market and the state, we now seem to have the worst possible combination of the two, each powerful where they should be weak, and weak where they should be powerful. Huge monopolistic industries flourish and enjoy political power. For example, the weekly day of rest, which even Robespierre and Stalin couldn't abolish, is threatened as never before by commercial pressure. And those who think that politicians have lost their appetite for controlling the economy should study the immense apparatus of regulation, some national, some supranational, now taking shape in almost all Western economies. This regulation is in many cases a far more effective way of imposing state authority on the economy than crude nationalisation ever was. Most advanced economies also have very large, and growing, public sectors, in the form of health and social services, often devolved to quangoes and local government but still public for all that.

I suppose this position may appear inconsistent to someone who thinks that a conservative has to be a Thatcherite warmonger, and that socialism has a monopoly of concern for the poor, or for human freedom. But, rather than accuse me of inconsistency, such critics might - if only for a moment - wonder if they are in fact mistaken about their own positions.